Note that a world where Insect suffering is 50% to be 10,000x as important as human suffering, and 50% to be 0.0001x as important as human suffering, is also a world where you can say exactly the same thing with humans and insects reversed.
That should make it clear that the âin expectation, [insects are] 5000x more importantâ claim that follows is false, or more precisely requires additional assumptions.
This is the type of argument I was trying to eliminate when I wrote this:
Thanks for this. I already had some sense that historical productivity data varied, but this prompted me to look at how large those differences are and they are bigger than I realised. I made an edit to my original comment.
TL;DR: Current productivity people mostly agree about. Historical productivity they do not. Some sources, including those in the previous comment, think Germany was more productive than the US in the past, which makes being less productive now more damning compared to a perspective where this has always been the case.
***
For simplicity Iâm going to focus on US vs. Germany in the first three bullets:
I struggle to find sources claiming a large gap in current productivity between the US and Germany.
Our World in Data shows 7%
The Banque France report you linked shows 8%
Wikipedia gives two sources:
The OECD, which shows 1%
The ILO, which shows 2%
The Bergeund report you linked to shows what appears to be ~5%[1]
However, historical productivity estimates vary much more significantly.
Some, like Our World in Data, show German productivity below US productivity near-continuously, e.g. 6% lower in 1995.
Some sources claim Germany had higher productivity 20+ years ago, and combined with the slightly lower present productivity that everybody agrees on that can imply noticeably lower growth:
If you look at the charts in the Banque France report you can see an example of this, with German productivity given as 3% higher in 2000.
A striking example is the OECD, which puts German productivity >10% higher in 1995.[2]
The Bergeund report, which is also the source for a chart from Draghiâs reportâshown belowâhas around 8% higher German productivity in 1995.
So there are two competing stories, which I donât know how to adjudicate between:
German productivity used to be slightly higher than US productivity, but is now slightly lower.
German productivity has always been slightly lower than US productivity.
German productivity is higher than EU productivity as a whole, by a factor of roughly 1.15x.
So you can substitute âslightly higherâ for âslightly lowerâ and âslightly lowerâ for âsignificantly lowerâ in (3), producing two parallel competing stories for the EU as a whole.
This link, with chart copied below as âFigure 3â, is an example of the âEU productivity has always been significantly lower than US productivityâ story.
Note also that this chart agrees with Bergeund/âDraghiâchart also belowâabout the current state; they both show EU-wide productivity at around 82% of US productivity in the present day. Itâs the 90s that they sharply disagree about, where one graph shows 74% and the other shows 95%, almost a 1.3x gap.
****
Where does that leave the conversation about European regulation? This is just my $0.02, but:
In my opinion the large divergences of opinion about the 90s, while academically interesting, are only indirectly relevant to the situation today. The situation today seems broadly accepted to be as follows:
Western and Northern EU countriesâGermany, Austria, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Swedenâhave very similar productivity to the US.
Eastern EU countriesâmostly ex-USSR countriesâhave much lower productivity, but are catching up fast.
Southern EU countries, e.g. Italy/âSpain/âGreece, have been languishing.
(Incidentally, so has the UK. I started to look at this when trying to understand how UK productivity compared to other countries, and was surprised to learn that the gap vs. nearby European countries was very similar to the gap vs. the US.)
Creating an average productivity of around 82% of the US level
I think that when Americans think about European regulations, they are mostly thinking about the Western and Northern countries. For example, when I ask Claude which EU countries have the strongest labour rights, the list of countries it gives me is entirely a subset of those countries. But unless you think replacing those regulations with US-style regulations would allow German productivity to significantly exceed US productivity, any claim that this would close the GDP per capita gap between the US and Germanyâaround 1.2xâwithout more hours being worked is not very reasonable. Let alone the GDP gap, which layers on the USâ higher population growth.
Digging into Southern Europe and figuring out why e.g. Italy and Germany have failed to converge seems a lot more reasonable. Maybe regulation is part of that story. I donât know.
So I land pretty much where the Economist article is, which is why I quoted it:
But in aggregate, western Europeans get just as much out of their labour as Americans do. Narrowing the gap in total GDP would require additional working hours, either via immigration or by raising the amount of time citizens spend on the job.
