Iâve thought about similar things to this before. Thanks for writing it out for the community. I think there are few reasons for this change.
The average EA today is far less âcommittedâ to EA than in 2016. By committed, I mean making personal sacrifices for altruism. Here is a website I found for Jeff Kauffman and Julia Wise where you can see them giving 50% of their income since ~2012. If Iâm not mistaken, theyâve had a family for most of that time. This behavior is significantly less common nowadays, particularly as a proportion of people in the movement where I suspect a good fraction of people in the community donate relatively little, let alone 50% of their income.
Salaries at EA organizations have grown a lot. People used to take massive pay cuts to do EA non-profit work. Hopefully people from the early days can fill in some numbers here but there is a picture here of an office in the basement of an estate agent, salaries being 15k/âyear pre-tax and lunch being the same every day. In the OP, Abraham talks about a $500 donation allowing him to hire a contractor and being able to hire staff after ~75k of donations. Apart from a select few CE incubated charities, 75k doesnât even cover a single personâs salary for a year at most EA orgs. Most salaries I see today for EA positions are 100k+, particularly at longtermist organizations.
There are a few solutions to this:
EA gets more frugal. We might not go back to 15k (20k or so with CPI adjustment) but a typical salary could become 50-60k. Catered lunches, generous expense policies, large benefits packages and ample + flexible + paid time off become a pot luck once a week, basic healthcare coverage and 2 weeks of vacation. All of a sudden, running a 10 person organization takes $1M instead of $10M and it becomes much more feasible to get 30 x $10-30k with a couple of 50-100k donations to cover the cost of the organization.
A general decentralization of the funding landscape. Open Phil (and maybe SFF) get divided into ~5 orgs. A significant amount of regranting gets done on the order of ~100k-1M per regrantor who otherwise do other things.
I think there are costs to both approaches. There will be a lot less work done by âless committedâ EAs if sacrifices compared to the private sector become expected. Furthermore, there are many efficiency gains to be had by not having several grantmaking orgs duplicate the same work + a bunch of less skilled and trained regrantors might on average make worse grants.
Itâs definitely true that, holding everything equal, spending less on salaries means itâs 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 donât 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 wouldnât 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 1â3 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 donât 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 doesnât feel or appear good to label âonlyâ earning 70k a âsacrificeâ, even if it is technically correct. Maybe using language like âtrade-offâ or âtough choiceâ 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 âsacrificeâ 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 âonlyâ 60 or 70k is a privilege most of the world doesnât 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 âBill Gates sacrificed an hour of his valuable time to serve in a soup kitchenâ
Yes it may be psychologically hard to earn a while lot less than you could be doing something else, but Iâm not sure âsacrificeâ is the best terminology to be using.
Iâve 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. Iâd 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 âenoughâ 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 peopleâs expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
What do you expect to happen for people who canât 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 thereâs lots of different countries, and lotâs 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 âenoughâ money? Not keeling over dead? Peak productivity but miserable? Thriving? As soon as youâre saving for pension, youâre in a good spot Iâd say.
What percentage of people can reach that state with your suggested salary?
Some issues that might raise peopleâs expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
>85% Iâd 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 canât meet the condition set in question 3 with the salary set in question 1?
The same as the for-profit world, if theyâre good enough theyâre paid more. But that thereâs a downward pressure on peopleâs 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, Iâd likely guess theyâd 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, Iâd likely guess theyâd be indistinguishable for most roles most of the time.
Iâm CEAâs main recruitment person and Iâve been involved with CEAâs hiring for 6+ years. Iâve also been involved in hiring rounds for other EA orgs.
I donât remember a case where the top two candidates were âindistinguishable.â 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 donât hire for the role at all and work we feel is important simply doesnât 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, weâd 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, Iâd encourage you to just ask.
FWIW, my experience (hiring mostly operations roles) is often the oppositeâI 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 /â 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 youâd 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 itâs still possible to make a bad hire.
