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Edit: upon reflection I think this idea may not be that useful. Since the 10% pledge is for the entire career, not each year, that flexibility is already incorporated. And a pause could produce some attrition.

Ask Giving What We Can anything, all week

by GraceAdams🔸

Dec 16 20241 min read 21

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Effective givingOpportunities to take actionAsk Me AnythingGiving Season (2024)Pledge Highlight WeekGiving What We CanLead Exposure Elimination Project

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Hi, I’m Grace Adams, Giving What We Can’s Head of Marketing, and a 10% pledger. I’ve been working at Giving What We Can for over 3 years and a pledger for even longer.

For Pledge Highlight Week, I’ll check this thread daily to respond to your questions. So please treat this as a week-long AMA.

Ask me anything, but I’d especially like to read your questions, concerns and comments about the 10% pledge.

I’ll also try to involve my GWWC colleagues if there are any questions they might be better suited to answer throughout the week!

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huwDec 16 202413

I asked this in-person, but I figure it’d be nice for a broader audience to hear: How should I navigate pledging if I have taken a very low salary to do direct work? In my case, I have taken a salary that roughly covers my expenses without leaving much margin for error. Of course, ‘my expenses’ buries the lede a little bit, because I believe I could make more sacrifices to take 10% off the top, but I think doing so might make me much more anxious or hurt my productivity.

In my case, my organisation doesn’t really have much more budget to pay me; that money would be better spent elsewhere. And the market rate for my skills is much higher, even in the non-profit sector, even in India, where we operate (still probably +50% at a minimum).

If I pledged 10%, would I have to take a higher salary or donate it out of my existing salary? Or is there another way to account for this?

Luke Moore 🔸Dec 17 202425

Hey @huw! Thanks for the question. My answer below should be read as guidance from a GWWC team member on how to interpret the 10% Pledge, but not as a formal or final position on what it means to stick to it.

We often hear from high-impact non-profit founders or employees (particularly those connected to AIM) that they are excited about effective giving and would love to take the 🔸10% Pledge, but haven’t done this (yet) mainly because they are already taking a lower salary at their organisation, and aren’t currently in a position to donate 10% of their remaining income.

In many cases, the above conclusion is based on misunderstandings about the 10% Pledge which are resulting in opportunities for impact being missed by people like yourself not pledging. For example, pledging would allow you to more effectively and authentically advocate for effective giving and the 10% Pledge among your peers. People founding / working at high-impact non-profits are often in a particularly valuable position to advocate, as their personal stories make them examples for others trying to live up to effective altruism principles and “practising what they preach”.

To help clarify some of these misunderstandings, let's walk through a few options that could be worth considering for people like yourself founding or working at high-impact organisations:

Salary sacrificing: We think salary sacrificing can be perfectly in line with the spirit of the 10% Pledge if the following two conditions are both met:

You think your sacrificed money is best spent on the non-profit you are working for
1. I.e. you think you have at least as much impact by salary sacrificing as by taking the salary and then donating to any other non-profit (taking into account tax benefits and any other logistical considerations).
  Some considerations here:
  1. This is a different question than asking whether your organisation is the highest-impact place to work for you.
    - E.g. most people would agree GiveDirectly is a high-impact organisation and for many employees it may be the highest-impact place to work, but they may still think that their marginal dollar is better spent donated to Malaria Consortium.
  2. If your organisation is not currently as funding constrained as some others, your money may have a larger impact elsewhere (it’s worth thinking about funging in this case).
  3. From a communications/advocacy perspective (for instance, “putting your money where your mouth is”) it may sometimes be higher-impact donating (at least some money) to another organisation than your own (or vice versa).
You would have received the sacrificed money for the job you are currently doing, if you hadn't explicitly decided to sacrifice it, and are able to receive it at any point in the future if you wish.
1. For example, this condition is met when:
  1. As an employee, you have it listed in your contract or in your organisation's internal accounts that your salary is X, but then instruct your employer to only pay out 90% of X to you. At any point in the future, you could instruct your employer to start paying you X instead and they would do so.
  2. As a founder, you have the explicit ability to pay yourself X (e.g. your co-founder, board and funders approve of you doing this), but then decide to only pay yourself 90% of X. At any point in the future, you are able to pay yourself X if you wish.
2. For example, this condition is not met when:
  1. You've founded or taken a job at a high-impact non-profit, knowing that you could have instead taken a higher-paying job elsewhere.
  2. You're confident you could have negotiated a higher salary with your employer, or paid yourself more as a founder, but haven't formally checked or arranged this in any way.

