I give because it's the most rational way to spend my money

I really enjoyed reading the "why I donate" posts in the past week, so much so that I felt compelled to add my reflections, in case someone finds my reasons as interesting as I found theirs.

1. My money must be spent on something, might as well spend it on the most efficient things

The core reason I give is something that I think is under-represented in the other posts: the money I have and earn will need to be spent on something, and it feels extremely inefficient and irrational to spend it on my future self when it can provide >100x as much to others.

To me, it doesn't seem important whether I'm in the global top 10% or bottom 10%, or whether the money I have is due to my efforts or to the place I was born. If it can provide others 100x as much, it just seems inefficient/irrational to allocate it to myself.

The post could end here, but there are other secondary reasons/perspectives on why I personally donate that I haven't seen commonly discussed.

2. Spending money is voting on how the global economy allocates its resources

In 2017, I read Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct by Kevin Simler. Surprisingly, I don't think it has ever been posted on this forum. I disagree with some of it, but the core points really changed how I think about wealth, earning, and spending. The post is very well written and enjoyable, but it's 2400 words, so copy-pasting some snippets:

A thought experiment — the Congolese Trading Window:
> Suppose one day you wake up to find a large pile of Congolese francs. [...] A window [...] pushes open to reveal the unfamiliar sights of a Congolese outdoor market [...] a man approaches your window. [...] He's asking if you'd like to buy his grain for 500 francs.

What should you do?

[...]

Your plan is to buy grain whenever you think the price is poised to go up in the near future, and sell whenever you think the price is poised to go down.
[...]
Imagine a particular bag of grain that you bought at T1 for 200 francs, and then sold at T2, for 800 francs. What changed in this interval was the relative scarcity of grain. At T1 the grain was abundant (and therefore cheap), but at T2 it had become scarce (and therefore expensive). [...] you're compensated for providing this service. But the money doesn't represent what you've weaseled from the economy, but rather the intrinsic value you added to it.

And here's the important part, emphasis mine:

[...] Imagine if, after years of speculating in the Congolese grain market and accumulating millions of francs, you decide to cash out with one final act of buying a yacht [...] The yacht is made of wood, metal, and plastic. Building it requires many thousands of hours of effort. Workers have to find the trees, cut them down, haul the lumber across vast distances, cut it, sand it, polish it, paint it, etc., etc., etc. If you weren't commissioning the yacht, all of those materials and man-hours could be put to other, better uses. For all the good it does the Congolese people, you may as well pay them to build the yacht, then burn it before their eyes.

After reading that, I sometimes think of the global economy as a weird kind of machine: I enter some money and it retroactively^[1] cuts trees, mines graphite, and does all sorts of complex things to output a pencil or whatever I ask.

I see the number in my bank account as a measure of votes I have to make this machine allocate its resources, and spending decisions I make as "€1.70 votes to be allocated into a slice of pizza for Lorenzo" or "$5.85 votes for an insecticide-treated bednet for a family in DRC". I give because I want some of my votes to go to what I genuinely believe the global economy machine should allocate more of its resources to.

3. I don't think it's as bad as some make it out to be

Some people in EA are against giving. I don't think everyone should donate significantly (especially people paying off debt with their marginal funds, or living below their country's poverty line), but I find most EA arguments against giving unconvincing.

1. I don't think it's that much of a sacrifice.
   Sometimes people paint a really sad picture of an EA not eating ice cream because that money could be spent on 0.4 bednets. I'll make the controversial claim that most marginal spending for most people I know is not clearly net-positive for their own longterm wellbeing, compared to donating it. Even in the ice cream example, it's not clear to me that eating an extra ice cream would be net-positive for many people I know compared to one fewer. The same applies to an extra videogame, purse, or Netflix/Spotify/... subscription. There are many things people spend money on that are clearly good for them (e.g. books, gym memberships, therapy, lentils), but it seems to me that those are usually non-marginal, and a 1%-50% reduction in self-spend won't impact them noticeably^[2].
   I also think that for many, the only difference in practice would be slightly lower savings for retirement.
   Even more controversially, sometimes people paint a sadder picture of an EA choosing not to have kids because they want to donate more. This survey finds that 44% of people under 50 who don't plan to have kids claim it's because they want to "focus on other things". I don't think it makes things sadder if those "other things" involve improving the lives of others instead of traveling.
   To be clear, some people in EA are sacrificing a lot (in rare cases possibly too much) to donate. I find that extremely inspiring, and really don't want to diminish the very tough choices they have to make. But in many cases (such as mine) the "sacrifices" that people make to donate are similar to "sacrifices" that others make so they can travel or have a nicer house, and should be seen in a similar way.
2. I don't think it's bad for personal epistemics/impact - I think it's actually good.
   Some claim that you should not donate unless you are extremely wealthy, as good decision-making comes from a position of abundance. Others worry that spending time thinking about donating will take time from their research/job.
   I think that spending some hours every year going through the process of "what is the most valuable thing I'd want the global economy to use more resources for" and allocating some of your wealth towards that, can be a really good exercise to improve your decision-making, especially if you're making important decisions about the future of others (whether at astronomical or local scale).
   This is a very weak datapoint, but many of the most impactful people donated significantly long before proving themselves great at decision-making, from the executives at LEEP to the ones at Anthropic.
3. I don't think markets are better than effective charities at allocating resources.
   As hinted above, I think a big failure mode of contemporary markets is that they give people what they want, not what they need. But I also think people don't even think about what they want before giving money to the global economy machine to make things happen. Also, a lot of the best things that ever happened (e.g. smallpox eradication) were not funded by markets.

4. I donate because I'm an atheist

I found it really interesting to read @NickLaing's I Donate because I am Christian, mostly because I'm a huge fan of his work, but partly because my main motivations for giving feel similar to my main motivations for atheism.

Atheists often use something along the lines of the Copernican principle/Principle of indifference/Mediocrity principle to claim that a specific religion/planet/species is unlikely to be "special" in a cosmological sense e.g. Feynman.

Very similar reasoning should cause us to believe that we're unlikely to be 100x more important than others, and to equally consider similar interests.

Nick claims that the EA community might put to shame the Christian community in terms of average giving. But for all the talk about being "rational", most atheists I know spend less than religious people on the things that they agree matter the most. Sometimes I hear them say things like "I know I should donate, but I don't", which does not strike me as rational.

1. ^{^}

   I don't actually believe in acausal time-travel, it's just how I model it in my head

2. ^{^}

    Some evidence for marginal income difference not leading to significant wellbeing changes here.