This is the third time I’ve seen a suggestion like this, and antitrust law is always brought up. I feel like maybe it’s worth a post that just says “no, you can’t coordinate salaries/hiring practices/etc., here’s why” since that would be helpful for the general EA population to know.
This would almost certainly violate antitrust law.
Probably most of these brief statements about “coordinating salaries equals violating antitrust”, are simplistic and may substantively be untrue or misleading.
I’m LARPING wildly but the below gives a sense why:
There might be several legal theories or law involved. A not entirely crazy guess is that one legal theory is that anti-trust is set to prevent for profit businesses from creating a cartel at their benefit. So these are completely separate entities, making agreements to maintain advantage in a marketplace at the expense of workers.
It’s totally possible this can be undermined or end-runned, and “anti-trust” doesn’t apply if:
These entities are funded by very close and coordinated sources of funds
In the same way it makes no sense to have different departments of an entity claim “antitrust”, defendants can argue that there is no material distinction in practice between many entities.
The “cartel” actually has to create economic harm, and this might require a natural marketplace for employees that is being undermined. If the funders and all the execs created the entire marketplace (e.g. think of many EA cause areas), that’s harder to say they are unfairly benefitting.
The EA community or funders gathered together and demanded lower/higher salaries or other norms.
The entities can then act and say they are acting in their own existential interest, at the demand of donors and the community.
This doesn’t apply if the coordination generally increased salaries.
Law isn’t this black and white thing where police drop out of helicopters.
At least half of this thing, is someone actually needing to sue and show harm. That’s a long and difficult process. I can see how that might not happen even if there was malign anti-trust actually going on.
By the way, as suggested by preceding thought that reality sort of sucks, I probably oppose and think it’s bad to set up hard salary norms from a central source.
This is just because of sort of “Soviet style” sort of central planning problems and I generally distrust the implementation, because for example:
One immediate obvious effect would be to ensnare “AI” related organizations—who would easily and immediately evade salary caps through any number of methods (for example, what exactly is an EA organization versus a for profit enterprise invested by the major EA funders?)
I think about how this plays out in some university faculties, where economics or finance salaries are normalized to other faculties.
The permanent damage of lock-in, intellectual poverty, and “moral mazes” that results is a horrific indignity I can’t imagine inflicting on any altruistic person or even for profit person.
I can’t imagine EAs developing a schedule that puts limits on salaries just as a design and coordination issue, that’s just not practical. It would just become this silly football and a mess.
The lists of practical problems are probably 10x longer in reality and the thoughts in this comment could change a lot if I spent more time thinking about this.
I also may have the dumbs, please stomp all over this comment if I’m wrong.
(For context, I’m a lawyer who’s worked a lot on issues related to antitrust and AI safety.)
These entities are funded by very close and coordinated sources of funds
There is such a thing as the “single entity defense,” but it almost certainly would not apply in this context. The orgs are legally and functionally separate entities.
The “cartel” actually has to create economic harm, and this might require a natural marketplace for employees that is being undermined. If the funders and all the execs created the entire marketplace (e.g. think of many EA cause areas), that’s harder to say they are unfairly benefitting.
. . .
The EA community or funders gathered together and demanded lower/higher salaries or other norms.
The best theory would be that employees are being harmed by anticompetitive fixing of the prices of their employment. That the funders or “community” want the salaries to be lower does not negate the impact on the workers, and so is not relevant to the claim.
However, it may be less legally risky (in the US) for funders to impose (common) salary caps on the downstream orgs that they fund as a condition of funding. Major cases on-point: State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3 (1997); Continental T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 433 U.S. 36 (1977); Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., 551 U.S. 877 (2007).
I might be a bit naive here, but I don’t really see how this would violate competition/antitrust law (other than potentially for very specialist roles that basically only exist at EA organisations): Surely the ‘market share’ of EA orgs for most type of role is so small that there shouldn’t be any way this actually interferes with the market?
(Just clarifying: I don’t think it would be a good or practicable idea for EA organisations EA organizations “to offer salaries based on the same formula”, but I’m confused why that wouldn’t be possible if they wanted to.)