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 âreplacement is 1/â10th as goodâ and âthere is nothing else to spend on the money onâ. But for fields like globally health and poverty, salary trades off directly against workâ. So itâs not surprising those fields look very different.
Iâm 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. Iâm surprised by that and a little skeptical that itâs unfixable, but I also expect theyâve put a lot of thought into recruitment. If CEA is regularly struggling to fill roles, that certainly explains some of the salary explanation.
Cait didnât mention this but I believe I read elsewhere that CEA didnât want too big a gap between programmers and non-programmers, and solved this by ~overpaying non-programmers. I donât 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 wasnât 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 CEAâs 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 couldnât 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.
Iâm 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 youâre paying more for better candidates, I am pretty happy.
Cait didnât mention this but I believe I read elsewhere that CEA didnât 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 EAâs 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/âdemand 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.).
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 didnât 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 didnât accept (I donât 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/âgeneralist 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 wouldnât 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 âindistinguishableâ is still not accurate.
Not Peter, but looking at the last ~20 roles Iâve hired for, Iâd 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 werenât (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. Thatâs different than who would be a better employeeâweâre assuming our hiring process does a good job of assessing peopleâs fit /â job performance, etc., and we know that the best predictors during hiring are only moderately correlated with later job performance, so itâs plausible that often we think there is a big gap between two candidates, but theyâd actually perform equally well (or that someone who seems like the best candidate isnât). 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 â Iâm somewhat skeptical that looking at hiring data is even the right approach, because youâd 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 didnât hire was. Iâm 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.
Not a specific salary, there should definitely be ranges. I guess I would say the average EA salary should be ~60-80k/âyear 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/âapartment. I think they would cook most of their own meals, could have kids, still save like 10% of income. I donât think itâs 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. Iâm also not opposed to higher salaries than this. I donât 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 wonât 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?
Iâm 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 donât really consider earning âonlyâ 70k a âsacrificeâ. Maybe it could be considered a ârelative sacrificeâ? 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 ârelative sacrificeâ, and I was wondering if it would be better words to use, as it somewhat softens the âsacrificeâ terminology. But I think Iâm wrong about this. Have deleted it from the comment.
The sense in which Iâm using âsacrificeâ is just âgiving something upâ: itâs not saying anything about how the situation post-sacrifice compares to other peopleâs. 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 âsacrificeâ online I donât see anyone seeming to use it the way you are suggesting?
Yes Iâve googled and I think you are right, the word sacrifice is mainly used in the way you were using it in your comment. Iâve 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 doesnât 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 âtrade offsâ rather than âsacrificesâ.
The average EA today is far less âcommittedâ to EA than in 2016. By committed, I mean making personal sacrifices for altruism. Here is a website I found for Jeff Kauffman and Julia Wise where you can see them giving 50% of their income since ~2012. If Iâm not mistaken, theyâve had a family for most of that time. This behavior is significantly less common nowadays, particularly as a proportion of people in the movement where I suspect a good fraction of people in the community donate relatively little, let alone 50% of their income.
Given how much the community has grown, isnât this just what youâd expect? There are way more people than there were in 2016, which pushes down how weird the community is on average due to regression to the mean. The obvious solution is that EA should just be smaller and more selected for altruism (which I think would be an error).
Salaries at EA organizations have grown a lot. People used to take massive pay cuts to do EA non-profit work. Hopefully people from the early days can fill in some numbers here but there is a picture here of an office in the basement of an estate agent, salaries being 15k/âyear pre-tax and lunch being the same every day. In the OP, Abraham talks about a $500 donation allowing him to hire a contractor and being able to hire staff after ~75k of donations. Apart from a select few CE incubated charities, 75k doesnât even cover a single personâs salary for a year at most EA orgs. Most salaries I see today for EA positions are 100k+, particularly at longtermist organizations.
I think the simplest explanation for this is that there are just more roles with well-paying counterfactuals e.g. ml engineering. Excluding those roles, after you adjust for the cost of living, most EA roles arenât particularly well paid e.g. Open Phil salaries arenât much higher than the median in SF and maybe less than the BART (Bay Area metro) police.
