This kind of ambivalent view of salary-increases is quite mainstream within EA, but as far as I can tell, a more optimistic view is warranted.
If 90% of engaged EAs were wholly unmotivated by money in the range of $50k-200k/yr, you’d expect >90% of EA software engineers, industry researchers, and consultants to be giving >50%, but much fewer do. You’d expect EAs to be nearly indifferent toward pay in job choice, but they’re not. You’d expect that when you increase EAs’ salaries, they’d just donate a large portion on to great tax-deductible charities, so >75% of the salary increase would be refunded on to other effective orgs. But when you say that the spending would be only a tenth as effective (rather than ~four-tenths), clearly you don’t.
Although some EAs are insensitive to money in this way, 90% seems too high. Rather, with doubled pay, I think you’d see some quality improvements from an increased applicant pool, and some improved workforce size (>10%) and retention. Some would buy themselves some productivity and happiness. And yes, some would donate. I don’t think you’d draw too many hard-to-detect “fake EAs”—we haven’t seen many so far. Rather, it seems more likely to help quality than hurt on the margin.
I don’t think the PR risk is so huge at <$250k/yr levels. Closest thing I can think of is commentary regarding folks at OpenAI, but it’s a bigger target, with higher pay. If the message gets out that EA employees are not bound to a vow of poverty, and are actually compensated for >10% of the good they’re doing, I’d argue that’s would enlarge and improve the recruitment pool on the margin.
(NB. As an EA worker, I’d stand to gain from increased salaries, as would many in this conversation. Although not for the next few years at least given the policies of my current (university) employer.)
[Predictable disclaimers, although in my defence, I’ve been banging this drum long before I had (or anticipated to have) a conflict of interest.]
I also find the reluctance to wholeheartedly endorse the ‘econ-101’ story (i.e. if you want more labour, try offering more money for people to sell labour to you) perplexing:
EA-land tends sympathetic using ‘econ-101’ accounts reflexively on basically everything else in creation. I thought the received wisdom these approaches are reasonable at least for first-pass analysis, and we’d need persuading to depart greatly from them.
Considerations why ‘econ-101’ won’t (significantly) apply here don’t seem to extend to closely analogous cases: we don’t fret (and typically argue against others fretting) about other charity’s paying their staff too much, we don’t think (cf. reversal test) that google could improve its human capital by cutting pay—keeping the ‘truly committed googlers’, generally sympathetic to public servants getting paid more if they add much more social value (and don’t presume these people are insensitive to compensation beyond some limit), prefer simple market mechs over more elaborate tacit transfer system (e.g. just give people money) etc. etc.
The precise situation makes the ‘econ-101’ intervention particularly appetising: if you value labour much more than the current price, and you are sitting atop a ungodly pile of lucre so vast you earnestly worry about how you can spend big enough chunks of it at once, ‘try throwing money at your long-standing labour shortages’ seems all the more promising.
Insofar as it goes, the observed track record looks pretty supportive of the econ-101 story—besides all the points Ryan mentions, compare “price suppression results in shortages” to the years-long (and still going strong) record of orgs lamenting they can’t get the staff.
Perhaps the underlying story is as EA-land is generally on the same team, one might hope you can do better than taking one’s cue from ‘econ-101’, given the typically adversarial/competitive dynamics it presumes between firms, and employee/employer. I think this hope is forlorn: EA-land might be full aspiring moral saints, but aspiring moral saints remain approximate to homo economicus. So the usual stories about the general benefits econ efficiency prove hard to better- and (play-pumps style) attempts to try feel apt to backfire (1, 2, 3, 4 - ad nauseum).
However, although I don’t think ‘PR concerns’ should guide behaviour (if X really is better than ¬X, the costs of people reasonably—if mistakenly—thinking less of you for doing X is typically better than strategising to hide this disagreement), many things look bad because they are bad.