I am eyeballing at page 66 and adding together âTFPâ and âcapital deepeningâ factors. I think that amounts to labour productivity, and indeed the report does say âlabour productivity...ie the product of TFP and capital deepeningâ. Less confident about this than the other figures though.
Unhelpfully, the data is displayed as % of 2015 productivity. Iâm getting my claim from (a) OECD putting German 1995 productivity at 80% of 2015 levels, vs. the US being at 70% of 2015 levels and (b) 2022 productivity being 107% vs. 106% of 2022 levels. Given the OECD has 2022 US/âGerman productivity virtually identical, I think the forced implication is that they think German productivity was >10% higher in 1995.
Just to respond to a narrow point because I think this is worth correcting as it arises: Most of the US/âEU GDP growth gap you highlight is just population growth. In 2000 to 2022 the US population grew ~20%, vs. ~5% for the EU. That almost exactly explains the 55% vs. 35% growth gap in that time period on your graph; 1.55 /â 1.2 * 1.05 = 1.36.
This shouldnât be surprising, because productivity in the âbig 3â of US /â France /â Germany track each other very closely and have done for quite some time. (Edit: I wasnât expecting this comment to blow up, and it seems I may have rushed this point. See Erichâs comment below and my response.) Below source shows a slight increase in the gap, but of <5% over 20 years. If you look further down my post the Economist has the opposing conclusion, but again very thin margins. Mostly I think the right conclusion is that the productivity gap has barely changed relative to demographic factors.
Iâm not really sure where the meme that thereâs some big /â growing productivity difference due to regulation comes from, but Iâve never seen supporting data. To the extent culture or regulation is affecting that growth gap, itâs almost entirely going to be from things that affect total working hours, e.g. restrictions on migration, paid leave, and lower birth rates[1], not from things like how easy it is to found a startup.
But in aggregate, western Europeans get just as much out of their labour as Americans do. Narrowing the gap in total GDP would require additional working hours, either via immigration or by raising the amount of time citizens spend on the job.
Fertility rates are actually pretty similar now, but the US had much higher fertility than Germany especially around 1980 â 2010, converging more recently, so itâll take a while for that to impact the relative sizes of the working populations.
Re. 2, that maths is the right ballpark is trying to save but if donating I do want to remind people that UK donations are tax-deductible and this deduction is not limited the way I gather it is in some countries like the US.
So you wouldnât be paying ÂŁ95k in taxes if donating a large fraction of ÂŁ250k/âyr. Doing quick calcs, if living off ÂŁ45k then the split ends up being something like:
Income: 250k
Donations: 185k
Tax: 20k
Personal: 45k
(I agree with the spirit of your points.)
PS- Are donations tax deductible in the UK (Besides giftaid)? Iâve been operating on the assumption that they arenât, but if they were, I could give more.
I think the short answer is âdepends what you mean?â. Longer answer:
Income tax is fully tax deductible. But if you are a basic rate (20%) taxpayer, this is what Gift Aid is handling and there isnât much further to do. If you are a higher or additional (40% or 45%) taxpayer then there is additional relief you can claim.
This post goes into more detail on this.
National Insurance is not deductible.
Some pseudo-taxes on higher earners care about Adjusted Net Income. Confusingly, ANI is not your after-tax income, itâs roughly your Gross Income minus Pension Contributions minus Donations; more detail at link. So donations do reduce this. Things which care about ANI:
Higher Income Child Benefit Charge
If you have children, this kicks in as your ANI goes from ÂŁ60k to ÂŁ80k.
Withdrawal of the Personal Allowance
This kicks in as your ANI goes from ÂŁ100k to ÂŁ125k.
30 hours âfreeâ Childcare /â Tax Free Childcare
These are withdrawn entirely if your ANI exceeds ÂŁ100k.
Note this is a cliff edge not a taper, and if it applies to you you are probably thousands worse off just above ÂŁ100k ANI vs. just below. Bizarrely this means donating money can leave you better off.
Stylistically, some commenters donât seem to understand how this differs from a normal cause prioritisation exercise. Put simply, thereâs a difference between choosing to ignore the Drowning Child because there are even more children in the next pond over, and ignoring the drowning children entirely because they might grow up to do bad things. Most cause prioritisation is the former, this post is the latter.
