Philanthropy

My donations

Starting in 2016 I became intensely interested in the ethical work of Peter Singer and Will MacAskill. This precipitated in a passion for effective altruism. Ethically I am a pluralist in the sense that I believe in both deontological and consequentialist reasons for acting. It just happens that I think the lions share of the normative power of ethical claims is derived on consequentialist grounds.

Throughout college I read authors related to Singer and MacAskill like Toby Ord, Nick Bostrom, and Phil Trammell. I was influenced by these philosophers and eventually became convinced that I ought to donate more. In particular, I was influenced to believe that I ought to donate with the goal of helping humans in the far future.

My pledges

At 20 I was more or less certain I was going to donate the majority of my lifetime earnings to charity. It wasn't until I was 22 that I actually took any sort of pledge.

I took the Giving Pledge with Giving What We Can, and then a year later I took an Incentive Pledge at 23 years old. During that time I worked as an organizer for the local EA Twin Cities group and as an ambassador for Giving What We Can.

Early Donations

The first donations I made centered around public health interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa and impoverished regions around the world. I am indebted to GiveWell for finding the most cost-effective charities in this space.

After about 11 months of donating I increased my donations to include the less tangible and more risky philanthropic bets of patient philanthropy and long-term existential risk reduction.

Throughout my life it is my goal to increase my donations and increase the percent directed towards long term efforts such as existential risk reduction. As of now my plan is to conduct an earn-to-give career path to donate the majority of my wealth to a Trammell style patient philanthropy fund.

The future

My long term vision for my career and philanthropic investments are:

Give 10% of my income to effective charities every year.
Follow an Incentive Pledge which commits me to living on $33,000 a year in 2020 dollars, which raises by $10,000 for every $1 million I invest and subsequently commit to charity.
Focus my career and personal time on helping vulnerable populations.

To achieve (1) I will use a charity evaluator to decide which charities improve wellbeing for the least amount of money. When working on (2) I will direct my investments to businesses in emerging markets which help build infrastructure or the economies of developing nations. Finally, I believe I will achieve (3) by building businesses which work on improving the wellbeing of children, the sick, and/or the elderly.