I’ve worked in the entertainment industry for almost 20 years now. I’ve been a restless vagabond and started dozens of different entertainment careers including setting up my own entertainment related company (several times). It’s been an adventure but also an experience full of trials and various hilariously inventive failures.
I don’t think it’s a shock for anyone to hear that entertainment is full of hopelessly miserable people whose only purpose in life seems to be making others miserable while they stack their money pile even higher. There are so many successful people who are also world class jerks that you might say to yourself “maybe there is something to this whole being an unrepentant asshole thing” and then you start yelling at a production assistant about why your salad is too cold and where-is-that-thing-I’m-pretty-sure-I-asked-for-5-minutes-ago anyway?!?
I tried on a lot of personalities over the years in an attempt to fool the gods of success into convincing them I was one of their tribe. It became a sort of religion to me. Maybe today if I wear this anger mask and dance around the fire the gods will believe I am also one of their spirit minions and shower me with riches. This did not work.
Eventually I went to therapy, spent more time in a state of both physical and emotional sobriety and learned to “let go and let god” to some degree. The thing I came to realize is that being of service to others made me feel better. I don’t mean like “I feel like a good person” but I felt more physically rested, I seemed to have less need for the waterfall like doses of pepto bismol and I started experiencing random feelings of joy just sitting at the park or wherever.
Making real attempts at being good has been important to my journey and has been a literal life saver. If you are struggling with purpose or meaning in your life try it out. People spend years in therapy or church or whatever and still live with a terrible emptiness that often leads to tragedy. The old Bible verse “faith without works is dead” is something I often think about. I used to feel dead inside but now I feel alive.
That’s been my experience and how giving has helped me realize a purpose I struggled to find for years. Nothing else worked as well or has sustained my spirit in the same way. I am joyful but I don’t take it for granted, it takes work and giving is part of that work.
<I don’t think it’s a shock for anyone to hear that entertainment is full of hopelessly miserable people whose only purpose in life seems to be making others miserable while they stack their money pile even higher. There are so many successful people who are also world class jerks that you might say to yourself “maybe there is something to this whole being an unrepentant asshole thing” and then you start yelling at a production assistant about why your salad is too cold and where-is-that-thing-I’m-pretty-sure-I-asked-for-5-minutes-ago anyway?!?>
This really resonated with me. I'm not in entertainment, but I was in a job for quite a long time where unrepentant assholes were plentiful and fairly successful, and the few times I even tried that suit on it was an awful fit for me. I got out of that business.
Question based on Matthew S.'s reply: do you think high competition due to sheer desire to be in the entertainment industry contributes to a higher proportion of unrepentant assholes?
That’s certainly part of it. I think there is also a thing where people get into it to do one thing but can’t make a go of it and then end up somewhere else that’s adjacent to but not necessarily what they really want to do. The frustration and disappointment of being so close to your goal can go beyond annoyance after awhile. It’s also the fact that the perception of what people can make hourly or salary in the average entertainment job is often totally wrong. Lots of producers make less than people would guess. When you think “Hollywood Producer” you are probably not imagining someone renting a studio apartment in the valley praying their Honda Civic doesn’t break down.
> I do think of this as part of an ethic of trying to be a not-awful person, but it’s really just about being a cooperative member of society — someone who doesn’t free ride — rather than being a truly other-directed gesture.
There’s a lot in this article that I like and agree with, yet this point in particular resonated with me. Opposition to free riding seems like a right-coded belief, and despite that, I as a progressive liberal believe this is an essential foundation of society.
At some level, I think all people have an intuitive disgust of freeloaders. We might disagree about who are the worst offenders: are they billionaires living opulent lives from the proceeds of other’s labor or welfare cheats who live off the largess of the government? Yet, at a deep emotional level, everyone is offended by the idea of free riders in our society.
Further, the psychological hardware that opposes mooching seems essential to human cooperation and flourishing society. When people begin to believe that others are gaming the system for unjust rewards, then they lose trust in institutions and society at large. For example, look at how tax evasion has become endemic in south Europe, which only adds to their fiscal and economic problems.
I believe it would be productive for all of us across the political spectrum to accept and even embrace this aspect of human psychology. For example, Democratic politicians could recognize freerider aversion as a challenge to address in welfare policy design. We’d likely have more success in persuading voters to support welfare expansion if we communicate our concern about gaming the system, and further explain how we’ll defend against cheaters, including punishing them. Similarly, Republicans might have more success in generally lowering taxes on the rich if they are willing to call out and prosecute the worst cases of tax evasion by the wealthy.
Level 9000 Dad energy (Dad is a state of mind, not a state of parenthood) of making sure you get out to shovel your sidewalk before both of your neighbors, and then you cut a single-shovel-width path for both of those neighbors, so that others can get around but you're not being ostentatious about it.
Yes, I agree. Yet that pragmatic argument does little to assuage voters’ emotional disgust with freeloaders. At some level, I’m willing to accept that we have to pay a price—both financial and bureaucratic—to at least appear in opposition to free riding if we want a defensible welfare state.
One thing to add: I think individuals vary in the degree to which they accept this pragmatic argument. For some of us, including myself, we can easily rationalize away the need to defend against freeloading. But we can incorrectly project our mindset onto others and fail to empathize with their concerns. They didn’t reason their way into a strong disgust with freeloading and we’re unlikely to reason them out if it.
I also recognize that my own desire for a strong welfare state differs considerably from many of my compatriots. For many others, this is motivated by an emotional desire to care for the neediest in society. In contrast, I see a strong safety net as essential for a robust liberal, democratic, and capitalistic society. But that is more of a reasoned argument.
To my fellow capitalists who are skeptical of welfare, consider the following: With a sufficiently muscular welfare state, we may be able to create and embrace an even more competitive form of capitalism; a capitalism based around a level of cold, calculating, psychopathic profit maximization that would even frighten Ayn Rand. With a sufficient safety net, future Marxist may find few if any converts to oppose our capitalism.
“…we may be able to create and embrace an even more competitive form of capitalism; a capitalism based around a level of cold, calculating, psychopathic profit maximization…”
It doesn't seem to me that that correlation exists, though. Europe is known for more welfare, but less economic risk taking. Ditto, probably, for Canada. China is known for less welfare, but possibly more risk-taking (although it's hard for me to know if that is really accurate or not).
Historically the US used to have less welfare, but as far as I can tell it wasn't any less risk averse prior to FDR or LBJ's welfare expansions.
Wrt to the origins of Marxists - people with strident Marxist views seem to most commonly come from the classes of people who are most comfortable and need welfare the least. If marxists were coming from the most impoverished segments of society I'd be inclined to agree, but that's not what I actually observe.
I'm not defending employer-tied healthcare. It's not what one would design if we could start from scratch. But I'm not sure it's as much of an albatross to innovation as is being claimed.
There's quite a lot of evidence that Sweden and Denmark have a lot of entrepreneurship; there are lots of small businesses being founded there (there are far more people self-employed or with a handful of employees than in the US, for instance)
What there aren't is the big businesses. People are more prepared to take a personal risk, but it's harder to raise the venture capital to go from a small business into a bigger one, perhaps?
Yes, we should prosecute tax cheats and thankfully we’ve significantly increased IRS funding to do just that.
Yet I think there is a separate concern about freeloading in the context of welfare. And I suspect that also needs to be addressed to gain broad support for a strong welfare state.
I think Matt's entire point is that most humans are intuitively disgusted by freeloaders, but politically sympathies and information diet lead some people to be more disgusted by welfare cheats and other others to be more disgusted by tax cheats.
And all that disgust is natural on a human level and needs to be factored into the equation, so to speak. But in the spirit of "the Slow Boring of Hard Boards" it's a good idea to check some of that disgust and pragmatically analyze the scope of problems and their potential solutions and then practically take action in those directions rather than just throw internet tomatoes and mean tweets and comments in the direction of whoever we're more mad at today.
"but politically sympathies and information diet lead some people to be more disgusted by welfare cheats and other others to be more disgusted by tax cheats."
Cannot emphasize this strongly enough. There are people who genuinely have very different perspectives on tax cheats vs welfare cheats. James L. seems to see tax cheats much worse than a poor person cheating a bit to get more from welfare. I've known a number of small business owners who feel like they work really hard for their money and if being "creative" on their taxes means they get to keep more of "THEIR" money then that's a good thing, but welfare cheats are people cheating to get "OTHER" people's money.
Something of a sidebar here, but a not insignificant amount of welfare fraud is perpetrated by organized rings of criminals or non-poor people who've just found a way to dip their hands into the kitty
Tax cheats significantly affect government revenues, and the IRS has been starved of funds and directed away from high-income taxpayers for a long time. I'm happy to prosecute welfare frauds as well, but I'm not willing to move on one without the other. Call it the "Paying Your Fair Share" bill and move both together.
I don't see the point in personally linking them. It's one thing if that's the only way to make either politically palatable, but to me, moving the needle on either one is fine and more "SlowBoring"
I think that we could likely cut down on both red tape and cheaters by consolidating our current mishmash of programs with different standards and applications into fewer larger transfer programs
This is why I continually waffle on a UBI. It is relatively simple and would replace all the other programs. I am just fearful of the culture and society it would create, by telling people they don't need to work a day in their life. Maybe a child allowence is a better place to start.
I think a UBI is DOA due precisely to the backlash among the working class that you identify. I'm with FrigidWind that a negative income tax is the best way to address the "ensuring those who can't make enough don't fall into poverty" program.
"revitalize rural areas" - is that a good thing, nationally speaking?
Subsidizing every economically backwards area of our country would be a huge drain on resources, and it would effectively have to be permanent or the brain drain would start again. As it stands people tend to leave rural areas with no growth and bring their "human capital" to economically more productive areas - it's basically the same story as people emigrating from El Salvador. Rural. areas already get more indirect subsidies in the forms of road maintenance and other services.
