Itās definitely true that, holding everything equal, spending less on salaries means itās easier to fundraise, and organizations can get more done for a given amount of money. But of course if you ask someone who could be earning $500k to work for $50k most of them (including me!) will say no, and even people who say yes initially are more likely to burn out and decide this is not what they want to do with their life.
There are also other costs to pushing hard on frugality: people will start making tradeoffs that donāt really make sense given how valuable their time is to the organization. For example, in 2015 when our first child was refusing to eat at daycare it would have been possible for us to hire someone to watch them, but this would have been expensive. Instead, we chose a combination of working unusual hours and working fewer hours so she wouldnāt need to be in daycare. We were both earning to give then, so this was fine, but if we had been doing work that was directly valuable I think it would probably have been a false economy.
if sacrifices compared to the private sector become expected
I think this general area is quite subtle and confusing, where people have really different impressions depending on their background. From my perspective, as someone making about 1ā3 as much in a direct work job as I was making (and expect I could still make) in industry, this is already a relative sacrifice. On the other hand, I also know people at EA orgs who would be making less money outside of EA. I donāt at all have a good sense of which of these is more typical? And then the longer someone spends within EA, developing EA-specific career capital and foregoing more conventional career capital, the lower a sacrifice it looks like they are making (relative to the highest comp job they could get right now) but also the higher a sacrifice there actually making (relative to a career in which they had optimized for income).
(And, as always, when people give us as examples of people making large sacrifices, I have to point out that the absolute amount of money we have kept has been relatively high. I expect most EAs who spent a similar period in direct work were living on less and have much lower savings than we can. And I think this would still be true even if current direct work compensation had been in place since 2012.)
I have a little bit of a different perspective on that it doesnāt feel or appear good to label āonlyā earning 70k a āsacrificeā, even if it is technically correct. Maybe using language like ātrade-offā or ātough choiceā might feel a little better.
70k (OPs suggested salary) still puts you very close to the top 1 percent of global earners. Imagine being a Ugandan interested in effective altruism looking at this discussion. The idea that a salary of 70k US being a āsacrificeā could seem grating and crass, even if the use of the word is correct. Everyone earning 70k doing a satisfying job that is making a difference in the world, is super fortunate with a whole lot of factors that have come together to make that possible.
Even just having the choice to be able to make the decision whether to earn to give or do direct work for āonlyā 60 or 70k is a privilege most of the world doesnāt have. I think it could be considered insensitive or even arrogant to talk in terms of sacrifice while being among the richest people around. To take it to the extreme (perhaps straw man tho) how would we feel about a sentence like āBill Gates sacrificed an hour of his valuable time to serve in a soup kitchenā
Yes it may be psychologically hard to earn a while lot less than you could be doing something else, but Iām not sure āsacrificeā is the best terminology to be using.
Iāve seen a number of conversations about salary in EA where people talk past each other. Below is a list of what I think are some key cruxes- not everywhere people disagree, but where they are most likely to have different implicit assumptions, and most likely to have disagreements stemming only from definitions. Iād love if everyone arguing about salary in this thread would fill this out.
What salary are you proposing? (US$70k ?)
What living conditions do you expect this to buy people?
Housing?
Location?
Kids?
Food?
Savings rate?
What is your bar for āenoughā money? Not keeling over dead? Peak productivity but miserable? Thriving?
What percentage of people can reach that state with your suggested salary?
Some issues that might raise peopleās expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
What do you expect to happen for people who canāt meet the condition set in question 3 with the salary set in question 1?
If you lose your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be?
What is your counterfactual for the money saved on salary?
What salary are you proposing? (US$70k ?) Obviously thereās lots of different countries, and lotās of different cause areas. But just focusing on one in particular. I think CEA employees in the UK, could largely pay teacher salaries (24-30K GBP) and basically be fine, not lose lots of talent.
What living conditions do you expect this to buy people? Pretty good conditions. Good apartment, good savings.
What is your bar for āenoughā money? Not keeling over dead? Peak productivity but miserable? Thriving? As soon as youāre saving for pension, youāre in a good spot Iād say.
