One thing that I wish was considered more often when looking at effective philanthropy is the opportunity cost of the money in terms of amount donated over time.
For example, assume someone like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos had donated all of their money (liquidating their shares however possible) the moment their companies went public. It's tough to say that this would have been a better result, since the amount donated would have been a small fraction in comparison to what could have been; their donations would have been a drop in the bucket.
Given certain people (and/or corporations) have historically allocated capital very effectively (and, for example, that the annual returns of AMZN/MSFT/others have been very good for decades and obviously far surpass inflation+charity efficiency scaling), is it not more effective altruism for those like Bezos and Scott to keep their wealth compounding as effectively as possible, and then donate it much later on, perhaps in a few decades?
I understand that the idea of this may sound unappealing for many reasons, but I rarely hear good counter-arguments for why it shouldn't be done. I apply this to myself personally, and rather than donate large amounts of my income now, I'd like to be able to donate 100x the amount (or whatever it may be) in 30-70 years.
(edit: After reading some great responses, I do think the best counter-argument is perhaps that of "sure you can compound wealth and donate later, or you can donate to something so effective that it compounds (e.g. enables more people to live and accomplish things, which could compound at a higher growth rate). I think this is the best point to mention in response to what I wrote, but I don't know of any analysis that backs it up with hard numbers - do we have charities that we can demonstrate actually cause compounding to happen this well? It's difficult since we'd need to accurately model future compounding returns from them to get the types of answers that we'd want.)
For example, assume someone like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos had donated all of their money (liquidating their shares however possible) the moment their companies went public. It's tough to say that this would have been a better result, since the amount donated would have been a small fraction in comparison to what could have been; their donations would have been a drop in the bucket.
Given certain people (and/or corporations) have historically allocated capital very effectively (and, for example, that the annual returns of AMZN/MSFT/others have been very good for decades and obviously far surpass inflation+charity efficiency scaling), is it not more effective altruism for those like Bezos and Scott to keep their wealth compounding as effectively as possible, and then donate it much later on, perhaps in a few decades?
I understand that the idea of this may sound unappealing for many reasons, but I rarely hear good counter-arguments for why it shouldn't be done. I apply this to myself personally, and rather than donate large amounts of my income now, I'd like to be able to donate 100x the amount (or whatever it may be) in 30-70 years.
(edit: After reading some great responses, I do think the best counter-argument is perhaps that of "sure you can compound wealth and donate later, or you can donate to something so effective that it compounds (e.g. enables more people to live and accomplish things, which could compound at a higher growth rate). I think this is the best point to mention in response to what I wrote, but I don't know of any analysis that backs it up with hard numbers - do we have charities that we can demonstrate actually cause compounding to happen this well? It's difficult since we'd need to accurately model future compounding returns from them to get the types of answers that we'd want.)