The Nonlinear Library EA - Rates of Criminality Amongst Giving Pledge Signatories by Ben West
Jan 22, 2024
11:46
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rates of Criminality Amongst Giving Pledge Signatories, published by Ben West on January 22, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
I investigate the rates of criminal misconduct amongst people who have taken
The Giving Pledge (roughly: ~200 [non-EA] billionaires who have pledged to give most of their money to charity).
I find that rates are fairly high:
25% of signatories have been accused of financial misconduct, and 10% convicted[1]
4% of signatories have spent at least one day in prison
Overall, 41% of signatories have had at least one allegation of substantial misconduct (financial, sexual, or otherwise)
I estimate that Giving Pledgers are not less likely, and possibly more likely, to commit financial crimes than YCombinator entrepreneurs.
I am unable to find evidence of The Giving Pledge doing anything to limit the risk of criminal behavior amongst its members, though I have heard second-hand that they do some sort of screening.
I conclude that the rate of criminal behavior amongst major philanthropists is high, which means that we should not expect altruism to substantially lower the risks compared to that of the general population, and that negative impacts to EA's public perception may occur independently of whether our donors actually commit crimes (e.g. because even noncriminal billionaires have a negative public image).
Methodology
I copied the list of signatories from
their website.
Gina Stuessy and I searched the internet for "(name) lawsuit", "(name) crime" and also looked at their Wikipedia page.
I categorized any results into "financial", "sexual", and "other", and also marked if they had spent at least one day in jail.
Gina and I eventually decided that the data collection process was too time-consuming, and we stopped partway through. The final dataset includes 115 of the 232 signatories.[2][3]
Data can be found
here.
How well do convictions correspond with immoral behavior?
It is a well-worn take that our[4] legal system overly protects white-collar criminals: If an employee steals $20 from the cash register, that's a criminal offense that the police will prosecute, but if an employer under-pays their employees by $20 that's a civil offense where the police don't get involved.
I found that the punishment of the criminals in my data set correlated extremely poorly with my intuition for how immorally they had behaved.
It would be funny if it weren't sad that one of the longest prison sentences in my data set is from Kjell Inge Røkke, a Norwegian businessman who
was convicted of having an illegal license for his yacht.
One particular way in which white-collar offenses are weird is that they often allow the defendant to settle without admitting wrongdoing.[5] E.g. my guess is that Philip Frost is guilty, but his settlement with the SEC
does not require him to admit wrongdoing.
I wasn't able to find a single person who admitted guilt in a sexual misconduct case, despite ~7% of the signatories being accused, including in high-profile cases like people involved with Jeffrey Epstein.[6]
I was considering trying to add some classification like "Ben thinks this person is guilty" but decided that this would be too time-consuming and subjective.
Nonetheless, if you want my subjective opinion, my guess is that most of the people who were accused of financial misconduct are guilty of immoral behavior, under a
commonsense morality definition of the term.
Less controversially, some of these cases are ongoing, and presumably at least some of them will result in convictions, which makes looking only at the current conviction rate misleading.
In any case though, I believe that this data set establishes that the base rate of both criminal and immoral behavior is fairly high among major philanthropists, no matter how you slice the data.
Some Representative Case...
Summary
I investigate the rates of criminal misconduct amongst people who have taken
The Giving Pledge (roughly: ~200 [non-EA] billionaires who have pledged to give most of their money to charity).
I find that rates are fairly high:
25% of signatories have been accused of financial misconduct, and 10% convicted[1]
4% of signatories have spent at least one day in prison
Overall, 41% of signatories have had at least one allegation of substantial misconduct (financial, sexual, or otherwise)
I estimate that Giving Pledgers are not less likely, and possibly more likely, to commit financial crimes than YCombinator entrepreneurs.
I am unable to find evidence of The Giving Pledge doing anything to limit the risk of criminal behavior amongst its members, though I have heard second-hand that they do some sort of screening.
I conclude that the rate of criminal behavior amongst major philanthropists is high, which means that we should not expect altruism to substantially lower the risks compared to that of the general population, and that negative impacts to EA's public perception may occur independently of whether our donors actually commit crimes (e.g. because even noncriminal billionaires have a negative public image).
Methodology
I copied the list of signatories from
their website.
Gina Stuessy and I searched the internet for "(name) lawsuit", "(name) crime" and also looked at their Wikipedia page.
I categorized any results into "financial", "sexual", and "other", and also marked if they had spent at least one day in jail.
Gina and I eventually decided that the data collection process was too time-consuming, and we stopped partway through. The final dataset includes 115 of the 232 signatories.[2][3]
Data can be found
here.
How well do convictions correspond with immoral behavior?
It is a well-worn take that our[4] legal system overly protects white-collar criminals: If an employee steals $20 from the cash register, that's a criminal offense that the police will prosecute, but if an employer under-pays their employees by $20 that's a civil offense where the police don't get involved.
I found that the punishment of the criminals in my data set correlated extremely poorly with my intuition for how immorally they had behaved.
It would be funny if it weren't sad that one of the longest prison sentences in my data set is from Kjell Inge Røkke, a Norwegian businessman who
was convicted of having an illegal license for his yacht.
One particular way in which white-collar offenses are weird is that they often allow the defendant to settle without admitting wrongdoing.[5] E.g. my guess is that Philip Frost is guilty, but his settlement with the SEC
does not require him to admit wrongdoing.
I wasn't able to find a single person who admitted guilt in a sexual misconduct case, despite ~7% of the signatories being accused, including in high-profile cases like people involved with Jeffrey Epstein.[6]
I was considering trying to add some classification like "Ben thinks this person is guilty" but decided that this would be too time-consuming and subjective.
Nonetheless, if you want my subjective opinion, my guess is that most of the people who were accused of financial misconduct are guilty of immoral behavior, under a
commonsense morality definition of the term.
Less controversially, some of these cases are ongoing, and presumably at least some of them will result in convictions, which makes looking only at the current conviction rate misleading.
In any case though, I believe that this data set establishes that the base rate of both criminal and immoral behavior is fairly high among major philanthropists, no matter how you slice the data.
Some Representative Case...