Is it really right coded? I feel like the idea of paying taxes, not to mention the literal idea of paying to ride a bus rather than driving “free”, are both pretty strongly left coded.
He is referring to the notion of "welfare cheats," which arguably isn't free riding, it's fraud, although there is certainly a gray area around some recipients who might be technically eligible for a program but not really the intended recipient. But yes, I agree with you, in generally I don't think disgust with free riding is right-coded. Partisanship tends to direct that disgust toward different actors, but it's pretty universal.
Disgust at tax cheats is left-coded, though. Many rich (and aspirational) right wingers valorize law-breaking when it comes to cheating on your taxes. MY has mentioned this before on Slow Boring.
Prior to Slow Boring's existence, I volunteered many hours to forming a local organization to help manage development in a neighborhood and community that was getting an influx of new transit. Local progressive groups sought to throw sand in the gears because they wanted impossible things ("the city just needs to prevent displacement and should just take this land and build 100% affordable housing"). Local NIMBY groups wanted to protect their own interests. The City had real needs because come ~2027 bond payments for a lot of great infrastructure work they had done would starting hitting for real, but the city had a bad habit of holding meetings to get community feedback and then ignoring it all in favor of being steamrolled by a developer who just wanted to build luxury studio condos. There were solutions, but the needle was VERY hard to thread and everyone was speaking a different language, including the developers. This is a skillset and a mode of thinking that not many people have (detached, meta-cognitive, non-reactive to just "scoring a win for my side"). The Slow Boring community has it. If you have time and live in a place where this makes sense, offer your services to help mediate these types of challenges. This match with Slow Boring's thinking is THE major reason why I subscribed when I first heard it was starting up!
That sounds like the most fun I could possibly have on a Friday night. Do you (or any other commenters) have any advice on how to find these discussions, and how to end up in that diplomatic role?
> This means not just someone who meets de minimus standards of acceptable conduct but someone who tries to be of some real use to the world
I think this philosophical point might the key gulf between Matt and many of his critics. So much of the online left seems singularly focused on what you feel and say rather than the impact you have.
I don’t think we should give to panhandlers, whether or not we give elsewhere. It is, in essence, a job, which produces unpleasantness for other people. If we all did not give, people would just shift to actually productive jobs instead, and everyone would be better off for it.
If/when you give to homeless organizations, make sure they have low threshold housing options. Otherwise there are no shelter beds for addicts, and there is nowhere for them to go but on the street to panhandle.
Are there cities or regions where this most homeless panhandle? When I lived in Los Angeles there were at least 20 homeless people for every 1 panhandler (if not 50:1).
Your comment makes me wonder if LA has low threshold housing options or something else that prevents panhandling, or whether the connection between homelessness and panhandling is essentially a myth in the USA of 2022.
I don’t think there is any evidence for this assertion. Maybe it’s true on the margin, but people panhandle because there are few to no institutional supports for the desperately poor, not because it’s a profit center. They’re not turning their nose up at honest jobs, they have no fixed address, no reliable place to shower, and no way to wash clothes regularly, so they’re not attractive employment candidates.
Likewise, what's the evidence for the assertions you're making here? Anecdotally, my experience with panhandlers has led me to believe that that many of them aren't even homeless, which makes sense when you consider that there's no required link between the two situations
My sister literally spends days planning, purchasing for, baking, and packaging baked goods for her kids' school bake sale. Now, she LOVES baking- loves every step of it and loves to admire the finished product. But I can't help but think how much more cost-effective it would be to just cut a damn check. But that's me!
I run a strongly anti-bake sale PTO fundraising operation for this same reason... we ask for checks! We do the occasional bake sales for the parents like your sister who enjoy it, but it's never really for the money.
For me the fundraiser that I most resented was an evening adults only party on behalf of the school. It just seemed insane to spend money on a babysitter and the food and drink for the event when that money could just go to the school, and if the purpose is to build community among the school parents, can't my kids be there too? They are essential to my being part of the community!
My old Catholic grade school "Country Fair" was a bunch of bs game boothes to entertain the kids while the parish/school made a bunch of money off of adults drinking and gambling. Gotta love doing "community service" dealing poker! I think the entertainment is necessary- it does build community imo, but the thing the school wanted (and got, pretty cleverly I think) is cash.
Way more cost effective and reduces the negative externalities of people compromising their health with guilt-induced junk food purchases (Deadweight loss of weight gain??)
I wonder if part of the value of those kind of activities is to get bigger checks from parents with more demands on their time.
Have a bake sale operating from noon to four on a Tuesday, ask for volunteers who either want to sit outside the school for 4 hours handing out treats they baked all weekend, or just write a check? You'd get a whole lot of checks.
I think there can be room for both. Some people are going to be motivated to just give "straight cash, homey" no matter what. But others will need to get thrill out of the nudge of getting something nice at a significantly marked up price in exchange for their charity. In the organizations I've been involved in, I've seen both direct giving campaigns and charity auctions for donated goods and services both be very successful.
For a small organization like a school, that community-building is valuable. Not only is your sister building an emotional link to the school for herself by baking, but probably other people are supporting the bake sale, and being brought into the school community, by thinking about going and buying her beautiful, delicious cupcakes or cookies or whatever she bakes. She could just write a check, but then five other people wouldn't be exposed to the needs of the school's reading program, or whatever the PTO supports.
Agree with this. There are stories of charitable organizations that cut their volunteer programs to save money but ended up losing money because the former volunteers stopped donating. Volunteering can make people feel more connected and more likely to give the more valuable cash
Haha...I mean, the schools I have worked in have not been the kind that need money - private and wealthy - and in that privileged context I have grown to hate how everything is just another cause to throw a few bucks at and then move on. Kony 2012! Let's donate money and forget. Hurricane whatever! Let's donate money and forget. So in this context I'm much more eager to see actual sustained involvement than a check.
I don't know what the research actually says (presuming there is research), but I've absolutely had it argued to me in a number of different charitable forums (educational, religious, civic) that large numbers of people are repulsed by being asked for direct cash donations so "in kind" fundraisers and such are necessary to get them to contribute.
Well I was just thinking how irritated I’m getting over emails begging me to donate to them in the name of “giving Tuesday” 🙄 (Slow Boring exempted from irritation for not asking for money, and instead providing thought-provoking perspective as usual)
It seems I'm more bullish on school volunteering than most here. I think (1) community building is real - both with other parents and the teachers and (2) it reinforces your commitment to the school to your child. I might be over-rotating to the second tho because my parents weren't involved and I noticed that as a kid.
That is still better, IMHO, than the "have kids sell random crap that no one wants or need" (e.g. sausage, calendars, make at home pizza kits, candy bars, coupon books, overpriced wrapping paper) fundraiser. The stuff is almost always crummy*, what the schools get is only a portion of the price people pay for it, and schools or related organizations too often put pressure on children or celebrate winners in ways that reinforce inequities, and often make children who can't sell as much because they are poorer or just don't have as large of families or parents who are willing to guilt their friends/colleagues into buying stuff feel horrible. Much better to just ask people to give money!
*honestly, even Girl Scout cookies, the one sale of this nature most people look forward to, are pretty overrated.
Almost everything else was crap, and Girl Scout cookies have been in a terrible way ever since they changed the Thin Mints recipe years ago...but Innisbrook giftwrap was the real deal. Bargain-basement prices for huge bulk quantity, especially compared to the incredibly flimsy, tiny, expensive rolls now sold at typical retail. That stuff lasted my entire family almost 20 years after us kids left elementary school - hundreds of dollars never given to the likes of Hallmark!
(I have no idea how much our elementary school actually got out of it, mind you.)
Upvote for your asterisk. When I get asked by them I just give them a few bucks and say that's good enough. They're always so insistent that they'll donate the cookies in some way.
As a former Girl Scout and Girl Scout leader of 10 years, I assure you donating $5 is 10x better for the troop than buying a box of cookies. Much appreciated.
"...a kind of crisis of meaning generated by the waning of religious faith paired with a culture that has come to weirdly valorize victimhood to the extent that people are incentivized to sort of wallow in their miseries and complaints."
Really insightful and well summarized, Matt. Absent a religious revival, I wonder where these cultural trends will go over time. Because the path over the past 25 years hasn't been very good in my view.
I really think acting locally is underrated. There's nothing wrong with having a normal middle-class job and, say, volunteering at the local soup kitchen. You get the emotional satisfaction, you're part of the community, and you can directly see that your effort is helping people. Not everything needs to be a cold calculation of where your dollar is best spent.
I don't actually do this – I'm lucky enough to be able to work on more global problems, though I still make sure to engage locally as much as possible to make sure they're working. But that's not inherently more noble in any way than just doing something in your own neighbourhood.
Would we agree that, for someone who can afford either amount, giving $200 is more noble than giving $100? Then why couldn’t we agree that giving $200 to save lives is more noble than giving $200 to build a local bike path? The latter isn’t wrong or shameful--it’s a fine thing to spend $200 on, like a nice anniversary dinner--but the $200 that saves lives is doing more good in the world no matter how you slice it.
Maybe. I think part of the pushback to EA is about how the actions universalize. Saving a marginal life is, as an isolated act, better than pretty much anything else you could do, but a life spent only saving lives probably isn't what any of us consider the model of human flourishing.
So I guess the intuition behind the "local charity is as noble as global charity" is a push to see the upholding of certain local/community bonds as part of what a well-lived life consists in, precisely because engaging in local community is a part of what human flourishing is about. (What are we saving lives for if those lives aren't filled with substantively good things?)
I don't think this is the whole story, and I think it's important for us to direct our empathy and our giving to places we don't naturally gravitate towards, but I'm not convinced that makes this latter category *more* noble or important; it's just also important, while demanding more of us and our empathy.