As for why the latter is a problem, I agree with JWSâs observation that this type of âFor The Greater Goodâ reasoning leads to great harm when applied at scale. This is not, or rather should not be, hypothetical for EA at this point. No amount of abstract reasoning for why this approach is âbetterâ is going to outweigh what seems to me to be very clear empirical evidence to the contrary, both within EA and without.
Beyond that issue, itâs pretty easy to identify any person, grant, or policy as plausibly-very-harmful if you focus only on possible negative side effects, so you end up with motivated reasoning driving the answers for what to do.
For example, in this post Vasco recommends:
In addition, I encourage people there to take uncertainty seriously, and, before significant further investigation, only support interventions which are beneficial in the nearterm accounting for effects on farmed animals.
But why stop at farmed animals? What about wild animals, especially insects? What about the long-term future? If taking Expected Total Hedonistic Utilitarianism seriously as Vasco does, I expect these effects to dominate farmed animals. My background understanding is that population increase leads to cultivation of land for farming and reduces wild animal populations and so wild animal suffering quite a bit.. So I could equivalently argue:
In addition, I encourage Vasco to take uncertainty seriously, and, before significant further investigation, only support interventions which are beneficial in the nearterm accounting for effects on wild animals.
These would then tend to be the opposite set of interventions to the prior set. It just goes round and round. I think there are roughly two reasonable approcahes here:
Pick something that seems like a clear good - âsave livesâ, âend factory farmingâ, âsave the worldâ - and try to make it happen without tying yourself into knots about side-effects.
Really just an extension of (1), but if you come across a side effect that worries you, add that goal as a second terminal goal and split your resources between the goals.
By contrast, if your genuine goal is to pick an intervention with no plausible chance of causing significant harm, and you are being honest with yourself about possible backfires, you will do nothing.
I appreciate you writing this up at the top level, since it feels more productive to engage here than on one of a dozen comment threads.
I have substantive and âstylisticâ issues with this line of thinking, which Iâll address in separate comments. Substantively, on the âSuggestionsâ section:
At the very least, I think GiveWell and Ambitious Impact should practice reasoning transparency, and explain in some detail why they neglect effects on farmed animals. By ignoring uncertain effects on farmed animals, GiveWell and Ambitious Impact are implicitly assuming they are certainly irrelevant.
Why? It seems clear that you arenât GiveWellâs target audience. You know that, and they know that. Unless someone gives me a reason to think that Animal Welfare advocates were expecting to be served by GiveWell, I donât see any value in them clarifying something that seems fairly obvious.
In addition, I encourage people there to take uncertainty seriously, and, before significant further investigation, only support interventions which are beneficial in the nearterm accounting for effects on farmed animals.
Unless the differences on human welfare are incredibly narrow or the impacts on animal welfare are enormous, this seems like a very bad idea. In general, donating $100 to a charity with suboptimal impacts on human welfare but improved impacts on animal welfare is going to be strictly worseâfor both human and animal welfareâthan donating $90 to the best human welfare charity and $10 to the best animal welfare charity.
Similarly, investigating the exact size of the effects mostly seems like a waste of time to me. I wrote this up in more detail a few years ago; was addressing a longtermist cluelessness critique but you can pretty much cut/âpaste the argument. To save a click-through, the key passage is:
Similar thoughts would seem to apply to also other possible side-effects of AMF donations; population growth impacts, impacts on animal welfare (wild or farmed), etc. In no case do I have reason to think that AMF is a particularly powerful lever to move those things, and so if I decide that any of them is the Most Important Thing then AMF would not even be on my list of candidate interventions
GiveWell and Ambitious Impact could also offset the nearterm harm caused to farmed animals by funding the best animal welfare interventions. I calculate these are over 100 times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities ignoring their effects on animals. If so, and some funding from GiveWell or Ambitious Impact is neutral due to negative effects on animals, these could be neutralised by donating less than 1 % (= 1â100) of that funding to the best animal welfare interventions.
Equally, GiveWell or AIMâs donors can offset if they are worried about this. That seems much better than GiveWell making the choice for all their donors.
