Unfortunately, this post doesn’t quite persuade me that small donors can be impactful compared to large donors. The gist of the post seems to be that, as long as there are professional EA fund managers, small donors may achieve a similar level of marginal impact. This seems clear enough. Since EA grant evaluators typically regrant unrestricted funding, they will just treat any dollar—whether from large or small donors—as the same. Everyone’s allowed to save lives at$3000 per life.
However, if the EA movement is asking the question ‘if we needed X amount of dollars, who should we approach’, would small donors still be the answer? I think this is the sort of ‘impact’ that people question, i.e. where do we expect impact to predominantly come from. Within EA, small donors make up a 1⁄10 of Good Venture + FTX. To be of comparable impact, small donors need to be 10x more effective.
Of course, we also need to consider where the baseline is. Would a 1⁄10 impact compared to large donors be decent enough for small donors collectively? As a MOVEMENT that does the MOST good, should we see small donors that give to AMF as impactful because they save lives per $3000 - and that’s very good for the world; or unimpactful as the number of people saved through such giving is expectedly much lower than what large donors are doing? These are probably the key considerations to determine how the impact of small donors should be viewed. Just discussing the marginal impact of small donors doesn’t quite do it for me.
Unfortunately, this post doesn’t quite persuade me that small donors can be impactful compared to large donors. The gist of the post seems to be that, as long as there are professional EA fund managers, small donors may achieve a similar level of marginal impact. This seems clear enough. Since EA grant evaluators typically regrant unrestricted funding, they will just treat any dollar—whether from large or small donors—as the same. Everyone’s allowed to save lives at$3000 per life.
However, if the EA movement is asking the question ‘if we needed X amount of dollars, who should we approach’, would small donors still be the answer? I think this is the sort of ‘impact’ that people question, i.e. where do we expect impact to predominantly come from. Within EA, small donors make up a 1⁄10 of Good Venture + FTX. To be of comparable impact, small donors need to be 10x more effective.
Of course, we also need to consider where the baseline is. Would a 1⁄10 impact compared to large donors be decent enough for small donors collectively? As a MOVEMENT that does the MOST good, should we see small donors that give to AMF as impactful because they save lives per $3000 - and that’s very good for the world; or unimpactful as the number of people saved through such giving is expectedly much lower than what large donors are doing? These are probably the key considerations to determine how the impact of small donors should be viewed. Just discussing the marginal impact of small donors doesn’t quite do it for me.