Given how much the community has grown, isnât this just what youâd expect? There are way more people than there were in 2016, which pushes down how weird the community is on average due to regression to the mean. The obvious solution is that EA should just be smaller and more selected for altruism (which I think would be an error).
Sure, Iâm not suggesting we become smaller but I donât think itâs completely either or. A bit more altruistic pressure/âexamples seems good.
I think the simplest explanation for this is that there are just more roles with well-paying counterfactuals e.g. ml engineering. Excluding those roles, after you adjust for the cost of living, most EA roles arenât particularly well paid e.g. Open Phil salaries arenât much higher than the median in SF and maybe less than the BART (Bay Area metro) police.
SF is among the most expensive cities in the world. Above median salary in the most expensive parts of the world seems quite high for non-profits. I think the actual simplest explanation is that EA got billions of dollars (a lot of which is now gone) and that had upward pressure on salaries.
Again, my comment mainly answered the question of why we donât have a robust earning to give ecosystem in EA. Not nearly enough people make enough money to give the type of sums that EA organizations spend.
To clarify, I donât think salaries are anywhere near $1M. I do think there are a lot of people at EA organizations who make $150-200k per year or so. When you add benefits, lunches, office space, expense policies, PTO, full Healthcare packages/âbenefits, staff retreats, events, unnecessary software packages, taxes etc. a typical organization might be spending 1/â3rd of their budget on salaries so something like $5-6M, not $10M. I wasnât being exact with numbers and I should have been.
I think many EA organizations could reduce their budgets by ~50%, drastically turn up the frugality and creativity and remain approximately as effective.
Iâm not sure the effects this would have. I suspect less âexodus from EAâ than people think.
Iâm also just speaking to what happened as to why we donât have a robust earning to give ecosystem. Itâs much different having 50 people fund a 100-500k org than a 5M org.
Minor downvoted because this comment seems to take Marcusâs comment out of context /â misread it:
Catered lunches, generous expense policies, large benefits packages and ample + flexible + paid time off become a pot luck once a week, basic healthcare coverage and 2 weeks of vacation. All of a sudden, running a 10 person organization takes $1M instead of $10M and it becomes much more feasible to get 30 x $10-30k with a couple of 50-100k donations to cover the cost of the organization.
I donât think the numbers are likely exactly right, but I think the broad point is correct. I think that likely an organization starting with say 70% market rate salaries in the longtermist space could, if it pursued fairly aggressive cost savings, reduce their budget by much more than 30%.
As an example, I was once quoted on office space in the community that cost around $14k USD /â month for a four person office, including lunch every day. For a 10 person organization, that is around $420k/âyear for office and food. Switching to a $300/âperson/âmo office, and not offering the same perks, which is fairly easily findable, including in large cities (though it wonât be Class A office space) would save $384k, which is like, 4 additional staff at $70k/âyear, if thatâs our benchmark.
FWIW, I feel uncertain about frugality of this sort being desirable â but I definitely believe there are major cost savings on the table.
Downvoted because this comment seems to take Marcusâs comment out of context /â misread it ⊠I donât think the numbers are likely exactly right, but I think the broad point is correct.
I think it depends a lot on whether you think the difference between 10x ($10M vs $1M) and 1.4x (30% savings) is a big deal? (I think it is)
The main out of context bit is that Elizabethâs comment seemed to interpret Marcus as only referring to salary, when the full comment makes it very clear that it wasnât just about that, which seemed like a strong misreading to me, even if the 10x factor was incorrect.
I suspect the actual âtheoretically maximally frugal core EA organization with the same number of staffâ is something like 2x-3x cheaper than current costs, if salaries moved to the $50k-$70k range.
Elizabethâs comment seemed to interpret Marcus as only referring to salary
I see Elizabeth as saying âall expenses are staff expensesâ, which is broader than salary and includes things like office and food?
