A few thoughts on how we could mitigate some of these risks:
Have generous reimbursement policies at EA orgs but don’t pay exorbitant salaries.
I think most EAs should value their time higher and be willing to trade money for time, and in these cases, I think you can justify a business expense. I think this will help clarify which spending choices are meant to actually boost productivity and which are just for fun. To be clear, I think spending some fraction of your income on just “fun” things like vacations, concerts, and eating out is fine in moderation. But to me at least, the shallow pond thought experiment is still basically true and there is plenty of need left in the world, even with the current funding situation.
I think we systematically overestimate how much spending more on personal consumption will make us happy/productive. I know plenty of people in finance/consulting/tech who have convinced themselves that they “need” to spend hundreds of thousands on personal consumption every year. I’ve lived in NYC on <$50K after taxes and donating for 4 years and feel like I’ve been able to do basically everything I want to do.
Emphasize costly signals of altruism.
We should encourage people to take the GWWC pledge and go vegetarian/vegan because they’re probably good things to do on their merits and because they signal a commitment to making a sacrifice to help others.
Disclosure: my partner is working on Carrick’s campaign. But I also chose to donate $2900 before she was involved with the campaign. I was persuaded by the fact that small dollar donations are particularly useful in elections, which have individual donation caps. Also, if you’re primarily interested in funding longtermist projects, I don’t think there’s much need for small dollar donors in other domains given how much big donors are focusing on LT.
I think Carrick has at least a 20% chance based on conversations with relevant domain experts. He’s leading in fundraising, which I expect to continue. Fundraising is more important to electoral success the more obscure the race is, and house primaries are the most obscure federal elections there are. He also got ~10k Twitter followers in a few days and has 10x more than Salinas (his top competitor IMO). I know Twitter isn’t real life, but it speaks to a strong network and savvy comms, which matter a lot in campaigning.
Salinas was appointed to her state rep position and has never won a competitive election. She has strong endorsements, and I think is still probably the candidate most likely to win based on name recognition, endorsements, and political experience.
FWIW, I worked for a successful state house campaign and have volunteered on a few other campaigns.