“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.