Comments
Interesting post! I think you raise several points that others on the fringes of the effective giving movement have brought up before. Please don't treat the following critiques as attacks but rather as "tough love," or perhaps tentative explorations by somebody else cautiously trying to discern right and wrong in a screwed-up world.
1) As a factual matter, living on $25,000 isn't just "far more than the average income in any developing nation," it's also a higher individual income than almost 50% of the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#Income_distribution
Note that a)the above number is before taxes and savings and b)the US is rich even among the developed world, so all else being equal I'd expect the median person in the developed world to spend less per year.
2) Is somebody who gives away a kidney less "human", in your view? What about a First Worlder who lives on less than $20,000*? A man who cooks for himself&family rather than go to restaurants? A woman who commits to never having children? An American citizen who's neutral (and thus triages) between complete strangers in the local elementary school in Newark and complete strangers in a local elementary school in Malawi? Someone who's vegan? Someone who eats beef and drinks milk but not chickens or eggs? Somebody who bikes to work? Somebody who cries at the thought of drowning strangers? Somebody who doesn't cry?
The way I see it, all of those are examples of what it means to be "human" (Case in point: the very same humans who exhibit those traits!), and much more. I don't think it's too strong a claim to say this and that you, ironically enough, severely under-estimate the richness of human experience.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country#Gallup_median_household_and_per-capita_income (The numbers are smaller than the above figure since "per capita" also includes children).
3 Your claim for what is and is not a human isn't just a problem in a definitional sense of inaccuracy, it's also rather harmful emotionally. Put another way, you're literally dehumanizing the views/actions of myself and some of my friends, and that makes me sad.
4) Combative language aside, I definitely agree with point that people are not idealized givers,. nor are they capable of being so. Julia Wise writes a lot of good articles about this:
http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html http://www.givinggladly.com/2014/10/aim-high-even-if-you-fall-short.html http://www.givinggladly.com/2015/10/burnout-and-self-care.html
5) Some people give more than you. Some people give less than you. Some people don't give at all. Some people kill orphans and other people save them. They're all human, no more or less than you are. This post is not meant to guilt you for not giving more, or for being "human". As DavidNash and Julua Wise talks about, people should factor in burnout/productivity/influence, and figure out the level of giving that works best for them. Different people have different limitations, different things that makes them "human." It's too high-level a critique to say that our foibles rather than our virtues are what makes us human, and I think human foibles are just that-foibles. Some of them can be avoided, but we all have limitations (different limitations) that we can't overcome. And that's fine! But despite our foibles, despite our limitations, our humanity can and will shine through, and we can and will strive to make the world a better place, together.
Of course you're correct that people are humans rather than idealised givers. This distinction matters, and sometimes it matters a lot.
I think there's an important disanalogy between making econs a principal object of study and making idealised givers a principal object of study, though. Most of economics is descriptive -- it's about understanding how the world works, and that includes understanding how the people in it work (positive economics). On the other hand much of the work around effective altruism is trying not to do describe how people do behave, but to give goals of behaviour to which people can aspire (this is really normative economics).