Thank you for this post, Vasco.
I’m really glad to see a post challenging what seems to be the status quo opinion of saving lives in cheapest countries is the best / ‘most effective’ thing to do. (Perhaps there are more posts challenging this—I’m still new to the forum and haven’t gone through the archives, but from what I’ve seen more generally, the saving lives most cheaply view seems to be fairly ubiquitous and I worry it’s an overly simplistic way to look at things)
I tend to agree that focusing on cost to save a life is not necessarily the best proxy for effectiveness, and that considering WELLBY type metrics seems a very sensible thing to take into account.
I also think there’s a bit of an under-consideration in common discourse of indirect effects. If you save a life in a rich country, does that sometimes have the potential to do more good overall because they might, post-intervention be in a better position to help others with donations/volunteering/high tax contribution? And if we only addressed what’s espoused to be “the most cost-effective”—only the malaria net charities etc. and we ignore dealing with more expensive issues, we could make the issues we neglect exponentially worse and do more harm than good. It’s not necessarily the case that the more expensive issues just say constant if we don’t fund interventions for them. The world is far more complex than that. Many problems have a tipping point where things get much worse beyond a set point, and if we just say ‘no funding for causes not on the effective charities lists’ there’s a strategic cost/implication to that. For example, child exploitation by criminal gangs—not something you find on the cause prioritisation lists, but if nothing is done to address issues like that, guess what—organised crime thrives without challenge and it becomes a much, much more complex, expensive problem to fix. (There are probably better examples, but I did find this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68615776 from the UK news today really interesting and it seems like an example where there is a problem getting worse and without attention it will become effectively an epidemic. Yet, the general EA wisdom would say funding charities that try to help children escape exploitation by criminal gangs is not cost-effective so don’t put it on your list—don’t we need a more nuanced view?)
Cause prioritisation is really important, considering effectiveness and cost-effectiveneness is really important, but it feels like the model needs to evolve to something a bit less simplistic than how many lives can you save with £X. To be clear, I do genuinely think charities like Against Malaria Foundation and GiveDirectly are fantastic and should receive a high level of funding—but not to the exclusion of everything else. If we fund ONLY those causes described by EA community as cost-effective, there are huge repercussions to that. We need to think about addressing root causes of issues, including those that are complex and may be expensive to solve, not just individual lives saved per £100k (or if we go for lives/£ then at least factor in WELLBYs as suggested, and make some attempt to consider knock on impacts of funding or not , including the difference between low funding for a cause vs zero funding for a cause).
I’d love to see more posts like this one that ask bold questions challenging existing assumptions—strong upvote!
RedTeam
Karma: 38
Thank you for this post—I definitely have some similar and related concerns about experience levels in senior roles in EA organisations. And I likewise don’t know how worried to be about it—in particular I’m unclear about whether what I’ve observed is representative or exceptional cases.
What I have observed is not from some structured analysis, but from a random selection of people and organisations I’ve looked up in the course of exploring job opportunities at various EA organisations. So in line with note above about being unsure whether it’s representative, it’s very unclear to me how much weight to assign to these observations.
Concerns: narrowness of skillsets/lack of diversity of experience*; limited experience of ‘what good looks like’; compounding effect of this on junior staff joining now.
*By ‘experience’ I do not strictly mean number of years working; though there may often be a correlation, I have met colleagues who have been in the workforce 40 years and have relatively limited experience/skillset and colleagues in the workforce for 5 years who have picked up a huge amount of experience, knowledge and skills.
Observations I’ve been surprised by:
- Hiring managers with reasonably large teams who have only been in the workforce for a couple of years themselves and / or have no experience in the operational field they’re line managing (e.g. in charge of all grant processes, but never previously worked in a grant-giving organisation).
- Entire organisations populated solely with staff fresh out of university. Appreciate these are often startups, appreciate you can be exceptionally bright and have a lot to contribute at 22/post-PhD, but also you don’t know what you don’t know at that very early career stage.
- EA orgs with significant budgets where some or all of the senior leadership team have been in the workforce for 3 years or less, and / or have only ever worked in start ups or organisations that have a very small number of employees.