What percentage of people can reach that state with your suggested salary?
Some issues that might raise peopleās expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
>85% Iād guess. Keep in mind median UK salary is 38k GBP, and median UK age of work force is significantly older than CEA employees (older people need more money).
What do you expect to happen for people who canāt meet the condition set in question 3 with the salary set in question 1?
The same as the for-profit world, if theyāre good enough theyāre paid more. But that thereās a downward pressure on peopleās salaries, not just a upwards pressure (as I believe we currently have).
If you lose your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be?
For CEA, Iād likely guess theyād be indistinguishable for most roles most of the time.
What is your counterfactual for the money saved on salary?
Half of one more employee, and a marginal effect resulting in more of an agile ecosystem (i.e. more entrepreneurship, more commitment).
If you lose your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be?
For CEA, Iād likely guess theyād be indistinguishable for most roles most of the time.
Iām CEAās main recruitment person and Iāve been involved with CEAās hiring for 6+ years. Iāve also been involved in hiring rounds for other EA orgs.
I donāt remember a case where the top two candidates were āindistinguishable.ā The gap very frequently seems quite large (e.g. our current guess is the top candidate might be twice as impactful, by some definition of expected impact). There have also been many cases where the gap is so large we donāt hire for the role at all and work we feel is important simply doesnāt happen. There have also, of course, been cases where we have two candidates we are similarly excited about. This is rare. If it does happen, weād generally be happy to be transparent about the situation, and so if you have been offered a role and are wondering about your own replacability, Iād encourage you to just ask.
FWIW, my experience (hiring mostly operations roles) is often the oppositeāI find for non-senior roles that I usually reach the end of a hiring process, and am making a pretty arbitrary choice between multiple candidates who both seem quite good on the (relatively weak) evidence from the hiring round. But, I also think RP filters a lot less heavily on culture fit /ā value alignment for ops roles than CEA does, which might be the relevant factor making this difference.
Thanks for clarifying, and I am certainly inclined to defer to you.
One concern I would have, is to what extent are these subjective estimations born-out by empirical data. Obviously youād never deliberately hire the second best candidate, so we never really test our accuracy. I suspect this is particular bad with hiring, where the hiring process can be really comprehensive and itās still possible to make a bad hire.
To add to what Caitlin said, my experience as a hiring manager and as a candidate is that this often is not the case.
When I was hired at CEA I took roles on two different teams (Head of US Operations at CEA and the Events Team role at EAO, which later merged into CEA). My understanding at the time is that they didnāt have second choice candidates with my qualifications, and I was told by the EAO hiring manager that they would have not filled the position if I didnāt accept (I donāt remember whether I checked this with the CEA role).
I should note that I was applying for these roles in 2015 and that the hiring pool has changed since then. But in my experience as a hiring manager (especially for senior/āgeneralist positions), it can be really hard to find a candidate that fits the specific requirements. Part of this is that my team requires a fairly specific skillset (that includes EA context, execution ability, and fit with our high energy culture) but I wouldnāt be surprised if other hiring managers have similar experiences. I think as the team grows and more junior positions become available this might be more flexible, though I think āindistinguishableā is still not accurate.
Not Peter, but looking at the last ~20 roles Iāve hired for, Iād guess that during hiring, maybe 15 or so had an alternative candidate who seemed worth hiring (though perhaps did worse in some scoring system). These were all operations roles within an EA organization. For 2 more senior roles I hired for during that time, there appeared to be suitable alternatives. For other less senior roles there werenāt (though I think the opposite generally tends to be more true).
I do thing one consideration here is we are talking about who looked best during hiring. Thatās different than who would be a better employeeāweāre assuming our hiring process does a good job of assessing peopleās fit /ā job performance, etc., and we know that the best predictors during hiring are only moderately correlated with later job performance, so itās plausible that often we think there is a big gap between two candidates, but theyād actually perform equally well (or that someone who seems like the best candidate isnāt). Hiring is just a highly uncertain business, and predicting long-term job performance from like, 10 hours of sample work and interviews is pretty hard ā Iām somewhat skeptical that looking at hiring data is even the right approach, because youād also want to control for things like if those employees always meet performance expectations in the future, etc, and you never actually get counterfactual data on how good the person you didnāt hire was. Iām certain that many EA organizations have hired someone who appeared to be better than the alternative by a wide margin, and easily cleared a hiring bar, but who later turned out to have major performance issues, even if the organization was doing a really good job evaluating people.