I think my if-the-stars-align minimum is probably around ÂŁ45k these days. But then it starts going up once there are suboptimal circumstances like the ones you mention. In practice I might expect it to land at 125% to 250% of that figure depending how the non-salary aspects of the job look.
Iâm curious about the motivation of the question; FWIW my figure here is a complicated function of my expenses, anticipated flexibility on those expenses, past savings, future plans, etc. in a way that I wouldnât treat it as much of a guide to what anyone else would or should say.
It does indeed depend a lot. I think the critical thing to remember is that the figure should be the minimum of what it costs to get a certain type of talent and how valuable that talent is. Clean Water is worth thousands of dollars per year to me, but if you turned up on my doorstep with a one-year supply of water for $1k Iâd tell you to stop wasting my time because I can get it far more cheaply than that.
When assessing the cost of acquiring talent, the hard thing to track is how many people arenât in the pool of applicants at all due to funding constraints. That sounds like itâs Abrahamâs position and I think itâs more common than often given credit for; thereâs something very low-status in EA about saying âI could be doing this more impactful thing, but I wonât because it wonât pay me enoughâ.
Funding isnât the only constraint on salaries of course; appearances matter too. Once your org is paying enough that you canât really pay more without getting a lot of sideways glances you donât want to get, thatâs when I would mostly stop calling you funding-constrained* and then I imagine this number can get really really high; cost of talent becomes ~infinite and weâre back to looking at âvalueâ. Open Philâs hiring is perhaps in approximately that position.
If you are still in a position where you could raise salaries if it werenât for funding constraints, I tend to think this number struggles to make it out of low six figures. Possible exceptions are positions that want a very specific combination of skills and experiences, like senior leadership at central EA orgs.
*Assuming you are mostly turning money into people into impact, rather than e.g. money into nets into impact.
I got very lucky that I was born in a city that is objectively one of the best places in the world to do what I do, so reasons to move location are limited.
More generally I donât feel like Iâm doing anything particularly out of the ordinary here compared to a world where I am not donating; I like money, more of it is better than less of it, but there are sometimes costs to getting more money that outweigh the money. Though I would say that as you go up the earnings curve it gets easier and easier to mitigate the personal costs, e.g. by spending money to save time.
Perhaps the biggest risk is that if I set my marginal tax + donation rate too high I am insufficiently incentivised to earn more, to the detriment of both me and the world. Still working on that one.
This really depends how broadly I define things; does reading the EA Forum count? In terms of time that feels like itâs being pretty directly spent on deciding, my sense is ~50 hours per year. Thatâs roughly evenly split between checking whether the considerations that inform my cause prioritisaition have changedâe.g. has a big new funder moved into a spaceâand evaluating individual opportunities.
I touched on the evaluation question in a couple of other answers.
Itâs either my 2014 donations to 80k or my 2015 donations to Charity Science, which eventually evolved into AIM. Both orgs were pretty small at the time, from memory we were >15% of their budgets in those years.
My views have not changed directionally, but I do feel happier with them than I did at the time for a couple of reasons:
I thought and continue to think that the best argument is some version of âclever arguments aside, from a layperson perspective what youâre doing looks awfully similar to what caused the GFC, and the GFC was a huge disaster which society has not learned the lessons fromâ.
If you talk to people inside finance, they will usually reject the second claim and say a huge amount has changed since the GFC.
In particular, regulatory pressure shifted many âinterestingâ risks from too-big-to-fail banks to hedge funds and firms like Jane Street (JS), where I used to work. JS arguably has much better incentives to keep its house in order than the big banks did, and it shouldnât have any call on public funds if it fails to do so.
But of course there was a reasonable question of whether JS and its ilk would actually succeed in doing this. And if they failed, would society pick up the tab somehow. As more time passes, the GFC looks more like the outlier event here.
On the positive side of the ledger, most of my work at JS was improving the pricing of equity ETFs. When I started there I felt like almost nobody I spoke to outside JS knew what an ETF was and when I explained it they couldnât really see the point. Now I feel like virtually all UK personal financial advice I see will mention ETFs as a solid option; a cheap and simple way to invest in a diversified fashion. Iâm fine with having been a very small part of what made that happen.
