Patient philanthropy is the idea (originated by the economics researcher Philip Trammell) that rather than donating now, you should invest money and donate it much later. Maybe you should even set up a foundation so that the money can be invested for a century or more before it’s donated. I can think of two strong arguments against patient philanthropy: the rational preference argument and the cost-effectiveness argument.
The rational preference argument
Let’s say I have $10 billion to donate.
Option A. I donate all $10 billion now through GiveDirectly. It is disbursed to poor people who invest it in the Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap Index Fund and earn a 7% compound annual growth rate or CAGR. In 2126, the poor people’s portfolios will have collectively grown to $8.68 trillion.
Option B. I invest all $10 billion in the Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap Index Fund for 100 years. In 2126, I have $8.68 trillion. I then disburse all the money to poor people through GiveDirectly.
Option B clearly provides no advantage to the poor people over Option A. On the other hand, it sure seems like Option A provides an advantage to the poor people over Option B.
If a philanthropist has $10 billion, I think they should prefer to arrange for Option A to happen rather than opt for Option B. But there may be other options that offer even more advantages to the poor people than Option A. So, they should seek out those options and choose an even better one, if they can.
To the extent Option B looks like it has higher impact, that’s just an artefact of how we might decide to do the accounting, rather than a true reflection of the causality involved or what’s morally best — or what the recipients of the aid would rationally prefer.
A potential reply is that, in Option A, the world’s poorest people can’t realistically invest the money rather than spend it on consumption (e.g., food, shelter, medicine, transportation, household goods). However, this reply does not overcome the argument. Spending the money on consumption probably benefits poor people more than investing it and it is probably what they rationally prefer. If this is in doubt, imagine the reverse: would the world’s poorest people rationally prefer for a foundation to expropriate, say, half of their wealth or income and to invest it on their behalf for, say, twenty years? Would that be a net benefit to them?
The cost-effectiveness argument
Let’s again imagine I have $10 billion to donate.
Option C. I donate all $10 billion now to GiveWell’s top charities. Per GiveWell’s estimate of $3,000 to $5,500 per life saved, I save at least 1,818,000 lives.
Option D. I wait 100 years to donate and, by the time I do, the world’s poorest countries have the per capita GDP that the United States does today. (For this to be true, the per capita GDP of these countries would need to end up at around 50% of what per capita GWP will be if it continues to grow by 2% a year for the next 100 years.) Although in 2126 I have $8.68 trillion, the cost to save a life in the world’s poorest countries is now $7,500,000, the same as what it costs to save a life in the United States today. So, with $8.68 trillion, I can only save 1,157,000 lives, which is 661,000 fewer (or 36% fewer) than if I had donated the money right away.
This comparison is highly sensitive to highly uncertain assumptions about the long-term future economic growth of the world’s poorest countries. It depends on those countries — mainly in sub-Saharan Africa — achieving some amount of catch-up growth, similar to what has occurred in several East Asian countries.
We should consider how and when to donate to promote catch-up growth in the poorest countries in light of the rational preference argument. Since Option A is preferable to Option B, donating now to promote economic growth in poor countries is preferable to delaying donations by 100 years.
Other arguments
Several other arguments may be equally important or more important. Some discount rate needs to be applied to the foundation’s money to account for the risk the foundation will cease to exist before it can execute its roadmap. (This could happen for operational, legal, political, or force majeure reasons.) Also, major advancements in science and technology over the intervening century may make the foundation’s plans obsolete, and may also make the remaining opportunities for philanthropic giving much less cost-effective than what was available earlier.
The philosopher David Thorstad notes that patient philanthropy is illegal in most Western democracies, which seems logical, since the laws against it put limits on the otherwise unlimited accumulation of wealth and power by foundations. The economist Thomas Piketty has not discussed patient philanthropy directly, but has described the long-term problems — namely, increasing wealth and income inequality — when the rate of return on capital persistently exceeds the rate of economic growth. Patient philanthropy relies on the rate of return on capital exceeding economic growth. Otherwise, there would be no advantage to investing funds long-term rather than disbursing them as soon as possible.