Unfortunately, it is not just limited to potential(ly unfounded concerns about) inexperience of individuals. As I’ve been reading job descriptions, application forms etc., specific content has also made me uneasy / feel there is a lack of experience in some of these organisations. This has included, but is not limited to: poor/entirely absent consideration of disabilities and the Equality Act in job application processes; statements of ‘we are going to implement xxxx’ that seem wildly unrealistic/naive; job descriptions that demonstrate a lack of knowledge of how an operational area works; and funders describing practices or desired future practices that are intentionally actively avoided by established grant funding organisations due to the amount of bias it would lead to in grant awarding decisions.
Why am I concerned?
In the case of the content that surprised me, I’m concerned both because of the risks associated with the specific issues but also that they may be indicators of the organisations as a whole having poor controls and low risk maturity—and it’s very difficult for organisations to be effective and efficient when that is the case.
Also I’ve been in the workforce for nearly 15 years, and when I think about my own experience at different organisations, it strikes me that:
- I’ve learned an awful lot over that time and I see a huge difference in my professional competence and decision making now versus early in my career.
- There has been a big difference in the quality of processes, learning and experience at different organisations. And being honest, in larger organisations I learned more; working with colleagues who had 20+ years’ experience and had been in charge of large, complex projects or big teams or had just been around long enough to see some issues that only happen infrequently has been very valuable. Seeing how things work in lots of different organisations and sectors has taught me a lot.
- I worry a lack of diversity amongst employees in any organisation. For all organisations, decision-making is likely to be worse if there’s a lack of diversity of opinions and experience. And in particular orgs where everyone did the same degree can have big blind spots, narrow expertise, or entrenched group think issues. For EA organisations in particular, in the same way as I think career politicians are problematic, I worry that people who have only worked in EA orgs may lack understanding of the experience of the vast majority of the population who don’t work in the EA sector, and this could be problematic for all sorts of reasons, particularly when trying to engage the wider public.
- Many of these EA orgs are in growth mode. I’ve seen how difficult rapid growth can be for organisations. Periods of rapid growth are often high risk not just because of the higher stakes of strategic decision-making in these periods, but because on the operational side it is very different having a 5 person organisation vs a 20 person organisation vs a 100 person organisation vs a 1,000 person organisation—you need completely different controls, systems, processes and skillsets as you grow and it can be very challenging to make this transition at the same time as (1) trying to deliver the growth/ambitions and (2) probably being in a position where you have quite a lot of vacancies as the hiring into roles will always lag behind identification of the need for additional staff. Trying to do this also with a team who also hasn’t seen what an organisation of the size they are aiming for looks like is going to mean even greater challenges.
Importantly—I suspect there are advantages too:
- I can see real advantages, particularly culturally, to having a workforce where all or most staff are early career or otherwise have not experienced work outside of EA orgs. For example, lots of long-established or large organisations really struggle to shift culture and get away from misogyny or to get buy-in on prioritising mental health. Younger staff members—as a generalisation—tend to have more progressive views. And experience in the private sector can cause even progressive individuals to pick up bad habits/take on negative elements of culture.
- Though I’ve been alarmed by some elements of application processes, some elements of the unorthodox application processes have been positive. It’s refreshing to see very honest descriptions/information, and prompts that try to minimise time from candidates in early application stages.
- Perhaps linked to culture being set by more progressive leaders, in many EA orgs I’ve looked into there is a focus on time and budget for learning/wellbeing that is in line with best practice and well ahead of many organisations in other sectors. E.g. I’ve commonly seen a commitment to £5k personal development spend from EA orgs; in many sectors, even in large organisations this type of commitment is still rare and it’s much more common to see lip-service type statements like ‘learning and development is a priority’ without budgetary backing.
N.B. In the spirit of drafts amnesty week, this response is largely off the top of my head so is rough around the edges and could probably include better examples/explanations/expansions if I spent a long time thinking about and redrafting it. However, I took the approach of better rough and shared than unfinished and unsaid.