We would agree that giving $200 to save lives is more noble than $200 to build the bike path, but that's not usually the tradeoff people are actually making. It's more likely to be $200 for the bike path vs. $200 for a new bike computer.
Sure--the comment I was replying to was making the comparison between donating to a global charity and volunteering at a local soup kitchen and saying that both are equally praiseworthy (with an implied dig at “cold calculation of where your dollar is best spent”).
For Matt and my other DC neighbors, I can't recommend DC SCORES (https://www.dcscores.org/) enough as a local charity worthy of your donations. They run afterschool programs that keep kids engaged in both soccer and writing 5 days a week at high poverty schools, for free. I lived across the street from a school that had a SCORES program and I could see first hand how effective it was in providing activities and a safe, positive space for vulnerable kids.
It serves a huge gap in programming for kids with limited options otherwise. 4 Stars on Charity Navigator, lean admin dedicated to helping kids and not fattening the non-profit industrial complex, etc etc. They have expanded the program to other cities through SCORES America, and though I can't comment on how effective it is elsewhere, it's worth seeing and donating to if you have a local branch.
My suggestion for this field is to acknowledge that many people give to their old university. Rather than denounce this, I think it would be better to determine how to do it more effectively. For example, should I give money to my department, to the “area of greatest need,” or something else?
This is all to say that there is a large untrammeled field for the application of GiveWell-type evaluation methodology.
Your old university's library provides common good services that are often undervalued and underfunded by central admin. At the same time, libraries lack the dedicated alumni support that departments have. If you're giving to your alma mater, consider directing some of it to the Library.
I'm actually somewhat skeptical of this for two reasons: the first is that money is fungible, so if you donate to your school puppy foundation, they can just shift some budget elsewhere. This obviously breaks if people donate so much to a given area that it is essentially overfunded, which brings me to critique #2: people tend to overfund charismatic cause areas, when recipients could often make much better use out of un-earmarked funds.
Of course, universities are weird beasts and it is possible that there are ways to force them to use donations well, but I'd really need to hear the specific argument. On it's surface, there are a lot of problems here.
This is not true, or at least is an issue that GiveWell is aware of. They include in their criteria whether charities can plausibly do any good with marginal funding. If a given charity doesn't have capacity to apply additional funds effectively, then GiveWell doesn't fund it. A common framework in EA is "importance, tractability, and neglectedness" of causes under consideration.
Again, what's most effective highly depends on what specific cause you want your university to pursue. Hell, tons of alumni think it's very important for their school to have a highly competitive college football program, so they donate to their athletic department--or, in the "if ya ain't cheatin' ya ain't tryin'" category, finding a way to give directly to the athletes. Thank goodness the legitimization of NIL (name, image, and likeness) is making that far more transparent.
Question for the comment section—What percentage or HHI or net worth are people giving annually? I’ve got pretty high HHI and no real debt outside a mortgage but came from a family that struggled financially and can acknowledge it’s sort of turned me into a cheap ass in terms of charity. I currently give $1000/year to a local children’s hospital and $1000/year to a local food bank, and I try to be very generous with gofundme’s for causes that hit close to home and my wife does similar amounts but we’re still only giving like 1-2% away
I personally struggle with this question of how much to give when I frame it as a donating vs. saving/investing tradeoff. It’s one thing to forgo consumption, but as a relatively frugal person, I feel that giving a proper 10% to charity would entail sacrificing financial security.
My current solution to this conflict is two-fold:
A) I believe that I’ll give substantially more than 10% of my salary after building a sufficient level of financial security; when I could live my current standard of living off the proceeds of my investments with a high degree of certainty.
I have no interest in early retirement because I get a lot of meaning out of having a job. If I no longer need to save/invest then I might as well donate a lot and I believe I’ll be able to do so for decades in the future.
B) My estate is willed entirely to charity as I don’t have nor plan to have children. At worst, my desire for financial security would make me a low-quality charitable endowment investment manager.
I believe a lot of this is self-delusion. Yet that’s where I’m at emotionally in my desire for financial security and I don’t think I or anyone else is gonna shame myself out of that state.
I struggle with this as well. I think the key is not to let the goalposts keep moving over time. Sit down and figure out what financial security really means to you, and then stick to it.
I can tell you even after making a lot more money it is difficult to shake the feeling of insecurity. Especially if you are self employed and your income and estimated tax payments don't match and you are constantly managing liquidity because you are trying to invest as much as you can.
I haven't found a better answer than write it down, stick to it, and push through the feelings once you are past it by thinking of the people you are helping.
Disagree with Nicholas Decker -- I think percentage of income is highly relevant. I used to give very little to charity, because I was really heavily invested in an ethic of saving. I also marinated in a sort of guilt about this, because I was persuaded by the general EA arguments (which are also articulated outside of EA) that I had certain ethical obligations to give more. It was intuitively obvious to me that if I gave, say, 10% of my income away, I would still have all the material necessities, still be wealthier than the vast majority of humanity, etc. Then I had a kid and was saddled with additional spending and additional concerns about whether it was foolish to be writing checks to strangers that could go into her college fund, etc. I kept vaguely resolving to change, but it was hard psychologically.
The thing that I think most helped knock me out of my inaction was getting divorced. Getting divorced was absolutely devastating financially -- it slashed my savings and really materially affected my day-to-day expenses. And contrary to what you might think, it engendered a bit of an "easy come, easy go" attitude in me. It's not that I became blasé about money. I just sort of realized that no matter how tightly you cling to it, you never know what the future holds, and that in any conceivable future, I am going to have a roof over my head and plenty to eat.
So I started working myself up to the "pledge to give" level, setting aside increasing amounts of my pre-tax income from each paycheck to see if I could make it work. I'm up to 10% now. Still not claiming it's entirely easy. But I feel good about it.
It is absolute amounts, not percentage of income, that matters. The goal is not to purify yourself, it is to make others better off! So I wouldn’t worry too much about what percentage of income you give away.
Isn’t this just the same question with different phrasing? The absolute amount Warren Buffett gives will be greater than what I give, because his income and wealth are greater.
Follow-up question: my spouse was raised in the context of pretty profound financial insecurity and frugality. I was not. At this time, we’re dual income and doing great despite having two little kids. We could easily give away 10% of annual income and still maintain our lifestyle. But my spouse is just not down. He’s just got a deep psychological block around giving money away, because he was not acculturated to it as a young person and has deep fears around instability. My position here is hampered by the fact that he out-earns me 5:1. (I am not maximizing my income potential because I love my public service job and feel personally and professionally enriched by it). Any advice?
I can empathize with your husband. I grew up poor/lower middle class in a household that spent every dollar that came in the door, and it's only by the grace of God or good luck that we missed any sudden setbacks that would've ended with us bankrupt and/or homeless.
As such, I tend to be extremely conservative with our money. I watched my parents 401ks get wiped out in the recession, so I don't even put it to use making me more money, and I don't like conspicuous consumption either.
Anyhow, this was a meandering way to tell you that as someone from a similar background and psychology, I think the best way to do it is to start small. You probably know what your husband's internal limit is for a splurge purchase - $100? $200? $500? - whatever he'd typically drop without thinking too much about it, and suggest that as a starting annual donation. Then next year suggest increasing it slightly, ~20-30%, and keep going from there until you get to a point where you feel like you're donating enough to match your income levels.
If he out-earns you 5:1, then it seems like you make enough together to justify hiring a financial planner to work with you to plan out your retirement and other life needs (and, possibly, he or she could also manage your investments). This process could both help ensure that YOU are right about your ability to tithe 10% (by helping to grow your savings faster) and help your husband see that your needs are well-planed for even CONSIDERING that you plan to give away 10%. That should be part of the financial plan. Hearing it from an outside 3rd party with charts and graphs might get you more milage than just putting together a budget yourself, which would come with assumptions that, unless this is your field, you cannot be confident in. I predict that your husband also might be naturally opposed to paying someone to help manage your finances, but there are good people out there that structure their business so that it's reasonable and/or just comes from the extra money that they earn you. If you have money as a couple, and he is culturally attenuated to be cautious about money, it's almost silly NOT to engage a professional out of caution. Just find someone you and he both trust. It can take a few meetings, and feel free to tell anyone you don't like to hit the road, but you'll find someone.
You did misunderstand. I was suggesting that the OP leverage a third-party to facilitate working WITH her spouse, as a cooperative partner in planning for their financial needs. Any conversation on charitable giving could come as a secondary part of that planning, not as some trap.
The above advice seems sound to me. Money is a deeply emotional issue, and I wouldn't presume to tell you how to work with your husband on this. One thing I might add is to convey to your husband, respectfully, that this is important to you as a matter of values, and that you want to collaborate to find a solution.
My plan is to sit down with my wife and review our budget (which I keep in detail on a google sheet). Review our earnings, and where we give today. And come up with a incremental increase in charity we both feel comfortable with. I want to get to 1-2% going into 2023
This is hard for me too. My husband and I are pretty comfortable, but we don’t have kids and I saw first hand, with my parents, how much serious illness, home help, hospice, and so on cost even when you have decent insurance. I’m obsessed with long-term financial security for this reason. We do donate, but we should give more.
Same boat. We're very comfortable now but want to have kids and buy a bigger house in the future, which makes getting super generous feel incompatible with those goals
I'm not an expert on this topic by any means, but have you considered buying Long Term Care Insurance? I don't know how affordable it is, but my understanding is it does what it is designed to do, ie financially covers the cost of providing home help and other living care for people who can no longer care for themselves.
The other thought is annuities, which again, just lock in some level of minimum financial security?