If the rate of return on capital didn’t exceed economic growth, patient philanthropy would imply a pessimistic outlook, since for opportunities for philanthropic giving to become more cost-effective in the future, it seems like the world would have to get worse over time. One alternative cited rationale for patient philanthropy is to save money that can be deployed in an emergency or when a highly cost-effective opportunity arises, but this isn’t sufficient justification for a patient philanthropic foundation to exist. Donors can invest their own money and deploy it when it is most appropriate. Other foundations that do active work and continually disburse funds can redirect their spending to respond to emergencies and new opportunities. (Other actors like governments may be able to fill that role as well.) There is no reason why putting money into a patient philanthropic foundation would be the only or best way to deploy funds in case of an emergency or a new opportunity.
There are also intuition-based arguments against patient philanthropy. For example, should the Against Malaria Foundation stop distributing bednets and put all of its funds into the Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap Index Fund for 100 years? Does that seem like it would be a net positive for the global poor?
A potential reply is that the current level of funding for the Against Malaria Foundation and other charities helping the global poor is at or above the optimal level. That is, no additional funding, beyond the current level, should go to the Against Malaria Foundation or similar charities. (All additional incremental funding earmarked to help the global poor should instead be invested by the prospective donors in index funds for many decades, or be donated to a patient philanthropic foundation that will invest the funds long-term.)
However, it is not clear how to empirically justify this reply. How is the optimal level empirically determined? How do we know the optimal level of funding for the Against Malaria Foundation and similar organizations is not zero, or 1% of their current funding, or 10%, or 50%? How do we know the optimal level is not 2x, or 10x, or 100x more? (If the optimal level of funding just happened to be the current level, that would be a strange coincidence.)
Conclusion
Investing in the stock market for 100 years before disbursing any funds seems to be almost certainly a worse way to help the global poor than donating to cost-effective charities in the short term. It’s not what the global poor would rationally prefer, it fails a plausible back-of-the-envelope cost-effectiveness calculation, and there are more arguments against it besides, such as illegality in most Western democracies (for good reason), the risk of a foundation failing to survive 100 years, and the possibility of transformative technologies accelerating the end of global poverty within the next century.
Epilogue
My meta-level takeaway is I continue to be skeptical of highly theoretical, abstract ideas that violate common sense and intuition. Inevitably, some such ideas will turn out to be right. However, most are wrong. This isn’t a reason to dismiss such ideas. It’s a reason to apply a high level of scrutiny and withhold judgment until things become clearer.
If you have an intuition that a logical-sounding yet strange idea is wrong but can’t immediately articulate an argument against it, your intuition is probably right. It may take a matter of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years to come up with the argument. That middle period between hearing the idea and forming the argument is the most uncomfortable part. You may be tempted to chastise yourself for resisting an idea for no logical reason. You may feel frustrated you can’t yet turn your intuition into an argument.
The ability to stay in that state of discomfort, confusion, and uncertainty for as long as it takes is an important part of thinking. The natural temptation is to try to prematurely resolve the discomfort by either accepting the counterintuitive idea or resorting to implausible arguments for rejecting it — whatever happens to be on hand at the time. The patience to wait out that middle part has served me well again and again throughout my life.
The rational preference argument only applies for giving to the current generation of recipients at some later point in their lives. If the most cost effective generation to help is really, say, 3 generations in the future we should save and then give to them instead.
The cost-effectiveness argument is more convincing but the case for patient philanthropy only requires there to be some large-enough region that stagnates growth-wise which unfortunately seems likely given the perennial nature of bad governance. I believe that if you make some simplifying assumptions about utility functions and population size, patience looks good iff the projected rate of return on your assets is greater than the projected income growth rate for your target population.
I agree donating now to promote economic growth in poor countries is likely preferable to delaying donations by 100 years, though I am unsure about the tractability of any particular growth intervention.
Not necessarily. Let’s say a patient philanthropy foundation wants to expropriate, say, half of the wealth that would be inherited from this generation by the next (in order to invest it for a future generation). The current generation would rationally prefer this not to happen. The next generation would also rationally prefer for this not happen. Conversely, the current generation would rationally prefer to receive from the foundation an amount of wealth equivalent to half the wealth the next generation would otherwise inherit. The next generation would also rationally prefer that.
The fundamental point is that investing wealth to accumulate wealth might make your impact numbers go up, because of an arbitrary impact accounting decision, but it doesn’t make the well-being of the people you’re trying to help go up, as measured by their rational preferences or revealed preferences.
