Thanks for sharing your thinking, John! Iāll share some opinions and relevant facts below. (Note to other readers: John wrote below that he didnāt want to spend more time on this discussion, so if he doesnāt respond to this comment, donāt take that as tacit agreement. I think time-capping is a really wise and healthy thing to do, so I really want to support his decision.)
Theory of change
My main goal with this post was to share updates, not make a full case for our strategy, so it makes sense that you didnāt find it compelling. Hereās my attempt at a quick case for field-building:
Research constraints: Wild animal welfare is very unusual in how much it is constrained by research (e.g., we donāt know basic facts like which animals live net-positive lives, or how to measure that). Trying to improve wild animal welfare without much more empirical understanding would be like trying to find the best public health interventions without germ theoryāthereās stuff you can do, but not nearly as much as will be possible once you learn more.
Academic institutions: Academia is the best, and maybe the only, place for that kind of research to start happening, because itās unlikely to lead to profit (thus not a good fit for the private sector), it primarily benefits nonhumans (thus not a good fit for government), it requires input from a wide range of disciplines (thus not a good fit for any one independent nonprofit), and it will require many years of iterative research (thus a good fit for academic institutions, which are unusually stable and long-lived).
Relationship to social change: Youāre right that for many social movements, more academic research isnāt what will change peopleās minds. Scaling up wild animal welfare interventions will require lots of the advocacy-type work you see in other social movements: educating, organizing, legislating, etc. But before it can get to that stage, our movement has to identify what things are worth advocating for. (I also think there are several powerful examples of academia influencing social change in real time: conservation biology and environmentalism, gender studies and feminism, critical race theory and racial justice...)
Tractability and scale: Wild animal welfare is way less tractable than many cause areas. But I think thatās outweighed by the scale: humanity, factory farmed animals, and other captive animals collectively make up only 0.1% of vertebrates. The other 99.9% of moral patients alive today are wild animals (or more, if you count invertebrates). So itās worth working harder to help them.
Rationale: The biggest determinant of our impact is the quality of our team. Offering salaries that are roughly comparable to those offered by similar jobs elsewhere allows us to attract and retain the talent we need to do good work without spending more than necessary.
Why not lower salaries? Some organizations can attract and retain the talent they need while paying below market rate, but thatās typically because they have different talent needs than ours:
We need people in high-income countries because thatās where thereās the most funding for science and nonprofits.
Many of our roles require advanced degrees, or knowledge or skills that are hard to get without many years of experience in an area. Later-career people can often command higher salaries elsewhere. Theyāre also more likely to have inflexible financial commitments (kids, house, etc.) that prevent them from taking a lower-paying job even if theyāre really excited about it.
Many EAs have extreme moral commitments and the desire and flexibility to make sacrifices for those. Most people in the world arenāt like that, and our day-to-day work doesnāt offer the emotional rewards that direct action can. So although there may be some dedicated activists who would accept less pay, we donāt want to limit ourselves to those. (Weād also rather not take advantage of those peopleās lower willingness-to-be-paid. They can always volunteer to take a lower salary if they really want to. Thatās what I do.)
People are more likely to accept low-paying jobs if they have family wealth or social privilege that means they donāt have to provide for others in their family and they donāt have to worry about their own long-term financial well-being. We want a diversity of people on our staff, because we think that will improve our epistemics and our ability to reach out to a wide range of people to build a sustainable and influential research community.
There are always exceptions: people who will take lower salaries despite living in expensive university hubs, having advanced degrees, not having a safety net, etc. But the bigger your project, the harder it is to build it mostly out of exceptions.
In other words: some kinds of work can be done with the kinds of people that are more likely to accept lower salaries. Lots of issues call for pairs of quixotic collaborators or lean quirky startups or tight bands of ruthless activists. Wild animal welfare, it turns out, currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers with highly specialized skills working at a marathon pace more than a sprint pace.* So itās more expensive per head, but if you think those heads can have a big impact, then itās still cost-effective.
* Edit: āCurrently calls for middle-class knowledge workersā sounds more exclusionary that what I meant to convey. I was trying to describe the type of work required, not the type of people required. Not everyone working a middle-class job identifies as belonging to the middle class. Many people who come from low-income backgrounds continue to feel out of place for much of their professional lives (in part due to insensitive comments from asshats like me). The wild animal welfare movement calls for everyone who can do the work, and that includes people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Thanks for sharing your thinking, John! Iāll share some opinions and relevant facts below. (Note to other readers: John wrote below that he didnāt want to spend more time on this discussion, so if he doesnāt respond to this comment, donāt take that as tacit agreement. I think time-capping is a really wise and healthy thing to do, so I really want to support his decision.)
