I am an attorney in a public-sector position not associated with EA, although I cannot provide legal advice to anyone. My involvement with EA so far has been mostly limited so far to writing checks to GiveWell and other effective charities in the Global Health space, as well as some independent reading. I have occasionally read the forum and was looking for ideas for year-end giving when the whole FTX business exploded . . .
Jason
Karma: 17,974
How much paid staff time was devoted to content development work in the past? I briefly skimmed the list of top posts in years past, and I didn’t get the impression that the Forum was a “bulletin board” in years past. If there were less paid staff time devoted to content development in years past, it would make me think it less likely that reducing that effort now would trigger a meaningful loss of Forum quality. It’s of course possible that something is different now—either to justify a greater or lesser level of content work than for years prior.
My guess is that the optimal number of FTEs working on the Forum is greater than 0.0 (let’s please not go to Reddit) and less than 3.0. But it’s hard for me to say where I think it should be within that range.
The EA equivalent could be things like discounted or early access to EAG(x) events, member-only discussion groups, or eligibility to complete advanced courses offered by national EA associations.
Maybe, but this sounds to me a lot like erecting new pay gates for engagement with the community (both the membership fee and any extra fee for the advanced courses, etc.). Maybe that’s unavoidable, but it does carry some significant downsides that aren’t present with a mountaineering club (where the benefits of participation are intended to flow mainly to the participant rather than to third parties like animals or future people)
It also seems at tension with the current recruitment strategy by increasing barriers/friction to deeper engagement. And it seems that people most commonly become interested in EA in their 20s, an age at which imposing financial barriers to deeper engagement may be particularly negative. While I think people would be okay lowering pay gates based on certain objectively-applied markers of merit or need, I am not confident that this could be done in a way that both didn’t impede “core” recruitment and that “supporter” members experienced as fair and acceptable. Most people don’t want to pay for something others are getting for free / near-free without a sufficiently compelling reason.
I don’t really understand what would be in it for the corporation, but I haven’t thought very deeply about it. (This is all from a US perspective. I’m using Coca-Cola as the company in my examples given its use in the post, and GiveWell as the potential charity).
Under I.R.C. 170(b)(2)(A), most corporations can deduct charitable contributions up to 10% of their taxable income. More discussion here. Maybe companies could try claiming their matching donations as an employment-related business expense instead of as a charitable donation per se, but I doubt (e.g.) Coca-Cola is running up against that 10% cap on the latter. I suspect that few corporations need the matching program to get credit for donating more from a tax perspective.[1]
If Coca-Cola wanted to give money to GiveWell (conditioned on strangers also giving money), trying to do this through an employee-matching system rather than through a more direct method seems awfully convoluted to me. I’m guessing Coca-Cola would prefer to give in a way that maximized the reputational benefits flowing it to / made its donation look as big as possible, and that experts in fundraising could tell them how to best accomplish that. I’m not sure why Coca-Cola would want to reinvent the wheel here.
If for some reason Coca-Cola wanted to give more money through employee matching in general, then it would have the option of increasing the generosity of their matches for authentic employee donations. From its perspective, that seems a superior option in light of the usual goals of an employee-match program. To the extent that the corporation thinks there is PR benefit from higher employee donations, that isn’t going to fly when it comes to light that the employees were acting as mere conduits for strangers. Moreover, one would expect more of an employee morale/retention boost for charities the staff strongly cared about (and their willingness to donate some of their own money is a signal about existence and intensity of staff preference).
So I’m not sure I see a clear use case here unless an employer (1) wants to give money to specific charities we endorse, (2) wants to do that through an employee-matching program for reasons that I am not predicting, and (3) feels that public disclosure of what is going on would not undermine the employer’s objectives. If I’m missing something, then figuring out what it is might be helpful in thinking through strategy.
If a company is willing to match $10,000 per employee per year, they may be flexible about whether the money comes from the employee or others in the community — the company’s contribution is the same either way and the company still enjoys the upsides of giving.
That being said: I assume that a company that is willing to match up to $10,000 per year first obtained projections on how much that policy would actually cost on a per-employee basis. I doubt they budgeted close to $10K/employee/year for this, although I don’t know what the participation rates are in reality. This site suggests ~31.25% of matching funds might be claimed.
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The most obvious exception would be those without taxable income. But even then, I suspect there may be less risky ways to justify charitable donations as an ordinary business expense than through what sounds a whole lot like straw donors. Cf. Marquis v. Comm’r, 49 T.C. 485 (1968) (charitable deductions allowed as business expenses, albeit under somewhat unusual circumstances).
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(US perspective)
There’s a limit of $50 for anonymous cash donations to a candidate. They could be annoying enough to account for—and vaguely disreputable enough—that they are of no meaningful benefit to the candidate. I don’t recall ever seeing a candidate provide a clear mechanism for such donations, and that may be why (although my experience is limited).
Donating through a straw donor to evade campaign-finance laws is an excellent way to end up in trouble with the feds.
I think an organization like that is plausible, but I get the sense that it is a much different animal than the Dutch mountaineering association.