I'm actually just genuinely curious to hear how you see those options - would they actually alleviate your fears? I talk about things like this with my parents and aunts and uncles sometimes, but I feel like I can't quite understand where they're coming from, emotionally, and it becomes very frustrating. So I truly appreciate any insights you'd share.
We actually have had this for years. But in my experience, insurance doesn’t cover everything you need, and in my family we’ve had a lot of devastating long-term illnesses including Parkinson’s, rheumatoid arthritis, and various iterations of dementia, to name a few (I have a huge extended family). It might also be relevant that my parents both came from modest backgrounds, and I’ve been a big saver since I was a young child.
There is no dollar figure or financial instrument that would make me feel like I have “enough” to be secure whatever happens (I guess maybe if I won the lottery, but I would never buy a lottery ticket so…) Maybe I’m messed up?! But also, I’m an Old! I’ve been to two funerals for friends this year, one just a few days ago (pancreatic cancer diagnosed in early 50s). As I said I’ve been pretty neurotic about financial security forever, but watching the vagaries of life play out has not made me feel more relaxed, even though I understand that my level of concern might not be entirely rational. Maybe your relatives have similar feelings?
That sounds a lot like my parents. I don't think they are you are messed up. They view the situation differently because of a lot of the same reasons you do, and also, as much as they area my parents and I love them, it is their own personal lives. Just like they couldn't tell me what to do or where to live when i became an adult, I can't tell them how to feel or how to worry as they age.
My frustration is I try to approach the situation with what I think is rational logic and I come out with certain answers that I put a lot of stock in. But they seem to view it from a much more emotional angle, and so there's this disconnect. But like I said - who am I to tell them not to worry? And maybe I flatter myself with the idea that I'm being so rational anyways, I don't know. Maybe it's nothing's changed since when I was a kid and "I'll understand when I'm older"
For good or ill - probably the latter - it's very hard to be rational about certain things. I try *very* hard to do so, but in this realm (probably others too!) I fail almost completely.
Despite being An Old, I'm not actually *that* old, and I'm lucky to be healthy. That said, I feel I'm tempting fate just by stating that, and so any moment now "They" will come for me with a wheelchair (wheelchairs figure prominently in my family history and I've had a lot of nightmares about this scenario over the course of my life). Seeing, over time, some of the many ways in which life can suddenly go sideways for people has made me obsessively self-reliant in a way that's closely related to the concern about financial security.
I'm similarly one of those "family tried really hard to paper over the budget gaps growing up, but we absolutely had a lot of struggles and controversial decisions, even if the kids were largely sheltered from direct consequences"...which hasn't necessarily imbued exemplary financial discipline in any of us, but definitely contributes to overactive loss aversion. There's just a lurking fear of hitting a shameful Rock Bottom again...maxed out credit card, $0 to my name, tens of thousands in debt, behind on rent, subsisting on plain rice and instant ramen, jobless. Bad times, 0/10 would not recommend.
Obviously things got better. Still poor, grossing <$40k/yr in uber-COL SF...but a full quarter of my income goes into retirement accounts, and after taxes, net paycheck is roughly 50%. Which is still enough disposable income to not live hand-to-mouth, albeit at great social cost. Clearly there's a lot of room in there for some charity! And yet...I don't, other than a small monthly donation to a local health clinic for the needy poor. (Severe budgeting constraints almost caused them to lose their lease in 2020, so I'd like to think I helped a little to avoid that?)
I guess I, too, am waiting for some nebulous sense of "financial security" to kick in...a point where I'd truly no longer fear being hungry, nevermind homeless. Student loan debt jubilee is/was a contributor to that, but realistically I don't think it'll come until either homeownership or moving to a not-crazy-expensive locale. And some nights it really does take some faith-assurances that stocks will turn around eventually...all these low-priced shares I'm picking up will be worth something, one day, and then maybe I could stop working at a reasonable age rather than until I die on the job. Lotsa rationalizations.
Yet somewhere out there, there are definitely children drowning, while I fret about market vagaries in my warm comfortable bed, typing up long-winded comments on Slow Boring (annual subscription ~roughly = 0.125 people not lifted out of poverty), surrounded by material goods I realistically would not much notice or care if they vanished tomorrow. Inner Ross Douthat reminds me that I'm still living an incredibly decadent life of apathetic opulence, and that's...kind of pathetic? Not giving that wealth to those who need it so much more, nor enjoying it all that much myself...just hoarding to avoid ambiguous dread of immisseration.
My advice is to experiment until you find what works for you.
My thinking about "how much should I give" also led me to think about "when to give" (lumpsums create more resistance, but have other benefits) and "who to give" (being able to understand how much the recipient needs, how much they get from others, what the recipient will be able to use it for, etc.)
Ten years ago I used to give a fixed amount, then decided to try increasing the amount by X each year, then switched to thinking in terms of percentages, and gradually reached 10% in 2022. I used to do all my giving during one month, then spread it evenly across quarters, and now do most of it monthly (catching up on some smaller things separately). Ten years ago I used to give to certain famous NGOs, then for a period tried various different things (giving up to 20 different places in a year), and now give to a handful of places (with the bulk of it to GiveWell).
If you are looking locally, please consider donating to of volunteering with your area Big Brothers Big Sisters. Pairing youth who have Adverse Childhood Experiences with adult mentors who show them new parts of the world is very high impact. Big Brothers Big Sisters has been around a long time and has real, validated impacts on life outcomes for these kids which translates into real impacts on your community. They are locally operated so program quality varies.
I'd get more involved in YIMBYism if it wasn't for thinking that Boise leadership is pretty reasonably YIMBY minded already. Maybe I could go to battle against historic preservationists if I feel like becoming a pariah in my surrounding neighborhoods, heh.
For example, this is a way to make sure nobody builds triplexes or fourplexes: "In order to build denser than a duplex, developers would need to designate one of three or two of four of the units for Boiseans making less than 80% of the area median income."
As I understand it, the zoning code rewrite is still not a complete project. There was backlash and then backlash to the backlash over that and some other clauses. I'm trying to hold fire until I see the final product. The council at least has the right broad ideas.
That is why you need to get involved! Instead of holding fire until they see what happens, I'm certain local YIMBYs are involved in the process and lobbying the decision makers. We have to get in there while the sausage is being made.
I think there are a lot of YIMBY (or YIMBYish) groups not included on that list. I know of two. If you're in MA, check out Abundant Housing MA (abundanthousingma.org), or in CT, check out Desegregate CT (desegregatect.org).
I’ve been a Slow Boring paid subscriber for over a year. I’m a small government/personal freedom guy (fiscal conservative/libertarianish). I very often disagree with your general direction (though I’m 100% in with your hyper YIMBYisum), but I always appreciate your logical approach.
I don’t have the time to comment very often, but I had to say something this morning because I think this is one your best posts yet. Good job!
"...weirdly valorize victimhood". When the dynamic and message in society is "you're either the oppressed or the oppressor; the victim or the victimizer", It's not surprising that many people would rather be the former. Victimhood also provides all kinds of excuses for why you're not happy and/or successful, and makes you "special".
The narrative in entertainment for decades has been the underdog, the victim, the sufferer is the hero, with that suffering directly tied to their hero status. Effectively, they are the hero because they suffer, because of things that happen to them, rather than things they do.
I think the "crisis of meaning" is much less about the "waning of religion" and more about the relentless centering of wealth (at all costs) rather than any kind of reasonable focus on being a good person. Society gives far too much play to wealth and the wealthy. Chasing the dollar at the expense of all else is a surefire recipe for a meaningless life.
If people are looking for volunteering-type things to do rather than spending-money-type things to do, then I can strongly recommend getting involved in a political party at the grassroots level. Delivering leaflets and knocking on doors is pretty good exercise, there's lots of basic organisational stuff that people with decent managerial skills can get stuck into. If you can reliably book rooms for meetings and get all the official paperwork (agendas, minutes, etc) done correctly and on time, or you can chair according to Robert's Rules of Order, or you can do a set of books and track where the money went for a small organisation with a few thousand dollars, then your local precinct will kill to keep you.
I rocked up with a specific set of skills - the ability to stay fair and unbiased even when I have strong personal opinions, the organisational skills to get paperwork done to a deadline, and the knowledge of how to count votes under various electoral systems. Ten years on, I'm currently in charge of an (internal) election in my party for the head of the party in England (this is the organisational head, not the political head, and there is an England head and a superior UK head).
There are hundreds of jobs like this, jobs that require middle-class office-worker skills, jobs that routinely get done by volunteers because no-one donates money to pay people to do admin, but without which the parties would cease to function.
[As an aside, these are the reasons why it is so hard to create a new political party even in countries that aren't the US where it is more possible; you need hundreds of the sort of minor functionary that I am to have a democratic party. You can have an autocratic party much more quickly and simply, which is how Macron did it.]
I’ve worked in the entertainment industry for almost 20 years now. I’ve been a restless vagabond and started dozens of different entertainment careers including setting up my own entertainment related company (several times). It’s been an adventure but also an experience full of trials and various hilariously inventive failures.
I don’t think it’s a shock for anyone to hear that entertainment is full of hopelessly miserable people whose only purpose in life seems to be making others miserable while they stack their money pile even higher. There are so many successful people who are also world class jerks that you might say to yourself “maybe there is something to this whole being an unrepentant asshole thing” and then you start yelling at a production assistant about why your salad is too cold and where-is-that-thing-I’m-pretty-sure-I-asked-for-5-minutes-ago anyway?!?
I tried on a lot of personalities over the years in an attempt to fool the gods of success into convincing them I was one of their tribe. It became a sort of religion to me. Maybe today if I wear this anger mask and dance around the fire the gods will believe I am also one of their spirit minions and shower me with riches. This did not work.