With my more recent work it seems much too soon to say anything definitive about social impact, so I always try to acknowledge some chance that Iâll feel bad when I look back on this.
It has varied. Giving both of us half the budget is in some ways most natural but we quickly noticed it was gameable to the extent we can predict each otherâs actions, similar to what is described here. At the moment weâre much closer to âdiscuss a lot and fund based on consensusâ.
Even with attempts to prevent it, I think annual risk of value drift for me is greater than the annual expected real return on equities, which tends to defeat the usual argument for giving later.
Another exercise Iâve done occasionally is to look at my donations from say 5-10 years ago and muse on whether I would rather have invested the money and given now. So far that hasnât been close to true, and thatâs in spite of an impressive bull market in stocks over the last decade. Money was just so much more of an issue back then. I thought this from Will MacAskill was a good reflection on just how money-constrained things were âin the old daysâ, for those who didnât see it:
At the time, there was very little funding available in EA. Lunch was the same, every day: budget baguettes and plain hummus. The initial salaries offered by CEA were ÂŁ15,000/âyr pre-tax. When it started off, CEA was only able to pay its staff at all because I loaned them ÂŁ7,000 â my entire life savings at the time. One of our first major donations was from Julia Wise, for $10,000, which was a significant fraction of the annual salary she received from being a mental health social worker at a prison.
Of course the directly relevant question is: When I look back on this relatively abundant period in 2034, will I feel the same way? I honestly donât know, realistically the biggest factors will be what Good Ventures decides to do with their money and how well EA attracts other money.
I sometimes think about whether we have or should have language for a mental health equivalent of Second-Impact syndrome. At the time I burned out I would say I was dealing with four ~independent situations or circumstances that most people would recognise as challenging, but my attitude to each one was âthis is fine, I can handle thisâ. Taken one at a time that was probably true, all at once was demonstrably false.
Somehow I needed to notice that I was already dealing with one or two challenging situations and strongly pivot to a defensive posture to avoid taking on even more, similar to how you shouldnât risk a second concussion shortly after your first one. I think this is a more helpful takeaway than âwell make fewer missteps next timeâ, which was my first reaction.
I have taken that posture once or twice since then, but the nature of doing prevention correctly is that you never really know if what youâre doing is actually making a difference. Still, it seems the logical thing to do.
This was a surprising question to me, because thatâs not how I think about my donations. I think there are a few things going on there:
I only listed the four largest recipients that account for around 2/â3rds of the total, so smaller orgs were naturally not listed.
As it happens another cluster I very nearly mentioned was AIM. Iâve donated roughly 150k (10% of donations) to AIM /â AIMâs predecessors /â AIM-incubated charities.
At the time I gave to 80k, in 2014-2018, they were much less of an âestablished institutionâ and much more of a fast-expanding startup.
Similarly, the bulk of the money I gave to GWWC was right as they were spinning up again in 2021.
Still, even with that said I think youâre pointing at something real; my approach has certainly been more institution-heavy than say EAIF. So to show some cards, Iâm roughly of the opinion that the âgive a promising individual a one-off grantâ setup thatâs common in EA is pretty dysfunctional and Iâm reluctant to pour much money into it. It requires a lot of evaluation time on the funder side and causes a lot of pain and heartache on the grantee side. Thereâs a reason most people prefer to be employees not contractors, and I think even contractors have way better average job security than the individuals and tiny orgs inside this model.
Then Iâm also not sold the outputs are better as they would need to be to justify those non-financial costs. In the private sector my understanding is that large orgs are generally more productive than smaller ones, at least up to sizes way larger than all EA orgs, due to fixed overheads and better ability to allow employees to specialise.
None of this is a hard no, and clearly I have done this sometimes. AIM mitigates some of these issues about as well as I think they can be mitigated. Sometimes Iâm just much closer to a grant opportunity than other funders and it makes sense for me to take it. But mostly I do end up preferring to give to institutions.
EAâs relationship with earn-to-givers is weird.
On the one hand, my post from last year is currently the 2nd-highest-upvoted post of all time on this Forum. People in EA are mostly nice about what I do, especially online. And when EA comes in for criticism, I often feel like my donations are effectively being wheeled out as a defense. To be clear, in many ways this is reasonable; I probably wouldnât have donated anything like as much if it werenât for EA.
