A couple of considerations Iâve thought about, at least for myself
(1) Fundamentally, giving helps save/âimprove lives, and thatâs a very strong consideration that we need equally strong philosophical or practical reasons to overcome.
(2) I think value drift is a significant concern. For less engaged EAs, the risk is about becoming non-EA altogether; for more engaged EAs, itâs more about becoming someone less focused on doing good and more concerned with other considerations (e.g. status); this doesnât have to be an explicit thing, but rather biases the way we reason and decide in a way that means we end up rationalizing choices that helps ourselves over the greater good. Giving (e.g. at the standard 10%) helps anchor against that.
(3) From a grantmaking/âdonor advisory perspective, I think itâs hard to have moral credibility, which can be absolutely necessary (e.g. advising grantees to put up modest salaries in their project proposals, not just to increase project runway but also the chances that our donor partners approve the funding request). And this is both psychologically and practically hard to do this if youâre not just earning more but earning far more and not giving to charity! Why would they listen to you? The LMIC grantees especially may be turned offâdisillusioned, by the fact that they have to accept peanuts while those of us with power over them draw fat stacks of cash! The least we can do is donate! Relatedly, I think part of Charity Entrepreneurshipâs success is absolutely down to Joey and co leading by example and taking low salaries.
(4) Runway is a legitimate consideration, especially since there are a lot of potentially impactful things one can do but which wonât be funded upfront (so you need to do it on savings, prove viability and then get it funded). However, I donât think this is sufficient to outweigh points 1-3.
(5) In general, I think itâs not useful at all to compare with how much others are earningâthat only leads to resentment, unhappiness, and less impactful choices. For myself, the vast majority of my friends are non-EAs; we have similar backgrounds (elite education, worked for the Singapore government as policy officers/âscholars at one point or another) and yet since leaving government Iâve had a riskier career, earn far less, have fewer savings, and am forced to delay having a family/âkids because of all those reasons. All of this is downstream of choices Iâve made an EA, particularly in avoiding job offers that paid very well but which didnât have impact (or in fact, had negative impact). Is the conclusion Iâm supposed to draw that Iâve made a mistake with my life? I donât think so, because statistically speaking, some random African kid out there is alive as a result of my donations (and hopefully, my work), and thatâs good enough for me.
Thanks for these thoughts. Itâs nice to get such detailed engagement. Iâm going to try to respond point by point.
(2) - Iâm not particularly worried about value drift, and I think there are more effective ways to guard against this than earning to give (e.g. living with people who share your values, talking about EA stuff regularly with people you care about). I think I have quite a lot of evidence in favour of me being pretty resilient to value drift (though I often change my mind about what is important intentionally).
(3) I think this is interesting, though I donât think that I share this view re being taken seriously. I think that I, and many people I know, have taken actions that they found much harder than donating (e.g. I live in a different country than my partner and in a pretty suboptimal timezone because I think I can do my work better from my current location, I work a lot of hours, I spend a lot of time doing tasks that I find emotionally challenging, Iâve been in situations that I found extremely stressful for ~0 credit). To be clear, I donât think that I am particularly worthy of praiseâbut I do think that I score reasonably well on âmoral credibilityâ. Also, I have concerns about this kind of signalling and think it often leads to concerning dynamicsâI donât want EA Funds grantees to feel pressured into taking shoestring salaries. When I was at CE, I remember there being a lot of pressure to take extremely low salaries despite many successful charity founders thinking this was a bad idea. It also led to weird epistemic effects (though I hear things have improved substantially).
(4) I donât think that runway and grants from EA funders are as fungible as you do. I can talk a bit more about this if thatâs useful. I guess that this general point (3) is where we have substantive disagreement. It seems likely to me that I can have much more impact through my career than through my donationsâand that having more runway could substantially increase the value of my career. If it doesnât increase the value of my career and I am wrong, then I can donate later (which I donât think incurs much in the way of losses from a NTist perspective, but itâs more confusing from a LTist one). To be clear, I think that Iâd like to build up 12-24 months of runway, and right now, I have substantially less than thatâI am not talking about being able to retire in 10 years or anything.
