This week the Effective Altruism Forum is running an Effective Giving Spotlight, and they asked if I could post an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on my experience earning to give.
Some background:
I was earning to give from 2009 to 2022, except for a few months in 2017 when I worked on expanding access to the financial system in Ethiopia and looking into AI risk disagreements.
I’ve been a Giving What We Can member since 2013, making a public pledge to continue with effective giving.
For most of this time my wife and I were donating 50% of our pre-tax income, for a total of $2.1M. This has been about 50-50 between trying to help the EA community grow into the best version of itself and funding global poverty reduction (details, thoughts, more recent but still obsolete thoughts).
In 2016 I gave a EA Global talk (transcript) on earning to give, which gives more background on the idea and how I’ve neen thinking about it.
That’s a lot of links, and it’s fine to ask questions even if you haven’t read any of them! I’m happy to take questions on earning to give, or anything else within EA. Here are some example questions I’d be happy to answer if there’s interest:
Where do individual donors earning to give have an advantage over foundations and funds?
How should you decide whether to use a fund?
How have I thought about how much to donate? How much is enough?
Why did I stop earning to give?
Why am I still donating some even though I’m funded by EA donors?
Feel free to comment on any platform, but if you’re having trouble deciding then the EA Forum post is ideal.
Comment via: the EA Forum
I haven’t read through the links, so you may have answered this elsewhere, but I’m curious how you manage to maintain motivation in the face of uncertainty about the effectiveness of whatever giving you choose. It seems like the feedback loop of telling whether a donation made a difference in something like global poverty would be on the order of years, whereas the feedback loop of working directly with people in need might be on the order of minutes.
Also, how do you reason about the amount of additional giving necessary to offset any negative societal consequences of the field that you work in? For instance, an oil rig worker would be able to give a lot more than a schoolteacher, but working on an oil rig directly facilitates a lot of environmentally questionable outcomes in a way that corralling peoples’ kiddos for them would not.
Or a harder question: should you work in negative fields at all? I’m sympathetic to arguments like early 80k gave that many high-earning jobs we conventionally think of as harmful rarely cause a level of harm in the same ballpark as the amount of benefit you can do via donations, especially after considering replaceability, though some still do very poorly. But I also think there’s a strong case for avoiding ones with obvious harm. I also think it’s important to consider that people often underestimate the harms of their own employment.
Unfortunately for most jobs, even questionable ones, the social impact is very hard to work out. Take your oil rig example: how much is your marginal contribution to oil production, after considering the oil company’s elasticity of rig labor and the elasticity of production? Does cheaper oil displace even more carbon-intensive coal? How likely are extreme climate outcomes? Is the benefit of cheaper energy in lifting people out of poverty enough to make it positive on its own? Making a high-quality impact estimate for a career is a huge amount of work, and there are a lot of potential careers. Overall I like a general rule like “don’t do work that is illegal, or that would be illegal if the public knew what you were really doing”, but I don’t have firm thoughts here.
I’ve generally worked in areas where I can tell if I’m making progress at my job. I have long-term goals, quarterly goals, what I’m trying to do this week, the specific flaky test case I’m trying to fix. I find making that sort of progress very motivating, and while I think it would have been possible to do significantly better I’ve been happy/fulfilled leaving figuring out how to deploy my money to fund managers.
Why did you stop earning to give in 2022?
He explains it in this post.
That’s right! At a high level, I was prompted to do another round of considering whether there were any non-EtG roles that might be a good fit for me, and this time when I looked around I found several strong options.
Happy to answer more specific questions!
Do you think earning to give is still a good idea for the median Google-tier software engineer or should that person just try to work in EA directly at this point? Has your picture of EA funding practically changed since the FTX collapse?
I think it depends so much person-specific factors (skills, talents, preferences) that it’s very hard to say, sorry!
I don’t think I have anything original to say here (except): there’s clearly a lot less money available, and on the margin this should push us towards more EtG.