"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

The best outcome for a charity is for the problem that it aims at fixing to be finished. But for all of the people involved with the charity, who gain value from their involvement (most clearly money, but also things like utils from being part of a community), an ultimate solution to the problem that the charity tries to fix would not be a good thing. They would have to find a new source of money/utils. We might expect that EAs would be less likely to fall victim to this trap, but in real life most EAs have other priorities than EA, so the potential to (most likely unconsciously) avoid solutions that are too effective is still present.

This isn’t an issue which admits easy answers, but that isn’t a reason to avoid the problem entirely. There are still things we can do to try to better align incentives.

Suggestion 1: Improve social recognition of work outside of EA organisations

EA should not be about the money, and we don’t want people to leave the community when they can no longer make money out of it. To help make sure that this is the case, we should look at ways that people can be socially rewarded for doing effective work outside of EA organisations.

For example, there are many EAs who work in government, and there is general acknowledgement within the community that in many cases the opportunities available in these positions simply do not exist outside of governments. Furthermore, these opportunities are generally not dependent on private EA funding to exist; the main value that the EA community can provide to people in this position is support through advice/suggestions for impact. Despite this acknowledgement, there are very few people government workers who one could classify as high-status EAs.

Put another way, an employee of an EA organisation producing unsolicited advice for government about pandemic prevention would likely have greater EA status than a government employee working on pandemic prevention policy.

A similar thing could be said for EAs working on personal projects that don’t require them to be part of an organisation or receive funding at all. Organisations require administrative paperwork and overhead, and if you can do something yourself without this, then that should be the preferred option.

Suggestion 2: Develop a norm against long-term EA projects and long-term employment in EA

As EAs, we know that people who receive cash transfers (e.g. GiveDirectly) generally do smart things with them. However, in almost all cases these are time-limited transfers. (Even if participants are told that the transfers will last for the rest of their lives, they would have good reason to doubt whether the organisation making this promise will be in a position to follow through with this 30 years into the future, if it exists at all.) If the cash transfers were guaranteed for a lifetime, the motivation to make smart decisions is less – if I make bad decisions with this month’s money, it’s not that important because I’ll get one next month, and every month after that.

The same analogy applies to time. Work expands to fill the time available. If I only have a limited time to do good, and I want to do as much good as I can, I will work really hard during that time to maximise the good that I can do with the limited opportunity that I have been given. If I can reasonably expect to have a long career in EA, or if my EA project can reasonably expect to indefinitely receive funding, then there is no urgency, and I can take my time and become complacent and inefficient in doing good.

This is not a good outcome for EA and a natural way to solve this problem is term limits, which are a feature of many government and community associations.

Term limits within EA would only apply to organisations applying for EA funding and individuals applying for employment with EA organisations. Individuals’ participation in EA as a community should not be limited by time in any circumstances.

The term limits would not (and logistically could not) be formal, but would operate more on the level of community expectations – if a funder receives an application from an organisation which has continually asked for funding for the previous (e.g.) 10 years, they should consider not refunding unless exceptional circumstances exist, and organisations could apply a similar process for employee recruitment.

We certainly don’t want to lose people and organisations who are performing difficult to replace work, which is why exceptions should always be an option. However, having irreplaceable people is an organisational weakness and should be minimised where possible (e.g. by documenting procedures and encouraging knowledge sharing). Executed properly, one would expect the number of people going past a community-accepted term limit to be minimal.

Suggestion 3: Financially reward organisations/people who stop operations when they are no longer performing effectively

If an organisation realises that it has solved the problem it was founded to solve, or that the solution that it proposed does not have a reasonable chance of solving the problem, and the organisation decides to publicise this fact among the EA community, then two things are likely to happen:

1. They will get significant praise among the EA community for their commitment to rationality and transparency.

2. They will lose all of their funding as nobody wants to fund an ineffective cause.

The first point is good and should be maintained. However, you and your employees can’t pay your rent with praise, so the second point may weigh more heavily on your mind when deciding what decisions to make with regards to requests for funding.

This second point is something that needs to be fixed in order to avoid the accumulation of organisations that have outlived their usefulness. The most obvious way that I can see to do this is to encourage organisations to announce when they no longer consider themselves to be useful, and if any organisations do this and the community agrees with the assessment, for funders to estimate the amount of money they would have given to the organisation over a reasonably long period of time and provide that amount (potentially plus a bonus for honesty) to the board/staff regardless.

On an individual organisation basis, this is not the most effective use of funds, but it is worth doing over the long term in order to create good incentives for the ecosystem as a whole