Earning to give is still impactful – probably more impactful than 98%+ of jobs. The current funding bar in e.g. global health by GiveWell is about 10x GiveDirectly, and so marginal donations still have about that level of impact. In longtermism, the equivalent bar is harder to quantify, but you can look at recent examples of what’s been funded by the EA Infrastructure and Long Term Funds (the equivalent of GiveDirectly is something like green energy R&D or scaling up a big disease monitoring program). Small donors can probably achieve a similar or better level of effectiveness as GiveWell. Going forward, the crucial question is how quickly more opportunities at that level can be found. It might be possible to keep the bar at 10x, otherwise it’s likely to drop a bit so that more funds can be deployed e.g. to ~5x GiveDirectly. If that happens, the value of earning to give in absolute terms will go down 2x, but still be very high.
Roles that help to deploy large amounts of funding above the current funding bar are more impactful than before (e.g. grantmaking, research, organisation building, entrepreneurship, movement building, plus supporting and feeder roles to these roles). This means their value has gone up relative to earning to give. (This is what we should expect because funding and labour are partially complementary, so as the amount of funding increases, the value of labour increases.) This means if you can find a good opportunity that’s a good fit within one of these paths, it’s seriously worth considering switching, and the case for switching is stronger than before.
3. If you’re earning to give and not going to switch, you could consider trying to add extra value by doing more active grantmaking (e.g. exploring new causes) rather than just topping up large pots. However, you still need to be able to do this better than e.g. the EA Funds, and it might still be more efficient just to earn extra money and delegate your grantmaking. Entering a donor lottery is another good option. It might also be better to focus on community building or gaining career capital that might make you happy to switch to direct work in the future (e.g. saving money).
I was parsing your comment here as saying that the marginal impact of a GiveWell donation was pretty close to GiveDirectly. Here it seems like you don’t endorse that interpretation?
I was wrong about that. The next step for GiveWell would be to drop the bar a little bit (e.g. to 3-7x GiveDirectly), rather than drop all the way to GiveDirectly.
I’m curious why you and many EA’s who focus on longtermism don’t suggest donating to longtermist cause areas (as examples often focuses on Givewell or ACE charities). It seems like if orgs I respect like Open Phil and long term future fund are giving to longtermist areas, then they think that’s among the most important things to fund, which confuses me when I then hear longtermists acting like funding is useless on the margin or that we might as well give to GiveWell charities. It gives me a sense that perhaps there’s either some contradiction going on, or I’m missing something, but either way it makes it very difficult for me to get others excited about longtermism if they won’t enter it with their career and even the die-hard longtermists are saying marginal funding is useless or at least worse than GiveWell charities.
I don’t mean to imply that, and I agree it probably doesn’t make sense to think longtermist causes are top and then not donate to them. I was just using 10x GiveDirectly as an example of where the bar is within near termism. For longtermists, the equivalent is donating to the EA Long-term or Infrastructure Funds. Personally I’d donate to those over GiveWell-recommended charities. I’ve edited the post to clarify.
I am also curious to understand why you think that earning to give is more impactful than 98%+ of jobs. Also, did you mean 98% of EA-aligned jobs or all jobs?
It’s super rough but I was thinking about jobs that college graduates take in general.
One line of thinking is based on a direct estimate:
Average college grad income ~$80k, so 20% donations = $16k per year
Mean global income is ~18k vs. GiveDirectly recipients at $500
So $1 to GiveDirectly creates value equivalent to increasing global income by ~$30
So that’s ~$500k per year equivalent
My impression is very few jobs add this much to world income (e.g. here’s one piece of reading about this). Maybe just people who are both highly paid and do something with a lot of positive externalities, like useful R&D or something like that.
Another line of thinking is that earning to give for GiveDirectly is a career path that has already been heavily selected for impact i.e. it contributes to global development, which is one of the most pressing global problems, it’s supporting an intervention and org that’s probably more effective than average within that cause, and it involves a strategy with some leverage (i.e. earning to give). So, we shouldn’t expect it to be easy to find something a lot better.
You’re saying that if I donated 1000€ to GiveWell right now, my donation would be expected to have 10 times as much impact as a donation to GiveDirectly? However, in the coming years that might change to 5x or 2x?
