Edit: On reflection, it almost doesn’t matter, does it? Spending something like 800 person-hours to allocate a mere £10,000 seems somewhat crazy regardless of where it ultimately goes, given that you could instead take a minimum-wage job for those 800 hours, earn more than £10,000 in the process, add the earnings to the original £10,000, and then donate that much larger sum of money, well, basically anywhere—pick any even remotely effective charity or set of charities—and you’ll have done more good than doing things this way.
And you say that £10,000 is a large grant, and suggest using this approach for even smaller amounts?! I do not understand the reasoning behind this.
I was a team member of OxPrio. To answer your question, we granted the money to 80,000 hours. I personally agree with your reasoning that the grant amount was too small compared to the effort put in; 800 person-hours is an underestimate (only counting the work of the two most-committed team members), and counterfactually the time could have been spent more productively than working minimum-wage. However, I don’t follow why giving the money to “basically anywhere” would have been good enough, since “remotely effective charities” plausibly still vary significantly in cost-effectiveness: for our OxPrio shortlist, we saw two orders of magnitude difference in our model’s cost-effectiveness estimates among the 4 options.
?? If you literally mean minimum-wage, I think that is less than 10,000 pounds… although agree with the general thrust of your point about the money being more valuanle than the time (but think you are missing the spirit of the exercise as outlined in the post).
The U.K.’s national minimum page seems to be £7.50/hr, so you are right and I stand corrected: it would only be about £6,000.
In order to earn at least £10,000, Jacob and Tom would have had to find work that paid at least £12.50/hr. I think this would be well within the scope of their abilities, as they both seem like smart enough young men, with one or two obvious employable skills, and no doubt more that we don’t know about.
think you are missing the spirit of the exercise as outlined in the post
Perhaps. What is the spirit of the exercise as outlined in the post?
Points 1-5 at the beginning of the post are all primarily about community-building and personal development externalities of the project, and not about the donation itself.
So, where did the money end up going?
Edit: On reflection, it almost doesn’t matter, does it? Spending something like 800 person-hours to allocate a mere £10,000 seems somewhat crazy regardless of where it ultimately goes, given that you could instead take a minimum-wage job for those 800 hours, earn more than £10,000 in the process, add the earnings to the original £10,000, and then donate that much larger sum of money, well, basically anywhere—pick any even remotely effective charity or set of charities—and you’ll have done more good than doing things this way.
And you say that £10,000 is a large grant, and suggest using this approach for even smaller amounts?! I do not understand the reasoning behind this.
I was a team member of OxPrio. To answer your question, we granted the money to 80,000 hours. I personally agree with your reasoning that the grant amount was too small compared to the effort put in; 800 person-hours is an underestimate (only counting the work of the two most-committed team members), and counterfactually the time could have been spent more productively than working minimum-wage. However, I don’t follow why giving the money to “basically anywhere” would have been good enough, since “remotely effective charities” plausibly still vary significantly in cost-effectiveness: for our OxPrio shortlist, we saw two orders of magnitude difference in our model’s cost-effectiveness estimates among the 4 options.
?? If you literally mean minimum-wage, I think that is less than 10,000 pounds… although agree with the general thrust of your point about the money being more valuanle than the time (but think you are missing the spirit of the exercise as outlined in the post).
The U.K.’s national minimum page seems to be £7.50/hr, so you are right and I stand corrected: it would only be about £6,000.
In order to earn at least £10,000, Jacob and Tom would have had to find work that paid at least £12.50/hr. I think this would be well within the scope of their abilities, as they both seem like smart enough young men, with one or two obvious employable skills, and no doubt more that we don’t know about.
Perhaps. What is the spirit of the exercise as outlined in the post?
Points 1-5 at the beginning of the post are all primarily about community-building and personal development externalities of the project, and not about the donation itself.