So person 1 is the job applicant who gets hired, and person 2 is the next best option. When working directly for EA organizations, the added value of person 1 working there compared to person 2 would be fractional. When working in a high paying profession and aiming to earn to give, person 1 will donate much more money to good causes than person 2, who according to assumption C would be a non EA applicant.
It looks like you’re comparing a situation where an EA applies to an EA organization (competing against other EAs) to a situation where the EA applies for earning to give, competing against non-EAs. You argue that the counterfactual difference is larger if the EA gets the high-earning job instead of a non-EA because for the EA role, the next-best candidate would also do something impactful if they get the role.
This is true when you look at it very narrowly (only look at the impact difference for that one specific job that people applied to, their first job application). However, consider what happens in each case after the other person gets rejected. The non-EA who gets rejected for the high-earning job will do something else where they presumably won’t have an outsized impact, either. By contrast, the other EA person who also applied to the direct work role will likely continue to apply to impactful roles. (They might even consider earning to give as a fallback option.)
So, once you consider further effects (second job applications, etc.), it becomes clear that the consideration you highlight loses most of its relevance. (It only applies to the degree that you getting the EA job slows down other EAs’ career trajectories or adds some chance that they give up on impactful roles altogether, being discouraged.)
When taking the median value from the 2018 80k hours survey on how much a new hire is worth in donations it comes out to $1,000,000 per year. Assuming a 5% skill gap that would make the Added direct value:
0.05⋅1000000=50000
I could imagine that the organizations here were asked to compare the person they actually hired to the next-best candidate. So, there’s probably no discounting – the impact is estimated to be 1 million in donation/grantmaking equivalents.
The reason the values can be so high is because earning to give is only impactful if there are shovel-ready interventions. To get shovel-ready interventions, you need people doing direct work. To convert money into direct work, you need more direct work (e.g., grantmakers or headhunters or senior staff running hiring rounds and doing onboarding). In a funding landscape where organizations never have to neglect core priorities in order to fundraise, it isn’t easy to replace direct work with money. Eventually, there have to be enough people to do all that direct work.
It looks like you’re comparing a situation where an EA applies to an EA organization (competing against other EAs) to a situation where the EA applies for earning to give, competing against non-EAs. You argue that the counterfactual difference is larger if the EA gets the high-earning job instead of a non-EA because for the EA role, the next-best candidate would also do something impactful if they get the role.
This is true when you look at it very narrowly (only look at the impact difference for that one specific job that people applied to, their first job application). However, consider what happens in each case after the other person gets rejected. The non-EA who gets rejected for the high-earning job will do something else where they presumably won’t have an outsized impact, either. By contrast, the other EA person who also applied to the direct work role will likely continue to apply to impactful roles. (They might even consider earning to give as a fallback option.)
So, once you consider further effects (second job applications, etc.), it becomes clear that the consideration you highlight loses most of its relevance. (It only applies to the degree that you getting the EA job slows down other EAs’ career trajectories or adds some chance that they give up on impactful roles altogether, being discouraged.)
0.05⋅1000000=50000See also this article.
I could imagine that the organizations here were asked to compare the person they actually hired to the next-best candidate. So, there’s probably no discounting – the impact is estimated to be 1 million in donation/grantmaking equivalents.
The reason the values can be so high is because earning to give is only impactful if there are shovel-ready interventions. To get shovel-ready interventions, you need people doing direct work. To convert money into direct work, you need more direct work (e.g., grantmakers or headhunters or senior staff running hiring rounds and doing onboarding). In a funding landscape where organizations never have to neglect core priorities in order to fundraise, it isn’t easy to replace direct work with money. Eventually, there have to be enough people to do all that direct work.