In the good old days, I realised I was behind on my GWWC pledge so used some of my holiday to volunteer for a week of night-shifts as a junior doctor on a cancer ward. If in the future my ‘EA praxis’ is tantamount to splashing billionaire largess on a lifestyle for myself of comfort and affluence scarcely conceivable to my erstwhile beneficiaries, spending my days on intangible labour in well-appointed offices located among the richest places heretofore observed in human history, an outside observer may wonder what went wrong.
I doubt they would be persuaded by my defence is any better than obscene: “Not all heroes wear capes; some nobly spend thousands on yuppie accoutrements they deem strictly necessary for them to do the most good!”. Nor would they be moved by my remorse: self-effacing acknowledgement is not expiation, nor complaisance to my own vices atonement. I still think jacking up pay may be good policy, but personally, perhaps I should doubt myself too.
I’m just saying that when we think offering more salary will help us secure someone, we generally do it. This means that further salary raises seem to offer low benefit:cost. This seems consistent with econ 101.
Likewise, it’s possible to have a lot of capital, but for the cost-benefit of raising salaries to be below the community bar (which is something like invest the money for 20yr and spend on OP’s last dollar—which is a pretty high bar). Having more capital increases the willingness to pay for labour now to some extent, but tops out after a point.
To be clear, I’m sympathetic to the idea that salaries should be even higher (or we should have impact certificates or something). My position is more that (i) it’s not an obvious win (ii) it’s possible for the value of a key person to be a lot higher than their salary, without something going obviously wrong.
I definitely agree EAs are motivated somewhat by money in this range.
My thought is more about how it compares to other factors.
My impression of hiring at 80k is that salary rarely seems like a key factor in choosing us vs. other orgs (probably under 20% of cases). If we doubled salaries, I expect existing staff would save more, donate more, and consume a bit more; but I don’t think we’d see large increases in productivity or happiness.
My impression is that this is similar at other orgs who pay similarly to us. Some EA orgs still pay a lot less, and I think there’s a decent chance this is a mistake – though you’d need to weigh it against the current cost-effectiveness of the project.
I think the PR risks for charities paying high salaries are pretty big—normal people hate the idea of charities paying a lot. Paying regular employees $200k in London would make them higher paid than the CEOs of most regular charities, including pretty big ones where the staff are typically middle aged. EA has also had a lot of kudos from the ‘living on not very much to donate’ meme. Most people aiming to do good are assumed to be full of shit, and living on not very much is a hard-to-fake symbol that shows you’re morally serious. I agree that meme has some serious downsides relative to ‘you can earn a bunch of money doing good’ meme, but giving up that kudos is a major cost – which makes the trade off ambiguous to me. Maybe it’s possible to have some of both by paying a lot but having some people donate most of it, or maybe you get the worst of both worlds.
Agree that we shouldn’t expect large productivity/wellbeing changes. Perhaps a ~0.1SD improvement in wellbeing, and a single-digit improvement in productivity—small relative to effects on recruitment and retention.
I agree that it’s been good overall for EA to appear extremely charitable. It’s also had costs though: it sometimes encouraged self-neglect, portrayed EA as ‘holier than thou’, EA orgs as less productive, and EA roles as worse career moves than the private sector. Over time, as the movement has aged, professionalised, and solidified its funding base, it’s been beneficial to de-emphasise sacrifice, in order to place more emphasis on effectiveness. It better reflects what we’re currently doing, who we want to recruit, too. So long as we take care to project an image that is coherent, and not hypocritical, I don’t see a problem with accelerating the pivot. My hunch is that even apart from salaries, it would be good, and I’d be surprised if it was bad enough to be decisive for salaries.
I think there are a few other considerations that may point in the direction of slightly higher salaries (or at least, avoiding very low salaries). EA skews young in age as a movement, but this is changing as people grow up ‘with it’ or older people join. I think this is good. It’s important to avoid making it more difficult for people to join/remain involved who have other financial obligations that come in a little later in life, e.g. - child-rearing - supporting elderly parents Relatedly, lower salaries can be easier to accept for longer for people who come from wealthier backgrounds and have better-off social support networks or expectations of inheritance etc (it can feel very risky if one is only in a position to save minimally, and not be able to build up rainy day funds for unexpected financial needs otherwise).