Although the financial breakdown is sparse (and I can’t read Dutch), a glance at the website suggests the association offers a lot of activities and other sources of value for its members—which I am guessing are significantly more costly than a card, sticker, e-mail, and so on. If you’re even moderately interested in mountaineering, it makes sense that joining would provide you with a lot of value. Thus, I wouldn’t be surprised that a large fraction of people who are moderately interested in mountaineering join.
That doesn’t strike me as the right joining-percentage base rate for an organization in which members don’t get much to show for their membership fees. For example, one might consider the number of individuals who support the free / open source software movement versus the number who are paying members of a FOSS software organization. If the conversion rate of interested people into membership of a sticker-and-card organization is rather low, you need a rather large group of interested people to end up with a sizable membership.
Don’t get me wrong; a membership organization with 80,000 people would be great! I just don’t see that a low-cost membership organization as a likely way to reduce net funding pressures.
I suspect that a delayed-allocation model is going to add a lot of complexity (and potentially create user-trust issues). It seems to me that such a model would require significantly more engineering and legal/operational work than a model in which GoodWallet transfers money directly from the donor to the creator’s preselected charity (“immediate model”). It requires the user to have more trust in GoodWallet as custodian of the funds, [1] and is likely to either cost the donor a potential tax deduction or require GoodWallet to jump through some hoops to qualify as a proper charity in its own right. And I think would-be donors do consider the tax-deductibility of a donation as a signal that things are on the up and up.
The advantages of such a delayed-allocation model over an immediate model are not clear to me. In particular, even if the universe of eligible charities is drawn from GiveWell’s recommended-charity list, the possible choices are not that different from each other and I suspect few creators would place much value on the ability to defer a decision on which one to point their supporters to.
As for “mini-DAF functionality for everyone”: as I understand it from a US perspective, the classic reason for DAFs is to allow donors to take the tax deduction now while letting the donation grow for a while and deferring the choice of charity until later. Especially with changes to the US tax code a few years ago, people with modest sums to give aren’t generally in a position to itemize donations anyway, and I didn’t see anything about offering investment opportunities. So I’m not sure who the target audience is for this functionality.
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As a potential donor with limited knowledge of anyone involved, I’d be relatively less worried about GoodWallet’s leaders being dishonest but relatively more concerned about whether those leaders had structured things in a way that protected funds intended for charitable purposes from GoodWallet’s potential creditors.
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On the income side of the ledger, having more members might help. But the more members you have, the more you need to spend on member-service activities (i.e., whatever it is that you’re offering that makes people want to pay the membership fee).
On the one hand, I don’t think that member-service activity expenditure would scale linearly with increased membership. On the other hand, current spend on meta / community building activities is far more than €50/involved person. So my assumption is that—at best—the marginal costs of serving additional members would be equal to the membership revenue. A meta in which the spend per average member was anywhere close to that would be a very different meta indeed.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that making a partisan donation could be an issue for some non-governmental roles either. I don’t have a strong sense of that, but recall that people looking to assert that an organization has a partisan bent will search their employees’ contribution records and then report that as evidence of bent. So I were trying to come across as a non-partisan organization, I might be concerned about hiring a bunch of people who had all donated to the same team.
That’s admittedly speculative . . . but probably not more speculative than a ~$10 donation being outcome-determinative in a major US political race, either.
More like: If EA is healthy, then groups that have been getting a consistent level of support should be as a class either stable or growing. That’s why I suggested looking at non-EOSP elite university groups—them being at least stable as a class would be evidence of general health. On the other hand, if their output is dropping despite holding investment steady, that would not be a great sign.
According to media issues, the JustGiving platform has some issues, so I’d consider not donating through it:
Although the Early OSP intervention at those universities could be influencing the outcomes—checking elite universities at which Early OSP wasn’t offered could control for this.
(Theres a typo in the title: 2025, not 2023.)
4 - Following the crisis, the movement enters a period of retrenchment and disillusionment—this is where EA is currently. This decline could take a variety of forms: declining numbers of explicitly signed-up members, the gradual plateauing and waning of the group’s political influence, or significant numbers of prominent members distancing themselves from the movement. This is the most ‘you know it when you see it’ criteria of the four presented, and hard to be exact about historically as often the rise of movements are more closely studied than the gradual falls. Nevertheless, all of the candidates I’ve found do show this pattern of decline.
Were movements in which adherents / influence / resources flowed ~productively into a ~spiritual-successor movement within the scope of your research? Admittedly, drawing a line between the original movement and the spiritual successor movement could be a bit tricky.
Conditioned on EA is in decline, we might be able to learn from those kinds of movements how to decline gracefully and in a way that best empowers spiritual-successor movements.
I don’t see a ton of overlap here. There are lots of social movements, and meaningful engagement with other social movements does take time, energy, and focus for both movements. Unless there is high overlap or unusual synergies, sometimes it is better for both movements to basically ignore each other. (I would emphasize that the points below apply to whether it is in radical feminism’s interests to expend resources on engaging with EA as much as the converse.)