Thanks for responding, it has really helped me clarify my understanding of your views.
I do think the comparison to teacher wages is a little unfair. In the US teaching jobs are incredibly stable, and stable things pay less. Unless the UK is very different, I expect that EA jobs would need to pay more just to have people end up with the same financial situation over time, because instability is expensive. But this is maybe a 10% difference, not so not that important in the scheme of things.
I think a big area of contention (in all the salary discussions, not just this one) stems from a disagreement on questions 6 and 7. For fields like alignment research, the answers may be āreplacement is 1/ā10th as goodā and āthere is nothing else to spend on the money onā. But for fields like globally health and poverty, salary trades off directly against workā. So itās not surprising those fields look very different.
Iām not sure where CEA falls in this spectrum. In a sister comment Cait says that for CEA their number two candidate is often half as impactful as their top choice, and sometimes they choose to forego filling a role entirely if the top choice is unvailable. Iām surprised by that and a little skeptical that itās unfixable, but I also expect theyāve put a lot of thought into recruitment. If CEA is regularly struggling to fill roles, that certainly explains some of the salary explanation.
Cait didnāt mention this but I believe I read elsewhere that CEA didnāt want too big a gap between programmers and non-programmers, and solved this by ~overpaying non-programmers. I donāt know how I feel about this. I guess tentatively I think that it was awfully convenient to solve the problem by overpaying people rather than expecting people to become comfortable with a salary gap, and it might have been good to try harder at that, or divide the orgs such that it wasnāt so obvious. My understanding is that CEA struggled to find programmers[1], so paying less is a nonstarter.
There was a long LW thread on this that left me with the impression that CEAās main problem was it was looking for the wrong thing, and the thing it was looking for was extremely expensive. But I imagine that even if they were looking for the cheaper right thing, they couldnāt get it with teacher wages.
In the US teaching jobs are incredibly stable, and stable things pay less. Unless the UK is very different, I expect that EA jobs would need to pay more just to have people end up with the same financial situation over time, because instability is expensive
I agree that there should be a premium for instability.
Iām not sure where CEA falls in this spectrum. In a sister comment Cait says that for CEA their number two candidate is often half as impactful as their top choice
I agree this is a crux. To the extent youāre paying more for better candidates, I am pretty happy.
Cait didnāt mention this but I believe I read elsewhere that CEA didnāt want too big a gap between programmers and non-programmers, and solved this by ~overpaying non-programmers.
Related to this, I have an intuition that salaries get inflated by EAās being too nice.
Also related to this point, a concern I have with paying little, or paying competitive salaries in workplaces which have an ideologically driven supply/ādemand mismatch (i.e. the game industry, or NGOs) often leads to toxic workplaces. If paying a premium avoids these, it could definitely be worth it. Although I am sceptical how much it helps, over other things (like generally creating a nice place to work, making people feel safe, hiring the right people ect.).
Not a specific salary, there should definitely be ranges. I guess I would say the average EA salary should be ~60-80k/āyear right now. I think this is less than many could make in the private sector but not necessarily all. I acknowledge this is a sacrifice or reduction.
I think a reasonable condo/āapartment. I think they would cook most of their own meals, could have kids, still save like 10% of income. I donāt think itās necessary to live in London, NY, SF.
Able to live a ~middle class life. Not sure what peak productivity but miserable means.
Virtually all. This is above the median income in the richest country in the world.
I think a small ~5% or so may do work outside of EA on the side. Iām also not opposed to higher salaries than this. I donāt know what you mean I would expect to happen to them.
Usually I expect this to be not a lot of a drop. Maybe an average of 10%. Sometimes i realize this will be more.
