How Dependent is the Effective Altruism Movement on Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna?

sapphire

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Benjamin_Todd

I think total EA funding is something like (per year):

$250m Open Phil / Good Ventures
$80m from GiveWell (excluding Open Phil)
$50m other

So that's 66% Open Phil. Note that Open Phil seems to be 90%+ Dustin and Cari.

Sorry I don't have sources for these figures - they're my personal rough estimates. (Though Open Phil's grants are almost all published.)

One other thing to note is that funding is only one component of EA – we also have the value of the labour of community members and our ideas. Even if there was no funding at all, we could still accomplish a bunch (by going to work in existing institutions like govt., academia, non-profits, or working as volunteers).

Quick note on the figures for 80k: about 66% of our funding comes from Open Phil in recent years. You can't divide the size of the grant by our annual budget, because we're also building up reserves with the scale of the org. You instead need to divide the grant by our total income.

Linch

Even if there was no funding at all, we could still accomplish a bunch (by going to work in existing institutions like govt., academia, non-profits, or working as volunteers).

Also existing EAs are doing or planning to do direct work in large part because of the existence of Open Phil funding. I expect that if Good Ventures decided to part ways, a fair number of people will pivot to earning-to-give instead.

Milan Griffes

$80m "other" per year seems very high to me, fwiw.

Benjamin_Todd

That's the bit I'm most unsure about.

I think the longtermist EA amount is around $30m per year - and I have reasonable data on that.

I then guessed that there's another $50m of near termist donations (based on typical ratios of near termist to longtermist donors). Note this needs to include all effective animal advocacy and Founder's Pledge. However, it might be that most of this category overlaps with the GiveWell donations, so I might have been overoptimistic. Still I would guess that it's ~$20m, making for $50m+ in total within other.

I've updated it to $50m rather than $80m.

sapphire

Good point that Open Phil makes all donations public. I found a CSV on their site and added up the donations dated 2018/2019/2020.

2018: $190,477,938

2019: $273,279,362

2020 so far: $145,405,362

This is a really useful answer.

ishaan

This matches my understanding, however, I think it is normal for non-profits of the budget size that the EA ecosystem currently is to have this structure.

Bridgespan identified 144 nonprofits that have gone from founding to at least $50 million in revenue since 1970...[up to 2003]...we identified three important practices common among nonprofits that succeeded in building large-scale funding models: (1) They developed funding in one concentrated source rather than across diverse sources; (2) they found a funding source that was a natural match to their mission and beneficiaries; and (3) they built a professional organization and structure around this funding model.

- How Non-Profits Get Really Big

Some common alternatives are outlined here: Ten Non-Proft Funding Models.

Within this framework, I would describe the EA community currently using a hybrid between "Member Motivator" (cultivating membership of many individual donors who feel personally involved with the community - such as the GWWC model) and "Big Bettor" (such as the relationship between Good Ventures and the ecosystem of EA organizations).

Benjamin_Todd

Agree. We should also probably expect it to happen: the income distribution is very heavy tailed, and it becomes easier to donate the more money you have, so we should probably expect the largest couple of donors to account for most of the money.

Otoh, the total US non-profit sector is something like 300 billion per year, and I think billionaire philanthropy is under $30bn, so that would suggest 10% from billionaires as a base rate. (Though a lot of this is to fund local services, churches etc. where we might expect a broader base.)

poppinfresh

As another data point, this OECD report says that from 2013-15, half of all philanthropic funding for international development came from the Gates Foundation ($12 billion out of $24 billion total).

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸

Unfortunately, I think this isn't far off. I am in the process of writing my first EA forum post and it specifically has to do with this. The amount of money moved by EA is currently extremely tied to the performance of Facebook. With approximately yearly major public image issues (Cambridge Analytica, political advertising, etc.), an increasing number of people leaving the platform and new generations not using Facebook, this is most definitely a concern. I am suggesting something to the effect of hedging against Facebook stock. (I don't know the state of Dustin's finances but I assume it is heavily correlated with FB stock.)

terraform

Counterpoint: yes, Facebook has lots of public image issues. As a result, we have good evidence that they're an org that's unusually resistant to such problems!

They've been having scandals since they were founded. And in spite of all the things you mention, their market cap has almost doubled since the bottom of the Cambridge Analytica fall-out.

They're also one of the world's most valuable companies, and operate in a sector (software) that on an inside view seems well poised to do well in future (unlike, say, Berkshire Hathaway, which has about the same market cap).

You might have concerns about having a non-diversified portfolio in general. But modulo that, I honestly think Facebook seems like a pretty good bet.

terraform

Happened to come across this old comment thread discussion whether holding too much Facebook stock was too risky. In the four years since the comment on Sep 21, 2020, Meta stock is up >100% and at an all time high. However, before reaching that point, it also had as large as a 60% drawdown vs the Sep 21 value, which occurred in late 2022 (notably, around the time of the FTX collapse).

Milan Griffes

So EA is currently in a regime wherein the large majority of capital flows from a single source, and capital allocation is set by a small number of decision-makers.

Rough estimate: if ~60% of Open Phil grantmaking decisioning is attributable to Holden, then 47.2% of all EA capital allocation, or $157.4M, was decided by one individual in 2017. 2018 & 2019 will probably have similar proportions.

It seems like EA entered into this regime largely due to historically contingent reasons (Cari & Dustin developing a close relationship with Holden, then outsourcing a lot of their philanthropic decision-making to him & the Open Phil staff).

It's not clear that this structure will lead to optimal capital allocation.

...

Lukas Finnveden

Givewell estimates that they directed or influenced about 161 million dollars in 2018. 64 million came from Good Ventures grants. Good Ventures is the philanthropic foundation founded and funded by Dustin and Cari. It seems like the 161 million directed by Give Well represents a comfortable majority of total 'EA' donation.

If you want to count OpenPhil's donations as EA donations, that majority isn't so comfortable. In 2018, OpenPhil recommended a bit less than 120 million (excluding Good Venture's donations to GiveWell charities) of which almost all came from Good Ventures, and they recommended more in both 2017 and 2019. This is a great source on OpenPhil's funding.

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