Altruistic perks,rather than personal perks. E.g.1. Turn up at this student event and got $10 donated to a charity of your choice. E.g.2. donation matching schemes mentioned in job adverts, perhaps funded by offering maybe slightly lower salaries. Anecdotally I remember the first EAish event I went to had money to charity for each attendee and free wine and it was the money to charity that attracted me to go, and free wine that attracted my friend, and I am still here and they are not involved.
Frugality options, like an optional version of the above idea.E.g.1. when signing up to an EA event the food options could be: “[]vegan, []nut free, []gluten free, []frugal—will bring my own lunch please donate money saved to charity x”. E.g.2. Jobs could advertise the organisation offers salary sacrifice schemes that some employees take. I don’t know how well this would work but would be interested to see a group try. Anecdotally I know some EAs in well paid jobs take lower salaries than they are offered but I don’t think this is well known.
Also for what it is worth I was really impressed by the post. I it was an very well written, clear, and transparent discussion of this topic with clear actions to take.
+1, the frugality options seem like a nice way to “make the opportunity cost of funding more salient” without necessarily requiring huge changes from event organizers.
+1 here as well, frugality option would be an amazing thing to normalize, especially if we can get it going as a thing beyond the world of EA (which may be possible if we get some good reporting on it).
Most EAs I’ve met over the years don’t seem to value their time enough, so I worry that the frugal option would often cost people more impact in terms of time spent (e.g. cooking), and it would implicitly encourage frugality norms beyond what actually maximizes altruistic impact.
That said, I like options and norms that discourage fancy options that don’t come with clear productivity benefits. E.g. it could make sense to pay more for a fancier hotel if it has substantially better Wi-Fi and the person might do some work in the room, but it typically doesn’t make sense to pay extra for a nice room.
I think I agree with this. I think if I look historically at my mistakes in spending money, there was very likely substantially more utility lost from spending too little money rather than spending too much money.
To be more precise, most of my historical mistakes do not come from consciously thinking about time-money tradeoffs and choosing money instead of time (“oh I can Uber or take the bus to this event but Uber is expensive so I should take the bus instead”) but from some money-expensive options not being in my explicit option set to prioritize in the first place (“oh taking the bus will take four hours total so I probably shouldn’t attend the event”) .
As I get in the habit of explicitly valuing my time often and trying to consider ways to buy time, I notice more and more options that my younger (and poorer) self would not even consider to be in the option set (e.g. international flights to conferences, cleaners, ordering food, paying money to alleviate bureaucracy hurdles, etc). Admittedly this coincided with the EA movement generally being much more spendthrift (and also there being far more resources now on time-money tradeoffs for people in my reference class) so it’s plausible younger EAs don’t have to go through the same mental evolutions to get the same effect.
I’m going through this right now. There have just clearly been times both as a group organiser and in my personal life when I should have just spent/taken money and in hindsight clearly had higher impact, e.g buying uni textbooks so I study with less friction to get better grades.
Extra ideas for the idea list:
Altruistic perks, rather than personal perks. E.g.1. Turn up at this student event and got $10 donated to a charity of your choice. E.g.2. donation matching schemes mentioned in job adverts, perhaps funded by offering maybe slightly lower salaries. Anecdotally I remember the first EAish event I went to had money to charity for each attendee and free wine and it was the money to charity that attracted me to go, and free wine that attracted my friend, and I am still here and they are not involved.
Frugality options, like an optional version of the above idea. E.g.1. when signing up to an EA event the food options could be: “[]vegan, []nut free, []gluten free, []frugal—will bring my own lunch please donate money saved to charity x”. E.g.2. Jobs could advertise the organisation offers salary sacrifice schemes that some employees take. I don’t know how well this would work but would be interested to see a group try. Anecdotally I know some EAs in well paid jobs take lower salaries than they are offered but I don’t think this is well known.
Also for what it is worth I was really impressed by the post. I it was an very well written, clear, and transparent discussion of this topic with clear actions to take.
I would love frugality options!
+1, the frugality options seem like a nice way to “make the opportunity cost of funding more salient” without necessarily requiring huge changes from event organizers.
+1 here as well, frugality option would be an amazing thing to normalize, especially if we can get it going as a thing beyond the world of EA (which may be possible if we get some good reporting on it).
+1. One concrete application: Offer donation options instead of generous stipends as compensation for speaking engagements.
I worry that it’d feel pretty fake for people who actually care about counterfactual impact. Money goes from EA sources to EA sources both ways.
Most EAs I’ve met over the years don’t seem to value their time enough, so I worry that the frugal option would often cost people more impact in terms of time spent (e.g. cooking), and it would implicitly encourage frugality norms beyond what actually maximizes altruistic impact.
That said, I like options and norms that discourage fancy options that don’t come with clear productivity benefits. E.g. it could make sense to pay more for a fancier hotel if it has substantially better Wi-Fi and the person might do some work in the room, but it typically doesn’t make sense to pay extra for a nice room.
I think I agree with this. I think if I look historically at my mistakes in spending money, there was very likely substantially more utility lost from spending too little money rather than spending too much money.
To be more precise, most of my historical mistakes do not come from consciously thinking about time-money tradeoffs and choosing money instead of time (“oh I can Uber or take the bus to this event but Uber is expensive so I should take the bus instead”) but from some money-expensive options not being in my explicit option set to prioritize in the first place (“oh taking the bus will take four hours total so I probably shouldn’t attend the event”) .
As I get in the habit of explicitly valuing my time often and trying to consider ways to buy time, I notice more and more options that my younger (and poorer) self would not even consider to be in the option set (e.g. international flights to conferences, cleaners, ordering food, paying money to alleviate bureaucracy hurdles, etc). Admittedly this coincided with the EA movement generally being much more spendthrift (and also there being far more resources now on time-money tradeoffs for people in my reference class) so it’s plausible younger EAs don’t have to go through the same mental evolutions to get the same effect.
I’m going through this right now. There have just clearly been times both as a group organiser and in my personal life when I should have just spent/taken money and in hindsight clearly had higher impact, e.g buying uni textbooks so I study with less friction to get better grades.