I’m puzzled by what’s going on in the category “Other near-term work (near-term climate change, mental health)”. The two causes in parentheses are quite different and I have no idea what other topics fall into this. Also, this has 12% of the people, but >1% of the money: how did that happen? What are those 12% of people doing?
Also, shouldn’t “global health” really be “global health and development”? If it’s just “global health” that leaves out the economic stuff, e.g. Give Directly. Further, global health should probably either include mental health, or be specified as “global physical health”.
Yes, sorry I was using ‘global health’ as a shorthand to include ‘and development’.
For other near term, that category was taken from the EA survey, and I’m also unsure exactly what’s in there. As David says, it seems like it’s mostly mental health and climate change though.
I think the figures for highly engaged EAs working in Mental Health, drawn from EA Survey data, will be somewhat inflated by people who are working in mental health, but not in an EA-relevant sense e.g. as a psychologist. This is less of a concern for more distinctively EA cause areas of course.
Among people who, in EAS 2019, said they were currently working for an EA org, the normalised figures were only ~5% for Mental Health and ~2% for Climate Change (which, interestingly, is a bit closer to Ben’s overall estimates for the resources going to those areas). Also, as Ben noted, people could select multiple causes, and although the ‘normalisation’ accounts for this, it doesn’t change the fact that these figures might include respondents who aren’t solely working on Mental Health or Climate Change, but could be generalists whose work somewhat involved considering these areas.
Thanks for this! Some minor points.
I’m puzzled by what’s going on in the category “Other near-term work (near-term climate change, mental health)”. The two causes in parentheses are quite different and I have no idea what other topics fall into this. Also, this has 12% of the people, but >1% of the money: how did that happen? What are those 12% of people doing?
Also, shouldn’t “global health” really be “global health and development”? If it’s just “global health” that leaves out the economic stuff, e.g. Give Directly. Further, global health should probably either include mental health, or be specified as “global physical health”.
Yes, sorry I was using ‘global health’ as a shorthand to include ‘and development’.
For other near term, that category was taken from the EA survey, and I’m also unsure exactly what’s in there. As David says, it seems like it’s mostly mental health and climate change though.
I think the figures for highly engaged EAs working in Mental Health, drawn from EA Survey data, will be somewhat inflated by people who are working in mental health, but not in an EA-relevant sense e.g. as a psychologist. This is less of a concern for more distinctively EA cause areas of course.
Among people who, in EAS 2019, said they were currently working for an EA org, the normalised figures were only ~5% for Mental Health and ~2% for Climate Change (which, interestingly, is a bit closer to Ben’s overall estimates for the resources going to those areas). Also, as Ben noted, people could select multiple causes, and although the ‘normalisation’ accounts for this, it doesn’t change the fact that these figures might include respondents who aren’t solely working on Mental Health or Climate Change, but could be generalists whose work somewhat involved considering these areas.