Eventually I went to therapy, spent more time in a state of both physical and emotional sobriety and learned to “let go and let god” to some degree. The thing I came to realize is that being of service to others made me feel better. I don’t mean like “I feel like a good person” but I felt more physically rested, I seemed to have less need for the waterfall like doses of pepto bismol and I started experiencing random feelings of joy just sitting at the park or wherever.
Making real attempts at being good has been important to my journey and has been a literal life saver. If you are struggling with purpose or meaning in your life try it out. People spend years in therapy or church or whatever and still live with a terrible emptiness that often leads to tragedy. The old Bible verse “faith without works is dead” is something I often think about. I used to feel dead inside but now I feel alive.
That’s been my experience and how giving has helped me realize a purpose I struggled to find for years. Nothing else worked as well or has sustained my spirit in the same way. I am joyful but I don’t take it for granted, it takes work and giving is part of that work.
<I don’t think it’s a shock for anyone to hear that entertainment is full of hopelessly miserable people whose only purpose in life seems to be making others miserable while they stack their money pile even higher. There are so many successful people who are also world class jerks that you might say to yourself “maybe there is something to this whole being an unrepentant asshole thing” and then you start yelling at a production assistant about why your salad is too cold and where-is-that-thing-I’m-pretty-sure-I-asked-for-5-minutes-ago anyway?!?>
This really resonated with me. I'm not in entertainment, but I was in a job for quite a long time where unrepentant assholes were plentiful and fairly successful, and the few times I even tried that suit on it was an awful fit for me. I got out of that business.
Glad you found your way to something better.
Question based on Matthew S.'s reply: do you think high competition due to sheer desire to be in the entertainment industry contributes to a higher proportion of unrepentant assholes?
That’s certainly part of it. I think there is also a thing where people get into it to do one thing but can’t make a go of it and then end up somewhere else that’s adjacent to but not necessarily what they really want to do. The frustration and disappointment of being so close to your goal can go beyond annoyance after awhile. It’s also the fact that the perception of what people can make hourly or salary in the average entertainment job is often totally wrong. Lots of producers make less than people would guess. When you think “Hollywood Producer” you are probably not imagining someone renting a studio apartment in the valley praying their Honda Civic doesn’t break down.
> I do think of this as part of an ethic of trying to be a not-awful person, but it’s really just about being a cooperative member of society — someone who doesn’t free ride — rather than being a truly other-directed gesture.
There’s a lot in this article that I like and agree with, yet this point in particular resonated with me. Opposition to free riding seems like a right-coded belief, and despite that, I as a progressive liberal believe this is an essential foundation of society.
At some level, I think all people have an intuitive disgust of freeloaders. We might disagree about who are the worst offenders: are they billionaires living opulent lives from the proceeds of other’s labor or welfare cheats who live off the largess of the government? Yet, at a deep emotional level, everyone is offended by the idea of free riders in our society.
Further, the psychological hardware that opposes mooching seems essential to human cooperation and flourishing society. When people begin to believe that others are gaming the system for unjust rewards, then they lose trust in institutions and society at large. For example, look at how tax evasion has become endemic in south Europe, which only adds to their fiscal and economic problems.
I believe it would be productive for all of us across the political spectrum to accept and even embrace this aspect of human psychology. For example, Democratic politicians could recognize freerider aversion as a challenge to address in welfare policy design. We’d likely have more success in persuading voters to support welfare expansion if we communicate our concern about gaming the system, and further explain how we’ll defend against cheaters, including punishing them. Similarly, Republicans might have more success in generally lowering taxes on the rich if they are willing to call out and prosecute the worst cases of tax evasion by the wealthy.
Level 9000 Dad energy (Dad is a state of mind, not a state of parenthood) of making sure you get out to shovel your sidewalk before both of your neighbors, and then you cut a single-shovel-width path for both of those neighbors, so that others can get around but you're not being ostentatious about it.
> defend against cheaters
The problem is that these safeguards lead to annoying and time-consuming bureaucracy, so it’s very hard to design them well.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/means-test-when
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/how-government-learned-waste-your-time-tax/619568/
Yes, I agree. Yet that pragmatic argument does little to assuage voters’ emotional disgust with freeloaders. At some level, I’m willing to accept that we have to pay a price—both financial and bureaucratic—to at least appear in opposition to free riding if we want a defensible welfare state.
One thing to add: I think individuals vary in the degree to which they accept this pragmatic argument. For some of us, including myself, we can easily rationalize away the need to defend against freeloading. But we can incorrectly project our mindset onto others and fail to empathize with their concerns. They didn’t reason their way into a strong disgust with freeloading and we’re unlikely to reason them out if it.
I also recognize that my own desire for a strong welfare state differs considerably from many of my compatriots. For many others, this is motivated by an emotional desire to care for the neediest in society. In contrast, I see a strong safety net as essential for a robust liberal, democratic, and capitalistic society. But that is more of a reasoned argument.
To my fellow capitalists who are skeptical of welfare, consider the following: With a sufficiently muscular welfare state, we may be able to create and embrace an even more competitive form of capitalism; a capitalism based around a level of cold, calculating, psychopathic profit maximization that would even frighten Ayn Rand. With a sufficient safety net, future Marxist may find few if any converts to oppose our capitalism.
“…we may be able to create and embrace an even more competitive form of capitalism; a capitalism based around a level of cold, calculating, psychopathic profit maximization…”
If you can find any workers, that is.
It doesn't seem to me that that correlation exists, though. Europe is known for more welfare, but less economic risk taking. Ditto, probably, for Canada. China is known for less welfare, but possibly more risk-taking (although it's hard for me to know if that is really accurate or not).
Historically the US used to have less welfare, but as far as I can tell it wasn't any less risk averse prior to FDR or LBJ's welfare expansions.
Wrt to the origins of Marxists - people with strident Marxist views seem to most commonly come from the classes of people who are most comfortable and need welfare the least. If marxists were coming from the most impoverished segments of society I'd be inclined to agree, but that's not what I actually observe.
I'm not defending employer-tied healthcare. It's not what one would design if we could start from scratch. But I'm not sure it's as much of an albatross to innovation as is being claimed.
There's quite a lot of evidence that Sweden and Denmark have a lot of entrepreneurship; there are lots of small businesses being founded there (there are far more people self-employed or with a handful of employees than in the US, for instance)
What there aren't is the big businesses. People are more prepared to take a personal risk, but it's harder to raise the venture capital to go from a small business into a bigger one, perhaps?
Ok, let's start by prosecuting tax cheats and go from there.
Yes, we should prosecute tax cheats and thankfully we’ve significantly increased IRS funding to do just that.
Yet I think there is a separate concern about freeloading in the context of welfare. And I suspect that also needs to be addressed to gain broad support for a strong welfare state.
I think Matt's entire point is that most humans are intuitively disgusted by freeloaders, but politically sympathies and information diet lead some people to be more disgusted by welfare cheats and other others to be more disgusted by tax cheats.
And all that disgust is natural on a human level and needs to be factored into the equation, so to speak. But in the spirit of "the Slow Boring of Hard Boards" it's a good idea to check some of that disgust and pragmatically analyze the scope of problems and their potential solutions and then practically take action in those directions rather than just throw internet tomatoes and mean tweets and comments in the direction of whoever we're more mad at today.
"but politically sympathies and information diet lead some people to be more disgusted by welfare cheats and other others to be more disgusted by tax cheats."
Cannot emphasize this strongly enough. There are people who genuinely have very different perspectives on tax cheats vs welfare cheats. James L. seems to see tax cheats much worse than a poor person cheating a bit to get more from welfare. I've known a number of small business owners who feel like they work really hard for their money and if being "creative" on their taxes means they get to keep more of "THEIR" money then that's a good thing, but welfare cheats are people cheating to get "OTHER" people's money.
Something of a sidebar here, but a not insignificant amount of welfare fraud is perpetrated by organized rings of criminals or non-poor people who've just found a way to dip their hands into the kitty
For me it's about the amounts. Tax cheats skim a lot more money than welfare cheats in terms of raw dollars.
Tax cheats significantly affect government revenues, and the IRS has been starved of funds and directed away from high-income taxpayers for a long time. I'm happy to prosecute welfare frauds as well, but I'm not willing to move on one without the other. Call it the "Paying Your Fair Share" bill and move both together.
I don't see the point in personally linking them. It's one thing if that's the only way to make either politically palatable, but to me, moving the needle on either one is fine and more "SlowBoring"
I think that we could likely cut down on both red tape and cheaters by consolidating our current mishmash of programs with different standards and applications into fewer larger transfer programs
This is why I continually waffle on a UBI. It is relatively simple and would replace all the other programs. I am just fearful of the culture and society it would create, by telling people they don't need to work a day in their life. Maybe a child allowence is a better place to start.
I think a UBI is DOA due precisely to the backlash among the working class that you identify. I'm with FrigidWind that a negative income tax is the best way to address the "ensuring those who can't make enough don't fall into poverty" program.
What is a negative income tax? Is that effectively a cash benefit you can only receive through filing taxes or am I completely off?
FrigidWind's got you covered again. The EITC is the most prominent NIT in the United States.
"revitalize rural areas" - is that a good thing, nationally speaking?
Subsidizing every economically backwards area of our country would be a huge drain on resources, and it would effectively have to be permanent or the brain drain would start again. As it stands people tend to leave rural areas with no growth and bring their "human capital" to economically more productive areas - it's basically the same story as people emigrating from El Salvador. Rural. areas already get more indirect subsidies in the forms of road maintenance and other services.
I get that, but by moving to a UBI we would be moving to not having a job as the default rather than the exception.
Is it really right coded? I feel like the idea of paying taxes, not to mention the literal idea of paying to ride a bus rather than driving “free”, are both pretty strongly left coded.
