Why don’t you consider the reduction as part of of your donations? Unlike taking a direct-work job (where the counterfactual and non-monetary compensation questions are complicated and any estimate will involve a lot of guesswork)[1] your salary reduction is from a known very well-understood baseline.
I’m sympathetic overall to your desire for this not to become a norm in EA, due to the concerns you listed, but I would (and do) count it towards my donation target, and would generally advise others to do so.
There’s an argument in your case that your counterfactual salary is extremely clear. I would expect for most people taking a salary reduction, the answer is much harder. I’d estimate that half of people I’ve heard of leaving EtG jobs would have had a hard time being happy at that job any more, and many more people are like me where I haven’t worked in industry for 7 years and so I would have to guess, which makes it a bit of a weird norm question if a peer of mine gets to claim a 50% reduction, but I have no idea if I could have made double my (reduced) salary in industry in a very distant counterfactual world.
I do list this on my donations page, but I’m trying to be pretty conservative in what I count as my donations: only the actual money I actually donate. So I don’t count it towards my 50% and put it in grey italics like my employer donation matches, donations in exchange for work, the PayPal 1% match, and other counterfactual money moved that I don’t fully include.
I think it’s fine (and probably good) if others are less strict about this, though!
Why don’t you consider the reduction as part of of your donations? Unlike taking a direct-work job (where the counterfactual and non-monetary compensation questions are complicated and any estimate will involve a lot of guesswork)[1] your salary reduction is from a known very well-understood baseline.
I’m sympathetic overall to your desire for this not to become a norm in EA, due to the concerns you listed, but I would (and do) count it towards my donation target, and would generally advise others to do so.
There’s an argument in your case that your counterfactual salary is extremely clear. I would expect for most people taking a salary reduction, the answer is much harder. I’d estimate that half of people I’ve heard of leaving EtG jobs would have had a hard time being happy at that job any more, and many more people are like me where I haven’t worked in industry for 7 years and so I would have to guess, which makes it a bit of a weird norm question if a peer of mine gets to claim a 50% reduction, but I have no idea if I could have made double my (reduced) salary in industry in a very distant counterfactual world.
I do list this on my donations page, but I’m trying to be pretty conservative in what I count as my donations: only the actual money I actually donate. So I don’t count it towards my 50% and put it in grey italics like my employer donation matches, donations in exchange for work, the PayPal 1% match, and other counterfactual money moved that I don’t fully include.
I think it’s fine (and probably good) if others are less strict about this, though!