First of all, kudos on writing an op-ed! I think it’s a good thing to do, and I think earning to give is a much better path than what most Ivy League grads wind up doing, so if you persuade a few people, that’s good.
My basic problem with the argument you make here (and with earning to give in general) is that some bad things tend to go along with “selling out” (as you put it), rendering it difficult to maintain one’s initial commitment to earning to give. Some worries I have about college students deciding to do this:
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Erosion of values. When your social group becomes full of Meta employees (vs. idealistic college students), you find a partner (who may or may not be EA), you have kids, and so on, your values shift, and it becomes easier to justify not donating. I have seen a lot of people become gradually less motivated to do good between the ages of 20 and 30, but while having committed to a career path in, eg, global health makes it harder for this value shift to be accompanied by a shift in the social value of one’s work (since most global health jobs are somewhat socially valuable), having committed to a career path in earning to give presents no such barriers.
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Relatedly, lifestyle creep occurs. As you get richer (and befriend your colleagues at Meta and so on), people start inviting you to expensive birthday dinners and on nice trips and stuff. And so your ability to maintain a relatively more frugal lifestyle can be compromised by desire/pressure to buy nice stuff.
In other words, I think it’s harder to maintain your EA values when you’re earning to give vs. working at, eg, an NGO. These challenges are then further compounded by:
(3) Selection bias. I suspect that the group of EA-interested people who are drawn to earning to give in the first place are more interested in having a bougie lifestyle (etc) than the average EA who isn’t drawn to earning to give. And, correspondingly, I think they’re more likely to be affected by (1) and (2).
I think it’s a nice op-ed; I also appreciate the communication strategy here—anticipating that SBF’s sentencing will reignite discourse around SBF’s ties to EA, and trying to elevate the discourse around that (in particular by highlighting the reforms EA has undertaken over the past 1.5 years).