This was an interesting read, thanks!

And Our World In Data’s chart is understanding the case

Understating..?

This is interesting! But I don't think I fully understand why 'private law' rights are supposed to be more credible than 'wellbeing' rights. Wouldn't humans also have an incentive to disregard these 'private law' rights when it suited them?

For example, if the laws were still created by humans, then if AI systems accumulated massive amounts of wealth, wouldn't there be a huge incentive to simply pass a law to confiscate it?

I'm very much enjoying this sequence!

I loved the final sentence on this one.

Thanks Vasco! I have written a reply to both you and Austin in the thread under Austin's comment.

One thing that applies to your reply specifically: I don't see how a market for farmed animal welfare could decrease animal-years, as you suggest it might in the near term (though I may be misunderstanding how the system is supposed to work).

I get that animal welfare improvements often carry a cost, and that imposing an animal welfare improvement on a farmer with no compensation would therefore shift the supply curve, raise prices, and ultimately decrease the number of animals being farmed.

But my understanding of the animal welfare market idea is that these welfare improvements are not imposed, but bought. The person paying for the improvement would now need to pay enough that it is worth the farmer voluntarily implementing that improvement, which presumably would involve covering all of the cost of the improvement and then some. Since this is now an additional source of the income for the farmer, I think you'd expect it to shift the supply curve of animal products in the opposite direction, causing a drop in prices, and an increase in the amount of animal products consumed?

Thank you both for these answers, this is helpful!

It sounds like it is useful to distinguish two possible ways of implementing a welfare market:

• A farmer is paid to change the welfare of their animals from negative (it would be better if they had never existed) to positive (it is better that they get to exist).
• A farmer is paid to change the welfare of their animals from negative, to less negative, but the animals still lead net-negative lives overall.

I can see how on pure consequentialist grounds the first case would be good, and avoid the problem I was asking about. Although I expect a lot of vegans who have a principled objection to animals being treated as property will object to this, if increasing quantity of farmed animals is explicitly viewed as a positive outcome of the policy. I would certainly have reservations about it.

On the other hand, the second case seems like it does carry the risk I was asking about. We should expect the quantity of animals farmed to increase in a way that might outweigh the gain in welfare per animal (whether or not it does will I think depend on complicated economics things like the slopes of supply and demand curves?)

It's still a psychology question! The people who die in year 1 and make up those increased donations haven't had time to accrue interest, so they're donating money you claim they'd never have donated if they were only 10% per year pledgers, which is a claim about donor psychology, and an unrealistic one at that!

Re-commenting the comment I left on Aaron Boddy's linked post, because would genuinely be interested to read a reply to this from a proponent of the idea (It was a sincere question, I wasn't looking to just shoot the idea down):

This is a really interesting idea. But does a system like this risk increasing the number of animals being farmed?

I'm struggling to wrap my head around the economics of it properly, but if you take it to extremes then it seems like it might?

Suppose I'm a wealthy individual who is willing to pay a very high price to keep a hen out of a cage (more than the market price of all of her eggs over her life). Now imagine that the demand for eggs drops to zero. In the current system, farmers would stop raising hens, and animal activists would be happy. But in this new system, if it is still legal to cage hens, then a farmer could keep raising hens, threaten to put them in cages unless I pay them not to, and just throw all their eggs in the bin? Or am I misunderstanding the system?

That's an extreme and unrealistic example, but just meant to illustrate that in principle paying for welfare (which is really paying someone not to do something bad) feels like it might carry a risk of increasing total amount of suffering, even if it decreases the average?

I'm not sure the same problem applies to things like carbon credits.

So I think you're trying to make two points at once (the points 1 and 2 as you've defined them) and that has prompted a bit of a negative reaction because most people responding (including me) are focusing on point 2, which is a well worn argument in EA circles that you seemed to be making an overly strong claim about.

To state it more clearly, I think most people have interpreted you as claiming:

"If you have X dollars that you want to donate, then it is better to invest them, and donate the X dollars + investment returns at death, than to donate the X dollars immediately"

Whereas what you are actually claiming is:

"The policy 'give X% at death' is an easier sell than the policy 'give Y% of your income each year', even when X is significantly bigger than Y, and in a realistic population of givers could result in more wealth being moved in total, even in year 1."

Do you agree with that summary?

If so, I think that's an interesting claim, and I'm sorry that a lot of us have been thrown off by the phrasing! My concerns with this claim would be:

• It involves an empirical claim about donor psychology that can't be answered just with a simulation (giving at death isn't free since lots of people want to leave something for their family, so the idea they'd be willing to give more under this policy needs more justification).
• I think comparing annual donors who give nothing at death to people who give everything at death is a false dichotomy. I expect most GWWC pledgers to also give a substantial amount of their wealth at death (in addition to what they give each year while alive).
• You should make clearer that you're advocating for a change in public messaging, not a change to what an ideal altruistic donor should do with their donations (the post title is not currently written in this way).

Your key rebuttal to the pro-giving-sooner arguments appears to be the finding that a "give at death" policy would lead to higher annual donations in a population of effective altruists, even in year 1. I can see others are questioning whether this claim is actually true, but I think this is missing the point. I think even if this claim is true, it is not relevant.

The question that each individual donor needs to answer is: What is the marginal impact of donating money now vs investing it and then donating it at some later time? (for each possible later time they could donate, which could even be after their death) I don't think the finding of your simulation actually has any bearing on this question.

This is because your finding is clearly highly dependent on mortality statistics. For example, if the variance in life-expectancy were lower so that no one died in the next 5 years, then the finding that donations are higher even in year 1 would no longer hold. On the other hand, the question of when a given donation will have the highest marginal impact has nothing to do with mortality statistics among effective altruists. So the two questions shouldn't have anything to do with each other.

If you are finding that one policy is leading to more wealth being moved than another (even after accounting for gains from interest), then I think you are also advocating a change in how much people should give, not just a change in when what they give should be given.

People can always give annually and donate a significant chunk of their wealth at death.

This is a really interesting idea. But does a system like this risk increasing the number of animals being farmed?

I'm struggling to wrap my head around the economics of it properly, but if you take it to extremes then it seems like it might?

Suppose I'm a wealthy individual who is willing to pay a very high price to keep a hen out of a cage (more than the market price of all of her eggs over her life). Now imagine that the demand for eggs drops to zero. In the current system, farmers would stop raising hens, and animal activists would be happy. But in this new system, if it is still legal to cage hens, then a farmer could keep raising hens, threaten to put them in cages unless I pay them not to, and just throw all their eggs in the bin? Or am I misunderstanding the system?

That's an extreme and unrealistic example, but just meant to illustrate that in principle paying for welfare (which is really paying someone not to do something bad) feels like it might carry a risk of increasing total amount of suffering, even if it decreases the average?