Even if you wanted to make an argument that investing in index funds is just always inherently going to be so much more cost-effective than consumption — I think this is highly dubious — you could have fewer recipients and disburse enough to each of them that they’d be able to invest a large enough portion of the cash transfer to satisfy you. Instead of 10 million people getting $1,000, maybe 100,000 people get $100,000, or 10,000 people get $1 million.
I can’t see any moral justification for why this wouldn’t be a preferable option to keeping all the money in a British foundation.
At what point in the future would you say it’s no longer likely? If not 100 years, what about 200 years, 300 years, and so on? At what point does patient philanthropy become clearly less cost-effective than giving today?
I think the tractability of stimulating economic growth in poor countries — while I acknowledge it is hard and uncertain, and will probably require funding research — is far better than the tractability of creating patient philanthropy foundations and that successfully execute their 100-year missions. Patient philanthropy foundations are rightly illegal in most Western democracies. It’s hard for any organization to last for 100 years, and especially to both last and remain in good condition. Executing a 100-year old plan to do philanthropic giving seems ridiculous. The plan will have been based on 100-year-old cost-effectiveness estimates that in all likelihood will no longer be considered close to accurate by then.
If the idea of the foundation is not to do any specific plan, then it doesn’t need to exist in the first place. The general pool of capital in wealthy countries, some of which is allocated to philanthropy annually, will be sufficient.
I'm not sure I understand this line of argument. Let's say the world is such that spending in 100 years (i.e on people who do not currently exist and cannot actualize their preferences) is especially cost-effective or otherwise useful. There are two ways of "putting money 100 years into the future".
Option A leads to a bigger counterfactual increase in spending-100-years-from-now which is what we care about in this (admittedly contrived) example.
I agree setting up 100-year foundations is hard; but there are more practical steps one can take if they are convinced of the general arguments for patient philanthropy, most simply giving later in their lives or in their wills (I'm not necessarily endorsing this, but I think it is worth considering).
If you think that investing in index funds is sure to lead to the best outcome, why not give each recipient enough money so that they can invest in index funds? Or otherwise arrange it so that the recipients own and control the capital? Is it plausible to think that the donor owning the capital for 100 years is preferable to the recipient owning the capital for 100 years? What advantage could possibly accrue to the recipient from that arrangement?
Well in this case the recipients do not currently exist so I cannot yet give them any money.
Give it to their ancestors.
see my previous comment:
Giving it to their ancestors is choosing option B
I follow the logic, but I think the logic of the contrived example actually exposes general weaknesses in patient philanthropy (i.e. for example B to be clearly better we have to assume that for some arbitrary reason we do not care about the first three generations of poor people at all, only about the poor people in 100 years' time, who are sufficiently far removed for us not to even know how poor they will be)
Once we relax that assumption and assume that poor people today are at least equally deserving as hypothetical poor people in the future, Option B starts looking rather good. [1]The first generation get helped to the extent they need, their descendants may benefit directly to some extent but also may be better able to help themselves, and for big enough donations there is some sort of compounding return in the wider poor country. In some plausible circumstances even the return to the grandchildren is greater than the sum of money you donated (ceteris paribus being born poor but obtaining a scholarship paid for by a foreign foundation isn't a better situation than being born into the middle class and having education paid for by the grandparent who received the foreign-funded scholarship and was able to earn much better for fifty years as a result)
It then becomes a debate on whether poor people can achieve better returns than index investments in Western stocks, and whilst poor people aren't sophisticated investors and are often subject to all sorts of negative economic shocks, they are often in a position to dramatically improve their livelihood (RCTs on cash transfers suggested the annual return on a long lived tin roof that didn't need replacing every two years was at least 19%, for example) and then there's whether to take into account the nonlinearity of money returns to the poorest people living on $2 per day (2025 USD PPP) now and the poorest people [most likely, based on current trends] earning >$2 per day (2025 USD PPP) 50 years in the future.
The exception might be in cases where your target population has very little capacity to improve their own situation right now, relative to those in future and so most of your money just gets wasted or stolen. I'm unconvinced this applies to people in poverty in general, but it might if you wanted to maximise the positive impact on a population of Palestinians in Gaza specifically, for example.
my example was merely trying to show that if patient philanthropy is preferred, then a wait and donate strategy is better than relying on inter-generational transfers.
No, we don't. We merely have to believe (in expectation) that our marginal money is better spent a few generations in the future than on the current generation. This is of course contested but there are plenty of non-arbitrary reasons to believe it. For example, if you doubt catch-up growth, and you think there will still be some very poor (in absolute terms) countries around a few generations in the future, then a few generations the future you will expect to have
So you can help people more then than you can now. (this is obviously glossing over a ton of details like those covered in Trammel's report but I think it helps get at the intuition).
