Thanks, Mark! I’ve been struggling to figure out what career goals I myself should pursue, so I appreciated this post.
Those considering EtG as their primary career path might want to consider direct work instead
I think this advice is missing a very important qualification: if you are a highly talented person, you might want to consider direct work. As the post mentions, highly talented people are rare—for example, you might be highly talented if you could plausibly earn upwards of $1m/year.
Regularly talented people are in general poor substitutes for highly talented people. As you say, there is little demand for them at EA organizations: “[Open Philanthropy is] not particularly constrained by finding people who have a strong resume who seemed quite aligned with their mission.” (More anecdotal evidence: “It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation.”)
In other words, EA orgs value regularly talented people below the market rate—that’s one reason those people should prefer earning to give instead of direct work. (On the other hand, maybe there are opportunities for direct work at non-EA organizations that constitute sufficient demand?)
As a probably regularly-talented person myself, I’m particularly interested in the best course of action here. Rather than “earn to give” or “do direct work,” I think it might be “try as hard as you can to become a highly talented person” (maybe by acquiring domain expertise in an important cause area).
One more thing:
Most people suffer extremely sharp diminishing returns to large sums of money [...] As people have more money, their desires shift: work-life balance, passion, location, etc. If someone is passionate about their work, no amount of money may be sufficient.
The flip side is that if you value money/monetary donations linearly—or more linearly than other talented people—then you’ve got a comparative advantage in earning to give! The fact that “people don’t value money” means that no one’s taking the exhausting/boring/bad-location jobs that pay really well. If you do, you can earn more than you “should” (in an efficient market) and make an outsize impact.
Thanks for that clarification—maybe the $1m/year figure is distracting. I only mentioned it as an illustration of this point:
The post argues that the kind of talent valuable for direct work is rare. Insofar as that’s true, the conclusion (“prefer direct work”) only applies to people with rare talent.