Donating less now but still taking the 10% Pledge: A common misconception about the 10% Pledge is that it would oblige you to give 10% every year. Instead, it is a lifetime pledge, so it's fine if you donate a bit less in some years and more in others to make up for that.

We obviously only recommend doing this if you’re confident you can and want to make the 10% lifetime commitment, and where feasible we still generally recommend people to give at least 10% yearly as a useful rule of thumb. This holds you accountable, embeds a pattern of giving in your life and avoids you getting so far behind on your pledge that it becomes daunting or unachievable. But we think there are cases, e.g. for some very early stage non-profit founders and/or when you’re having a particularly challenging year financially, where it may be worth diverging from this rule of thumb.

Taking a 🔹Trial Pledge: If you're not ready to take a 10% Pledge but are excited to start giving effectively, consider taking a 🔹Trial Pledge (1-10% pledge for 6 months to 5 years), which still allows you to lead by example and additionally can serve as a helpful reminder to reconsider taking the 10% Pledge (or another Trial Pledge) at a later date.

huwDec 17 20247

Thank you—that’s very helpful to have all spelled out like that! Once I get my finances in order you may see me pledge ;)

PabloAMC 🔸Dec 18 20244

I am a bit confused by 2b. I would argue that the spirit of the 10% pledge is to donate part of your possible income. So if you have offers by $2X but instead take a direct impact job that you deem highly impactful for just $X, then you are donating close to $X already? In fact, the condition

and are able to receive it at any point in the future if you wish.

may be looked the other way round. If you can take the $2X job now, but you may not in the future (say, because you are changing fields), you may be donating more than just $X this year.

Luke Moore 🔸Dec 18 20249

Thanks for this follow-up! In my view the key distinction is between:

Taking a lower-paying job for impact (opportunity cost)
Explicitly sacrificing part of your available salary (active sacrifice)

While both involve financial sacrifice for impact, only the second case counts towards the pledge. This is because pledge is specifically about donating a portion of the income you actually receive or could immediately receive in your current role. It's not about the opportunity cost of career choices or hypothetical alternative salaries you could earn elsewhere.

So in your example - if someone has offers for $2X but takes a $X job for impact, this opportunity cost doesn't count towards their pledge amount. The pledge would be calculated based on the $X they actually earn.

There are a few reasons for this approach:

Clarity and consistency in pledge calculations across different situations
Avoiding complex counterfactuals about alternative career paths
Maintaining the pledge as an active commitment to give from current income
Preserving the behavioural and advocacy benefits of regular giving

What are your thoughts on this distinction? I'm curious to hear your perspective on how we might better support people making career changes for impact while maintaining the integrity and clarity of the pledge.

PabloAMC 🔸Dec 19 20242

Thanks Luke! It makes sense what you mention. It is true that it would become significantly more messy to track, even when the spirit of the 10% pledge would suggest accounting for it. Just a random idea: perhaps you could offer the option of “pausing” the pledge temporarily so it does not become a blocker for people aiming to do direct work that they deem to be particularly impactful.

PabloAMC 🔸Dec 20 20242

Vasco Grilo🔸Dec 17 20247

Thanks, Grace. Have you (GWWC) considered highlighting your animal welfare recommendations as more cost-effective than your recommendations in other areas? From GWWC's recommendations page:

What do we mean by “effective”?
Not all charities are equal. Your choice of where to donate can lead to significant differences in impact.
Our research team estimates that you can often do 100x more good with your dollar by donating to the best charities, and sometimes this multiplier is even greater.
If this comes as a surprise, you’re not alone. Many donors vastly underestimate the difference between “good” and “great” charities, which explains why many of the best charities to donate to remain underfunded.

I believe the same applies to GWWC's recommendations, in the sense I think your animal welfare recommendations are over 100 times as cost-effective as your recommendations in other areas. I estimate:

Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
The Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) is 64.3 k times as cost-effectivene as GiveWell’s top charities.

I also have a sense that people working on cause prioritisation would agree that the best interventions in animal welfare are more cost-effective than the best ones in global health and development. For example, Ambitious Impact’s estimates suggest this, and so did the votes in Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week.

