First, I think there’s something akin to creating a pyramid scheme for EA by leaning too heavy on this idea, e.g. “earn to give, or better yet get 3 friends to earn to give and you don’t need to donate yourself because you had so much indirect impact!”. I think david_reinstein’s comment is in the same vein and good.
Second, this is a general complaint about the active/passive distinction that is not specific to your proposal but since your proposal relies on it I have to complain about it. :-)
I don’t think the active/passive distinction is real (or at real enough to be useful). I think it just looks that way to people who only earn money by directly trading their labor for it. So-called passive income still requires work (otherwise money would just earn you more money with zero effort), just less of it. And that’s the key. Thus I think it’s better to talk about leverage rather than active/passive.
To say a bit more, trading labor for money/impact by default has 1:1 leverage, i.e. you get linear return on your labor. For example, literally handing out malaria nets, literally serving food to the destitute, etc.. Then you can do work that gets a bit of leverage but is still linear. So maybe you can leverage your knowledge, network, etc. to have 1:n leverage. This might be working as a researcher, doing work for an EA meta-org, etc.. Then there’s opportunities to have non-linear levage where each unit of work gets quadratic or exponential returns. In the realm of money and “passive” income this is stuff like investing in or starting a company (I know, not what people usually think of as “passive” income). In EA this might be defining a new field, starting a new EA org, etc..
Note though that we rely on people having impact in all these different ways for the economy/ecosystem to function. Yes, 1:1 leverage work would best be automated, but sometimes it can’t be, and then it’s a bottleneck and we need someone to do it. If you squeeze out too much of this type work you get something like a high-income/impact trap: no one can be bothered to do important work because it isn’t high leverage enough!
So, I think people should try to have as much leverage as they can, but also we need to be careful about how we promote leverage, especially in EA where there are fewer feedback systems in the economy to help the EA ecosystem self-regulate, so that we don’t end up without anyone to do the essential, low-leverage work.
A couple comments.
First, I think there’s something akin to creating a pyramid scheme for EA by leaning too heavy on this idea, e.g. “earn to give, or better yet get 3 friends to earn to give and you don’t need to donate yourself because you had so much indirect impact!”. I think david_reinstein’s comment is in the same vein and good.
Second, this is a general complaint about the active/passive distinction that is not specific to your proposal but since your proposal relies on it I have to complain about it. :-)
I don’t think the active/passive distinction is real (or at real enough to be useful). I think it just looks that way to people who only earn money by directly trading their labor for it. So-called passive income still requires work (otherwise money would just earn you more money with zero effort), just less of it. And that’s the key. Thus I think it’s better to talk about leverage rather than active/passive.
To say a bit more, trading labor for money/impact by default has 1:1 leverage, i.e. you get linear return on your labor. For example, literally handing out malaria nets, literally serving food to the destitute, etc.. Then you can do work that gets a bit of leverage but is still linear. So maybe you can leverage your knowledge, network, etc. to have 1:n leverage. This might be working as a researcher, doing work for an EA meta-org, etc.. Then there’s opportunities to have non-linear levage where each unit of work gets quadratic or exponential returns. In the realm of money and “passive” income this is stuff like investing in or starting a company (I know, not what people usually think of as “passive” income). In EA this might be defining a new field, starting a new EA org, etc..
Note though that we rely on people having impact in all these different ways for the economy/ecosystem to function. Yes, 1:1 leverage work would best be automated, but sometimes it can’t be, and then it’s a bottleneck and we need someone to do it. If you squeeze out too much of this type work you get something like a high-income/impact trap: no one can be bothered to do important work because it isn’t high leverage enough!
So, I think people should try to have as much leverage as they can, but also we need to be careful about how we promote leverage, especially in EA where there are fewer feedback systems in the economy to help the EA ecosystem self-regulate, so that we don’t end up without anyone to do the essential, low-leverage work.