Well, depends. I think a baseline reasonable counterfactual is Givewell Top Charities Fund.
I suppose 6 and 7 are for an individual hire and not for EA as a whole.
Suppose you want to hire Alice, but she wonāt accept the salary, so you go to your second choice, Bob. How good is Bob, relative to Alice? Indistinguishable? 90% of impact? 50% of impact?
Iām not asking for survey data and suspect EA is too weird to make normal surveys applicable. So personal anecdotes or at best the experiencing of people involved in lots of hiring is the most we can hope for.
I know we are moving to absurdity now a little, but I feel like at 70,000 dollars in a position where people are doing meaningful work that aligns with their values, 90 percent Bob is probably there.
I have a little bit of a different perspective on that I donāt really consider earning āonlyā 70k a āsacrificeā. Maybe it could be considered a ārelative sacrificeā? But even that language makes me uncomfortable.
Any sacrifice is relative. You can only sacrifice something if you had or could have had it in the first place.
Yes I agree with this, Jeff used the words ārelative sacrificeā, and I was wondering if it would be better words to use, as it somewhat softens the āsacrificeā terminology. But I think Iām wrong about this. Have deleted it from the comment.
The sense in which Iām using āsacrificeā is just āgiving something upā: itās not saying anything about how the situation post-sacrifice compares to other peopleās. For example, I could talk about how big or small a sacrifice it would be for me go vegan, even if as a vegan I would still be spending more on food and having a wider variety of options than most people globally. I think this is pretty standard, and looking through various definitions of āsacrificeā online I donāt see anyone seeming to use it the way you are suggesting?
Yes Iāve googled and I think you are right, the word sacrifice is mainly used in the way you were using it in your comment. Iāve edited my comment to reflec t this.
I still think using the concept of sacrifice, when we are talking people at the absolute top of the chain deciding between a range of amazing life options doesnāt feel great and perhaps could not look great externally either. I would rather talk positively about choosing the best option we have, or perhaps talking about ātrade offsā rather than āsacrificesā.
Itās definitely true that, holding everything equal, spending less on salaries means itās easier to fundraise, and organizations can get more done for a given amount of money. But of course if you ask someone who could be earning $500k to work for $50k most of them (including me!) will say no, and even people who say yes initially are more likely to burn out and decide this is not what they want to do with their life.
There are also other costs to pushing hard on frugality: people will start making tradeoffs that donāt really make sense given how valuable their time is to the organization. For example, in 2015 when our first child was refusing to eat at daycare it would have been possible for us to hire someone to watch them, but this would have been expensive. Instead, we chose a combination of working unusual hours and working fewer hours so she wouldnāt need to be in daycare. We were both earning to give then, so this was fine, but if we had been doing work that was directly valuable I think it would probably have been a false economy.
I think this general area is quite subtle and confusing, where people have really different impressions depending on their background. From my perspective, as someone making about 1ā3 as much in a direct work job as I was making (and expect I could still make) in industry, this is already a relative sacrifice. On the other hand, I also know people at EA orgs who would be making less money outside of EA. I donāt at all have a good sense of which of these is more typical? And then the longer someone spends within EA, developing EA-specific career capital and foregoing more conventional career capital, the lower a sacrifice it looks like they are making (relative to the highest comp job they could get right now) but also the higher a sacrifice there actually making (relative to a career in which they had optimized for income).
(And, as always, when people give us as examples of people making large sacrifices, I have to point out that the absolute amount of money we have kept has been relatively high. I expect most EAs who spent a similar period in direct work were living on less and have much lower savings than we can. And I think this would still be true even if current direct work compensation had been in place since 2012.)
EDITED HEAVILY RESPONDING TO COMMENTS BELOW
I have a little bit of a different perspective on that it doesnāt feel or appear good to label āonlyā earning 70k a āsacrificeā, even if it is technically correct. Maybe using language like ātrade-offā or ātough choiceā might feel a little better.