I understand people supporting global health and development may be a little distanced by GWWC highlighting animal welfare as more cost-effective. However, people donating to local organisations which are 1 % as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities (e.g. supporting people with low income in high income countries) are way more distanced by not even having their preferred options on GWWC's platform, and I believe the cost-effectiveness gap between such organisations and GiveWell's top charities may well be smaller than that between the best animal welfare organisations and GiveWell's top charities.

GraceAdams🔸Dec 18 20245

Hi Vasco,

Thanks for your question - I think it's a good one!

I was going to write up a response but then I remembered we had this nice explanation on our research and approach page:

Some other organisations in the effective giving space advocate a particular “worldview”; for example, they might believe it is most impactful to focus on safeguarding the long-term future and as such, recommend giving to organisations working to reduce existential risk, rather than other high-impact causes like global health. Others may believe it is best to focus on non-human animal wellbeing, because the scale of the problem (if you value all sentient beings equally) is so enormous compared to human wellbeing and the solutions are much more tractable than attempting to safeguard the long-term future.
At Giving What We Can, we believe there are compelling arguments and reasons for focusing on any of the high-impact cause areas we recommend, and that no matter which one you choose, you’ll have the capacity to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems and prevent the suffering of many. We’ve outlined why the cause areas we recommend are particularly impactful (and why we encourage supporting these over others) but we don’t currently take a view on which of our high-impact cause areas we deem most impactful as we think this is quite value-specific. Instead, we wish to provide the public with a variety of highly effective giving options, and then empower them to determine which ones best align with their own worldviews/values. Some of our donors feel strongly that they’ll have more impact by prioritising one of these cause areas; others prefer to diversify their giving portfolio across several cause areas.

So I think the TL;DR of this answer is that we provide recommendations across a number of worldviews but don't currently want to weigh in on what we think is the "correct" worldview. This means that we'll be unlikely to create a ranked link of recommendations across our cause areas unless we change our view on how we think about worldview diversity.

Vasco Grilo🔸Dec 18 20242

Thanks, Grace. I think this is the most relevant section of the page explaining your areas relevant to my question:

How do the high-impact cause areas we recommend differ from each other in terms of scale, neglectedness, and tractability?
Importantly, none of the high-impact cause areas we recommend above rank highest on all three attributes of the scale, neglectedness, tractability framework. Each of them excel on various of these attributes that — when taken together — lead to them being impactful options. For example:
Global health and wellbeing is large in scale compared to other causes, but is small in scale compared to animal welfare and global catastrophic risk reduction. However, global health and wellbeing is likely the most tractable of the three cause areas — there are proven, concrete interventions that we know save lives.
Animal welfare is much larger in scale and much more neglected than global health and wellbeing, but much smaller in scale than global catastrophic risk reduction. On the flip side, it is less tractable than global health and wellbeing but more tractable than global catastrophic risk reduction.
Global catastrophic risk reduction is by far the largest in scale of the three cause areas, as mitigating a threat like rogue AI could affect not just those living today but the entire future of humanity (and other species too)! However, while highly neglected relative to its potential consequences, it is much less tractable than the other two cause areas.

The bullets do not really justify the bolded claim at the top because it is unclear which effects (of scale, tractability or neglectedness) dominate, and whether they are as you described (there are no sources in the bullets). Moreover, the product between scale, tractability and neglectedness as usually defined is equal to the cost-effectiveness, and I estimate the best animal welfare (AW) interventions are way more cost-effective than the best ones in global health and development (GHD).

I think prioritising the most cost-effective causes is what distinguishes effective giving initiatives. So I would say it would be good for you (GWWC) to analyse the question in more detail instead of defaulting to recommending with the same strength the 3 cause areas linked to the founding of effective altruism.

GraceAdams🔸Dec 19 20245

Hi Vasco,

This isn't something that GWWC is currently planning to look into, but I think it's a good question and I'd like to see us develop our thinking about it further. We've made an internal note on this to discuss within the team!

We may also review this page mentioned next year to include sources.

Thanks as always for your feedback :)

PabloAMC 🔸Dec 18 20242

For what is worth, I think keeping cause neutrality is important: the spirit of the 10% pledge is to do the most good, not choose specific causes. I would find it reasonable to highlight reasons why one may consider cause X particularly effective, but not give a final answer on this.

