I would echo that “career insurance” would be particularly valuable to certain groups. Moreover, the negative effects of its absence are not uniform—they disproportionately affect certain types of endeavors and thus warp the types of new initiatives that get off the ground (not merely who gets them off the ground).
Absence / paucity of career insurance disproportionately affects:
Those with lower financial resources as a cushion (e.g., savings from a tech job, wealthy and supportive parents, etc.);
Those with more established careers, kids / similar other obligations, etc. (which correlates with age);
Those whose professional training and/or experience does not present a relatively safe backup plan (e.g., someone with an English degree vs. someone with an elite-university STEM degree vs. );
Those whose path to impact offers fewer transferrable, in-market-demand skills (e.g., community building vs. programming/development work);
Those whose path to impact offers lower levels of social capital that is legible outside of EA (same example here);
Those for whom a detour would be particularly costly (e.g., a tenured psychology prof vs. someone fresh out of university)
Those whose path to impact is high-risk/high-reward.
(Many of these points are referenced in the original post.)
Some of those disproportionate effects apply to individuals, but I submit that there is a decent correlation between the characteristics of the potential worker and the types of work they would be most interested in / good at. Moreover, some of the effects relate directly to the nature of the work.
And I agree with the other point as well- it’s a one-two punch in the sense of the lack of safety net pushing away certain groups of people and thereby also biasing the type of work done away from what would be otherwise optimal.
I would echo that “career insurance” would be particularly valuable to certain groups. Moreover, the negative effects of its absence are not uniform—they disproportionately affect certain types of endeavors and thus warp the types of new initiatives that get off the ground (not merely who gets them off the ground).
Absence / paucity of career insurance disproportionately affects:
Those with lower financial resources as a cushion (e.g., savings from a tech job, wealthy and supportive parents, etc.);
Those with more established careers, kids / similar other obligations, etc. (which correlates with age);
Those whose professional training and/or experience does not present a relatively safe backup plan (e.g., someone with an English degree vs. someone with an elite-university STEM degree vs. );
Those whose path to impact offers fewer transferrable, in-market-demand skills (e.g., community building vs. programming/development work);
Those whose path to impact offers lower levels of social capital that is legible outside of EA (same example here);
Those for whom a detour would be particularly costly (e.g., a tenured psychology prof vs. someone fresh out of university)
Those whose path to impact is high-risk/high-reward.
(Many of these points are referenced in the original post.)
Some of those disproportionate effects apply to individuals, but I submit that there is a decent correlation between the characteristics of the potential worker and the types of work they would be most interested in / good at. Moreover, some of the effects relate directly to the nature of the work.
Great examples there, thank you for commenting!
And I agree with the other point as well- it’s a one-two punch in the sense of the lack of safety net pushing away certain groups of people and thereby also biasing the type of work done away from what would be otherwise optimal.