Most individual-level income gains like we see from tin roofs do not compound across generations at anything like market rates (we can see inter-generational income elasticity is far less than 1 in low-income countries which implies income gains to one generation get diluted over time).
Sure, your example showed that if one irrationally disregards earlier generations and focuses purely on the needs of cohort P, Option B is a clear winner. If one doesn't, we agree that it's actually pretty darn complicated to estimate the total welfare impact of donating now versus donating a larger nominal sum on equivalent problems (assuming they still exist) in future, which requires a lot of contestable counterfactual assumptions,[1] as well as choice of discount rates, PPP and money nonlinearity assumptions and decisions about whether any value is attached to economic stimulus to non-recipients in developing countries and keeping marginal NGOs alive. (Donations to things other than poverty relief have their own idiosyncracies: hopefully the number of ITNs needed to prevent malaria deaths by ~2050 will be zero.)
The intergenerational elasticity point is an interesting one, but intergenerational income elasticities are higher in less developed countries (and the higher incomes are partially inherited by more people in later generations, assuming they continue to reproduce above replacement rate). And under normal assumptions we care about the earlier generations helped at least as much as the later ones, so you've already helped many more people than the direct recipients by the time the patient philanthropy fund is investigating how many more people accrued compound interest will let them help. Plus in the specific example of the roof we're talking about wealth, and you'd have to invest very well in stocks and shares to beat the imputed 20% annual returns on a tin roof, even over time spans that extend beyond its serviceability.
Catchup growth definitely exists, the only question is whether more marginal economies will be excluded from it.[2] There are many reasons for economic stagnation in poorer regions (most obviously terrible governance), but it's certainly not independent from whether philanthropic funds for economic growth and poverty alleviation decide that in the near term they should shift towards promoting the economic development of the stock market in their own country instead.[3] Too much patience is probably worse for developing countries than the opposite extreme of too much philanthropic cash chasing too few viable opportunities.
You also have to make assumptions about the philanthropists of the future as well: I'm not as rosy on near future technology-enabled post scarcity societies as some people on here, but if we trend in that direction maybe your nominally larger funds are a lot less relevant in future than that now
Never mind the Asian Tiger economies, even some conflict-ridden impoverished backwaters like Burkina Faso have seen average growth rates comparable to US stocks over extended periods of time, and even without wild technological optimism it'll probably be fairly hard to find people living under the new $3 per day (2025 PPP) poverty threshold in 2075
Makes wayyy more sense for funds to keep most of the funds invested in domestic stocks when they're endowments ring fenced for specific things like selective scholarships or maintenance of a facility than funds for promoting economic growth and poverty alleviation
If by Option B you meant that the recipients would invest most or all of the cash transfers in index funds, why is Option A preferable?
If the answer is they’re too desperately poor to not spend a large portion of the money on consumption, then rather than respecting the global poor’s rational preferences, this is a paternalistic argument.
So lets say we are targeting population P - these are the recipients. P is the population of people most in need that will be around in 100 years. Most of them do not currently exist. We want to spend money to help P either in the form of direct cash transfers or health interventions.
We can do that by investing our money and then handing it out to the individuals in P once they come into existence. This is option A, aka the patient philanthropy strategy.
We could also give to the parents or grandparents of P, some of which are alive today, which we can call P_p and P_g. I am assuming this is what you mean by "Give it to their ancestors.". I call this Option B. Option B is worse because:
Thanks for writing this, I’ve been somewhat skeptical of arguments for patient philanthropy. But at the same time mildly patient philanthropy has lead me to some more easy/sustainable ways to donate over time.
As a US citizen, instead of donating $5000 every year I can donate $1000 every year & invest $4000 every year. Starting in 2026 we can do a tax write off up to $1000 per year in donations even if we take the standard deduction. Then every like 4-7 years when the $4000 per year investment fund reaches around $30,000 (or whatever 30% of my annual income is as that’s the max one can stock transfer donate), I can do a direct stock transfer to GiveWell/EA programs, avoid capital gains, & itemize my taxes so I can get a better $30,000 write off than the standard deduction offers. All that can make for an extra like $4500 in tax write-offs on net.
