Thanks for making this post. Many commenters are disputing your claim that “Being paid to run a college club is weird”, and I want to describe why I think it is in fact distorting.
One real reason you don’t want to pay the leadership of a college club a notably large amount of money is because you expose yourself to brutal adverse selection: the more you pay above the market rate for a campus job, the more attractive the executive positions are to people who are purely financially motivated rather than motivated by the mission of the club. This is loosely speaking a problem faced by all efforts to hire everywhere, but is usually resolved in a corporate environment through having precise and dispassionate performance evaluation, and the ability to remove people who aren’t acting “aligned”, if you will. I think the lack of mechanisms like this at college org level basically mean this adverse selection problem blows up, and you simply can’t bestow excess money or status on executives without corrupting the org. I saw how miserable college-org politics were in other settings, with a lot less money to go around than EA.
At the core of philanthropic mission is a principal-agent problem. Donors, at some length, need to empower agents to spend their money wisely and maximally efficiently. As an EA contributor, rather than primarily a donor, you are constantly being nudged by your corrupted hardware to justify spending money on luxuries and conveniences. From the outside, it’s very difficult to tell whether the money-spenders are adjusting for this bias, hence why things like Wytham Abbey are controversial. So then as an outsider, seeing that the Columbia EA club pays its executives so much and does things like maintain The Commons basically destroys the club’s credibility in my eyes, and I’d only engage with it (as a former Columbia student and now donor) if it were of a substantially different and more frugal looking character.
I expect I reside farther on the “you should be frugal to signal credibility” axis than a lot of people here, and this comment bleeds into larger criticisms I have of current EA culture, but I thought it was reflected neatly in the dynamic your post describes.
...seeing that the Columbia EA club pays its executives so much...
To the best of my knowledge, I don’t think Columbia EA gives out salaries to their “executives.” University group organizers who meet specific requirements (for instance, time invested per week) can independently apply for funding and have to undergo an application and interview process. So, the dynamics you describe in the beginning would be somewhat different because of self-selection effects; there isn’t a bulletin board or a LinkedIn post where these positions are advertised. I say somewhat because I can imagine a situation where a solely money-driven individual gets highly engaged in the club, learns about the Group Organizer Fellowship, applies, and manages to secure funding. However, I don’t expect this to be that likely.
...you are constantly being nudged by your corrupted hardware to justify spending money on luxuries and conveniences.
For group funding, at least, there are strict requirements for what money can and cannot be spent on. This is true for most university EA clubs unless they have an independent funding source.
All that said, I agree that “notably large amount[s] of money” for university organizers is not ideal.
Chaplains dont raise all of the same concerns here. They generally aren’t getting above-market salaries (either for professional-degree holders generally, or compared to other holders of their degree), and there’s a very large barrier to entry (in the US, often a three-year grad degree costing quite a bit of money). So there’s much less incentive and opportunity for someone to gift into a chaplain position; chaplains tend to be doing it because they really believe in their work.
Thanks for making this post. Many commenters are disputing your claim that “Being paid to run a college club is weird”, and I want to describe why I think it is in fact distorting.
One real reason you don’t want to pay the leadership of a college club a notably large amount of money is because you expose yourself to brutal adverse selection: the more you pay above the market rate for a campus job, the more attractive the executive positions are to people who are purely financially motivated rather than motivated by the mission of the club. This is loosely speaking a problem faced by all efforts to hire everywhere, but is usually resolved in a corporate environment through having precise and dispassionate performance evaluation, and the ability to remove people who aren’t acting “aligned”, if you will. I think the lack of mechanisms like this at college org level basically mean this adverse selection problem blows up, and you simply can’t bestow excess money or status on executives without corrupting the org. I saw how miserable college-org politics were in other settings, with a lot less money to go around than EA.
At the core of philanthropic mission is a principal-agent problem. Donors, at some length, need to empower agents to spend their money wisely and maximally efficiently. As an EA contributor, rather than primarily a donor, you are constantly being nudged by your corrupted hardware to justify spending money on luxuries and conveniences. From the outside, it’s very difficult to tell whether the money-spenders are adjusting for this bias, hence why things like Wytham Abbey are controversial. So then as an outsider, seeing that the Columbia EA club pays its executives so much and does things like maintain The Commons basically destroys the club’s credibility in my eyes, and I’d only engage with it (as a former Columbia student and now donor) if it were of a substantially different and more frugal looking character.
I expect I reside farther on the “you should be frugal to signal credibility” axis than a lot of people here, and this comment bleeds into larger criticisms I have of current EA culture, but I thought it was reflected neatly in the dynamic your post describes.
To the best of my knowledge, I don’t think Columbia EA gives out salaries to their “executives.” University group organizers who meet specific requirements (for instance, time invested per week) can independently apply for funding and have to undergo an application and interview process. So, the dynamics you describe in the beginning would be somewhat different because of self-selection effects; there isn’t a bulletin board or a LinkedIn post where these positions are advertised. I say somewhat because I can imagine a situation where a solely money-driven individual gets highly engaged in the club, learns about the Group Organizer Fellowship, applies, and manages to secure funding. However, I don’t expect this to be that likely.
For group funding, at least, there are strict requirements for what money can and cannot be spent on. This is true for most university EA clubs unless they have an independent funding source.
All that said, I agree that “notably large amount[s] of money” for university organizers is not ideal.
The mostly analogous position I can think of is that university chaplains get paid to work with university students to help teach and mentor them.
Chaplains dont raise all of the same concerns here. They generally aren’t getting above-market salaries (either for professional-degree holders generally, or compared to other holders of their degree), and there’s a very large barrier to entry (in the US, often a three-year grad degree costing quite a bit of money). So there’s much less incentive and opportunity for someone to gift into a chaplain position; chaplains tend to be doing it because they really believe in their work.