On the other hand, Iâm sometimes reminded of the observation that it is ânecessary to get behind someone in order to stab them in the backâ. Some of the people and groups who are using me as a shield are the same groups who have spent the last several years trying to get me to stop earning to give or at least stop donating to Givewell charities, and this has had meaningful impacts on my motivation that I have mostly mitigated by talking to them less. In these cases I am doing what I do in spite of them, not because of them, and any lives I save arenât theirs to claim.
I donât want EA to stop thinking about questions whose answers may challenge peopleâs life choices, this seems too core to the project. I do want to flag that non-genuine support isnât as useful or as harmless as people perhaps think it is. I donât gain anything from someone praising my choices in public while privately thinking my choices are dumb, and would mostly encourage people not to do the former if they feel the latter. Trust is hard to regain once lost.
One obvious issue here is that if youâre earning to give youâre donating, and many people in EA are searching for money. So I get the incentives, but silence is also an option. Probably not a coincidence that the dynamics Iâm describing here bear a lot of resemblance to what people much richer than me grumble about.
Pragmatically, I think the best path forward is for people on the Effective Giving/âEtG side of things to support each other more and look to the wider movement less. There are some things starting to shift in this direction.
Would you say currently, the median EA should consider trying some E2G (or at least non-EA work while giving significantly) early on in their career?
Thatâs quite a cautious phrasing! Let me strengthen it a bit then respond to that:
As of 2024, should the median EA try some E2G (or at least non-EA work while giving significantly) early on in their career?
My thoughts on this now depend a fair bit on where you draw the boundaries of âEAâ.
For the median EA survey taker, I pretty strongly lean âyesâ here. Full disclosure that I am moderately influenced by my partnerâs experience of trying to get an âimpactfulâ job straight out of university, but Iâve seen a lot of others in similar spots, just they mostly arenât married to EAs and they mostly bounce right out of the movement rather than writing it up.
For the median student or early-career EAG attendee in 2024, I am much less confident but lean no for âmedianâ, my entirely guessed percentage would hover more around 35%. Thatâs a crowd which has roughly been selected for having the skills to contribute directly to important EA causes[1].
Somewhere in between is the actual audience of this post, EA forum readers. I donât have a clear lean here, but I would note the following:
My understanding of my strengths and weaknesses today is not the same as it was 5 years ago, and itâs definitely not the same as it was when I graduated. I think this is a common way for people in their 30s to feel, and it makes committing âtoo earlyâ unlikely to work in my view.
You can short-circuit the first bullet to a degree by deferring to a wider group of mostly-older people. Trying to get a job âthe normal wayâ does this to a significant degree! The job market is not perfect, but if you engage it will make at least some effort to place you where you are best-suited.
The other classic-for-EAs way to beat that issue is to essentially defer to older EAs; 80k advisors, EAG admissions staff, people you meet through EAG or retreats, etc. This can work, but bear in mind that those people ultimately will not bear the consequences of mistaken advice, much less so than a firm which makes a mistake in hiring you[2]. Look for ways to confirm those recommendations that involve someone else having skin in the game before you make life-altering decisions.
E.g., from recent post:
An applicant might be rejected if: They do not seem well-placed to take impactful actions as a result of the event....
EAG is first and foremost a professional networking event.
I think young people really donât always realise this, so to say it outright: bad hires are expensive. Even in countries like the UK/âUS with minimal worker protections. Personally I knew this in the abstract but it wasnât until I became a manager that I really âgotâ this.
I believe this productivity puzzle turned out to be about current vs. constant prices:
AFAICT those sources are using âconstant pricesâ. The other sources, which show pretty much the same productivity gap over time, are using âcurrent pricesâ. I worked with Claude to summarise the differences, final summary from Claude copied below.
While I agree with Claude that both methods have issues, I do want to flag one particularly odd implication of constant prices, courtesy of this Twitter user; even if a statistical agency continuously sees French GDP-per-capita as 70-75% of the US level in the present-day; the over-time graph has US and France âdivergingâ by changing the valuation of historical production to reflect modern-day prices.