The scope of what could be considered "patient philanthropy" is pretty broad. My comment doesn't apply to all potential implementations of the topic.
To start with, I'll note the distinction between whether society should allow for patient philanthropy and whether it makes sense for a philanthropist who is attempting to maximize their own altruistic goals. For what it is worth, I think there should be some significant limits roughly in line with US law on private foundations, and I would close what I see as some loopholes on public charity status (e.g., that donors can evade the intent of the public-charity rules by donating through a DAF which is technically a public charity, and so counts as public support).
But it's not logically inconsistent to favor tightening the rules for everyone and to also think that if society chooses not to do so, then I shouldn't unilaterally disadvantage my preferred cause areas while (e.g.) the LDS church increases its cash hoard.
A Cause Area in Which Yarrow's Arguments Don't Work Well for Me
I think some of these arguments depend significantly on what the donor is trying to do. I'm going to pick non-EA cause areas for the examples to keep the focus somewhat abstract (while also concrete enough for examples to work).
Let's suppose Luna's preferred cause area is freeing dogs from shelters and giving them loving homes. The rational preference argument doesn't work here, and I know of no reason to think that the cost of freeing dogs will increase nearly as fast as the rate of return on investments. I also don't have any clear reason to think that there are shovel-ready interventions today that will have a large enough effect on future shelter populations in 50 years to justify spending a much smaller sum of money now. (Admittedly, I didn't research either; please do your own research if you are interested in funding canine rescue.)
Luna does face risk from "operational, legal, political, or force majeure" considerations, as well as the risk of technological or social changes making her original goal ineffective or inefficient. But many of these considerations happen over time, meaning that Luna (or her successors) should be able to sense them and start freeing dogs if their risk of disruption over the next 10-20 years gets too high. More broadly, I think this is an answer to some criticisms -- the philanthropist doesn't have to cabin the discretion of the fund to act as circumstances change (although there are also costs to allowing more discretion).
This sounds like patient philanthropy lite -- with an implied time limit of the rest of the donor's life and a restriction on buying/selling assets, both coming from tax considerations. That addresses some valid concerns with patient philanthropy, but we lose the advantage of having the money irrevocably committed to charitable purposes. I'm not sure how to weigh those considerations.
The Anti-PP Argument Calls for Faith in Future Foundations, Donors, and Governments
For the reserve-fund variants of PP: the patient philanthropist may not want to trust other foundations and governments to react strongly enough to future developments. There's at least some reason to hold such a view, although it may not be enough to justify the practice. I suspect most people think the government generally doesn't do a great job with its funding priorities (although they would have diverging and even contradictory opinions on why that is the case). I am not particularly impressed by the big foundations that have a wide scope of practice (and thus are potentially flexible). While experience that foundations tend to ossify and become bloated is an argument against patient philanthropy, it also counts as an argument against trusting big foundations to move swiftly and decisively in the face of an emerging threat or opportunity. Still, I think this premise would need to be developed and supported further to update my views on reserve-fund PP.
For other forms of PP: The assertion that the future world should rely on current-income donors, traditional foundations, and/or governments may rest on an assumption that the amount of need / opportunity in a given cause area tracks fairly well with the amount of funding available. If something happens in cause area X and it needs 1-2 orders of magnitude more money this year, will the money be forthcoming in short order? I don't have a clear opinion on that (and it may depend on the cause area).
Patient Philanthropy May Work Particularly Well in Some Use Cases
Thanks for this very detailed, thoughtful comment, Jason. These are interesting considerations and thought experiments.
There are many particular points I could respond to, but let me focus on giving my most important overall point. I am suspicious of arguments that take a form that’s this abstract and theoretical, where you’re making an empirical prediction about the thing that would be best to do in practice, but the real data that you use as an input is only the historical CAGR of the S&P 500 and the rest is pure imagination or theory. Arguments like these add or multiply irreducible uncertainties together, which feels a bit like adding or multiplying infinities — in this case, it’s adding or multiplying unknowable numbers.
So, ultimately, this is a form of argument based on intuition, and the intuitions are weaker than the intuitions that support the opposite conclusion.
What if we apply some form of universalizability or rule consequentialism, such that we should follow the general rule that, if everybody (or most people) followed it, the world would be better off? It seems hard to argue that indefinitely delaying philanthropic impact is this sort of rule. For instance, this discussion would not be happening because effective altruism would not exist. And many, many good things in the world would not exist.
