Earning potential goes down with distance to the Bay (less so in COVID times, but even then that is still true, as many companies still adjust their salaries based on cost of living), which matters because people have friends and spouses who don’t want to live an ascetic EA lifestyle.
Also, many, if not most of these projects could not be started outside of the Bay or any of the other global hubs, because they benefit from being part of an ecosystem of competent people. You could maybe pull them off in other major global cities (like New York, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo), but the rent prices won’t differ that much between them, because the demand for being close to all the other good people drives prices up. The best people are in the big cities because that’s where the other good people are. Not moving to one of the hubs of the world is for most people career suicide, and in general I am much more optimistic about projects and organizations that are located in one of the global talent hubs, because they get to leverage the local culture, service ecosystem, talent availability and social networks that come with those hubs that extend far beyond what the EA and Rationality communities can provide on their own.
I know that my effectiveness would have dropped drastically had I moved out of a global hub, and my overall impact trajectory would have been much worse, so I am hesitant to recommend that anyone else do so, at least for the long term (I think temporarily moving to lower cost places is a good strategy for many people, and many should consider it, but it’s not really solving the funding problem much, since I don’t really think people should do that for more than 6 months, or maybe at the most a year).
Edit: Also COVID changes all of this at least a bit, though I don’t really know how much and for how long. But it seems likely to me that the overall trends here are pretty robust and we will continue seeing high prices in the places where I would want people to be located.
Earning potential goes down with distance to the Bay (less so in COVID times, but even then that is still true, as many companies still adjust their salaries based on cost of living), which matters because people have friends and spouses who don’t want to live an ascetic EA lifestyle.
Also, many, if not most of these projects could not be started outside of the Bay or any of the other global hubs, because they benefit from being part of an ecosystem of competent people. You could maybe pull them off in other major global cities (like New York, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo), but the rent prices won’t differ that much between them, because the demand for being close to all the other good people drives prices up. The best people are in the big cities because that’s where the other good people are. Not moving to one of the hubs of the world is for most people career suicide, and in general I am much more optimistic about projects and organizations that are located in one of the global talent hubs, because they get to leverage the local culture, service ecosystem, talent availability and social networks that come with those hubs that extend far beyond what the EA and Rationality communities can provide on their own.
I know that my effectiveness would have dropped drastically had I moved out of a global hub, and my overall impact trajectory would have been much worse, so I am hesitant to recommend that anyone else do so, at least for the long term (I think temporarily moving to lower cost places is a good strategy for many people, and many should consider it, but it’s not really solving the funding problem much, since I don’t really think people should do that for more than 6 months, or maybe at the most a year).
Edit: Also COVID changes all of this at least a bit, though I don’t really know how much and for how long. But it seems likely to me that the overall trends here are pretty robust and we will continue seeing high prices in the places where I would want people to be located.