Quick attempt to summarise:
Earning to give is still impactful – probably more impactful than 98%+ of jobs. The current funding bar in e.g. global health by GiveWell is about 10x GiveDirectly, and so marginal donations still have about that level of impact. In longtermism, the equivalent bar is harder to quantify, but you can look at recent examples of what’s been funded by the EA Infrastructure and Long Term Funds (the equivalent of GiveDirectly is something like green energy R&D or scaling up a big disease monitoring program). Small donors can probably achieve a similar or better level of effectiveness as GiveWell. Going forward, the crucial question is how quickly more opportunities at that level can be found. It might be possible to keep the bar at 10x, otherwise it’s likely to drop a bit so that more funds can be deployed e.g. to ~5x GiveDirectly. If that happens, the value of earning to give in absolute terms will go down 2x, but still be very high.
Roles that help to deploy large amounts of funding above the current funding bar are more impactful than before (e.g. grantmaking, research, organisation building, entrepreneurship, movement building, plus supporting and feeder roles to these roles). This means their value has gone up relative to earning to give. (This is what we should expect because funding and labour are partially complementary, so as the amount of funding increases, the value of labour increases.) This means if you can find a good opportunity that’s a good fit within one of these paths, it’s seriously worth considering switching, and the case for switching is stronger than before.
3. If you’re earning to give and not going to switch, you could consider trying to add extra value by doing more active grantmaking (e.g. exploring new causes) rather than just topping up large pots. However, you still need to be able to do this better than e.g. the EA Funds, and it might still be more efficient just to earn extra money and delegate your grantmaking. Entering a donor lottery is another good option. It might also be better to focus on community building or gaining career capital that might make you happy to switch to direct work in the future (e.g. saving money).
I was parsing your comment here as saying that the marginal impact of a GiveWell donation was pretty close to GiveDirectly. Here it seems like you don’t endorse that interpretation?
I was wrong about that. The next step for GiveWell would be to drop the bar a little bit (e.g. to 3-7x GiveDirectly), rather than drop all the way to GiveDirectly.
https://twitter.com/moskov/status/1455210000855359490
I’m curious why you and many EA’s who focus on longtermism don’t suggest donating to longtermist cause areas (as examples often focuses on Givewell or ACE charities). It seems like if orgs I respect like Open Phil and long term future fund are giving to longtermist areas, then they think that’s among the most important things to fund, which confuses me when I then hear longtermists acting like funding is useless on the margin or that we might as well give to GiveWell charities. It gives me a sense that perhaps there’s either some contradiction going on, or I’m missing something, but either way it makes it very difficult for me to get others excited about longtermism if they won’t enter it with their career and even the die-hard longtermists are saying marginal funding is useless or at least worse than GiveWell charities.
I don’t mean to imply that, and I agree it probably doesn’t make sense to think longtermist causes are top and then not donate to them. I was just using 10x GiveDirectly as an example of where the bar is within near termism. For longtermists, the equivalent is donating to the EA Long-term or Infrastructure Funds. Personally I’d donate to those over GiveWell-recommended charities. I’ve edited the post to clarify.
I am also curious to understand why you think that earning to give is more impactful than 98%+ of jobs. Also, did you mean 98% of EA-aligned jobs or all jobs?
It’s super rough but I was thinking about jobs that college graduates take in general.
One line of thinking is based on a direct estimate:
Average college grad income ~$80k, so 20% donations = $16k per year
Mean global income is ~18k vs. GiveDirectly recipients at $500
So $1 to GiveDirectly creates value equivalent to increasing global income by ~$30
So that’s ~$500k per year equivalent
My impression is very few jobs add this much to world income (e.g. here’s one piece of reading about this). Maybe just people who are both highly paid and do something with a lot of positive externalities, like useful R&D or something like that.
Another line of thinking is that earning to give for GiveDirectly is a career path that has already been heavily selected for impact i.e. it contributes to global development, which is one of the most pressing global problems, it’s supporting an intervention and org that’s probably more effective than average within that cause, and it involves a strategy with some leverage (i.e. earning to give). So, we shouldn’t expect it to be easy to find something a lot better.
Thanks for the answer.
Just to make sure I understand #1.
You’re saying that if I donated 1000€ to GiveWell right now, my donation would be expected to have 10 times as much impact as a donation to GiveDirectly? However, in the coming years that might change to 5x or 2x?
I think that’s roughly right—though some of the questions around timing donations get pretty complicated.