Some observations:
- Most of GiveWell’s senior staff are moving over to the Open Philanthropy Project.
- This year, GiveWell had to set explicit funding targets for all of their charities and update their recommendations in April to make sure nobody ran out of room for more funding.
- My understanding is that Good Ventures (a) probably has more money than the current discounted cash flows from the rest of the EA movement combined and (b) still isn’t deploying nearly as much money as they eventually will be able to.
- Open Phil has recently posted about an org they wish existed but doesn’t and funder-initiated startups.
- I can’t remember any EA orgs failing to reach a fundraising target.
- Effective altruism is growing quickly; many EAers plan to earn to give but are currently students and will increase their giving substantially in the next few years.
These observations make me feel generally weird about earning to give: Good Ventures and other large foundations can fund a ton of stuff, and there are many individual EA donors who can fund the good ideas that aren't worth large funders engaging with for whatever reason (at least, many relative to the available opportunities). So it might be important to have more people trying to spot opportunities and start effective charities with support from large funders or current EtGers. For instance, the Gates Foundation has 1200 employees trying to help them deploy their money (and that’s presumably not counting the people who help them start new organizations); applying a similar ratio to Good Ventures would suggest they should have on the order of 100 people helping them, whereas today they have ~10.
Given that doing a normal job and making large donations is psychologically more attractive than trying to start nonprofits for a lot of people (including myself), this suggests that marginal EtGers (also potentially including myself?) might want to give more weight to trying to find opportunities to start new effective organizations, and leave the funding to people like Dustin Moskovitz.
One counterpoint might be that “large funders” are not actually that large; for instance, 72% of total giving is from individuals, but I don’t know if that ratio holds for global poverty or other causes EAs are interested in. And even if it does, it seems like you have to be a certain size of organization to raise grassroots funds effectively, and right now we don’t have enough orgs of that size.
I’d love to get other people’s thoughts on this.
"I donated $100,000 last year; based on my skill set I would probably earn $50,000 working at a charity; therefore earning to give is twice as good."
The naive argument definitely works if $50,000 will reliably hire someone as good as you would be at the job, where that someone would otherwise have been doing activities of little altruistic value.
That's a bit of an odd situation. Say your programming skills are worth $200k on the open market, and a charity needs skills like those. Why can they successfully hire a programmer for $50k? They need some combination of a supply of candidates who are eager to work for them for non-monetary reasons and lowered standards. Sort of like how lots of people want to be musicians, so average musician wages are very low.
Basically the naive argument assumes that there is a large population ready to donate their time at discount rates and high productivity but not to earn and donate with comparable willingness/productivity. Earning to give then exploits the opportunity for cut-rate hiring created by others' unreasonable enthusiasm for direct work.
And that's true for many positions, especially for people who have particular advantages in earning income. But it will break down for less popular positions, which offer less non-monetary compensation: they may be higher risk, weirder, have poorer exit options, involve fewer warm fuzzies, require years of onerous preparation getting a PhD or proceeding on the tenure track, etc.
In some cases there are also other pressures to keep wages low and rely on employees voluntarily taking low wages, e.g. if you have several employees already doing that then hiring new ones at market wages can create workplace jealousy (which is a big deal, believed to be a major contributor to wage stickiness and unemployment).
Thanks Carl. Here's a specific example: ACE spends about $100,000 per year on its five staff members. I don't think all five are full-time paid, but still this implies a pretty low average salary.
While ACE probably has some need for software skills, my guess is that my labor would be significantly less valuable than the staff they currently have on board with backgrounds in statistics etc.
Does this imply that earning to give is a good career route for me? Or is there something I'm not thinking of?