You mean like they are in the comments of this post? ;-)
Yes, exactly. :)
Do we know how sensitive recruiting is to salaries? I would have thought not very for direct work, because many people weren’t using salary as a heuristic.
I can’t quantify this, but I can give anecdata which suggest “a bit”:
CEA has before been interested in people who we couldn’t attract for salary reasons;
I personally had reservations about how useful it would be for me to work at CEA. When I unpacked this I realised that I had been using salary as a partial heuristic for how much value I was adding, and it looked weak compared to postdocs (also not in a “optimised for making money” category). This was easier to lay aside after spotting, and I suspect that relatively few people use it as an explicit heuristic, but it is a fairly normal thing in society generally, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some other people were letting it enter into their decision making.
Even if there is an effect here, it could be that organisations can end up talent-constrained, so that it is hard/expensive to pay money for better staff. VipulNaik posted some analysis of this on LW; I also did some thinking about it before joining CEA.
Like Owen all I can offer is anecdata. I’ve worked in nonprofits or public sector jobs during my career and there is a serious brain drain problem. Again I don’t have specific numbers but it is talked about frequently, and definitely felt. I know several talented, thoughtful, hard working people who left nonprofit work because there was no money, and no expectation of this changing through their career.
In my experience there is actually the established norm that if you are asking for money on-par with what your position would earn in for-profit you are vilified. This is one reason I mentioned improving nonprofits in my previous comment. I have the impression that changing some of the cultural norms around nonprofit work would create the turnover necessary to lift an under-preforming organization into EA efficacy.
I’m not sure whether it should have happened in these cases (particularly if the total costs of offering high salaries spills over into higher salaries across the board), but yes, it was meant to be evidence that higher salaries could achieve at least somewhat better outcomes, a corollary of which is that the marginal value of EtG can’t diminish too severely.
Yes, exactly. :)
I can’t quantify this, but I can give anecdata which suggest “a bit”:
CEA has before been interested in people who we couldn’t attract for salary reasons;
I personally had reservations about how useful it would be for me to work at CEA. When I unpacked this I realised that I had been using salary as a partial heuristic for how much value I was adding, and it looked weak compared to postdocs (also not in a “optimised for making money” category). This was easier to lay aside after spotting, and I suspect that relatively few people use it as an explicit heuristic, but it is a fairly normal thing in society generally, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some other people were letting it enter into their decision making.
Even if there is an effect here, it could be that organisations can end up talent-constrained, so that it is hard/expensive to pay money for better staff. VipulNaik posted some analysis of this on LW; I also did some thinking about it before joining CEA.
Like Owen all I can offer is anecdata. I’ve worked in nonprofits or public sector jobs during my career and there is a serious brain drain problem. Again I don’t have specific numbers but it is talked about frequently, and definitely felt. I know several talented, thoughtful, hard working people who left nonprofit work because there was no money, and no expectation of this changing through their career.
In my experience there is actually the established norm that if you are asking for money on-par with what your position would earn in for-profit you are vilified. This is one reason I mentioned improving nonprofits in my previous comment. I have the impression that changing some of the cultural norms around nonprofit work would create the turnover necessary to lift an under-preforming organization into EA efficacy.
Why couldn’t CEA fundraise more to pay for better salaries? This sort of thing seems like a failure of too little ETG.
I’m not sure whether it should have happened in these cases (particularly if the total costs of offering high salaries spills over into higher salaries across the board), but yes, it was meant to be evidence that higher salaries could achieve at least somewhat better outcomes, a corollary of which is that the marginal value of EtG can’t diminish too severely.