Every full-time employee at a nonprofit requires at least 10 unusually generous donors or 1 exceptionally generous donor to pay their salary.
If you define “generous” by “amount of capital” then this is tautologically true. But by this standard, extraordinarily wealthy people are capable of being exceptionally exceptionally exceptionally generous. I’d recur to my remark about the Giving Pledge. I believe that the projects of highest humanitarian value will generally get funded.
I should pause here to remark [...] but this can possibly be purchased elsewhere via living on the West or East Coast and hanging around with others who are earning-to-give or working directly.
In principle this could fall under the “unusual values” consideration that I raise above. But I don’t think that the sociological phenomenon that you seem to be implying to exist prevails in practice. I think that there a lot of funders who are not risk-averse, and indeed, many who are actively attracted to high risk projects.
Well, if James Simons wanted to retire from Renaissance and work on FAI full-time, it would not be entirely obvious to me that this was a bad move, but only if Simons had enough in the bank to also pay as much other top-flight math talent as could reasonably be used, and was already so paying, such that there was no marginal return to his further earning power relative to existing funds.
I think that James Simons is an example of someone with an unusually strong comparative advantage at making money. But this wouldn’t necessarily have been clear a priori: if you put yourself in Simons’ shoes in 1980 the expected earnings of going into finance would be much lower than his actual earnings turned out to be. So it’s not clear that he would have done better to “earn to give” than doing something of direct humanitarian value (though maybe it was clear from the outset that his comparative advantage was in finance.)
If you define “generous” by “amount of capital” then this is tautologically true. But by this standard, extraordinarily wealthy people are capable of being exceptionally exceptionally exceptionally generous. I’d recur to my remark about the Giving Pledge. I believe that the projects of highest humanitarian value will generally get funded.
In principle this could fall under the “unusual values” consideration that I raise above. But I don’t think that the sociological phenomenon that you seem to be implying to exist prevails in practice. I think that there a lot of funders who are not risk-averse, and indeed, many who are actively attracted to high risk projects.
Well, if James Simons wanted to retire from Renaissance and work on FAI full-time, it would not be entirely obvious to me that this was a bad move, but only if Simons had enough in the bank to also pay as much other top-flight math talent as could reasonably be used, and was already so paying, such that there was no marginal return to his further earning power relative to existing funds.
This situation has not yet arisen. Unfortunately.
I think that James Simons is an example of someone with an unusually strong comparative advantage at making money. But this wouldn’t necessarily have been clear a priori: if you put yourself in Simons’ shoes in 1980 the expected earnings of going into finance would be much lower than his actual earnings turned out to be. So it’s not clear that he would have done better to “earn to give” than doing something of direct humanitarian value (though maybe it was clear from the outset that his comparative advantage was in finance.)
Edit: [Moved comment to a different place]