“Spending on Ourselves” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸

The Effective Altruism community has encouraged a range of different approaches to doing good over time. Initially there was more focus on frugality as a way to increase how much you could donate, which was mostly supplanted by emphasis on earning more. In late 2015 this started to shift towards doing things that are directly useful, which accelerated in 2021. Then the market fell in 2022, FTX turned out to be a fraud, and there haven't been new donors near the scale of Open Phil / Good Ventures. Among many changes, people are thinking more about frugality again: the less you can live on, the more you can stretch a given amount of funding. [1]

To encourage myself to live more frugally and to give an example of what I thought was a pretty fulfilling life at relatively low cost for the US, I used to calculate numbers [...]

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First published:
April 20th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hYzpFJEwttBjtCjEW/spending-on-ourselves

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.