Do you think it was a mistake (ex ante) for some folks to de-emphasize earning to give a few years back?
How many years back? ;) There used to be a lot of clearly important work that was shockingly underfunded, and I think the early EA approach of encouraging earning to give as a good default option was reasonable. There clearly wasn’t the money to support most of us going into direct work. With Good Ventures / Open Phil this changed, however, and I think EAs were generally a bit slow to adjust to the new funding landscape. By the time Doing Good Better came out in 2015 (I’m guessing exacerbated by the long lead times of print) I think we would have ideally no longer been presenting effective giving as the core of EA. Then I think we overcorrected some pre-FTX, and even more during FTX (when I think we collectively really messed up on risk assessment). I’m glad to see the community post-FTX shifting back towards including earning to give as one of several core ways to be an EA and one that’s a good fit for a lot of people and a lot of life circumstances.
We should also keep in mind how it’s really hard to accurately “steer” a movement with as many people as EA. Even in a community where people care as much about detail, nuance, and getting things right as this one does, a lot of people will still mostly update on discussion of effective giving by becoming somewhat more positively or negatively inclined towards the approach. You can push EA, and any large thing, much more than you can target it. So a history of under- and over-correction is not surprising.
Still, talking publicly about where we think we should be, and thinking specifically about where we want to be and not just which direction we’d like to shift in, seems like it should be able to do a lot to help us not get top far from the right level of emphasis (both on the question of earning to give and all the other important questions).
How many years back? ;) There used to be a lot of clearly important work that was shockingly underfunded, and I think the early EA approach of encouraging earning to give as a good default option was reasonable. There clearly wasn’t the money to support most of us going into direct work. With Good Ventures / Open Phil this changed, however, and I think EAs were generally a bit slow to adjust to the new funding landscape. By the time Doing Good Better came out in 2015 (I’m guessing exacerbated by the long lead times of print) I think we would have ideally no longer been presenting effective giving as the core of EA. Then I think we overcorrected some pre-FTX, and even more during FTX (when I think we collectively really messed up on risk assessment). I’m glad to see the community post-FTX shifting back towards including earning to give as one of several core ways to be an EA and one that’s a good fit for a lot of people and a lot of life circumstances.
We should also keep in mind how it’s really hard to accurately “steer” a movement with as many people as EA. Even in a community where people care as much about detail, nuance, and getting things right as this one does, a lot of people will still mostly update on discussion of effective giving by becoming somewhat more positively or negatively inclined towards the approach. You can push EA, and any large thing, much more than you can target it. So a history of under- and over-correction is not surprising.
Still, talking publicly about where we think we should be, and thinking specifically about where we want to be and not just which direction we’d like to shift in, seems like it should be able to do a lot to help us not get top far from the right level of emphasis (both on the question of earning to give and all the other important questions).