70k (OPs suggested salary) still puts you very close to the top 1 percent of global earners. Imagine being a Ugandan interested in effective altruism looking at this discussion. The idea that a salary of 70k US being a āsacrificeā could seem grating and crass, even if the use of the word is correct. Everyone earning 70k doing a satisfying job that is making a difference in the world, is super fortunate with a whole lot of factors that have come together to make that possible.
Even just having the choice to be able to make the decision whether to earn to give or do direct work for āonlyā 60 or 70k is a privilege most of the world doesnāt have. I think it could be considered insensitive or even arrogant to talk in terms of sacrifice while being among the richest people around. To take it to the extreme (perhaps straw man tho) how would we feel about a sentence like āBill Gates sacrificed an hour of his valuable time to serve in a soup kitchenā
Yes it may be psychologically hard to earn a while lot less than you could be doing something else, but Iām not sure āsacrificeā is the best terminology to be using.
Iāve seen a number of conversations about salary in EA where people talk past each other. Below is a list of what I think are some key cruxes- not everywhere people disagree, but where they are most likely to have different implicit assumptions, and most likely to have disagreements stemming only from definitions. Iād love if everyone arguing about salary in this thread would fill this out.
What salary are you proposing?(US$70k ?)What living conditions do you expect this to buy people?
Housing?
Location?
Kids?
Food?
Savings rate?
What is your bar for āenoughā money? Not keeling over dead? Peak productivity but miserable? Thriving?
What percentage of people can reach that state with your suggested salary?
Some issues that might raise peopleās expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
What do you expect to happen for people who canāt meet the condition set in question 3 with the salary set in question 1?
If you lose your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be?
What is your counterfactual for the money saved on salary?
What salary are you proposing?(US$70k ?)Obviously thereās lots of different countries, and lotās of different cause areas. But just focusing on one in particular. I think CEA employees in the UK, could largely pay teacher salaries (24-30K GBP) and basically be fine, not lose lots of talent.
What living conditions do you expect this to buy people?
Pretty good conditions. Good apartment, good savings.
What is your bar for āenoughā money? Not keeling over dead? Peak productivity but miserable? Thriving?
As soon as youāre saving for pension, youāre in a good spot Iād say.
What percentage of people can reach that state with your suggested salary?
Some issues that might raise peopleās expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
>85% Iād guess. Keep in mind median UK salary is 38k GBP, and median UK age of work force is significantly older than CEA employees (older people need more money).
What do you expect to happen for people who canāt meet the condition set in question 3 with the salary set in question 1?
The same as the for-profit world, if theyāre good enough theyāre paid more. But that thereās a downward pressure on peopleās salaries, not just a upwards pressure (as I believe we currently have).
If you lose your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be?
For CEA, Iād likely guess theyād be indistinguishable for most roles most of the time.
What is your counterfactual for the money saved on salary?
Half of one more employee, and a marginal effect resulting in more of an agile ecosystem (i.e. more entrepreneurship, more commitment).
Iām CEAās main recruitment person and Iāve been involved with CEAās hiring for 6+ years. Iāve also been involved in hiring rounds for other EA orgs.
I donāt remember a case where the top two candidates were āindistinguishable.ā The gap very frequently seems quite large (e.g. our current guess is the top candidate might be twice as impactful, by some definition of expected impact). There have also been many cases where the gap is so large we donāt hire for the role at all and work we feel is important simply doesnāt happen. There have also, of course, been cases where we have two candidates we are similarly excited about. This is rare. If it does happen, weād generally be happy to be transparent about the situation, and so if you have been offered a role and are wondering about your own replacability, Iād encourage you to just ask.
FWIW, my experience (hiring mostly operations roles) is often the oppositeāI find for non-senior roles that I usually reach the end of a hiring process, and am making a pretty arbitrary choice between multiple candidates who both seem quite good on the (relatively weak) evidence from the hiring round. But, I also think RP filters a lot less heavily on culture fit /ā value alignment for ops roles than CEA does, which might be the relevant factor making this difference.
Thanks for clarifying, and I am certainly inclined to defer to you.
One concern I would have, is to what extent are these subjective estimations born-out by empirical data. Obviously youād never deliberately hire the second best candidate, so we never really test our accuracy. I suspect this is particular bad with hiring, where the hiring process can be really comprehensive and itās still possible to make a bad hire.
