Hello! I’m Toby Satake, and I’m new to Effective Altruism Forum, so forgive me if this kind of question has already been asked!
If it was possible to convince very rich people (like movie actors and other celebrities) to donate to effective charities, would it be more effective to spend one’s lifetime just doing that instead of working in a high-paying job and donating that money to charity?
My thought process goes somewhat like this:
-one might get a basic job just to pay the bills, and avoid time/money spent training for a better one
-even if most people refuse to donate, if just one or two donate a portion of their money it would have a huge effect, quite easily larger than a year spent working the high paying job. And a lot of people could be asked in one year.
-if they are high-publicity, it might motivate lots of others to donate, especially if they endorse it.
Of course I could be easily missing some key points that render the whole idea useless (maybe people aren’t generally very convincible, even if you try 100 times in a year). But I find it interesting. I’d love to hear any counterpoints—that’s why I posted!
Thanks!
P.S-in an ideal world, what if there was an organization or movement where lots of high-profile or high-income people were convinced to donate, making it part of culture? Perhaps other high-income people felt a bit more expected to follow suit? This last idea is probably much harder...
P.P.S: one person answered it (an amazing answer btw), but I’d love to hear opinions from others still!
Hi Toby, and welcome to the EA forum 🤝
My impression is that if you find a tractable way of doing this consistently, then you probably should.[1] You would have to do the math, but if you can get one high-worth funder a year, then I’m guessing it’s probably worth it.
The problem tends to be that this does seem hard. People already compete for the attention of philanthropists, and making millionaires into philanthropists also seems inherently very hard. Lobbying existing philanthropic orgs also seems hard, because they often have tight focus areas unrelated to EA.
More generally, convincing people of funding some EA cause areas (especially animal suffering and x-risks) requires a lot of effort, and most people aren’t swayed easily by EA arguments for caring about them.[2]
That said, there are already some people out there working on this. Some EA funding organizations as well as some big EA orgs do hire people to do “development” or engage with high-worth individuals that may become donors.[3]
As far as I know, the number of people working specifically on this is very low (I know three people, tops?), so it seems plausible that if you had some competitive advantage for doing this kind of work, you should at least consider it as a potential career path.
You can check the Fundraising tag of the forum to see discussions related to this.
Plus or minus putting some thought into the downside risks of doing this kind of engagement with high stakes figures. Also see my added nuance below.
The exception being (in my opinion), high fidelity interactions with EA. For example, EA university groups seem to be good at getting people to reflect deeply about EA, and take it more seriously.
Rethink Priorities, for example, has a small Development team that does this. I believe orgs like EA Funds also do this, but it might be less systematic.
That’s an amazing answer, thank you! And thanks for mentioning Rethink Priorities and EA funds, I’ve taken a look and (even though they don’t seem to generally focus on wealthy individuals) they’re quite interesting. Do you know why it tends to be difficult to convince people? And would I be able to contact any of these 3 people you know? No worries if not!
I want to flag that in general, convincing people to become EAs, or more precisely, creating cool spaces for more people to get into EA, is a thing that people in the community do actually do a lot. I did this myself a few years ago, by starting an EA group at my university. I’m guessing there might be several hundred EA community builders around the world, it’s just that they don’t generally focus on wealthy individuals specifically.[1]
A general answer to this is that the core ideas of EA have some significant inferential distance for most people, that is, there’s usually a lot of context that you need to explain to someone before they get why EAs care so much about anti-malaria bednets, animal suffering or AI Safety. It’s also the case that some EA conclusions tend to be very counterintuitive and run against people’s previously held beliefs, adding to the difficulty. [2]
It can be much easier to pitch them in any of these individual cause areas, but this means you trade-off generality: maybe you get someone to care about animal suffering, but they end up donating to organizations that are much less impactful than the EA standard.[3]
And going into more speculative territory[4], I think people with a lot of money might be more skeptical of people wanting their money, which kinda makes sense. Philanthropists tend to be one-issue donors: they think about something that is meaningful to them (like education, homelessness, or dogs) and then tend to focus their donations heavily in that issue. Persuading them otherwise means not only explaining EA ideas, but also making them realize that they should stop doing what they’re doing, which is hard.
Let me see what I can do, I’ve sent you a message through the forum!
PD: I want to push back on something I’ve said earlier: “My impression is that if you find a tractable way of doing this consistently, then you probably should”.
I should probably add some nuance: you shouldn’t pursue a job just because you think it’s a priori impactful. Whether you like this job, whether you feel like you could do it sustainably, is very important. And EA shouldn’t necessarily determine your entire life, there’s balance to be had. It’s also obviously very important to check this possibility against others, you shouldn’t just dig into the first impactful job you find.
I do think a lot of people have done this in ad-hoc basis though.
See The explanatory obstacle of EA for some concrete examples.
This is not to say there isn’t value to this. I think you can often convince people that they should donate to big funds (say, the Animal Welfare Fund), but this tends to be a tougher sell. In some cases, like say, the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, the EA context might be completely unnecessary for potential funders.
I’m not an expert on this, please don’t take my guesses too seriously!
You’re right, there are lots of EA community builders, just they might not be specifically focused on wealthy people. Sorry about that! I edited my post if it helps.
Also, thanks for all the links! Inferential Distance is an idea I’ve considered before but couldn’t put into words until now—one of the main ones being that someone has to expand their moral circle before any conversation about altruism can be had.
And now that you mention it, creating cool spaces for people to join EA feels to me possibly more effective than convincing specific wealthy individuals (multiplier effect again?).
I’ll stop asking questions here because you’ve explained lots of great stuff, and I don’t want to wear you out :)
(I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff you’re involved with, being a community builder!)
But if you get any more ideas spur of the moment, feel free to DM me!