I’m not sure if there’s any data on this, but I think EAs do actually tend to come from well-off backgrounds.
Because of that, I think a share (I’d guess like 15%?) of EA funding for career building for students and recent graduates doesn’t actually have counterfactual impact and just provides funding for people to do stuff which they would have spent their own money on anyway. More money in EA will mean more money being used in this way.
Obviously, this wasted money is bad, because it’s still important for us to be cost-effective and the counterfactual use is still AMF.
So I think we’d benefit from a strong norm against using EA funding for career building activities which people would have spent their own money on anyway.
I don’t think we should retire the “do you think this would be a better use of money than giving it to AMF?” type thinking, we should keep it alongside “actually, yes, flow through effects could mean that this is a better use of money than giving it to AMF”.
There’s also probably a case for experimenting with means-testing for grants, which a lot of social initiatives use to focus their money on people who need it the most, which improves counterfactual cost-effectiveness.
Current (highly engaged) EAs mostly coming from well-off backgrounds can also be a good argument in favor of more funding for career building for students and recent graduates though.
EAs from less-affluent backgrounds are those who benefit the most from career building and exploration funding, as they are the people most likely to face financial/other kinds of bottlenecks that prevent them from doing impactful stuff.
Reducing career building funding will just reinforce the trend of only well-off EAs that can afford taking risks staying engaged, while EAs from less affluent backgrounds being more likely to drift out of the community/less likely to take riskier but more impactful career paths.
As you say, the solution would be to effectively assess whether career building has counterfactual impact and ideally even fine-tuning the funding amount to specific circumstances, although that probably could lead to the development of weird and undesirable incentives on the applicants’ side.
Yes I agree with you with regards to amount of funding—one EA initiative I’d actually like to see is funding EA students from LMICs to go to the world’s best universities.
And yes, my idea is more about fine-tuning the funding to go to people where the counterfactual impact is higher (another plus would be that less EA money is used up by wealthier people, freeing it up for less wealthy people).
I think means-testing is fairly widely used (at least in the UK). I use it myself to selectively distribute products from my social enterprise towards kids from lower income backgrounds. I’m fairly confident that the downsides of means-testing - weird incentives, people trying to “game” the system and the indignity it makes some people feel, generally don’t outweigh the benefits of the better targeting of funding. And in the EA context, I think the benefits of better targeting funding will be larger than usual because of the cost effectiveness with which the saved EA money will be spent.
I’m not sure if there’s any data on this, but I think EAs do actually tend to come from well-off backgrounds.
Because of that, I think a share (I’d guess like 15%?) of EA funding for career building for students and recent graduates doesn’t actually have counterfactual impact and just provides funding for people to do stuff which they would have spent their own money on anyway. More money in EA will mean more money being used in this way.
Obviously, this wasted money is bad, because it’s still important for us to be cost-effective and the counterfactual use is still AMF.
So I think we’d benefit from a strong norm against using EA funding for career building activities which people would have spent their own money on anyway.
I don’t think we should retire the “do you think this would be a better use of money than giving it to AMF?” type thinking, we should keep it alongside “actually, yes, flow through effects could mean that this is a better use of money than giving it to AMF”.
There’s also probably a case for experimenting with means-testing for grants, which a lot of social initiatives use to focus their money on people who need it the most, which improves counterfactual cost-effectiveness.
Current (highly engaged) EAs mostly coming from well-off backgrounds can also be a good argument in favor of more funding for career building for students and recent graduates though.
EAs from less-affluent backgrounds are those who benefit the most from career building and exploration funding, as they are the people most likely to face financial/other kinds of bottlenecks that prevent them from doing impactful stuff.
Reducing career building funding will just reinforce the trend of only well-off EAs that can afford taking risks staying engaged, while EAs from less affluent backgrounds being more likely to drift out of the community/less likely to take riskier but more impactful career paths.
As you say, the solution would be to effectively assess whether career building has counterfactual impact and ideally even fine-tuning the funding amount to specific circumstances, although that probably could lead to the development of weird and undesirable incentives on the applicants’ side.
Yes I agree with you with regards to amount of funding—one EA initiative I’d actually like to see is funding EA students from LMICs to go to the world’s best universities.
And yes, my idea is more about fine-tuning the funding to go to people where the counterfactual impact is higher (another plus would be that less EA money is used up by wealthier people, freeing it up for less wealthy people).
I think means-testing is fairly widely used (at least in the UK). I use it myself to selectively distribute products from my social enterprise towards kids from lower income backgrounds. I’m fairly confident that the downsides of means-testing - weird incentives, people trying to “game” the system and the indignity it makes some people feel, generally don’t outweigh the benefits of the better targeting of funding. And in the EA context, I think the benefits of better targeting funding will be larger than usual because of the cost effectiveness with which the saved EA money will be spent.