To add to what Caitlin said, my experience as a hiring manager and as a candidate is that this often is not the case.
When I was hired at CEA I took roles on two different teams (Head of US Operations at CEA and the Events Team role at EAO, which later merged into CEA). My understanding at the time is that they didnāt have second choice candidates with my qualifications, and I was told by the EAO hiring manager that they would have not filled the position if I didnāt accept (I donāt remember whether I checked this with the CEA role).
I should note that I was applying for these roles in 2015 and that the hiring pool has changed since then. But in my experience as a hiring manager (especially for senior/āgeneralist positions), it can be really hard to find a candidate that fits the specific requirements. Part of this is that my team requires a fairly specific skillset (that includes EA context, execution ability, and fit with our high energy culture) but I wouldnāt be surprised if other hiring managers have similar experiences. I think as the team grows and more junior positions become available this might be more flexible, though I think āindistinguishableā is still not accurate.
I definitely had roles Iāve hired for this year where the top candidate was significantly better than the second place candidate by a large margin
How senior was this position? or, can you say more about how this varies across different roles and experience levels?
Based on some other responses to this question I think replaceability may be a major crux, so the more details the better.
Not Peter, but looking at the last ~20 roles Iāve hired for, Iād guess that during hiring, maybe 15 or so had an alternative candidate who seemed worth hiring (though perhaps did worse in some scoring system). These were all operations roles within an EA organization. For 2 more senior roles I hired for during that time, there appeared to be suitable alternatives. For other less senior roles there werenāt (though I think the opposite generally tends to be more true).
I do thing one consideration here is we are talking about who looked best during hiring. Thatās different than who would be a better employeeāweāre assuming our hiring process does a good job of assessing peopleās fit /ā job performance, etc., and we know that the best predictors during hiring are only moderately correlated with later job performance, so itās plausible that often we think there is a big gap between two candidates, but theyād actually perform equally well (or that someone who seems like the best candidate isnāt). Hiring is just a highly uncertain business, and predicting long-term job performance from like, 10 hours of sample work and interviews is pretty hard ā Iām somewhat skeptical that looking at hiring data is even the right approach, because youād also want to control for things like if those employees always meet performance expectations in the future, etc, and you never actually get counterfactual data on how good the person you didnāt hire was. Iām certain that many EA organizations have hired someone who appeared to be better than the alternative by a wide margin, and easily cleared a hiring bar, but who later turned out to have major performance issues, even if the organization was doing a really good job evaluating people.
Thanks for responding, it has really helped me clarify my understanding of your views.
I do think the comparison to teacher wages is a little unfair. In the US teaching jobs are incredibly stable, and stable things pay less. Unless the UK is very different, I expect that EA jobs would need to pay more just to have people end up with the same financial situation over time, because instability is expensive. But this is maybe a 10% difference, not so not that important in the scheme of things.
I think a big area of contention (in all the salary discussions, not just this one) stems from a disagreement on questions 6 and 7. For fields like alignment research, the answers may be āreplacement is 1/ā10th as goodā and āthere is nothing else to spend on the money onā. But for fields like globally health and poverty, salary trades off directly against workā. So itās not surprising those fields look very different.
Iām not sure where CEA falls in this spectrum. In a sister comment Cait says that for CEA their number two candidate is often half as impactful as their top choice, and sometimes they choose to forego filling a role entirely if the top choice is unvailable. Iām surprised by that and a little skeptical that itās unfixable, but I also expect theyāve put a lot of thought into recruitment. If CEA is regularly struggling to fill roles, that certainly explains some of the salary explanation.
Cait didnāt mention this but I believe I read elsewhere that CEA didnāt want too big a gap between programmers and non-programmers, and solved this by ~overpaying non-programmers. I donāt know how I feel about this. I guess tentatively I think that it was awfully convenient to solve the problem by overpaying people rather than expecting people to become comfortable with a salary gap, and it might have been good to try harder at that, or divide the orgs such that it wasnāt so obvious. My understanding is that CEA struggled to find programmers[1], so paying less is a nonstarter.
