Great comment. I think “people who sacrifice significantly higher salaries to do EA work” is a plausible minimum definition of who those calling for democratic reforms feel deserve a greater say in funding allocation. It doesn’t capture all of those people, nor solve the harder question of “what is EA work/an EA organization?” But it’s a start.
Your 70⁄30 example made me wonder whether redesigning EA employee compensation packages to include large matching contributions might help as a democratizing force. Many employers outside EA/in the private sector offer a matching contributions program, wherein they’ll match something like 1-5% of your salary (or up to a certain dollar value) in contributions to a certified nonprofit of your choosing. Maybe EA organizations (whichever voluntarily opt into this) could do that except much bigger—say, 20-50% of your overall compensation is paid not to you but to a charity of your choosing. This could also be tied to tenure so that the offered match increases at a faster rate than take home pay, reflecting the intuition that committed longtime members of the EA community have engaged with the ideas more, and potentially sacrificed more, and consequently deserve a stronger vote than newcomers.
Ex: Sarah’s total compensation is 100k, of which she takes home 80k and her employer offers an additional 20k to a charity of her choosing. After 2 years working there, her total package jumps to 120k, of which she takes home 88k and allocates another 32k. After 10 years she takes home 110 and allocates another 90, etc. This tenure could be interchangeable across participating organizations. With time, it may even resemble the “impact certificates” you mention.
Employers could limit this match to a prespecified list of plausibly EA recipients if they wish. Employees could accept this arrangement en lieu of giving X% of their personal incomes (which has the added benefit of avoiding taxation on “income” that’s only going to be given away to largely tax-deductible organizations anyway). Employees could also elect to give a certain amount back to their employing organization, which some presumably would since people tend to believe in the importance of work they are doing. We could write software to anonymize these donations, and avoid any fear of recrimination for NOT regifting it to the employing org.
One downside could be making it more expensive for EA organizations to hire, and thus harder for them to grow and harder for individual EAs to find an EA job. It also wouldn’t solve the fact that the resources controlled by EA organizations are not proportional to the number of people they employ, especially at the extremes. Perhaps if mega-donors like Dustin are open to democratization but wary of how to define the EA electorate, they’d support higher grants to participating recipients, on the logic that “if they’re EA enough to deserve my grant for X effective project, they’re EA enough to deserve a say in how some of my other money is spent too” (even beyond what they need for X).
For all I know EA organizations may have something like this already. If anyone has toyed with or tried to implement this idea before, I’d love to hear about it.
Another option would be to just directly give EA org employees regranting funds, with no need for them to donate their own money to regrant them. However, requiring some donation, maybe matching at a high rate, e.g. 5:1, gets them to take on at least some personal cost to direct funding.
Also, the EA org doesn’t need to touch the money. The org can just confirm employment, and the employee can regrant through a system Open Phil (or GWWC) sets up or report a donation for matching to Open Phil (or GWWC, with matching funds provided by Open Phil).
Great comment. I think “people who sacrifice significantly higher salaries to do EA work” is a plausible minimum definition of who those calling for democratic reforms feel deserve a greater say in funding allocation. It doesn’t capture all of those people, nor solve the harder question of “what is EA work/an EA organization?” But it’s a start.
Your 70⁄30 example made me wonder whether redesigning EA employee compensation packages to include large matching contributions might help as a democratizing force. Many employers outside EA/in the private sector offer a matching contributions program, wherein they’ll match something like 1-5% of your salary (or up to a certain dollar value) in contributions to a certified nonprofit of your choosing. Maybe EA organizations (whichever voluntarily opt into this) could do that except much bigger—say, 20-50% of your overall compensation is paid not to you but to a charity of your choosing. This could also be tied to tenure so that the offered match increases at a faster rate than take home pay, reflecting the intuition that committed longtime members of the EA community have engaged with the ideas more, and potentially sacrificed more, and consequently deserve a stronger vote than newcomers.
Ex: Sarah’s total compensation is 100k, of which she takes home 80k and her employer offers an additional 20k to a charity of her choosing. After 2 years working there, her total package jumps to 120k, of which she takes home 88k and allocates another 32k. After 10 years she takes home 110 and allocates another 90, etc. This tenure could be interchangeable across participating organizations. With time, it may even resemble the “impact certificates” you mention.
Employers could limit this match to a prespecified list of plausibly EA recipients if they wish. Employees could accept this arrangement en lieu of giving X% of their personal incomes (which has the added benefit of avoiding taxation on “income” that’s only going to be given away to largely tax-deductible organizations anyway). Employees could also elect to give a certain amount back to their employing organization, which some presumably would since people tend to believe in the importance of work they are doing. We could write software to anonymize these donations, and avoid any fear of recrimination for NOT regifting it to the employing org.
One downside could be making it more expensive for EA organizations to hire, and thus harder for them to grow and harder for individual EAs to find an EA job. It also wouldn’t solve the fact that the resources controlled by EA organizations are not proportional to the number of people they employ, especially at the extremes. Perhaps if mega-donors like Dustin are open to democratization but wary of how to define the EA electorate, they’d support higher grants to participating recipients, on the logic that “if they’re EA enough to deserve my grant for X effective project, they’re EA enough to deserve a say in how some of my other money is spent too” (even beyond what they need for X).
For all I know EA organizations may have something like this already. If anyone has toyed with or tried to implement this idea before, I’d love to hear about it.
I think this is a proposal worth exploring. Open Phil could earmark additional funding to orgs for employee donation matching.
Another option would be to just directly give EA org employees regranting funds, with no need for them to donate their own money to regrant them. However, requiring some donation, maybe matching at a high rate, e.g. 5:1, gets them to take on at least some personal cost to direct funding.
Also, the EA org doesn’t need to touch the money. The org can just confirm employment, and the employee can regrant through a system Open Phil (or GWWC) sets up or report a donation for matching to Open Phil (or GWWC, with matching funds provided by Open Phil).