I think why Elizabeth was pointing out that the calculation implies only staff costs contribute to the overall budget because if you have expenses for things other than staff (ex: in my current org we spend money on lab reagents and genetic sequencing, which donât go down if we decide to compensate more frugally) then your overall costs will drop less than your staff costs.
Iâm not just talking about salaries when I talk about the costs of orgs (as i said, my original comment is a diagnosis, not a prescription). To use the example of lab reagents and genetic sequencing, Iâve worked in several chemistry labs and they operate very differently depending on how much money is available. When money is abundant (and frugality is not a concern), things like buying expensive laptops/âcomputers (vs. thinking about what is actually necessary) to run equipment, buying more expensive chemicals, re-use of certain equipment (vs. discarding on single use), celebrations of accomplishments, etc. all are different.
The way I see it, from 2016 to 2022, EA (and maybe specifically longtermism) got a bunch of billionaire money that grew the movements âmoneyâ resource faster than the other resource like talent and time etc. and so money could be used more liberally, especially when trading it off vs. time, talent, ingenuity, creativity, etc.
Iâve thought about similar things to this before. Thanks for writing it out for the community. I think there are few reasons for this change.
The average EA today is far less âcommittedâ to EA than in 2016. By committed, I mean making personal sacrifices for altruism. Here is a website I found for Jeff Kauffman and Julia Wise where you can see them giving 50% of their income since ~2012. If Iâm not mistaken, theyâve had a family for most of that time. This behavior is significantly less common nowadays, particularly as a proportion of people in the movement where I suspect a good fraction of people in the community donate relatively little, let alone 50% of their income.
Salaries at EA organizations have grown a lot. People used to take massive pay cuts to do EA non-profit work. Hopefully people from the early days can fill in some numbers here but there is a picture here of an office in the basement of an estate agent, salaries being 15k/âyear pre-tax and lunch being the same every day. In the OP, Abraham talks about a $500 donation allowing him to hire a contractor and being able to hire staff after ~75k of donations. Apart from a select few CE incubated charities, 75k doesnât even cover a single personâs salary for a year at most EA orgs. Most salaries I see today for EA positions are 100k+, particularly at longtermist organizations.
There are a few solutions to this:
EA gets more frugal. We might not go back to 15k (20k or so with CPI adjustment) but a typical salary could become 50-60k. Catered lunches, generous expense policies, large benefits packages and ample + flexible + paid time off become a pot luck once a week, basic healthcare coverage and 2 weeks of vacation. All of a sudden, running a 10 person organization takes $1M instead of $10M and it becomes much more feasible to get 30 x $10-30k with a couple of 50-100k donations to cover the cost of the organization.
A general decentralization of the funding landscape. Open Phil (and maybe SFF) get divided into ~5 orgs. A significant amount of regranting gets done on the order of ~100k-1M per regrantor who otherwise do other things.
I think there are costs to both approaches. There will be a lot less work done by âless committedâ EAs if sacrifices compared to the private sector become expected. Furthermore, there are many efficiency gains to be had by not having several grantmaking orgs duplicate the same work + a bunch of less skilled and trained regrantors might on average make worse grants.
Still something to consider.
Itâs definitely true that, holding everything equal, spending less on salaries means itâs 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 donât 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 wouldnât 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 1â3 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 donât 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 doesnât feel or appear good to label âonlyâ earning 70k a âsacrificeâ, even if it is technically correct. Maybe using language like âtrade-offâ or âtough choiceâ 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 âsacrificeâ 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 âonlyâ 60 or 70k is a privilege most of the world doesnât 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 âBill Gates sacrificed an hour of his valuable time to serve in a soup kitchenâ
Yes it may be psychologically hard to earn a while lot less than you could be doing something else, but Iâm not sure âsacrificeâ is the best terminology to be using.
Iâve 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. Iâd 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 âenoughâ 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 peopleâs expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
What do you expect to happen for people who canât 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 thereâs lots of different countries, and lotâs 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 âenoughâ money? Not keeling over dead? Peak productivity but miserable? Thriving?
