Nice punchy writing! I hope this sparks some interesting, good faith discussions with classmates.
I think a powerful thing to bring up re earning to give is how it can strictly dominate some other options. e.g. a 4th or 5th year biglaw associate could very reasonably fund two fully paid public defender positions with something like 25-30% of their salary. A well-paid plastic surgeon could fund lots of critical medical workers in the developing world with less.
One important thing to keep in mind when you have these chats is that there are better options; they’re just harder to carve out and evaluate. One toy model I play with is entrepreneurship. Most people inclined towards working for social good have a modesty/meekness about them where they just want to be a line-worker standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people doing the hard work of solving problems. This suggests there might be a dearth of people with this outlook looking to build, scale, and importantly sell novel solutions.
As you point out, there are a lot of rich people out there. Many/most of them just want to get richer, sure, but lots of them have foundations or would fund exciting/clever projects with exciting leaders, even if there wasn’t enormous (or any) profitability in it. The problem is a dearth of good prosocial ideas – which Harvard students seem well positioned to spin up: you have four years to just think and learn about the world, right? What projects could exist that need to? Figure it out instead of soldiering away for existing things.
I object to calling funding two public defenders “strictly dominating” being one yourself; while public defender isn’t an especially high-variance role with respect to performance compared to e.g. federal public policy, it doesn’t seem that crazy that a really talented and dedicated public defender could be more impactful than the 2 or 3 marginal PDs they’d fund while earning to give.
Yes, in general it’s good to remember that people are far from 1:1 substitutes for each other for a given job title. I think the “1 into 2” reasoning is a decent intuition pump for how wide the option space becomes when you think laterally though and that lateral thinking of course shouldn’t stop at earning to give.
A minor, not fully-endorsed object level point: I think people who do ~one-on-one service work like (most) doctors and lawyers are much less likely to 10x the median than e.g. software engineers. With rare exceptions, their work just isn’t that scalable and in many cases output is a linear return to effort. I think this might be especially true in public defense where you sort of wear prosecutors down over a volume of cases.
I mention in another comment that I don’t actually think “selling out” is the best career option for every single person, especially folks at Harvard.
I do think it’s a persuasive one though — because it’s a path of less resistance. It feels harder to say “Hey, you should go explore under-researched areas in search for the most effective way to do good,” and actually persuade people.
The target audience was those who were generally uninformed about doing good, or people on the fence about it.
Nice punchy writing! I hope this sparks some interesting, good faith discussions with classmates.
I think a powerful thing to bring up re earning to give is how it can strictly dominate some other options. e.g. a 4th or 5th year biglaw associate could very reasonably fund two fully paid public defender positions with something like 25-30% of their salary. A well-paid plastic surgeon could fund lots of critical medical workers in the developing world with less.
One important thing to keep in mind when you have these chats is that there are better options; they’re just harder to carve out and evaluate. One toy model I play with is entrepreneurship. Most people inclined towards working for social good have a modesty/meekness about them where they just want to be a line-worker standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people doing the hard work of solving problems. This suggests there might be a dearth of people with this outlook looking to build, scale, and importantly sell novel solutions.
As you point out, there are a lot of rich people out there. Many/most of them just want to get richer, sure, but lots of them have foundations or would fund exciting/clever projects with exciting leaders, even if there wasn’t enormous (or any) profitability in it. The problem is a dearth of good prosocial ideas – which Harvard students seem well positioned to spin up: you have four years to just think and learn about the world, right? What projects could exist that need to? Figure it out instead of soldiering away for existing things.
I object to calling funding two public defenders “strictly dominating” being one yourself; while public defender isn’t an especially high-variance role with respect to performance compared to e.g. federal public policy, it doesn’t seem that crazy that a really talented and dedicated public defender could be more impactful than the 2 or 3 marginal PDs they’d fund while earning to give.
Yes, in general it’s good to remember that people are far from 1:1 substitutes for each other for a given job title. I think the “1 into 2” reasoning is a decent intuition pump for how wide the option space becomes when you think laterally though and that lateral thinking of course shouldn’t stop at earning to give.
A minor, not fully-endorsed object level point: I think people who do ~one-on-one service work like (most) doctors and lawyers are much less likely to 10x the median than e.g. software engineers. With rare exceptions, their work just isn’t that scalable and in many cases output is a linear return to effort. I think this might be especially true in public defense where you sort of wear prosecutors down over a volume of cases.
Yes, I absolutely agree.
I mention in another comment that I don’t actually think “selling out” is the best career option for every single person, especially folks at Harvard.
I do think it’s a persuasive one though — because it’s a path of less resistance. It feels harder to say “Hey, you should go explore under-researched areas in search for the most effective way to do good,” and actually persuade people.
The target audience was those who were generally uninformed about doing good, or people on the fence about it.