> It’s unclear to me that charitable initiatives have anything even close to perfect information.
The whole point of EA efforts like GiveWell is to fix that.
> Sure, assuming a perfect market, this would be true, but I’d argue that charity labor is specifically a case where markets are far from perfect.
Why do you assume the market distortion is in the direction you'd like it to be? It's far more likely to go in the other direction - many people and organisations are willing to work for charities at below their normal cost, whereas people are unreasonably averse to giving money a charity (compared to how people do things where they actually care about the results), especially if we're talking about making donations that can be spent on things like improved organisational infrastructure that multiply effectiveness but aren't directly advancing the cause.
> There’s a reason most capitalist governments offer so many tax incentives for charitable firms.
Because they're vote-winners, there's no need to look for a deeper reason than that.
> The whole point of EA efforts like GiveWell is to fix that.
I mean it doesn't seem like it is at all. Given the huge swath of political organizations it deems too complicated to analyze, I think GiveWell is far from perfect, and just adding information into an area with very little. It helps, sure, but I don't think we're even close to an EMH approximation.
> Why do you assume the market distortion is in the direction you'd like it to be?
I don't assume anything here. The point is, without an efficient market you cannot achieve Pareto optimal outcomes. You can't assign directions here, I'm not sure what what a direction even means.
> Because they're vote-winners, there's no need to look for a deeper reason than that.
Look, at this point you're just asking me to believe that EMH applies out of faith. I'm sorry, but EMH is not an axiom, neither academically not practically, and if you can't prove the preconditions for an efficient market, then we can't say we have one.
Then on what grounds are you claiming that it's better for people to get directly involved in charitable organisations than get a high-paying job and give money?
> The point is, without an efficient market you cannot achieve Pareto optimal outcomes. You can't assign directions here, I'm not sure what what a direction even means.
If there was an efficient market, we could assume that the relative value of charitable contributions of money and contributions of labour was approximately proportional to the normal market rate between them. There are two equal and opposite ways for that assumption to be false - either charities somehow have much easier access to labour than to money (and are unable to convert that labour into money at anything close to the usual market rate), or vice versa. One of those possibilities seems vastly more plausible than the other to me.
> Look, at this point you're just asking me to believe that EMH applies out of faith.
Not at all, I'm just asking you to not claim that the existence of tax incentives for charitable donations is any kind of evidence about the efficiency of charities. It isn't.
> There are two equal and opposite ways for that assumption to be false
Hm? There are many ways for pricing to occur if EMH is not true, not two equal and opposite ways (how are they opposite in magnitude?)
Anyway I think this is not going to be a fruitful conversation going forward since I'm not interested in showing all the way markets without pareto-optimal outcomes can fail, so cheers.
The whole point of EA efforts like GiveWell is to fix that.
> Sure, assuming a perfect market, this would be true, but I’d argue that charity labor is specifically a case where markets are far from perfect.
Why do you assume the market distortion is in the direction you'd like it to be? It's far more likely to go in the other direction - many people and organisations are willing to work for charities at below their normal cost, whereas people are unreasonably averse to giving money a charity (compared to how people do things where they actually care about the results), especially if we're talking about making donations that can be spent on things like improved organisational infrastructure that multiply effectiveness but aren't directly advancing the cause.
> There’s a reason most capitalist governments offer so many tax incentives for charitable firms.
Because they're vote-winners, there's no need to look for a deeper reason than that.