I like the gist of your post, but I wish you’d included a better estimate as I’m guessing your post is way off. Maybe assume 20% goes to salaries, so that’d be 200, but it doesn’t include overheads, so maybe 130? Then again, it’s not clear how much of the 100 million they want to give out this round. If it’s half, then that’d be 65.
What would the other 80% be spent on? Sanjay’s estimate could also be quite conservative. Say it was $1B given away in next year, with 80% of it allocated to programs in next year, and 80% spent on salaries, with an average salary of $80k. Then it would be 8k jobs! Maybe we can say that there will be somewhere in the range of 80-8,000 jobs available over the next 18 months (and more in the coming years). Sanjay’s 1,000 does seem like a reasonable point estimate.
Here’s an example of an FTX Future Fund application requesting $1M that doesn’t mention using the money to hire anyone. Instead, the plan is to use the money to subsidize charity prediction markets.
I, like Greg, am confused about your 20% estimate.
However I think your comment does point to one possible misunderstanding, which it would be good to clear up. My post might have suggested that the BEAHR is a one-off moment lasting over a short period in the coming months, but it might actually be more spread out than that.
More on the 20% estimate:
In the orgs I’ve founded, 90%+ of spend is on people.
If we had an office, and/or paid for more expensive HR/accounting services, that might go down to c80% or maybe a bit lower.
If we outsourced more (e.g. tech or design) that might go down further to, say, 60% or 50% (although note that those things might be outsourced to orgs in the EA ecosystem).
But for an organisation whose work involves people sitting at a computer and doing work (as opposed to, say, buying and passing on malaria nets) I’m unclear what the remaining 80% would be spent on.
There is a growing need for projects that deploy money rather than just having people think, and so, to me, it seems likely that “organisation whose work involves people sitting at a computer and doing work” will describe a decreasing proportion of total spending.
David is not the only person to have this perspective—KHorton seemed to believe something similar in an earlier post, but as I argued there, I don’t understand the dichotomy of “deploy money rather than just having people think”. I expect there to be lots of money spent on “deploying money by having people think”.
I like the gist of your post, but I wish you’d included a better estimate as I’m guessing your post is way off. Maybe assume 20% goes to salaries, so that’d be 200, but it doesn’t include overheads, so maybe 130? Then again, it’s not clear how much of the 100 million they want to give out this round. If it’s half, then that’d be 65.
What would the other 80% be spent on? Sanjay’s estimate could also be quite conservative. Say it was $1B given away in next year, with 80% of it allocated to programs in next year, and 80% spent on salaries, with an average salary of $80k. Then it would be 8k jobs! Maybe we can say that there will be somewhere in the range of 80-8,000 jobs available over the next 18 months (and more in the coming years). Sanjay’s 1,000 does seem like a reasonable point estimate.
Here’s an example of an FTX Future Fund application requesting $1M that doesn’t mention using the money to hire anyone. Instead, the plan is to use the money to subsidize charity prediction markets.
8000 is unrealistic. EA can’t scale that fast.
Yes, it would have to involve some amount of hiring from outside the community.
I, like Greg, am confused about your 20% estimate.
However I think your comment does point to one possible misunderstanding, which it would be good to clear up. My post might have suggested that the BEAHR is a one-off moment lasting over a short period in the coming months, but it might actually be more spread out than that.
More on the 20% estimate:
In the orgs I’ve founded, 90%+ of spend is on people.
If we had an office, and/or paid for more expensive HR/accounting services, that might go down to c80% or maybe a bit lower.
If we outsourced more (e.g. tech or design) that might go down further to, say, 60% or 50% (although note that those things might be outsourced to orgs in the EA ecosystem).
But for an organisation whose work involves people sitting at a computer and doing work (as opposed to, say, buying and passing on malaria nets) I’m unclear what the remaining 80% would be spent on.
There is a growing need for projects that deploy money rather than just having people think, and so, to me, it seems likely that “organisation whose work involves people sitting at a computer and doing work” will describe a decreasing proportion of total spending.
David is not the only person to have this perspective—KHorton seemed to believe something similar in an earlier post, but as I argued there, I don’t understand the dichotomy of “deploy money rather than just having people think”. I expect there to be lots of money spent on “deploying money by having people think”.
...but we’re already doing tons of that, and I’m not saying it will end, just that other things more like deploying funds will also get started.
I guess I was counting prizes and scholarships separate from jobs.