You can, of course, argue that we should think about what’s best on the margin, not about what’s the best general rule. Okay, sure. But then how do you determine what’s best on the margin? Should we have 10x more philanthropy focused on immediate disbursements before we allocate resources to patient philanthropy? 100x more? 1000x more? Or maybe we already have 10x, 100x, or 1000x more actively disbursing philanthropy than is optimal. Or maybe, through a strange coincidence, we’re currently right on the margin. How do we determine this? We can’t. So, marginal thinking doesn’t actually help us here.
There’s also a sort of free-riding argument: you’re just waiting for others to do the work to improve the world first so you can make your impact numbers go up in the future, without accounting for their contribution. This is true both in general with investing in stocks over the very long-term and with arguments of the sort that you should wait for LGBT rights to get more popular before advocating for LGBT rights to be more cost-effective to advocate for — this seems like an accounting trick, not a principled argument. If advocating now is a pre-requisite to advocating later, advocating now is part of the cost. By opting not to pay it, you aren’t increasing the overall cost-effectiveness of the LGBT rights movement, you’re just juicing your own numbers.
By analogy, consider something like environmental impact assessment. These numbers can be juiced depending on what you count or don’t count. What’s in doubt is not the overall environmental impact of all economic activity, but what credit or blame should be assigned to different economic actors. Would patient philanthropy make the world better off overall? Or would it just increase the credit that could be assigned to some philanthropic foundations on one particular accounting scheme?
In general, we should (hopefully) expect the world getting better to actually reduce the cost-effectiveness of future interventions, e.g. the cost of saving a life will go up as global poverty goes down and the poorest countries experience per capita GDP growth. But you can elicit the opposite result by being very selective about your interventions. You can you only care about providing free hologram entertainment to disadvantaged children, but since holograms are very expensive today, you’ll wait until they’re much cheaper. But shouldn’t you be responsible for making them cheaper? Why are you free-riding and counting on others to do that for you, for free, to juice your philanthropic impact?
You can always contrive a thought experiment that shows it’s theoretically possible for patient philanthropy to be the best thing to do, but we’re not asking if it’s theoretically possible to be the best, we’re asking if it’s the best in practice. So, we have to consider what’s realistic as opposed to what’s possible.
Ultimately, we may not be able to produce a realistic mathematical model that tells us an answer one way the other. We might have to rely on general principles, general wisdom, or general intuition. The main thing recommending patient philanthropy is that we think/hope the stock market will go up a lot over time. The things recommending against it are:
(Also, I forgot to mention, we shouldn’t be accounting for stock market gains as if it’s "free money" that dropped from the sky because r > g has troubling implications, but I won’t get into that now.)
This isn’t as satisfying as a crisp cost-effectiveness estimate where in the end you get some clear number telling you what to do, but I think it’s the right/best way to reason about such things.
I think that relies on a certain model of the effects of social advocacy. Modeling is error-prone, but I don't think our activist in 1900 would be well-served spending significant money without giving some thought to their model. More often, I think the model for getting stuff done looks more like a more complicated version of: Inputs A and B are expected to produce C in the presence of a sufficient catalyst and the relative absence of inhibiting agents.
Putting more A into the system isn't going to help produce C if the rate limit is being caused by the amount of B available, the lack of the catalyst, or the presence of inhibiting agents. Although money is a useful input that is often fungible at various rates to other necessary inputs, and sometimes can influence catalyst & inhibitor levels, sometimes it cannot (or can do so very inefficiently and/or at levels beyond the funder's ability to meaningfully influence).
Sometimes for social change, having the older generation die off or otherwise lose power is useful. There's not much our hypothetical activist could do to accelerate that. One might think, for instance, that a significant decline in religiosity and/or the influence of religious entities is a necessary reagent in this model. While one could in theory put money into attempting to reduce the influence of religion in 1900s public life, I think there would be good reasons not to pursue this approach. Rather, I think it could make more sense for the activist to let the broader cultural and demographic changes to do some of the hard work for them.
There's also the reality that efforts often decay if there isn't sufficient forward momentum -- that was the intended point of the Pikachu welfare example. Ash doesn't have the money right now to found a perpetual foundation for the cause that will be able to accomplish anything meaningful. If he front-loads the money -- say on some field-building, some research grants, some grants to graduate students -- and the money runs out, then the organizations will fold, the research will grow increasingly out of date, and the graduate students will find new areas to work in.