(5) I think for me, the comparison stuff doesnât really lead to resentment/âunhappiness. It wasnât clear from my post, but one of the reasons that I made this comparison was because many of my friends do very altruistically valuable work and earn substantially more than I do. They are extremely talented and hard-working (and lucky), and whilst this doesnât mean that I could get a highly-paying job that generated a lot of altruistic value, I think talking to them regularly has given me an understanding of the kind of work that they do and what it might take to enter a similar role, and it feels doable for me to enter similar roles in a relatively short amount of time (on my inside view). I also have friends that I think are similarly smart/âhardworking etc., who earn a lot more money than me in purely for-profit roles. Again, I donât resent any of these people, and the comparison seems pretty useful to me.
For what itâs worth, I think saving up runway is a no brainer.
During my one year as a tech consultant, I put aside half each month and donated another 10%. The runway I built made the decision for me to quit my job and pursue direct work much easier.
In the downtime between two career moves, it allowed me to spend my time pursuing whatever I wanted without worrying about how to pay the bills. This gave me time to research and write about snakebites, ultimately leading to Open Phil recommending a $500k investment into a company working on snakebite diagnostics.
I later came upon great donation opportunity to a fish welfare charity, which I gave a large part of my runway to and wouldnât have been able to support if I had given all my money away two years prior.
Had I given more away sooner I think it would be clearer to myself and others that I was in fact altruistically motivated. I also think my impact would have been lower. Impact over image.
EDIT: Actually itâs probably a some-brainer a lot of the time, seeing as I currently have little runway and am taking a shoestring salary. The reason I take a shoestring salary is to increase my organizationâs runway, which is valuable for the same reasons that increasing oneâs personal runway is. You donât have to spend as much time worrying about how your org is going to pay the bills and you can instead focus on impact.
Iâm probably misunderstanding you, but Iâm confused by (3) and (5). They seem like they somewhat contradict each other. Remove the emotive language and (3) is saying that people in positions of power should donate and/âor have lower salaries because donors or grantees might be upset in comparison, and (5) is saying that we shouldnât compare our own earnings and donations to others.
These claims contradict each other in the following ways:
If we take (5) as a given, (3) no longer makes sense. If it truly is the case that comparing earnings is never useful, we should not expect (or want) grantees or donors to compare earnings.
Hypothetically, maybe your position might be more like âoh itâs clearly bad to compare earnings, but we live in a flawed world with flawed people.â But if that were the case, then acceding to peopleâs comparisons is essentially enabling a harmful activity, and maybe we should have a higher bar for enabling othersâ negative proclivities.
If we take (3) as the primary constraint (Donors/âgrantees respect us less if we donât visibly make sacrifices for the Good), then it seems like (5) is very relevant. Pointing out ways in which we sacrificed earnings to take on EA jobs just seems like a really good reply to concerns that we are being overpaid in absolute terms, or are only doing EA jobs for the money. At least in my case, I donât recall any of our large donors complaining about my salary, but if I did, âI took a >>70% pay cut originally to do EA workâ [1] seems like a reasonable response that I predict to mollify most donors.
Though I think itâs closer to ~40-50% now at my current salary, adjusting for inflation? On the other hand, if I stayed and/âor switched jobs in tech Iâd probably have had salary increases substantially above inflation as well, so itâs kind of confusing what my actual counterfactual is[2]. But Iâm also not sure how much I should adjust for liking EA work and being much more motivated at it, which seems like substantial non-monetary compensation. But EA work is also more stressful and in some ways depressing, so hazard pay is reasonable, so...ÂŻ\_(ă)_/âÂŻ.
In part because I think if I wasnât doing EA work the most obvious alternative Iâd be aiming for high-variance earning-to-give, which means high equity value in expectation but ~0 payout in the median case.
