At a broad level, I expect the ratio of (value of marginal earning-to-give):(value of marginal direct work) can’t get too distorted, because of mechanisms like:
Donors discuss publicly whether they feel the pool of giving opportunities is deep;
Charities talk publicly about whether they are more funding- or talent-constrained;
Charities raise or lower salaries, making direct work more or less appealing to people using that as a heuristic in choosing a career.
However this isn’t in conflict with your suggestion that at the margin now there may be slightly too much EtG. I’m not sure about that.
Donors discuss publicly whether they feel the pool of giving opportunities is deep;
Charities talk publicly about whether they are more funding- or talent-constrained;
You mean like they are in the comments of this post? ;-)
(This reminds me of a similar conversation we had on this post...)
Charities raise or lower salaries, making direct work more or less appealing to people using that as a heuristic in choosing a career.
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 get the (purely anecdotal) impression that recruiting is sensitive to salaries in the sense that some people who would be good fits for EA charities automatically rule them out because the salaries are low enough that they would have to make undesirable time/money tradeoffs. However, it’s a bit of a tricky problem, because most nonprofits want to pay everyone roughly the same amount, so hiring one marginal person at say 20% more really means increasing all salaries by that much.
Another relevant factor is how much of a salary cut you’re looking at when moving from EtG to direct work. In for-profit organizations, the most competent people frequently get paid 3-10x as much as average. I don’t think a 3-10x disparity would be culturally acceptable in EA charities, which means that someone at the top essentially has to forgo a much higher percentage of their salary to do direct work.
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.
At a broad level, I expect the ratio of (value of marginal earning-to-give):(value of marginal direct work) can’t get too distorted, because of mechanisms like:
Donors discuss publicly whether they feel the pool of giving opportunities is deep;
Charities talk publicly about whether they are more funding- or talent-constrained;
Charities raise or lower salaries, making direct work more or less appealing to people using that as a heuristic in choosing a career.
However this isn’t in conflict with your suggestion that at the margin now there may be slightly too much EtG. I’m not sure about that.
You mean like they are in the comments of this post? ;-)
(This reminds me of a similar conversation we had on this post...)
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 get the (purely anecdotal) impression that recruiting is sensitive to salaries in the sense that some people who would be good fits for EA charities automatically rule them out because the salaries are low enough that they would have to make undesirable time/money tradeoffs. However, it’s a bit of a tricky problem, because most nonprofits want to pay everyone roughly the same amount, so hiring one marginal person at say 20% more really means increasing all salaries by that much.
Another relevant factor is how much of a salary cut you’re looking at when moving from EtG to direct work. In for-profit organizations, the most competent people frequently get paid 3-10x as much as average. I don’t think a 3-10x disparity would be culturally acceptable in EA charities, which means that someone at the top essentially has to forgo a much higher percentage of their salary to do direct work.
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.