The more neutral-to-positive way to cast free-riding is employing leverage. I'm really not concerned about free-riding on for-profit companies, or even much governmental work (especially things like military R&D, which has led to various socially useful technologies).
That's not an accounting trick in my book -- there are clear redistributive effects here. If I spend my money on basic science to promote hologram technology, the significant majority of the future benefits of my work are likely going to flow to future for-profit hologram companies, future middle-class+ people in developed countries, and so on. Those aren't the benefits I care about, and Big Hologram isn't likely to pay it forward by mailing a bunch of holograms to disadvantaged children (in your terminology, they are going to free-ride off my past efforts).
As a society, we give corporations and similar entities certain privileges to incentivize behavior because a lot of value ends up leaking out to third parties. For example, the point of patents is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Art" with the understanding that said progress becomes part of the commons after a specified time has passed. Utilizing that progress after the patent period has expired isn't some sort of shady exploitation of the researcher; it is the deal society made in exchange for taking affirmative actions to protect the researcher's IP during the patent period.
I don't agree with this causal model/explanatory theory.
This is some kind of at least partly deterministic theory about culture that says culture is steered by forces that can't be steered by human creativity, agency, knowledge, or effort. I don't agree with that view. I think culture is changed by what people decide to do.
That depends on two things:
I guess it could theoretically be true that both assumptions are correct, and maybe we can imagine a scenario where you would have good reasons to believe both of these things, but in practice, in reality, I think it's rare that we ever really know things like that. So, while it's possible to imagine scenarios where the upfront money will definitely be supplied by someone else and the down-the-line money definitely won't, what does this tell us about whether this is a good idea in practice?
The hologram example is making the point: if the pool of dollars required to produce an outcome is a certain amount, the overall cost-effectiveness of producing that outcome doesn't change regardless of which dollars are yours or not. I think your point is: your marginal cost-effectiveness could be much higher or lower depending on what's going to happen if you do nothing. Which is true, I just don't think we can actually know what's going to happen if you do nothing, and the best version of this still seems to be guesswork or hunches.
It also seems like an oddly binary choice of the sort that doesn't really exist in real life. If you have significant philanthropic money, can you really not affect what others do? Let's flip it: if another philanthropist said they would subsidize holograms down the line, that would affect what you would do. So, why not think you have the same power?
What seems to be emerging here is an overall theme of: 'the future will happen the way it's going to happen regardless of what we do about it' vs. 'we have the agency to change how events play out starting right now'. I definitely believe the latter, I definitely disbelieve the former. We have agency. And, on the other hand, we can't predict the future.
Who was it who recently quoted someone, maybe the physicist David Deutsch or the psychologist Steven Pinker, saying something like: how terrible would it be if we could predict the future? Because that would mean we had no agency.
One of the benefits of patient philanthropy is that it allows you to select the people to receive your money in, say, 50 years.
Assume the poorest people in the world are in Ghana. There is no guarantee that the poorest people in the world will be in Ghana in 50 years. If we want to help people in Ghana in 50 years, your two arguments strike me as quite plausible. However, if we want to help the global poor in 50 years, donating to Ghanans seems much less likely to maximize this.
On the other hand, there is also no guarantee that the global poor in 50 years will (i) be as poor as some people from Ghana you might be able to help today and (ii) have as many low hanging fruit interventions that can help them.
Give What We Can currently assumes that the cost of saving a life today is ~$4k. It's not obvious that the cost of saving a life will be as low as ($4k x compound interest on index fund) in 50 years' time.
(Also, if the philanthropist's timelines are as long as 50 years it may not be them doing the cause selection, which may or may not be a consideration)
It seems very implausible that there will be any low-income countries (~$1,100 per capita GDP or less) in 50 years that are not currently low-income countries. So, donating to people in low-income countries now is a sure thing.
You can make a slightly more complicated version of the rational preference argument to also answer this objection, but that added twist seems like an unnecessary complication, given what I just said above.
What about counties that exit low income in the next fifty years? Under your assumptions and framework, we can be sure that we won’t accidentally exclude a future low income country, but we can’t be sure we won’t fail to select a future low income country.
This isn't clear to me.
If the countries in question have been growing much slower than the S&P 500, then the money at the future point might be far more money to them than it is to them now. And they aren't going to invest in the S&P 500 in the meantime.