Vasco Grilo🔸Dec 18 20246

Hi Pablo. Cause neutrality is "the view that causes should be prioritized based on impartial assessments of impact rather than on other considerations, such as saliency or personal attachment". As far as I can tell, the best AW interventions are way more cost-effective than the best in GHD, so I would say cause neutrality would imply recommending the best AW interventions over the best ones in GHD.

PabloAMC 🔸Dec 19 20247

What I mean is that there’s some hard to objectively reduce uncertainty about these choices, so it is important to attach the pledge to the method or goal, not the result we get at one point in time.

It would be similar as EA becoming just about animal welfare. Even if it were the most effective use of resources, you want to keep the method, not just stick to the result, and obviate how you got there.

After all, changing assumptions (for example in the tools provided by rethink priorities, https://rethinkpriorities.org/our-research-areas/worldview-investigations/) you can get different answers of what you should prioritise.

PabloAMC 🔸Dec 18 20244

Let us imagine you live in a couple but you are the only one currently getting an income, but you fully share finances. Would it be reasonable to donate half of 10%?

Luke Moore 🔸Dec 18 20249

I think that you raise a good point that in a partnership with fully shared finances and joint decision-making, there's a reasonable argument that each partner could view their effective "personal income" as 50% of the household income. This could align with the spirit of the pledge, which is about committing a meaningful portion of one's resources to helping others.

Another approach could be to sign the pledge together as a couple. Many GWWC members have found this to be a meaningful way to approach their giving as a couple. You can track your joint donations through a single pledge dashboard, making it easier to manage your giving together.

Ultimately, the goal of this advice is to help members stick to their plan of taking significant action to benefit others. All guidelines about how to calculate income should be thought of as serving that goal. In other words, our overall advice is to follow the spirit of the pledge, which is using a significant portion of one's income to benefit others. We recognise that a simple rule won't work perfectly for all possible situations, and encourage pledgers to define 10% of income in the way that makes sense to them.

Simon NewsteadDec 18 20243

My question is about donation swap and is there enough critical mass of givers (and demand) to implement or help facilitate something like this?

eg- Australia can give to some cause areas / charities but not others (eg existential risk, animal policy/lobbying etc)

Thanks for all the great work (and donations!) you and crew all do at GWWC.

GraceAdams🔸Dec 19 20248

Hi Simon,

Thanks for the question!

The EA Hub used to facilitate donation swaps - but the project was retired so now there's no one owning this.

I think it can be hard to formally organise this, and have some reservations as to whether there could be legal implications for an organisation to run a project like this.

That being said, I know some people who are informally organising donation swaps at the moment.

It could be a good idea to gauge feasibility and interest in this across the EA community. I don't know if it's something GWWC would want to own but I do think it's worth someone exploring!

Another thing to mention is that in the absence of a donation swap, if you expect a non-tax-deductible donation opportunity to be ≥2x times more impactful than one that you could claim a tax deduction on, you should probably choose the higher-impact option and forego the tax deduction. Here's a nice page to explain why: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/donating-effectively-tax-deductibly

Thanks for your kind words about our work and team, too!!

PabloAMC 🔸Dec 18 20242

Suppose someone takes a direct-impact job that directly lowers the salary by double-digit percentage, particularly when changing careers. What is the best rule of thumb for incorporating that into the amount pledged?

Luke Moore 🔸Dec 18 20241

Hey @PabloAMC 🔸! Thanks for the question. We think direct work at a charity or nonprofit can be extremely impactful! However, your pledged amount does not change depending on your workplace or occupation. Those of us who work for nonprofits, even if we left higher-paying jobs to do so, still donate our pledged amounts.

If your giving pledge is preventing you from doing more impactful work then it might be appropriate to resign from your pledge. Read more about this in “How permanent is a giving pledge?”.

GraceAdams🔸Dec 19 20244

Just echoing Luke's response here: When I moved from my corporate job to GWWC, I gave up ~30% of salary I would have had if I stayed. I still give at least 10% of my current salary.

I think I was lucky to be in a high paying role to begin with, and that I get paid a fair salary at GWWC but there definitely was a large financial cost to moving to a non-profit, especially on top of donating min. 10%.

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What do we mean by “effective”?

How do the high-impact cause areas we recommend differ from each other in terms of scale, neglectedness, and tractability?