Marginal returns to work (probably) go up with funding cuts, not down.
It can be demoralizing when a field you’re working in gets funding cuts. Job security goes down, less stuff is happening in your area, and people may pay you less attention since they believe others are doing more important work. But assuming you have job security and mostly make career decisions on inside views (meaning you’re not updating too heavily on funders de-prioritizing your cause area), then your skills are more valuable than they were previously.
Lots of caveats apply of course. The big one to me seems that some projects need a minimum scale to work. But I also think this idea is a nice psychological counterweight to the career uncertainties that pop up with changes in the funding landscape.
(Inspired by a comment Dean Karlan, a development economist, made on funding cuts to global health)
It’s true that there are diminishing marginal returns, and with less funding and fewer projects/people around, there is now a bunch of opportunities for impact which you can exploit (where previously someone else would have done it anyway).
However, there’s also a countervailing reduction in marginal value of labour due to reduced availability of capital and non-labour input, especially since cuts aren’t necessarily well targeted (e.g. keeping staff while capital investment is slashed). Loss of infrastructure field-wide is also a critical problem (e.g. all those interventions and programmes piggybacking on AIDS clinics)
Good point. In a toy model, it’d depend on relative cuts to labor versus non-labor inputs. Now that I think about it, it probably points towards exiting being better in mission-driven fields. People are more attached to their careers so the non-labor resources get cut deeply while all the staff try to hold onto their jobs.
Maybe I’d amend it to… if you’re willing to switch jobs, then you can benefit from increasing marginal returns in some sub-cause areas. Because maybe there’s a sub-cause area where lots of staff are quitting (out of fear the cause area isn’t worth it) while capital investment is about the same.
But I admit that, even if we knew those sub-cause areas existed, it’s not quite as punchy of a reason to stay in the cause area as a whole
Marginal returns to work (probably) go up with funding cuts, not down.
It can be demoralizing when a field you’re working in gets funding cuts. Job security goes down, less stuff is happening in your area, and people may pay you less attention since they believe others are doing more important work. But assuming you have job security and mostly make career decisions on inside views (meaning you’re not updating too heavily on funders de-prioritizing your cause area), then your skills are more valuable than they were previously.
Lots of caveats apply of course. The big one to me seems that some projects need a minimum scale to work. But I also think this idea is a nice psychological counterweight to the career uncertainties that pop up with changes in the funding landscape.
(Inspired by a comment Dean Karlan, a development economist, made on funding cuts to global health)
It’s true that there are diminishing marginal returns, and with less funding and fewer projects/people around, there is now a bunch of opportunities for impact which you can exploit (where previously someone else would have done it anyway).
However, there’s also a countervailing reduction in marginal value of labour due to reduced availability of capital and non-labour input, especially since cuts aren’t necessarily well targeted (e.g. keeping staff while capital investment is slashed). Loss of infrastructure field-wide is also a critical problem (e.g. all those interventions and programmes piggybacking on AIDS clinics)
Good point. In a toy model, it’d depend on relative cuts to labor versus non-labor inputs. Now that I think about it, it probably points towards exiting being better in mission-driven fields. People are more attached to their careers so the non-labor resources get cut deeply while all the staff try to hold onto their jobs.
Maybe I’d amend it to… if you’re willing to switch jobs, then you can benefit from increasing marginal returns in some sub-cause areas. Because maybe there’s a sub-cause area where lots of staff are quitting (out of fear the cause area isn’t worth it) while capital investment is about the same.
But I admit that, even if we knew those sub-cause areas existed, it’s not quite as punchy of a reason to stay in the cause area as a whole