An agreement of the type contemplated in the OP (as I understand it) would very likely be treated as anticompetitive “per se,” and therefore not require any empirical inquiry into the effects on the “market” (however defined).
This would almost certainly violate antitrust law.
This is the third time I’ve seen a suggestion like this, and antitrust law is always brought up. I feel like maybe it’s worth a post that just says “no, you can’t coordinate salaries/hiring practices/etc., here’s why” since that would be helpful for the general EA population to know.
Probably most of these brief statements about “coordinating salaries equals violating antitrust”, are simplistic and may substantively be untrue or misleading.
I’m LARPING wildly but the below gives a sense why:
There might be several legal theories or law involved. A not entirely crazy guess is that one legal theory is that anti-trust is set to prevent for profit businesses from creating a cartel at their benefit. So these are completely separate entities, making agreements to maintain advantage in a marketplace at the expense of workers.
It’s totally possible this can be undermined or end-runned, and “anti-trust” doesn’t apply if:
These entities are funded by very close and coordinated sources of funds
In the same way it makes no sense to have different departments of an entity claim “antitrust”, defendants can argue that there is no material distinction in practice between many entities.
The “cartel” actually has to create economic harm, and this might require a natural marketplace for employees that is being undermined. If the funders and all the execs created the entire marketplace (e.g. think of many EA cause areas), that’s harder to say they are unfairly benefitting.
The EA community or funders gathered together and demanded lower/higher salaries or other norms.
The entities can then act and say they are acting in their own existential interest, at the demand of donors and the community.
This doesn’t apply if the coordination generally increased salaries.
Law isn’t this black and white thing where police drop out of helicopters.
At least half of this thing, is someone actually needing to sue and show harm. That’s a long and difficult process. I can see how that might not happen even if there was malign anti-trust actually going on.
By the way, as suggested by preceding thought that reality sort of sucks, I probably oppose and think it’s bad to set up hard salary norms from a central source.
This is just because of sort of “Soviet style” sort of central planning problems and I generally distrust the implementation, because for example:
One immediate obvious effect would be to ensnare “AI” related organizations—who would easily and immediately evade salary caps through any number of methods (for example, what exactly is an EA organization versus a for profit enterprise invested by the major EA funders?)
I think about how this plays out in some university faculties, where economics or finance salaries are normalized to other faculties.
The permanent damage of lock-in, intellectual poverty, and “moral mazes” that results is a horrific indignity I can’t imagine inflicting on any altruistic person or even for profit person.
I can’t imagine EAs developing a schedule that puts limits on salaries just as a design and coordination issue, that’s just not practical. It would just become this silly football and a mess.
The lists of practical problems are probably 10x longer in reality and the thoughts in this comment could change a lot if I spent more time thinking about this.
I also may have the dumbs, please stomp all over this comment if I’m wrong.
(For context, I’m a lawyer who’s worked a lot on issues related to antitrust and AI safety.)
There is such a thing as the “single entity defense,” but it almost certainly would not apply in this context. The orgs are legally and functionally separate entities.
The best theory would be that employees are being harmed by anticompetitive fixing of the prices of their employment. That the funders or “community” want the salaries to be lower does not negate the impact on the workers, and so is not relevant to the claim.
However, it may be less legally risky (in the US) for funders to impose (common) salary caps on the downstream orgs that they fund as a condition of funding. Major cases on-point: State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3 (1997); Continental T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 433 U.S. 36 (1977); Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., 551 U.S. 877 (2007).
I might be a bit naive here, but I don’t really see how this would violate competition/antitrust law (other than potentially for very specialist roles that basically only exist at EA organisations): Surely the ‘market share’ of EA orgs for most type of role is so small that there shouldn’t be any way this actually interferes with the market?
(Just clarifying: I don’t think it would be a good or practicable idea for EA organisations EA organizations “to offer salaries based on the same formula”, but I’m confused why that wouldn’t be possible if they wanted to.)
An agreement of the type contemplated in the OP (as I understand it) would very likely be treated as anticompetitive “per se,” and therefore not require any empirical inquiry into the effects on the “market” (however defined).
Does antitrust law apply to non-profits in that way?
It does, yes.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w12132