Theory of change
My main goal with this post was to share updates, not make a full case for our strategy, so it makes sense that you didnāt find it compelling. Hereās my attempt at a quick case for field-building:
Research constraints: Wild animal welfare is very unusual in how much it is constrained by research (e.g., we donāt know basic facts like which animals live net-positive lives, or how to measure that). Trying to improve wild animal welfare without much more empirical understanding would be like trying to find the best public health interventions without germ theoryāthereās stuff you can do, but not nearly as much as will be possible once you learn more.
Academic institutions: Academia is the best, and maybe the only, place for that kind of research to start happening, because itās unlikely to lead to profit (thus not a good fit for the private sector), it primarily benefits nonhumans (thus not a good fit for government), it requires input from a wide range of disciplines (thus not a good fit for any one independent nonprofit), and it will require many years of iterative research (thus a good fit for academic institutions, which are unusually stable and long-lived).
Relationship to social change: Youāre right that for many social movements, more academic research isnāt what will change peopleās minds. Scaling up wild animal welfare interventions will require lots of the advocacy-type work you see in other social movements: educating, organizing, legislating, etc. But before it can get to that stage, our movement has to identify what things are worth advocating for. (I also think there are several powerful examples of academia influencing social change in real time: conservation biology and environmentalism, gender studies and feminism, critical race theory and racial justice...)
Tractability and scale: Wild animal welfare is way less tractable than many cause areas. But I think thatās outweighed by the scale: humanity, factory farmed animals, and other captive animals collectively make up only 0.1% of vertebrates. The other 99.9% of moral patients alive today are wild animals (or more, if you count invertebrates). So itās worth working harder to help them.
Staff salaries
Actual salaries: Our salaries currently range from $60,000 to $104,000. Hereās how we set salaries.
Rationale: The biggest determinant of our impact is the quality of our team. Offering salaries that are roughly comparable to those offered by similar jobs elsewhere allows us to attract and retain the talent we need to do good work without spending more than necessary.
Why not lower salaries? Some organizations can attract and retain the talent they need while paying below market rate, but thatās typically because they have different talent needs than ours:
We need people in high-income countries because thatās where thereās the most funding for science and nonprofits.
Many of our roles require advanced degrees, or knowledge or skills that are hard to get without many years of experience in an area. Later-career people can often command higher salaries elsewhere. Theyāre also more likely to have inflexible financial commitments (kids, house, etc.) that prevent them from taking a lower-paying job even if theyāre really excited about it.
Many EAs have extreme moral commitments and the desire and flexibility to make sacrifices for those. Most people in the world arenāt like that, and our day-to-day work doesnāt offer the emotional rewards that direct action can. So although there may be some dedicated activists who would accept less pay, we donāt want to limit ourselves to those. (Weād also rather not take advantage of those peopleās lower willingness-to-be-paid. They can always volunteer to take a lower salary if they really want to. Thatās what I do.)
People are more likely to accept low-paying jobs if they have family wealth or social privilege that means they donāt have to provide for others in their family and they donāt have to worry about their own long-term financial well-being. We want a diversity of people on our staff, because we think that will improve our epistemics and our ability to reach out to a wide range of people to build a sustainable and influential research community.
There are always exceptions: people who will take lower salaries despite living in expensive university hubs, having advanced degrees, not having a safety net, etc. But the bigger your project, the harder it is to build it mostly out of exceptions.
In other words: some kinds of work can be done with the kinds of people that are more likely to accept lower salaries. Lots of issues call for pairs of quixotic collaborators or lean quirky startups or tight bands of ruthless activists. Wild animal welfare, it turns out, currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers with highly specialized skills working at a marathon pace more than a sprint pace.* So itās more expensive per head, but if you think those heads can have a big impact, then itās still cost-effective.
* Edit: āCurrently calls for middle-class knowledge workersā sounds more exclusionary that what I meant to convey. I was trying to describe the type of work required, not the type of people required. Not everyone working a middle-class job identifies as belonging to the middle class. Many people who come from low-income backgrounds continue to feel out of place for much of their professional lives (in part due to insensitive comments from asshats like me). The wild animal welfare movement calls for everyone who can do the work, and that includes people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Final commentāthank you for your gracious reply. I appreciate it is difficult to engage productively with the type of criticism I delivered.
Wow, that is a beautiful salary source of truth doc. Iām impressed! Thanks for sharing.