There was a long LW thread on this that left me with the impression that CEAās main problem was it was looking for the wrong thing, and the thing it was looking for was extremely expensive. But I imagine that even if they were looking for the cheaper right thing, they couldnāt get it with teacher wages.
I agree that there should be a premium for instability.
I agree this is a crux. To the extent youāre paying more for better candidates, I am pretty happy.
Related to this, I have an intuition that salaries get inflated by EAās being too nice.
Also related to this point, a concern I have with paying little, or paying competitive salaries in workplaces which have an ideologically driven supply/ādemand mismatch (i.e. the game industry, or NGOs) often leads to toxic workplaces. If paying a premium avoids these, it could definitely be worth it. Although I am sceptical how much it helps, over other things (like generally creating a nice place to work, making people feel safe, hiring the right people ect.).
Happy to answer these
Not a specific salary, there should definitely be ranges. I guess I would say the average EA salary should be ~60-80k/āyear right now. I think this is less than many could make in the private sector but not necessarily all. I acknowledge this is a sacrifice or reduction.
I think a reasonable condo/āapartment. I think they would cook most of their own meals, could have kids, still save like 10% of income. I donāt think itās necessary to live in London, NY, SF.
Able to live a ~middle class life. Not sure what peak productivity but miserable means.
Virtually all. This is above the median income in the richest country in the world.
I think a small ~5% or so may do work outside of EA on the side. Iām also not opposed to higher salaries than this. I donāt know what you mean I would expect to happen to them.
Usually I expect this to be not a lot of a drop. Maybe an average of 10%. Sometimes i realize this will be more.
Well, depends. I think a baseline reasonable counterfactual is Givewell Top Charities Fund.
I suppose 6 and 7 are for an individual hire and not for EA as a whole.
Thanks Elizabeth can you clarify what you mean by no. 6?
Suppose you want to hire Alice, but she wonāt accept the salary, so you go to your second choice, Bob. How good is Bob, relative to Alice? Indistinguishable? 90% of impact? 50% of impact?
In many cases you just donāt end up hiring anyone. There is no Bob.
Can you elaborate on this? Whatās your data source?
To come back to this, this podcast has an argument sort of adjacent to the conversation here.
No data source, just personal experience.
Maybe a more common outcome is eventually you find Bob but itās 18 months later and you had to do without Alice for that time.
rephrase: where is your personal experience from?
Iām not asking for survey data and suspect EA is too weird to make normal surveys applicable. So personal anecdotes or at best the experiencing of people involved in lots of hiring is the most we can hope for.
Sorry Elizabeth, I hope youāll understand if I donāt want to share more about this in a public forum. Happy to speak privately if you like.
I know we are moving to absurdity now a little, but I feel like at 70,000 dollars in a position where people are doing meaningful work that aligns with their values, 90 percent Bob is probably there.
Any sacrifice is relative. You can only sacrifice something if you had or could have had it in the first place.
Yes I agree with this, Jeff used the words ārelative sacrificeā, and I was wondering if it would be better words to use, as it somewhat softens the āsacrificeā terminology. But I think Iām wrong about this. Have deleted it from the comment.
The sense in which Iām using āsacrificeā is just āgiving something upā: itās not saying anything about how the situation post-sacrifice compares to other peopleās. For example, I could talk about how big or small a sacrifice it would be for me go vegan, even if as a vegan I would still be spending more on food and having a wider variety of options than most people globally. I think this is pretty standard, and looking through various definitions of āsacrificeā online I donāt see anyone seeming to use it the way you are suggesting?
Yes Iāve googled and I think you are right, the word sacrifice is mainly used in the way you were using it in your comment. Iāve edited my comment to reflec t this.
I still think using the concept of sacrifice, when we are talking people at the absolute top of the chain deciding between a range of amazing life options doesnāt feel great and perhaps could not look great externally either. I would rather talk positively about choosing the best option we have, or perhaps talking about ātrade offsā rather than āsacrificesā.