This kind of ambivalent view of salary-increases is quite mainstream within EA, but as far as I can tell, a more optimistic view is warranted.
If 90% of engaged EAs were wholly unmotivated by money in the range of $50k-200k/yr, you’d expect >90% of EA software engineers, industry researchers, and consultants to be giving >50%, but much fewer do. You’d expect EAs to be nearly indifferent toward pay in job choice, but they’re not. You’d expect that when you increase EAs’ salaries, they’d just donate a large portion on to great tax-deductible charities, so >75% of the salary increase would be refunded on to other effective orgs. But when you say that the spending would be only a tenth as effective (rather than ~four-tenths), clearly you don’t.
Although some EAs are insensitive to money in this way, 90% seems too high. Rather, with doubled pay, I think you’d see some quality improvements from an increased applicant pool, and some improved workforce size (>10%) and retention. Some would buy themselves some productivity and happiness. And yes, some would donate. I don’t think you’d draw too many hard-to-detect “fake EAs”—we haven’t seen many so far. Rather, it seems more likely to help quality than hurt on the margin.
I don’t think the PR risk is so huge at <$250k/yr levels. Closest thing I can think of is commentary regarding folks at OpenAI, but it’s a bigger target, with higher pay. If the message gets out that EA employees are not bound to a vow of poverty, and are actually compensated for >10% of the good they’re doing, I’d argue that’s would enlarge and improve the recruitment pool on the margin.
(NB. As an EA worker, I’d stand to gain from increased salaries, as would many in this conversation. Although not for the next few years at least given the policies of my current (university) employer.)
[Predictable disclaimers, although in my defence, I’ve been banging this drum long before I had (or anticipated to have) a conflict of interest.]
I also find the reluctance to wholeheartedly endorse the ‘econ-101’ story (i.e. if you want more labour, try offering more money for people to sell labour to you) perplexing:
EA-land tends sympathetic using ‘econ-101’ accounts reflexively on basically everything else in creation. I thought the received wisdom these approaches are reasonable at least for first-pass analysis, and we’d need persuading to depart greatly from them.
Considerations why ‘econ-101’ won’t (significantly) apply here don’t seem to extend to closely analogous cases: we don’t fret (and typically argue against others fretting) about other charity’s paying their staff too much, we don’t think (cf. reversal test) that google could improve its human capital by cutting pay—keeping the ‘truly committed googlers’, generally sympathetic to public servants getting paid more if they add much more social value (and don’t presume these people are insensitive to compensation beyond some limit), prefer simple market mechs over more elaborate tacit transfer system (e.g. just give people money) etc. etc.
The precise situation makes the ‘econ-101’ intervention particularly appetising: if you value labour much more than the current price, and you are sitting atop a ungodly pile of lucre so vast you earnestly worry about how you can spend big enough chunks of it at once, ‘try throwing money at your long-standing labour shortages’ seems all the more promising.
Insofar as it goes, the observed track record looks pretty supportive of the econ-101 story—besides all the points Ryan mentions, compare “price suppression results in shortages” to the years-long (and still going strong) record of orgs lamenting they can’t get the staff.
Perhaps the underlying story is as EA-land is generally on the same team, one might hope you can do better than taking one’s cue from ‘econ-101’, given the typically adversarial/competitive dynamics it presumes between firms, and employee/employer. I think this hope is forlorn: EA-land might be full aspiring moral saints, but aspiring moral saints remain approximate to homo economicus. So the usual stories about the general benefits econ efficiency prove hard to better- and (play-pumps style) attempts to try feel apt to backfire (1, 2, 3, 4 - ad nauseum).
However, although I don’t think ‘PR concerns’ should guide behaviour (if X really is better than ¬X, the costs of people reasonably—if mistakenly—thinking less of you for doing X is typically better than strategising to hide this disagreement), many things look bad because they are bad.