For instance, although Open Phil has funded work on reducing incarceration rates in the US, that isn’t a current focus of any appreciable segment of the EA community to my knowledge. And to the extent that radical feminists are also working in or near core EA cause areas, it’s plausible that most radical feminists and most EAs have different values and goals that cannot be harmonized with better understanding of different approaches. The idea that their values in these areas are fundamentally compatible is plausible, but would need evidentiary support.
Is there evidence of meaningful competition between the two groups for the same donors and funding sources? Based on your description so far, the movements seem different enough to me that I would expect very few donors to be realistically open to funding EAs (but listening to radical feminist advisors), or vice versa.
In my view, EA generally shouldn’t say much at all about “issues [it is] poorly suited to solving” (and I suspect the same is true of radical feminism). If EA methodologies are not well-suited to solving a problem, then they probably aren’t well suited to figuring out which of the numerous other altruistic social movements are best situated to solve the problem either. Moreover, trying to recommend charities or charitable approaches in a bunch of non-EA cause areas, and doing a good job of it, would be a costly endeavor at best.
And realistically, there are tons of different altruistic or altruism-adjacent social movements, and there may be many of the size or significance of radical feminism. Expecting one’s reader to do a lot of research on one specific movement is a rather heavy ask.
My starting point would be to give the MA group a good bit of breathing room here. Based on this quote, it appears that Bregman is intentionally trying to do something distinct from EA. I think there’s a lot of potential value in that approach, and would be concerned about interfering with it. That may change as MA becomes more established, but for now I think it makes sense for MA to focus on being its own thing with a clear separation from EA.
While I too suspect that some of the distancing is “for PR reasons,” I suspect there is more to it than that. The quote suggests that Bregman is aiming for a movement with a broader scope rather than focusing as much on the recruitment of elite, highly engaged individuals. I personally think that is a vast area that EA has been largely unable to tap (in part for cultural reasons), and I’m not sure if significant interfacing with EA early on is going to help MA tap it. Once it has its own culture and is more developed, MA should be in a position to work more closely with EA without being swallowed by it.
Of course, MA will develop its own weaknesses and turnoffs. But there’s significant value in those weaknesses being somewhat different than the weaknesses and turnoffs of the EA community. We want to maximize the number of individuals who will find a comfortable home in a effectiveness-focused community of altruism, and having the EA-like movements be too similar doesn’t move us toward that goal.
Rubenstein says that “As the low-hanging fruit of basic health programs and cash transfers are exhausted, saving lives and alleviating suffering will require more complicated political action, such as reforming global institutions.” Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of low-hanging fruit out there, and things have recently gotten even worse as of late with the USAID collapse and the UK cutting back on foreign aid.
In general, as the level of EA’s involvement and influence in a given domain increases, the more I start to be concerned about the sort of things that Rubenstein worries about here. When a particular approach is at a smaller size, it’s likely to concentrate on niches where its strengths shine and its limitations are less relevant. I would put the classic GiveWell-type interventions in that category, for instance. Compared to the scope of both the needs in global health & development and the actions of other actors, EA is still a fairly small fish.
I have only speculation, but it’s plausible to me that developments in AI could be playing a role. The original decision in 2000 was to sunset “several decades after [Bill and Melinda Gates’] deaths.” Likely the idea was that handpicked successor leadership could carry out the founders’ vision and that the world would be similar enough to the world at the time of their death or disability for that plan to make sense for several decades after the founders’ deaths. To the extent that Gates thought that the world is going to change more rapidly than he believed in 2000, this plan may look less attractive than it once did.
What percent of my disposable income (After needed expenses) should a young uni student set aside for fuzzies, versus just giving it all to utilons and only doing free fun stuff (e.g. public TV, only donated clothes etc)
Given the “likely to be under £500 a year”—this is not intended as an opinion for all uni students.
I would still support de minimis effective giving for habit-forming reasons, among others.
If having too many org-promotional posts is unhealthy for the Forum, one could argue for structuring the Frontpage to prevent org promotions/announcements from becoming too prominent. That could mean a weighting adjustment, a hard cap on how many org-promo posts can appear on Frontpage (e.g., the community section), or adjusting the Frontpage algorithm to more heavily weight comments/interaction (which these posts tend to have less of).
There may be an ideal stable range of activity level for the Forum. Users feel they can commit a certain amount of time to keeping up with things, and they may experience having too much content to wade through as frustrating and off-putting. And most authors will experience getting pushed off the Frontpage soon due to the volume of other content as demotivating. If that’s correct, then there’s a point at which seeking more discussion-related content to dilute org-promotional posts could backfire. I’m not suggesting that we are outside the ideal stable range at the moment.
However, techniques to limit the prominence of org promotions/announcements should require a fairly modest investment of upfront staff time (with monitoring by volunteers or the community if necessary). Thus, calculating the risk that reducing paid staff time devoted to the Forum and/or content development will lead to bulletin-board-ization should account for mitigating measures.