He is referring to the notion of "welfare cheats," which arguably isn't free riding, it's fraud, although there is certainly a gray area around some recipients who might be technically eligible for a program but not really the intended recipient. But yes, I agree with you, in generally I don't think disgust with free riding is right-coded. Partisanship tends to direct that disgust toward different actors, but it's pretty universal.
Disgust at tax cheats is left-coded, though. Many rich (and aspirational) right wingers valorize law-breaking when it comes to cheating on your taxes. MY has mentioned this before on Slow Boring.
Prior to Slow Boring's existence, I volunteered many hours to forming a local organization to help manage development in a neighborhood and community that was getting an influx of new transit. Local progressive groups sought to throw sand in the gears because they wanted impossible things ("the city just needs to prevent displacement and should just take this land and build 100% affordable housing"). Local NIMBY groups wanted to protect their own interests. The City had real needs because come ~2027 bond payments for a lot of great infrastructure work they had done would starting hitting for real, but the city had a bad habit of holding meetings to get community feedback and then ignoring it all in favor of being steamrolled by a developer who just wanted to build luxury studio condos. There were solutions, but the needle was VERY hard to thread and everyone was speaking a different language, including the developers. This is a skillset and a mode of thinking that not many people have (detached, meta-cognitive, non-reactive to just "scoring a win for my side"). The Slow Boring community has it. If you have time and live in a place where this makes sense, offer your services to help mediate these types of challenges. This match with Slow Boring's thinking is THE major reason why I subscribed when I first heard it was starting up!
That sounds like the most fun I could possibly have on a Friday night. Do you (or any other commenters) have any advice on how to find these discussions, and how to end up in that diplomatic role?
> This means not just someone who meets de minimus standards of acceptable conduct but someone who tries to be of some real use to the world
I think this philosophical point might the key gulf between Matt and many of his critics. So much of the online left seems singularly focused on what you feel and say rather than the impact you have.
I don’t think we should give to panhandlers, whether or not we give elsewhere. It is, in essence, a job, which produces unpleasantness for other people. If we all did not give, people would just shift to actually productive jobs instead, and everyone would be better off for it.
If/when you give to homeless organizations, make sure they have low threshold housing options. Otherwise there are no shelter beds for addicts, and there is nowhere for them to go but on the street to panhandle.
Are there cities or regions where this most homeless panhandle? When I lived in Los Angeles there were at least 20 homeless people for every 1 panhandler (if not 50:1).
Your comment makes me wonder if LA has low threshold housing options or something else that prevents panhandling, or whether the connection between homelessness and panhandling is essentially a myth in the USA of 2022.
I don’t think there is any evidence for this assertion. Maybe it’s true on the margin, but people panhandle because there are few to no institutional supports for the desperately poor, not because it’s a profit center. They’re not turning their nose up at honest jobs, they have no fixed address, no reliable place to shower, and no way to wash clothes regularly, so they’re not attractive employment candidates.
Likewise, what's the evidence for the assertions you're making here? Anecdotally, my experience with panhandlers has led me to believe that that many of them aren't even homeless, which makes sense when you consider that there's no required link between the two situations
My sister literally spends days planning, purchasing for, baking, and packaging baked goods for her kids' school bake sale. Now, she LOVES baking- loves every step of it and loves to admire the finished product. But I can't help but think how much more cost-effective it would be to just cut a damn check. But that's me!
I run a strongly anti-bake sale PTO fundraising operation for this same reason... we ask for checks! We do the occasional bake sales for the parents like your sister who enjoy it, but it's never really for the money.
For me the fundraiser that I most resented was an evening adults only party on behalf of the school. It just seemed insane to spend money on a babysitter and the food and drink for the event when that money could just go to the school, and if the purpose is to build community among the school parents, can't my kids be there too? They are essential to my being part of the community!
My old Catholic grade school "Country Fair" was a bunch of bs game boothes to entertain the kids while the parish/school made a bunch of money off of adults drinking and gambling. Gotta love doing "community service" dealing poker! I think the entertainment is necessary- it does build community imo, but the thing the school wanted (and got, pretty cleverly I think) is cash.
Way more cost effective and reduces the negative externalities of people compromising their health with guilt-induced junk food purchases (Deadweight loss of weight gain??)
I wonder if part of the value of those kind of activities is to get bigger checks from parents with more demands on their time.
Have a bake sale operating from noon to four on a Tuesday, ask for volunteers who either want to sit outside the school for 4 hours handing out treats they baked all weekend, or just write a check? You'd get a whole lot of checks.
I think there can be room for both. Some people are going to be motivated to just give "straight cash, homey" no matter what. But others will need to get thrill out of the nudge of getting something nice at a significantly marked up price in exchange for their charity. In the organizations I've been involved in, I've seen both direct giving campaigns and charity auctions for donated goods and services both be very successful.
I’ll grant that there is the positive externality of just building a sense of community through food or events…
For a small organization like a school, that community-building is valuable. Not only is your sister building an emotional link to the school for herself by baking, but probably other people are supporting the bake sale, and being brought into the school community, by thinking about going and buying her beautiful, delicious cupcakes or cookies or whatever she bakes. She could just write a check, but then five other people wouldn't be exposed to the needs of the school's reading program, or whatever the PTO supports.
Agree with this. There are stories of charitable organizations that cut their volunteer programs to save money but ended up losing money because the former volunteers stopped donating. Volunteering can make people feel more connected and more likely to give the more valuable cash
Haha...I mean, the schools I have worked in have not been the kind that need money - private and wealthy - and in that privileged context I have grown to hate how everything is just another cause to throw a few bucks at and then move on. Kony 2012! Let's donate money and forget. Hurricane whatever! Let's donate money and forget. So in this context I'm much more eager to see actual sustained involvement than a check.
I don't know what the research actually says (presuming there is research), but I've absolutely had it argued to me in a number of different charitable forums (educational, religious, civic) that large numbers of people are repulsed by being asked for direct cash donations so "in kind" fundraisers and such are necessary to get them to contribute.
Well I was just thinking how irritated I’m getting over emails begging me to donate to them in the name of “giving Tuesday” 🙄 (Slow Boring exempted from irritation for not asking for money, and instead providing thought-provoking perspective as usual)
It seems I'm more bullish on school volunteering than most here. I think (1) community building is real - both with other parents and the teachers and (2) it reinforces your commitment to the school to your child. I might be over-rotating to the second tho because my parents weren't involved and I noticed that as a kid.
That is still better, IMHO, than the "have kids sell random crap that no one wants or need" (e.g. sausage, calendars, make at home pizza kits, candy bars, coupon books, overpriced wrapping paper) fundraiser. The stuff is almost always crummy*, what the schools get is only a portion of the price people pay for it, and schools or related organizations too often put pressure on children or celebrate winners in ways that reinforce inequities, and often make children who can't sell as much because they are poorer or just don't have as large of families or parents who are willing to guilt their friends/colleagues into buying stuff feel horrible. Much better to just ask people to give money!
*honestly, even Girl Scout cookies, the one sale of this nature most people look forward to, are pretty overrated.
Almost everything else was crap, and Girl Scout cookies have been in a terrible way ever since they changed the Thin Mints recipe years ago...but Innisbrook giftwrap was the real deal. Bargain-basement prices for huge bulk quantity, especially compared to the incredibly flimsy, tiny, expensive rolls now sold at typical retail. That stuff lasted my entire family almost 20 years after us kids left elementary school - hundreds of dollars never given to the likes of Hallmark!
(I have no idea how much our elementary school actually got out of it, mind you.)
Upvote for your asterisk. When I get asked by them I just give them a few bucks and say that's good enough. They're always so insistent that they'll donate the cookies in some way.
As a former Girl Scout and Girl Scout leader of 10 years, I assure you donating $5 is 10x better for the troop than buying a box of cookies. Much appreciated.
Same logic applies to "canned food drives" and the like for food banks. Infinitely more efficient to give money.
"...a kind of crisis of meaning generated by the waning of religious faith paired with a culture that has come to weirdly valorize victimhood to the extent that people are incentivized to sort of wallow in their miseries and complaints."
Really insightful and well summarized, Matt. Absent a religious revival, I wonder where these cultural trends will go over time. Because the path over the past 25 years hasn't been very good in my view.
I really think acting locally is underrated. There's nothing wrong with having a normal middle-class job and, say, volunteering at the local soup kitchen. You get the emotional satisfaction, you're part of the community, and you can directly see that your effort is helping people. Not everything needs to be a cold calculation of where your dollar is best spent.
I don't actually do this – I'm lucky enough to be able to work on more global problems, though I still make sure to engage locally as much as possible to make sure they're working. But that's not inherently more noble in any way than just doing something in your own neighbourhood.
Would we agree that, for someone who can afford either amount, giving $200 is more noble than giving $100? Then why couldn’t we agree that giving $200 to save lives is more noble than giving $200 to build a local bike path? The latter isn’t wrong or shameful--it’s a fine thing to spend $200 on, like a nice anniversary dinner--but the $200 that saves lives is doing more good in the world no matter how you slice it.
Maybe. I think part of the pushback to EA is about how the actions universalize. Saving a marginal life is, as an isolated act, better than pretty much anything else you could do, but a life spent only saving lives probably isn't what any of us consider the model of human flourishing.
So I guess the intuition behind the "local charity is as noble as global charity" is a push to see the upholding of certain local/community bonds as part of what a well-lived life consists in, precisely because engaging in local community is a part of what human flourishing is about. (What are we saving lives for if those lives aren't filled with substantively good things?)
I don't think this is the whole story, and I think it's important for us to direct our empathy and our giving to places we don't naturally gravitate towards, but I'm not convinced that makes this latter category *more* noble or important; it's just also important, while demanding more of us and our empathy.
We would agree that giving $200 to save lives is more noble than $200 to build the bike path, but that's not usually the tradeoff people are actually making. It's more likely to be $200 for the bike path vs. $200 for a new bike computer.
