I think Will’s statement is mostly correct with the background of who the existing donors are. How much billionaires (and near-billionaires) donate as a percentage of their wealth in general is much less important to assessing his claim than what the specific billionaires and near-billionaires on board intend to donate.
Even for GiveWell, which has a significantly easier road to being a mass movement than most of EA/EA-adjacent work, over half of its revenue came from 18 donors out of 41,862 [p. 18 of https://files.givewell.org/files/metrics/GiveWell_Metrics_Report_2021.pdf] even before one considers that over half of its impact came from direct-to-charity grants from Open Phil not included in those numbers. Over half of the total donors were in the under-$1,000 bucket, so it’s not that small donors weren’t present.
Of course, the centralization of funding would be less pronounced in a true mass movement. But mass movements take a lot of time and energy to cultivate all those small/mid-size donors . . .
I agree that Will’s statement is correct for the near term. But Will also said that his vision is that, like science is the agreed way of getting to the truth, EA should be the agreed way of getting to the good. I think that would imply that EA has become a mass movement.
I think Will’s statement is mostly correct with the background of who the existing donors are. How much billionaires (and near-billionaires) donate as a percentage of their wealth in general is much less important to assessing his claim than what the specific billionaires and near-billionaires on board intend to donate.
Even for GiveWell, which has a significantly easier road to being a mass movement than most of EA/EA-adjacent work, over half of its revenue came from 18 donors out of 41,862 [p. 18 of https://files.givewell.org/files/metrics/GiveWell_Metrics_Report_2021.pdf] even before one considers that over half of its impact came from direct-to-charity grants from Open Phil not included in those numbers. Over half of the total donors were in the under-$1,000 bucket, so it’s not that small donors weren’t present.
Of course, the centralization of funding would be less pronounced in a true mass movement. But mass movements take a lot of time and energy to cultivate all those small/mid-size donors . . .
I agree that Will’s statement is correct for the near term. But Will also said that his vision is that, like science is the agreed way of getting to the truth, EA should be the agreed way of getting to the good. I think that would imply that EA has become a mass movement.