I think the market price is a bit higher than that.
Someone else in this thread found a report claiming that employers spend an average of ~$6,100 to hire someone at a US university. I also found this report saying that the average cost per hire in the United States is <$5,000, $15k for an executive. At 1 career = 10 jobs that’s $150,000/career for executive-level talent, or $180,000/career adjusting for inflation since the report was released.
I’m not sure how well those numbers reflect reality (the $15k/executive number looks quite low), but it seems at least fairly plausible that the market price is substantially less than $750k/career.
The mean impact from someone at a top school is worth over $750k/year, which means we should fund all interventions that produce a career change for $750k (unless they have large non-financial costs) since those have a <2 year payback period.
This line of reasoning is precisely what I’m claiming to be misguided. Giving you a gallon of water to drink allows you to live at least two additional days (compared to you having no water), which at $750k of impact/year (~$2000/day ) means, by your reasoning, that EA should fund all interventions that ensure you have 1 gallon of water for <=$4000, up to the amount you need to survive.
If water happened to be that expensive, that would be a worthwhile trade. But given the current market price of water (with the time cost of acquiring it included) being willing to pay anywhere near $4000/gallon is absurd.
In general, if you value something at $x, and its market price is $y, x only matters for deciding whether you should pay for the thing or not, not for deciding how much you should pay for it. If x >= y, then you should pay $y, otherwise you should pay $0.
It looks like I misunderstood a comment above. I meant “market price” as the rate at which CEA should currently trade between money and marginal careers, which is >$750k. I think you mean the average price at which other companies “in the market for talent” buy career changes, which is <$750k.
I think there isn’t really a single price at which we can buy infinite talent. We should do activities as cost-effective as other recruiters, but these can only be scaled up to a limited extent before we run into other bottlenecks. The existence of a cheaper intervention doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fund a more expensive intervention once the cheaper one is exhausted. And we basically want an infinite amount of talent, so in theory the activities that buy career changes at prices between $150k and $750k are also worth funding.
I think we can agree that
different activities have different cost-effectiveness, some of them substantially cheaper than $750k/career
we can use a basically infinite amount of talent, and the supply curve for career changes slopes upwards
we shouldn’t pay more than the market price for any intervention e.g. throw $100k at a university group for dinners when it produces the same effect as $5k spent on dinners
we should fund every activity that has a cost-effectiveness of better than $750k per career change (or whatever the true number is), unless we saturate our demand for talent and lower the marginal benefit of talent, or deplete much of our money and increase the marginal benefit of money
we are unlikely to saturate our demand for talent by throwing more money at EA groups because there are other bottlenecks
Because most of the interventions are much cheaper than $750k/career change, our average cost will be much less than $750k/career change
Someone else in this thread found a report claiming that employers spend an average of ~$6,100 to hire someone at a US university. I also found this report saying that the average cost per hire in the United States is <$5,000, $15k for an executive. At 1 career = 10 jobs that’s $150,000/career for executive-level talent, or $180,000/career adjusting for inflation since the report was released.
I’m not sure how well those numbers reflect reality (the $15k/executive number looks quite low), but it seems at least fairly plausible that the market price is substantially less than $750k/career.
This line of reasoning is precisely what I’m claiming to be misguided. Giving you a gallon of water to drink allows you to live at least two additional days (compared to you having no water), which at $750k of impact/year (~$2000/day ) means, by your reasoning, that EA should fund all interventions that ensure you have 1 gallon of water for <=$4000, up to the amount you need to survive.
If water happened to be that expensive, that would be a worthwhile trade. But given the current market price of water (with the time cost of acquiring it included) being willing to pay anywhere near $4000/gallon is absurd.
In general, if you value something at $x, and its market price is $y, x only matters for deciding whether you should pay for the thing or not, not for deciding how much you should pay for it. If x >= y, then you should pay $y, otherwise you should pay $0.
It looks like I misunderstood a comment above. I meant “market price” as the rate at which CEA should currently trade between money and marginal careers, which is >$750k. I think you mean the average price at which other companies “in the market for talent” buy career changes, which is <$750k.
I think there isn’t really a single price at which we can buy infinite talent. We should do activities as cost-effective as other recruiters, but these can only be scaled up to a limited extent before we run into other bottlenecks. The existence of a cheaper intervention doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fund a more expensive intervention once the cheaper one is exhausted. And we basically want an infinite amount of talent, so in theory the activities that buy career changes at prices between $150k and $750k are also worth funding.
I think we can agree that
different activities have different cost-effectiveness, some of them substantially cheaper than $750k/career
we can use a basically infinite amount of talent, and the supply curve for career changes slopes upwards
we shouldn’t pay more than the market price for any intervention e.g. throw $100k at a university group for dinners when it produces the same effect as $5k spent on dinners
we should fund every activity that has a cost-effectiveness of better than $750k per career change (or whatever the true number is), unless we saturate our demand for talent and lower the marginal benefit of talent, or deplete much of our money and increase the marginal benefit of money
we are unlikely to saturate our demand for talent by throwing more money at EA groups because there are other bottlenecks
Because most of the interventions are much cheaper than $750k/career change, our average cost will be much less than $750k/career change