Sure--the comment I was replying to was making the comparison between donating to a global charity and volunteering at a local soup kitchen and saying that both are equally praiseworthy (with an implied dig at “cold calculation of where your dollar is best spent”).
For Matt and my other DC neighbors, I can't recommend DC SCORES (https://www.dcscores.org/) enough as a local charity worthy of your donations. They run afterschool programs that keep kids engaged in both soccer and writing 5 days a week at high poverty schools, for free. I lived across the street from a school that had a SCORES program and I could see first hand how effective it was in providing activities and a safe, positive space for vulnerable kids.
It serves a huge gap in programming for kids with limited options otherwise. 4 Stars on Charity Navigator, lean admin dedicated to helping kids and not fattening the non-profit industrial complex, etc etc. They have expanded the program to other cities through SCORES America, and though I can't comment on how effective it is elsewhere, it's worth seeing and donating to if you have a local branch.
I'll upvote any program that provides after school care, that's a big chunk of my giving, as I said in my top level comment.
My suggestion for this field is to acknowledge that many people give to their old university. Rather than denounce this, I think it would be better to determine how to do it more effectively. For example, should I give money to my department, to the “area of greatest need,” or something else?
This is all to say that there is a large untrammeled field for the application of GiveWell-type evaluation methodology.
Your old university's library provides common good services that are often undervalued and underfunded by central admin. At the same time, libraries lack the dedicated alumni support that departments have. If you're giving to your alma mater, consider directing some of it to the Library.
Full disclosure: I work as an academic librarian.
Great idea!
I'm actually somewhat skeptical of this for two reasons: the first is that money is fungible, so if you donate to your school puppy foundation, they can just shift some budget elsewhere. This obviously breaks if people donate so much to a given area that it is essentially overfunded, which brings me to critique #2: people tend to overfund charismatic cause areas, when recipients could often make much better use out of un-earmarked funds.
Of course, universities are weird beasts and it is possible that there are ways to force them to use donations well, but I'd really need to hear the specific argument. On it's surface, there are a lot of problems here.
"Money is fungible" also applies to GiveWell top charities and everything else--your donations may funge against Dustin Moskovitz's.
This is not true, or at least is an issue that GiveWell is aware of. They include in their criteria whether charities can plausibly do any good with marginal funding. If a given charity doesn't have capacity to apply additional funds effectively, then GiveWell doesn't fund it. A common framework in EA is "importance, tractability, and neglectedness" of causes under consideration.
Again, what's most effective highly depends on what specific cause you want your university to pursue. Hell, tons of alumni think it's very important for their school to have a highly competitive college football program, so they donate to their athletic department--or, in the "if ya ain't cheatin' ya ain't tryin'" category, finding a way to give directly to the athletes. Thank goodness the legitimization of NIL (name, image, and likeness) is making that far more transparent.
Question for the comment section—What percentage or HHI or net worth are people giving annually? I’ve got pretty high HHI and no real debt outside a mortgage but came from a family that struggled financially and can acknowledge it’s sort of turned me into a cheap ass in terms of charity. I currently give $1000/year to a local children’s hospital and $1000/year to a local food bank, and I try to be very generous with gofundme’s for causes that hit close to home and my wife does similar amounts but we’re still only giving like 1-2% away
I personally struggle with this question of how much to give when I frame it as a donating vs. saving/investing tradeoff. It’s one thing to forgo consumption, but as a relatively frugal person, I feel that giving a proper 10% to charity would entail sacrificing financial security.
My current solution to this conflict is two-fold:
A) I believe that I’ll give substantially more than 10% of my salary after building a sufficient level of financial security; when I could live my current standard of living off the proceeds of my investments with a high degree of certainty.
I have no interest in early retirement because I get a lot of meaning out of having a job. If I no longer need to save/invest then I might as well donate a lot and I believe I’ll be able to do so for decades in the future.
B) My estate is willed entirely to charity as I don’t have nor plan to have children. At worst, my desire for financial security would make me a low-quality charitable endowment investment manager.
I believe a lot of this is self-delusion. Yet that’s where I’m at emotionally in my desire for financial security and I don’t think I or anyone else is gonna shame myself out of that state.
I struggle with this as well. I think the key is not to let the goalposts keep moving over time. Sit down and figure out what financial security really means to you, and then stick to it.
I can tell you even after making a lot more money it is difficult to shake the feeling of insecurity. Especially if you are self employed and your income and estimated tax payments don't match and you are constantly managing liquidity because you are trying to invest as much as you can.
I haven't found a better answer than write it down, stick to it, and push through the feelings once you are past it by thinking of the people you are helping.
Disagree with Nicholas Decker -- I think percentage of income is highly relevant. I used to give very little to charity, because I was really heavily invested in an ethic of saving. I also marinated in a sort of guilt about this, because I was persuaded by the general EA arguments (which are also articulated outside of EA) that I had certain ethical obligations to give more. It was intuitively obvious to me that if I gave, say, 10% of my income away, I would still have all the material necessities, still be wealthier than the vast majority of humanity, etc. Then I had a kid and was saddled with additional spending and additional concerns about whether it was foolish to be writing checks to strangers that could go into her college fund, etc. I kept vaguely resolving to change, but it was hard psychologically.
The thing that I think most helped knock me out of my inaction was getting divorced. Getting divorced was absolutely devastating financially -- it slashed my savings and really materially affected my day-to-day expenses. And contrary to what you might think, it engendered a bit of an "easy come, easy go" attitude in me. It's not that I became blasé about money. I just sort of realized that no matter how tightly you cling to it, you never know what the future holds, and that in any conceivable future, I am going to have a roof over my head and plenty to eat.
So I started working myself up to the "pledge to give" level, setting aside increasing amounts of my pre-tax income from each paycheck to see if I could make it work. I'm up to 10% now. Still not claiming it's entirely easy. But I feel good about it.
It is absolute amounts, not percentage of income, that matters. The goal is not to purify yourself, it is to make others better off! So I wouldn’t worry too much about what percentage of income you give away.
Isn’t this just the same question with different phrasing? The absolute amount Warren Buffett gives will be greater than what I give, because his income and wealth are greater.
Warren Buffett is just a much better person than us. This would still be true if he didn't give away a cent.
Follow-up question: my spouse was raised in the context of pretty profound financial insecurity and frugality. I was not. At this time, we’re dual income and doing great despite having two little kids. We could easily give away 10% of annual income and still maintain our lifestyle. But my spouse is just not down. He’s just got a deep psychological block around giving money away, because he was not acculturated to it as a young person and has deep fears around instability. My position here is hampered by the fact that he out-earns me 5:1. (I am not maximizing my income potential because I love my public service job and feel personally and professionally enriched by it). Any advice?
I can empathize with your husband. I grew up poor/lower middle class in a household that spent every dollar that came in the door, and it's only by the grace of God or good luck that we missed any sudden setbacks that would've ended with us bankrupt and/or homeless.
As such, I tend to be extremely conservative with our money. I watched my parents 401ks get wiped out in the recession, so I don't even put it to use making me more money, and I don't like conspicuous consumption either.
Anyhow, this was a meandering way to tell you that as someone from a similar background and psychology, I think the best way to do it is to start small. You probably know what your husband's internal limit is for a splurge purchase - $100? $200? $500? - whatever he'd typically drop without thinking too much about it, and suggest that as a starting annual donation. Then next year suggest increasing it slightly, ~20-30%, and keep going from there until you get to a point where you feel like you're donating enough to match your income levels.
If he out-earns you 5:1, then it seems like you make enough together to justify hiring a financial planner to work with you to plan out your retirement and other life needs (and, possibly, he or she could also manage your investments). This process could both help ensure that YOU are right about your ability to tithe 10% (by helping to grow your savings faster) and help your husband see that your needs are well-planed for even CONSIDERING that you plan to give away 10%. That should be part of the financial plan. Hearing it from an outside 3rd party with charts and graphs might get you more milage than just putting together a budget yourself, which would come with assumptions that, unless this is your field, you cannot be confident in. I predict that your husband also might be naturally opposed to paying someone to help manage your finances, but there are good people out there that structure their business so that it's reasonable and/or just comes from the extra money that they earn you. If you have money as a couple, and he is culturally attenuated to be cautious about money, it's almost silly NOT to engage a professional out of caution. Just find someone you and he both trust. It can take a few meetings, and feel free to tell anyone you don't like to hit the road, but you'll find someone.
It seems like you are suggesting that the OP leverage a third-party to gain a kind of advantage over their spouse.
He wouldn't be convinced. He would be manipulated (or somewhat coerced).
I would be deeply resentful if my spouse tried that with me.
(Though perhaps I misunderstood you?)
You did misunderstand. I was suggesting that the OP leverage a third-party to facilitate working WITH her spouse, as a cooperative partner in planning for their financial needs. Any conversation on charitable giving could come as a secondary part of that planning, not as some trap.
The above advice seems sound to me. Money is a deeply emotional issue, and I wouldn't presume to tell you how to work with your husband on this. One thing I might add is to convey to your husband, respectfully, that this is important to you as a matter of values, and that you want to collaborate to find a solution.
My plan is to sit down with my wife and review our budget (which I keep in detail on a google sheet). Review our earnings, and where we give today. And come up with a incremental increase in charity we both feel comfortable with. I want to get to 1-2% going into 2023
This is hard for me too. My husband and I are pretty comfortable, but we don’t have kids and I saw first hand, with my parents, how much serious illness, home help, hospice, and so on cost even when you have decent insurance. I’m obsessed with long-term financial security for this reason. We do donate, but we should give more.