A couple of considerations Iâve thought about, at least for myself
(1) Fundamentally, giving helps save/âimprove lives, and thatâs a very strong consideration that we need equally strong philosophical or practical reasons to overcome.
(2) I think value drift is a significant concern. For less engaged EAs, the risk is about becoming non-EA altogether; for more engaged EAs, itâs more about becoming someone less focused on doing good and more concerned with other considerations (e.g. status); this doesnât have to be an explicit thing, but rather biases the way we reason and decide in a way that means we end up rationalizing choices that helps ourselves over the greater good. Giving (e.g. at the standard 10%) helps anchor against that.
(3) From a grantmaking/âdonor advisory perspective, I think itâs hard to have moral credibility, which can be absolutely necessary (e.g. advising grantees to put up modest salaries in their project proposals, not just to increase project runway but also the chances that our donor partners approve the funding request). And this is both psychologically and practically hard to do this if youâre not just earning more but earning far more and not giving to charity! Why would they listen to you? The LMIC grantees especially may be turned offâdisillusioned, by the fact that they have to accept peanuts while those of us with power over them draw fat stacks of cash! The least we can do is donate! Relatedly, I think part of Charity Entrepreneurshipâs success is absolutely down to Joey and co leading by example and taking low salaries.
(4) Runway is a legitimate consideration, especially since there are a lot of potentially impactful things one can do but which wonât be funded upfront (so you need to do it on savings, prove viability and then get it funded). However, I donât think this is sufficient to outweigh points 1-3.
(5) In general, I think itâs not useful at all to compare with how much others are earningâthat only leads to resentment, unhappiness, and less impactful choices. For myself, the vast majority of my friends are non-EAs; we have similar backgrounds (elite education, worked for the Singapore government as policy officers/âscholars at one point or another) and yet since leaving government Iâve had a riskier career, earn far less, have fewer savings, and am forced to delay having a family/âkids because of all those reasons. All of this is downstream of choices Iâve made an EA, particularly in avoiding job offers that paid very well but which didnât have impact (or in fact, had negative impact). Is the conclusion Iâm supposed to draw that Iâve made a mistake with my life? I donât think so, because statistically speaking, some random African kid out there is alive as a result of my donations (and hopefully, my work), and thatâs good enough for me.
Thanks for these thoughts. Itâs nice to get such detailed engagement. Iâm going to try to respond point by point.
(2) - Iâm not particularly worried about value drift, and I think there are more effective ways to guard against this than earning to give (e.g. living with people who share your values, talking about EA stuff regularly with people you care about). I think I have quite a lot of evidence in favour of me being pretty resilient to value drift (though I often change my mind about what is important intentionally).
(3) I think this is interesting, though I donât think that I share this view re being taken seriously. I think that I, and many people I know, have taken actions that they found much harder than donating (e.g. I live in a different country than my partner and in a pretty suboptimal timezone because I think I can do my work better from my current location, I work a lot of hours, I spend a lot of time doing tasks that I find emotionally challenging, Iâve been in situations that I found extremely stressful for ~0 credit). To be clear, I donât think that I am particularly worthy of praiseâbut I do think that I score reasonably well on âmoral credibilityâ. Also, I have concerns about this kind of signalling and think it often leads to concerning dynamicsâI donât want EA Funds grantees to feel pressured into taking shoestring salaries. When I was at CE, I remember there being a lot of pressure to take extremely low salaries despite many successful charity founders thinking this was a bad idea. It also led to weird epistemic effects (though I hear things have improved substantially).
(4) I donât think that runway and grants from EA funders are as fungible as you do. I can talk a bit more about this if thatâs useful. I guess that this general point (3) is where we have substantive disagreement. It seems likely to me that I can have much more impact through my career than through my donationsâand that having more runway could substantially increase the value of my career. If it doesnât increase the value of my career and I am wrong, then I can donate later (which I donât think incurs much in the way of losses from a NTist perspective, but itâs more confusing from a LTist one). To be clear, I think that Iâd like to build up 12-24 months of runway, and right now, I have substantially less than thatâI am not talking about being able to retire in 10 years or anything.