As soon as youâre saving for pension, youâre in a good spot Iâd say.
What percentage of people can reach that state with your suggested salary?
Some issues that might raise peopleâs expenses: health issues (mental and physical), kids, introversion, far flung family.
>85% Iâd 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 canât meet the condition set in question 3 with the salary set in question 1?
The same as the for-profit world, if theyâre good enough theyâre paid more. But that thereâs a downward pressure on peopleâs 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, Iâd likely guess theyâd 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).
Iâm CEAâs main recruitment person and Iâve been involved with CEAâs hiring for 6+ years. Iâve also been involved in hiring rounds for other EA orgs.
I donât remember a case where the top two candidates were âindistinguishable.â 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 donât hire for the role at all and work we feel is important simply doesnât 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, weâd 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, Iâd encourage you to just ask.
FWIW, my experience (hiring mostly operations roles) is often the oppositeâI 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 /â 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 youâd 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 itâs still possible to make a bad hire.
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 âreplacement is 1/â10th as goodâ and âthere is nothing else to spend on the money onâ. But for fields like globally health and poverty, salary trades off directly against workâ. So itâs not surprising those fields look very different.
Iâm 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. Iâm surprised by that and a little skeptical that itâs unfixable, but I also expect theyâve put a lot of thought into recruitment. If CEA is regularly struggling to fill roles, that certainly explains some of the salary explanation.
Cait didnât mention this but I believe I read elsewhere that CEA didnât want too big a gap between programmers and non-programmers, and solved this by ~overpaying non-programmers. I donât 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 wasnât 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 CEAâs 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 couldnât get it with teacher wages.
I agree that there should be a premium for instability.
I agree this is a crux. To the extent youâre paying more for better candidates, I am pretty happy.
Related to this, I have an intuition that salaries get inflated by EAâs 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/âdemand 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.).
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 didnât 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 didnât accept (I donât 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/âgeneralist 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 wouldnât 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 âindistinguishableâ is still not accurate.
I definitely had roles Iâve 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 Iâve hired for, Iâd 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 werenât (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. Thatâs different than who would be a better employeeâweâre assuming our hiring process does a good job of assessing peopleâs fit /â job performance, etc., and we know that the best predictors during hiring are only moderately correlated with later job performance, so itâs plausible that often we think there is a big gap between two candidates, but theyâd actually perform equally well (or that someone who seems like the best candidate isnât). 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 â Iâm somewhat skeptical that looking at hiring data is even the right approach, because youâd 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 didnât hire was. Iâm 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.
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/âyear 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/âapartment. I think they would cook most of their own meals, could have kids, still save like 10% of income. I donât think itâs 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. Iâm also not opposed to higher salaries than this. I donât 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 wonât 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 donât end up hiring anyone. There is no Bob.
Can you elaborate on this? Whatâs 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 itâs 18 months later and you had to do without Alice for that time.
rephrase: where is your personal experience from?
Iâm 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 youâll understand if I donât 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 ârelative sacrificeâ, and I was wondering if it would be better words to use, as it somewhat softens the âsacrificeâ terminology. But I think Iâm wrong about this. Have deleted it from the comment.
The sense in which Iâm using âsacrificeâ is just âgiving something upâ: itâs not saying anything about how the situation post-sacrifice compares to other peopleâs. 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 âsacrificeâ online I donât see anyone seeming to use it the way you are suggesting?
Yes Iâve googled and I think you are right, the word sacrifice is mainly used in the way you were using it in your comment. Iâve 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 doesnât 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 âtrade offsâ rather than âsacrificesâ.
Given how much the community has grown, isnât this just what youâd expect? There are way more people than there were in 2016, which pushes down how weird the community is on average due to regression to the mean. The obvious solution is that EA should just be smaller and more selected for altruism (which I think would be an error).
I think the simplest explanation for this is that there are just more roles with well-paying counterfactuals e.g. ml engineering. Excluding those roles, after you adjust for the cost of living, most EA roles arenât particularly well paid e.g. Open Phil salaries arenât much higher than the median in SF and maybe less than the BART (Bay Area metro) police.