Same boat. We're very comfortable now but want to have kids and buy a bigger house in the future, which makes getting super generous feel incompatible with those goals
I'm not an expert on this topic by any means, but have you considered buying Long Term Care Insurance? I don't know how affordable it is, but my understanding is it does what it is designed to do, ie financially covers the cost of providing home help and other living care for people who can no longer care for themselves.
The other thought is annuities, which again, just lock in some level of minimum financial security?
I'm actually just genuinely curious to hear how you see those options - would they actually alleviate your fears? I talk about things like this with my parents and aunts and uncles sometimes, but I feel like I can't quite understand where they're coming from, emotionally, and it becomes very frustrating. So I truly appreciate any insights you'd share.
We actually have had this for years. But in my experience, insurance doesn’t cover everything you need, and in my family we’ve had a lot of devastating long-term illnesses including Parkinson’s, rheumatoid arthritis, and various iterations of dementia, to name a few (I have a huge extended family). It might also be relevant that my parents both came from modest backgrounds, and I’ve been a big saver since I was a young child.
There is no dollar figure or financial instrument that would make me feel like I have “enough” to be secure whatever happens (I guess maybe if I won the lottery, but I would never buy a lottery ticket so…) Maybe I’m messed up?! But also, I’m an Old! I’ve been to two funerals for friends this year, one just a few days ago (pancreatic cancer diagnosed in early 50s). As I said I’ve been pretty neurotic about financial security forever, but watching the vagaries of life play out has not made me feel more relaxed, even though I understand that my level of concern might not be entirely rational. Maybe your relatives have similar feelings?
That sounds a lot like my parents. I don't think they are you are messed up. They view the situation differently because of a lot of the same reasons you do, and also, as much as they area my parents and I love them, it is their own personal lives. Just like they couldn't tell me what to do or where to live when i became an adult, I can't tell them how to feel or how to worry as they age.
My frustration is I try to approach the situation with what I think is rational logic and I come out with certain answers that I put a lot of stock in. But they seem to view it from a much more emotional angle, and so there's this disconnect. But like I said - who am I to tell them not to worry? And maybe I flatter myself with the idea that I'm being so rational anyways, I don't know. Maybe it's nothing's changed since when I was a kid and "I'll understand when I'm older"
For good or ill - probably the latter - it's very hard to be rational about certain things. I try *very* hard to do so, but in this realm (probably others too!) I fail almost completely.
Despite being An Old, I'm not actually *that* old, and I'm lucky to be healthy. That said, I feel I'm tempting fate just by stating that, and so any moment now "They" will come for me with a wheelchair (wheelchairs figure prominently in my family history and I've had a lot of nightmares about this scenario over the course of my life). Seeing, over time, some of the many ways in which life can suddenly go sideways for people has made me obsessively self-reliant in a way that's closely related to the concern about financial security.
I'm similarly one of those "family tried really hard to paper over the budget gaps growing up, but we absolutely had a lot of struggles and controversial decisions, even if the kids were largely sheltered from direct consequences"...which hasn't necessarily imbued exemplary financial discipline in any of us, but definitely contributes to overactive loss aversion. There's just a lurking fear of hitting a shameful Rock Bottom again...maxed out credit card, $0 to my name, tens of thousands in debt, behind on rent, subsisting on plain rice and instant ramen, jobless. Bad times, 0/10 would not recommend.
Obviously things got better. Still poor, grossing <$40k/yr in uber-COL SF...but a full quarter of my income goes into retirement accounts, and after taxes, net paycheck is roughly 50%. Which is still enough disposable income to not live hand-to-mouth, albeit at great social cost. Clearly there's a lot of room in there for some charity! And yet...I don't, other than a small monthly donation to a local health clinic for the needy poor. (Severe budgeting constraints almost caused them to lose their lease in 2020, so I'd like to think I helped a little to avoid that?)
I guess I, too, am waiting for some nebulous sense of "financial security" to kick in...a point where I'd truly no longer fear being hungry, nevermind homeless. Student loan debt jubilee is/was a contributor to that, but realistically I don't think it'll come until either homeownership or moving to a not-crazy-expensive locale. And some nights it really does take some faith-assurances that stocks will turn around eventually...all these low-priced shares I'm picking up will be worth something, one day, and then maybe I could stop working at a reasonable age rather than until I die on the job. Lotsa rationalizations.
Yet somewhere out there, there are definitely children drowning, while I fret about market vagaries in my warm comfortable bed, typing up long-winded comments on Slow Boring (annual subscription ~roughly = 0.125 people not lifted out of poverty), surrounded by material goods I realistically would not much notice or care if they vanished tomorrow. Inner Ross Douthat reminds me that I'm still living an incredibly decadent life of apathetic opulence, and that's...kind of pathetic? Not giving that wealth to those who need it so much more, nor enjoying it all that much myself...just hoarding to avoid ambiguous dread of immisseration.
I hope that in fact, and in spirit, you might be released from that dread.
We aim for 5% of our gross income. And other than giving to our colleges and grad schools, all of our donations are to local groups.
My advice is to experiment until you find what works for you.
My thinking about "how much should I give" also led me to think about "when to give" (lumpsums create more resistance, but have other benefits) and "who to give" (being able to understand how much the recipient needs, how much they get from others, what the recipient will be able to use it for, etc.)
Ten years ago I used to give a fixed amount, then decided to try increasing the amount by X each year, then switched to thinking in terms of percentages, and gradually reached 10% in 2022. I used to do all my giving during one month, then spread it evenly across quarters, and now do most of it monthly (catching up on some smaller things separately). Ten years ago I used to give to certain famous NGOs, then for a period tried various different things (giving up to 20 different places in a year), and now give to a handful of places (with the bulk of it to GiveWell).
If you are looking locally, please consider donating to of volunteering with your area Big Brothers Big Sisters. Pairing youth who have Adverse Childhood Experiences with adult mentors who show them new parts of the world is very high impact. Big Brothers Big Sisters has been around a long time and has real, validated impacts on life outcomes for these kids which translates into real impacts on your community. They are locally operated so program quality varies.
I don't know anything about their funding needs, but these interim results were really interesting! https://www.arnoldventures.org/stories/at-big-brothers-big-sisters-mentorship-moves-the-needle
BBBS is another very good program, great recommendation.
Thoughtful and reasoned, I was inspired by this post, thank you!
I also appreciated the links to the YIMBY groups (alas, none near me) and political GiveSmart lists. Helpful!
I'd get more involved in YIMBYism if it wasn't for thinking that Boise leadership is pretty reasonably YIMBY minded already. Maybe I could go to battle against historic preservationists if I feel like becoming a pariah in my surrounding neighborhoods, heh.
Looks to me like Boise could use your YIMBY voice: https://boisedev.com/news/2022/07/13/boise-zoning-code-rewrite/
For example, this is a way to make sure nobody builds triplexes or fourplexes: "In order to build denser than a duplex, developers would need to designate one of three or two of four of the units for Boiseans making less than 80% of the area median income."
As I understand it, the zoning code rewrite is still not a complete project. There was backlash and then backlash to the backlash over that and some other clauses. I'm trying to hold fire until I see the final product. The council at least has the right broad ideas.
That is why you need to get involved! Instead of holding fire until they see what happens, I'm certain local YIMBYs are involved in the process and lobbying the decision makers. We have to get in there while the sausage is being made.
I think there are a lot of YIMBY (or YIMBYish) groups not included on that list. I know of two. If you're in MA, check out Abundant Housing MA (abundanthousingma.org), or in CT, check out Desegregate CT (desegregatect.org).
Good Job, Matt! 👏👏
I’ve been a Slow Boring paid subscriber for over a year. I’m a small government/personal freedom guy (fiscal conservative/libertarianish). I very often disagree with your general direction (though I’m 100% in with your hyper YIMBYisum), but I always appreciate your logical approach.
I don’t have the time to comment very often, but I had to say something this morning because I think this is one your best posts yet. Good job!
"...weirdly valorize victimhood". When the dynamic and message in society is "you're either the oppressed or the oppressor; the victim or the victimizer", It's not surprising that many people would rather be the former. Victimhood also provides all kinds of excuses for why you're not happy and/or successful, and makes you "special".
The narrative in entertainment for decades has been the underdog, the victim, the sufferer is the hero, with that suffering directly tied to their hero status. Effectively, they are the hero because they suffer, because of things that happen to them, rather than things they do.
I think the "crisis of meaning" is much less about the "waning of religion" and more about the relentless centering of wealth (at all costs) rather than any kind of reasonable focus on being a good person. Society gives far too much play to wealth and the wealthy. Chasing the dollar at the expense of all else is a surefire recipe for a meaningless life.
If people are looking for volunteering-type things to do rather than spending-money-type things to do, then I can strongly recommend getting involved in a political party at the grassroots level. Delivering leaflets and knocking on doors is pretty good exercise, there's lots of basic organisational stuff that people with decent managerial skills can get stuck into. If you can reliably book rooms for meetings and get all the official paperwork (agendas, minutes, etc) done correctly and on time, or you can chair according to Robert's Rules of Order, or you can do a set of books and track where the money went for a small organisation with a few thousand dollars, then your local precinct will kill to keep you.
I rocked up with a specific set of skills - the ability to stay fair and unbiased even when I have strong personal opinions, the organisational skills to get paperwork done to a deadline, and the knowledge of how to count votes under various electoral systems. Ten years on, I'm currently in charge of an (internal) election in my party for the head of the party in England (this is the organisational head, not the political head, and there is an England head and a superior UK head).
There are hundreds of jobs like this, jobs that require middle-class office-worker skills, jobs that routinely get done by volunteers because no-one donates money to pay people to do admin, but without which the parties would cease to function.
[As an aside, these are the reasons why it is so hard to create a new political party even in countries that aren't the US where it is more possible; you need hundreds of the sort of minor functionary that I am to have a democratic party. You can have an autocratic party much more quickly and simply, which is how Macron did it.]