The Privilege of Earning To Give

One thing I note when thinking along these lines is that one of my biggest lucky breaks was my innate mathematical talent. We tend not to characterise innate abilities as 'privilege', for reasons I've never fully understood, but if you understand privilege as 'unearned advantage' as I do then it absolutely deserves a spot on many people's lists.

Edit: On that note, I strongly identify with a quote from Warren Buffet:

"I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner.

But I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing — and make a lot of money doing it. The least I can do is help pay for all that. "

Great point Jeff! Most of us here are very lucky people - to be born humans, in rich countries with an upbringing that provides us outstanding opportunities to influence the world. This motivates me all the more to go out and help others who weren't born as fortunate as me.

"Someone at the poverty line in the US has more than 90% of people in the world ... This is not to minimize the suffering of people in the US, along any dimension"

Something to keep in mind here is that wealth can only go so far, so you would expect that a rich country would still have plenty of unhappy people in it for non-material welfare related reasons. The thing is we know more about how to easily fix extreme poverty than we do about how to solve e.g. serious mental health problems or unhappy marriages.

Good to hear this sort of discussion in the effective altruism community. One important privilege/unearned advantage that often goes unrecognized is time. We live in a time of where massive suffering from global poverty and factory farming is coupled with also massive stockpiles of resources, which allows us to be particularly helpful by commandeering these resources for ethical purposes through earning to give, accumulating power and influence, or other means. I greatly admire all who recognize this privilege and take it upon themselves to make use of it.

This makes me want to distinguish among different kinds of privilege, as in this post:

Dominance is privilege that is harmful to other people and that no one should have; Support is privilege that everyone should have, and is not on its own harmful to anyone else.

For instance: A habit of attempting to dominate conversations is internalized dominance, and actually being allowed to do so is external dominance; speaking up for oneself is a sign of internalized support, while actually being listened to is external support.

I think Jeff is (mostly?) talking about "support", the kind of privilege that everyone should have.

In other words, having privilege is a privilege :)

I think it's important for those of us who are privileged in one way or another to acknowledge this. It should help disarm some of the controversial aspects of earning to give, which are precisely a matter of it being a strategy of privileged people which takes advantage of a social system which privileges them.

Hi Jeff.

You say that "the best response to privilege is to turn it to fixing the situation that led you to having these major advantages over others". I'm not entirely comfortable with this wording. For example, one way of "fixing the situation" would be removing your advantages without increasing other people's advantages.

In other words, our goal should be making the world better for everyone, not only and not even primarily making the world equally good for everyone.