(5) I think for me, the comparison stuff doesnât really lead to resentment/âunhappiness. It wasnât clear from my post, but one of the reasons that I made this comparison was because many of my friends do very altruistically valuable work and earn substantially more than I do. They are extremely talented and hard-working (and lucky), and whilst this doesnât mean that I could get a highly-paying job that generated a lot of altruistic value, I think talking to them regularly has given me an understanding of the kind of work that they do and what it might take to enter a similar role, and it feels doable for me to enter similar roles in a relatively short amount of time (on my inside view). I also have friends that I think are similarly smart/âhardworking etc., who earn a lot more money than me in purely for-profit roles. Again, I donât resent any of these people, and the comparison seems pretty useful to me.
For what itâs worth, I think saving up runway is a no brainer.
During my one year as a tech consultant, I put aside half each month and donated another 10%. The runway I built made the decision for me to quit my job and pursue direct work much easier.
In the downtime between two career moves, it allowed me to spend my time pursuing whatever I wanted without worrying about how to pay the bills. This gave me time to research and write about snakebites, ultimately leading to Open Phil recommending a $500k investment into a company working on snakebite diagnostics.
I later came upon great donation opportunity to a fish welfare charity, which I gave a large part of my runway to and wouldnât have been able to support if I had given all my money away two years prior.
Had I given more away sooner I think it would be clearer to myself and others that I was in fact altruistically motivated. I also think my impact would have been lower. Impact over image.
EDIT: Actually itâs probably a some-brainer a lot of the time, seeing as I currently have little runway and am taking a shoestring salary. The reason I take a shoestring salary is to increase my organizationâs runway, which is valuable for the same reasons that increasing oneâs personal runway is. You donât have to spend as much time worrying about how your org is going to pay the bills and you can instead focus on impact.
(I work with Caleb. Opinions are my own.)
Thank you for your comment.
Iâm probably misunderstanding you, but Iâm confused by (3) and (5). They seem like they somewhat contradict each other. Remove the emotive language and (3) is saying that people in positions of power should donate and/âor have lower salaries because donors or grantees might be upset in comparison, and (5) is saying that we shouldnât compare our own earnings and donations to others.
These claims contradict each other in the following ways:
If we take (5) as a given, (3) no longer makes sense. If it truly is the case that comparing earnings is never useful, we should not expect (or want) grantees or donors to compare earnings.
Hypothetically, maybe your position might be more like âoh itâs clearly bad to compare earnings, but we live in a flawed world with flawed people.â But if that were the case, then acceding to peopleâs comparisons is essentially enabling a harmful activity, and maybe we should have a higher bar for enabling othersâ negative proclivities.
If we take (3) as the primary constraint (Donors/âgrantees respect us less if we donât visibly make sacrifices for the Good), then it seems like (5) is very relevant. Pointing out ways in which we sacrificed earnings to take on EA jobs just seems like a really good reply to concerns that we are being overpaid in absolute terms, or are only doing EA jobs for the money. At least in my case, I donât recall any of our large donors complaining about my salary, but if I did, âI took a >>70% pay cut originally to do EA workâ [1] seems like a reasonable response that I predict to mollify most donors.
Though I think itâs closer to ~40-50% now at my current salary, adjusting for inflation? On the other hand, if I stayed and/âor switched jobs in tech Iâd probably have had salary increases substantially above inflation as well, so itâs kind of confusing what my actual counterfactual is[2]. But Iâm also not sure how much I should adjust for liking EA work and being much more motivated at it, which seems like substantial non-monetary compensation. But EA work is also more stressful and in some ways depressing, so hazard pay is reasonable, so...ÂŻ\_(ă)_/âÂŻ.
In part because I think if I wasnât doing EA work the most obvious alternative Iâd be aiming for high-variance earning-to-give, which means high equity value in expectation but ~0 payout in the median case.