How important is marginal earning to give?

To play devil's advocate (these don't actually represent my beliefs):

I can’t remember any EA orgs failing to reach a fundraising target.

This doesn't necessarily mean much, because fundraising targets have a lot to do with how much money EA orgs believe they can raise.

Open Phil has recently posted about an org they wish existed but doesn’t and funder-initiated startups.

It's pretty hard to get funding for a new organization, e.g. Spencer and I put a lot of effort into it without much success. The general problem I see is a lack of "angel investing" or its equivalent–the idea of putting money into small, experimental organizations and funding them further as they grow. (As a counter-counterpoint, EA Ventures seems well poised to function as an angel investor in the nonprofit world.)

Also, to address the general point that EA is talent-constrained, the problem might be that there are very few people with the skills needed, and more funding can be used to train people, like MIRI is doing with the summer fellows program. In that case earning to give is still a good solution to the talent constraint.

Note that GiveWell / Good Ventures (unsurprisingly) like to research a charity or cause area themselves before they direct funding to it, and this is tightly constrained by the pace of GiveWell research staff growth, so in practice many high-leverage opportunities are still (in my opinion) available to marginal EtGers — at-least, if those EtGers are willing to be at least 1/5th as proactive about finding good opportunities as, say, Matt Wage is. Maybe that won't be true after 10 years of additional research conducted by GiveWell (incl. OpenPhil), but I think it'll be true for the foreseeable future.

There are probably additional reasons GiveWell / Good Ventures won't fund particular things, besides the fact that they haven't been researched in sufficient depth by GiveWell. E.g. GiveWell might think it's a good thing for there to be multiple meta-charities in the EA space that maintain independence, and so even if funding CEA projects is a clear win, they still might think it's a bad idea for GW/GV to direct any support to CEA projects.

And finally, it's also possible that individual EtGers might have different values or world-models than the public faces of GW/GV have, and for that reason those marginal EtGers could have good opportunities available to them that are not likely to be met by GW-directed funding anytime soon, if ever.

(I say all this as a random EA who thinks about these things, not as a soon-to-be GW staffer.)

That said, I also think people with the right collection of talents should seriously consider applying to do cause prioritization research at GW or elsewhere, and people with a different right collection of talents should consider starting new projects/organizations, especially when doing so in coordination with an already-interested funder like GV.

This is what I was trying to get at with http://acesounderglass.com/2015/05/11/map-of-open-spaces-in-effective-altruism/ . I don't think the number of unsolved problems is at all well publicized.

A note on what we mean when we talk about "marginal EtGers".

In some sense all EtGers look marginal, in that they could shift the margins by moving onto direct work. But there's a coordination issue. Really the people who have the highest comparative advantage at EtG should be pursuing that, and whether we have the right balance determines where the cut-off should be between people choosing EtG or direct work. "Marginal EtGers" are people who only just decided on EtG. They could be people already in EtG careers, but they will more often be people who haven't started, because experience and specialisation shifts your comparative advantage.

I expect this is all exactly as you were thinking, but I've been confused about this before so the clarification seemed like it might be useful for somebody!

Has there been much thought or discussion put into the idea of making existing charities more effective? Sure there are lots of organizations out there that focus on making marketing more effective or getting more donors; but there seems to be a big whole in the market for people or organizations that work to turn current charities into ones we would consider effective. I've thought about this myself quite frequently and would be stoked to see something like this. Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

Thanks for posting this Ben, I've noticed some of the same things you mention.

I personally would be more motivated against earning to give if I heard an argument about why the "more money equals more stuff done" equation which seems to hold in the rest of our economy fails for charities.

I think EAs irrationally avoid giving to "second-best" charities (like GiveWell's standouts) , but that's a relatively weak impression. It might be helpful to talk more about top giving opportunities in a given moment/year, rather than talking about top charities, which can become less top as donations are made, until donating doesn't feel so shiny anymore (also saying this as a random EA, not soon-to-be GW staffer).

Of course, it might be better to ask people to give later in general, but there's no reason as far as I know to believe the best order would be 'donate to room-for-funding-remaining top charity' > 'donate later' > 'donate to second-best charity.'

Also, as Eliezer and Jacy pointed out on Facebook, this sufficient funding argument is far less true of existential risk and animal-focused charities than global poverty ones (in fact, many of those are somewhat strapped for cash).

I don't have any new considerations to add but I agree with a) there's probably a relative oversupply of 'EA money' on the margin and b) there are various psychological reasons that would pull towards E2G over direct work.

I think there are plausibly contrary explanations for some of these observations. for senior staff moving to Open Phil, it could be because Open Phil is younger, and its tasks are less structured. For top charities running out of room for more funding, this is only the top couple of GiveWell charities, and this needn't apply to intergenerationally-altruistic charities. GiveWell has mentioned a couple of organisations that they would like to see, but it's not as though finding such opportunities has yet become their main activity.

I think the general point is right though: Good Ventures has most of the cash that we need, and EA Ventures has some also, as do Jaan Tallin, Sam Harris, edit: Matt Wage and others. Most of the people who are clever enough to want to make epic charities are also clever enough to know that they can have a more secure and conventional life elsewhere. This can be solved by just starting epic charities anyway, and by accumulating more funding to push more marginal individuals to do the same.

What charity would you start?

Sounds reasonable - and if successful will come back to a funding constraint.

You want to put your most expensive resource at the bottle-neck as an efficiency heuristic.

Do people think the bottle neck is ideas, execution, or funding - or the infrastructure needed to facilitate one or more of those?

It seems a shame that such intelligent and amazing people in the EA movement are, on the whole, putting their most productive and creative years (25-35?) into EtG rather than building and delivering practical solutions to improve the world in the best way possible outside of AI/Xrisk and movement building - as I think there is a lot of learning value from this kind of thing!

EA groups specialised around key promising interests such as healthcare, AI, governance, animal welfare, poverty and development etc. that can learn together, network efficiently, keep track of projects, prioritise collective resources etc. might be a way forward. AI/X-risk and perhaps animal welfare appears from the outside to be more developed along these lines than the others? What are people's thoughts?

The answer to this question depends somewhat on your focus area, but my experience so far has been that almost all the organizations I work with could use more money (including ACE, Animal Ethics, most Swiss EA projects, MIRI, FHI, and most object-level charities except those that get saturated by Good Ventures). Many of these groups need money more than talent right now.

I also think the people who can be hired for an opportunity cost of ~$50K aren't 4 times less talented than those who can be hired for an opportunity cost of $200K. This belief is partly based on what I've seen at current charities and partly based on the premise that EAs aren't as special as they can sometimes seem. When you do nonprofit startups, most of the time goes toward ordinary tasks that lots of people could do.

I enjoy working on nonprofit stuff, so I don't find EtG psychologically more attractive, but after a lot of thinking about this question, I've tentatively concluded that I can make a bigger impact EtGing. I think this would be true even if I could only make ~$150K/year, which is too low as an estimate of long-term future earnings.

I broadly agree with this (and have some relevant posts in draft).

At a broad level, I expect the ratio of (value of marginal earning-to-give):(value of marginal direct work) can't get too distorted, because of mechanisms like:

• Donors discuss publicly whether they feel the pool of giving opportunities is deep;
• Charities talk publicly about whether they are more funding- or talent-constrained;
• Charities raise or lower salaries, making direct work more or less appealing to people using that as a heuristic in choosing a career.

However this isn't in conflict with your suggestion that at the margin now there may be slightly too much EtG. I'm not sure about that.