Sure, Iâm not suggesting we become smaller but I donât think itâs completely either or. A bit more altruistic pressure/âexamples seems good.
SF is among the most expensive cities in the world. Above median salary in the most expensive parts of the world seems quite high for non-profits. I think the actual simplest explanation is that EA got billions of dollars (a lot of which is now gone) and that had upward pressure on salaries.
Again, my comment mainly answered the question of why we donât have a robust earning to give ecosystem in EA. Not nearly enough people make enough money to give the type of sums that EA organizations spend.
Do you mean these numbers literally? You think people are being paid $1m a year, and all expenses are staff expenses?
To clarify, I donât think salaries are anywhere near $1M. I do think there are a lot of people at EA organizations who make $150-200k per year or so. When you add benefits, lunches, office space, expense policies, PTO, full Healthcare packages/âbenefits, staff retreats, events, unnecessary software packages, taxes etc. a typical organization might be spending 1/â3rd of their budget on salaries so something like $5-6M, not $10M. I wasnât being exact with numbers and I should have been.
I think many EA organizations could reduce their budgets by ~50%, drastically turn up the frugality and creativity and remain approximately as effective.
Iâm not sure the effects this would have. I suspect less âexodus from EAâ than people think.
Iâm also just speaking to what happened as to why we donât have a robust earning to give ecosystem. Itâs much different having 50 people fund a 100-500k org than a 5M org.
Minor downvoted because this comment seems to take Marcusâs comment out of context /â misread it:
I donât think the numbers are likely exactly right, but I think the broad point is correct. I think that likely an organization starting with say 70% market rate salaries in the longtermist space could, if it pursued fairly aggressive cost savings, reduce their budget by much more than 30%.
As an example, I was once quoted on office space in the community that cost around $14k USD /â month for a four person office, including lunch every day. For a 10 person organization, that is around $420k/âyear for office and food. Switching to a $300/âperson/âmo office, and not offering the same perks, which is fairly easily findable, including in large cities (though it wonât be Class A office space) would save $384k, which is like, 4 additional staff at $70k/âyear, if thatâs our benchmark.
FWIW, I feel uncertain about frugality of this sort being desirable â but I definitely believe there are major cost savings on the table.
I think it depends a lot on whether you think the difference between 10x ($10M vs $1M) and 1.4x (30% savings) is a big deal? (I think it is)
The main out of context bit is that Elizabethâs comment seemed to interpret Marcus as only referring to salary, when the full comment makes it very clear that it wasnât just about that, which seemed like a strong misreading to me, even if the 10x factor was incorrect.
I suspect the actual âtheoretically maximally frugal core EA organization with the same number of staffâ is something like 2x-3x cheaper than current costs, if salaries moved to the $50k-$70k range.
I see Elizabeth as saying âall expenses are staff expensesâ, which is broader than salary and includes things like office and food?
I think why Elizabeth was pointing out that the calculation implies only staff costs contribute to the overall budget because if you have expenses for things other than staff (ex: in my current org we spend money on lab reagents and genetic sequencing, which donât go down if we decide to compensate more frugally) then your overall costs will drop less than your staff costs.
Iâm not just talking about salaries when I talk about the costs of orgs (as i said, my original comment is a diagnosis, not a prescription). To use the example of lab reagents and genetic sequencing, Iâve worked in several chemistry labs and they operate very differently depending on how much money is available. When money is abundant (and frugality is not a concern), things like buying expensive laptops/âcomputers (vs. thinking about what is actually necessary) to run equipment, buying more expensive chemicals, re-use of certain equipment (vs. discarding on single use), celebrations of accomplishments, etc. all are different.
The way I see it, from 2016 to 2022, EA (and maybe specifically longtermism) got a bunch of billionaire money that grew the movements âmoneyâ resource faster than the other resource like talent and time etc. and so money could be used more liberally, especially when trading it off vs. time, talent, ingenuity, creativity, etc.