Donations 2022-2024
editorial note: This post is incomplete, but I'm publishing it in its current form in the hopes that it'll be helpful to other people thinking about their end-of-year donation decisions.
While I, as ever, recommend that every serious donor use a donor advised fund to allow them to set donation amounts in tax year 2024 and decide recipient organizations in early 2025, I do recognize that a post published on December 31 is worse than one published this week. So we're going with this experiment with an unfinished draft.
This notice will be removed when I consider this post final.
This post describes my thoughts, at the end of 2024, about using money to make the universe a better place. I remain committed to using at least 10% of what income I earn to do so, and am excited to do more than that when I have the opportunity.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of my first $4,000 donation to GiveWell's top charities! (That donation was 10% of my summer internship salary, plus some other campus jobs.)
A lot has changed since my last post in 2021, only some of which I'm able to recap here. (I have tried to publish these posts annually, but missed 2022 and 2023 for idiosyncratic reasons.) I'll break this post into (1) general discussion and personal outlook, [incomplete], and logistics, (2) donations by cause area for 2024, 2023, and 2022, and summary lists, (3) [incomplete: events of 2022 and 2023], and personal-policy updates, and (4) other people's writeups that I have found interesting.
(1a)
Shortly after my last donations post, I left a career in quantitative trading where I had been