In the good old days, I realised I was behind on my GWWC pledge so used some of my holiday to volunteer for a week of night-shifts as a junior doctor on a cancer ward. If in the future my ‘EA praxis’ is tantamount to splashing billionaire largess on a lifestyle for myself of comfort and affluence scarcely conceivable to my erstwhile beneficiaries, spending my days on intangible labour in well-appointed offices located among the richest places heretofore observed in human history, an outside observer may wonder what went wrong.
I doubt they would be persuaded by my defence is any better than obscene: “Not all heroes wear capes; some nobly spend thousands on yuppie accoutrements they deem strictly necessary for them to do the most good!”. Nor would they be moved by my remorse: self-effacing acknowledgement is not expiation, nor complaisance to my own vices atonement. I still think jacking up pay may be good policy, but personally, perhaps I should doubt myself too.
I’m just saying that when we think offering more salary will help us secure someone, we generally do it. This means that further salary raises seem to offer low benefit:cost. This seems consistent with econ 101.
Likewise, it’s possible to have a lot of capital, but for the cost-benefit of raising salaries to be below the community bar (which is something like invest the money for 20yr and spend on OP’s last dollar—which is a pretty high bar). Having more capital increases the willingness to pay for labour now to some extent, but tops out after a point.
To be clear, I’m sympathetic to the idea that salaries should be even higher (or we should have impact certificates or something). My position is more that (i) it’s not an obvious win (ii) it’s possible for the value of a key person to be a lot higher than their salary, without something going obviously wrong.
I definitely agree EAs are motivated somewhat by money in this range.
My thought is more about how it compares to other factors.
My impression of hiring at 80k is that salary rarely seems like a key factor in choosing us vs. other orgs (probably under 20% of cases). If we doubled salaries, I expect existing staff would save more, donate more, and consume a bit more; but I don’t think we’d see large increases in productivity or happiness.
My impression is that this is similar at other orgs who pay similarly to us. Some EA orgs still pay a lot less, and I think there’s a decent chance this is a mistake – though you’d need to weigh it against the current cost-effectiveness of the project.
I think the PR risks for charities paying high salaries are pretty big—normal people hate the idea of charities paying a lot. Paying regular employees $200k in London would make them higher paid than the CEOs of most regular charities, including pretty big ones where the staff are typically middle aged. EA has also had a lot of kudos from the ‘living on not very much to donate’ meme. Most people aiming to do good are assumed to be full of shit, and living on not very much is a hard-to-fake symbol that shows you’re morally serious. I agree that meme has some serious downsides relative to ‘you can earn a bunch of money doing good’ meme, but giving up that kudos is a major cost – which makes the trade off ambiguous to me. Maybe it’s possible to have some of both by paying a lot but having some people donate most of it, or maybe you get the worst of both worlds.
Agree that we shouldn’t expect large productivity/wellbeing changes. Perhaps a ~0.1SD improvement in wellbeing, and a single-digit improvement in productivity—small relative to effects on recruitment and retention.
I agree that it’s been good overall for EA to appear extremely charitable. It’s also had costs though: it sometimes encouraged self-neglect, portrayed EA as ‘holier than thou’, EA orgs as less productive, and EA roles as worse career moves than the private sector. Over time, as the movement has aged, professionalised, and solidified its funding base, it’s been beneficial to de-emphasise sacrifice, in order to place more emphasis on effectiveness. It better reflects what we’re currently doing, who we want to recruit, too. So long as we take care to project an image that is coherent, and not hypocritical, I don’t see a problem with accelerating the pivot. My hunch is that even apart from salaries, it would be good, and I’d be surprised if it was bad enough to be decisive for salaries.
I think there are a few other considerations that may point in the direction of slightly higher salaries (or at least, avoiding very low salaries). EA skews young in age as a movement, but this is changing as people grow up ‘with it’ or older people join. I think this is good. It’s important to avoid making it more difficult for people to join/remain involved who have other financial obligations that come in a little later in life, e.g.
- child-rearing
- supporting elderly parents
Relatedly, lower salaries can be easier to accept for longer for people who come from wealthier backgrounds and have better-off social support networks or expectations of inheritance etc (it can feel very risky if one is only in a position to save minimally, and not be able to build up rainy day funds for unexpected financial needs otherwise).