How Much to Give is a Pragmatic Question
"How much?" is a question people have struggled with for a very long time. Donating 10% of income has a long history, and it's common for EAs to pledge to do this; donating 2.5% of wealth is also traditional. If you're earning to give, however, you might want to give more: Julia and I have been giving 50%; Allan Saldanha has been giving 75% since 2019. How should one decide?
I was hoping there were good EA blog posts on this topic, but after spending a while with EA Forum search and Google I didn't find any. Claude kept telling me I should check out Jeff Kaufman's blog, but all I found was a rough post from 2011. So here's an attempt that I think is better than my old post, but still not great.
While EAs talk a lot about principles, I think this is fundamentally a pragmatic question. I find the scale of the world's problems overwhelming; no one has enough money to eliminate poverty, disease, or the risk we make ourselves extinct. This is not to say donations don't matter—there are a lot of excellent options for making the world better—but there's not going to be a point where I'm going to be satisfied and say "Good! That's done now." This gives a strong intellectual pull to donate to the point where donating another dollar would start to decrease my altruistic impact, by interfering in my work; burning out does not maximize your impact!
In the other direction, I'm not fully altruistic. I like some amount of comfort, there are fun things I want to do, and I want my family to have good lives. I'm willing to go pretty far in the altruism direction (I donate 50% and took a 75% pay cut to do more valuable work) but it's a matter of balance.
