Thank you for this post. I was hoping to read what others say, but unlike other posts, this post doesn't seem to have got comments. Perhaps that, in itself, is a comment on how unimportant or uncomfortable the topic is for other EAs.

I am not an EA, and am not familiar with your work. It is unclear to me whether these suggestions are based on some data or discussions with others, or whether this is an opinion piece. BTW, I live in a not-so-rich country and am a full-time volunteer.

While many suggestions seem in the ballpark of what makes sense, I must admit deep discomfort at your suggestions regarding migration. You have two in your list:

• Try to migrate to an OECD country, perhaps by moving for higher education. This one is straightforward and usually on people's lists anyway where possible.

• Consider becoming an expert at assisting people in your country to migrate to richer countries.

I am unclear why you think migration is a good EA idea. You call it "straightforward" but it is not obvious to me how migration to richer countries can help overall social impact, at least in the poorer country to which the potential EA belongs. I can understand suggesting migration to escape tyranny. And I can understand individuals moving to a richer country for education or better salaries and better "quality of life" for themselves and their immediate family. Migration/ open borders can also be viewed as a human right (country boundaries are a construct of history and politics etc). But you are suggesting this as a way of being an EA, and that puzzles me.

Here is what I think: Once a person migrates

• the person's skills are unavailable to the home country. As I assume you see the potential EA's profile as someone who is highly intelligent, you are suggesting a step that deprives the country of origin of its creamy layer of skills, its innovative persons and potential entrepreneurs
• some fraction of earned money may be sent back, but that is actually not likely for many years, and if that is a reason for suggesting migration, there should be data to support it. Anecdotally, I don't see it happen around me.
• migration changes exposure and loyalties of the person who migrates. They forget conditions back home, get caught up in esoteric intellectual causes and forget ground realities that need to be addressed. They get busy working on keeping their visas, getting green cards, and citizenship. None of this benefit the home country in the short and medium run--maybe much later, there will be some flow-back, but the person may not be an EA by that time :(
• migration moves the person away from family, reducing the roots and connections. The family left behind has less support. They all spend large amounts of money commuting to meet each other, or they lose contact except in a vacation-together shallow way.
• when someone migrates, the person can no longer inspire others in the home country to work on causes that would benefit the people of that country. Others, too, want to migrate to improve their "quality of life"

Also, when you suggest migration as a mode of being an EA, potential EAs may see it as a message that their home country is not a nice place to live and work. Such movement may make sense if there is some major problem in the country, but wanting to migrate just because a country is not so rich and to call it "EA" seems decidedly odd to me. People are happy and productive in non-rich countries, too.

Another point is that skills for developmental work are often difficult to get. Development initiatives need persons who can envisage such initiatives, staff them, and implement them. All that needs people who are good and have not migrated. Money cannot buy what is not available. Suggesting more migration doesn't make sense to me. It is my opinion that too many EAs who have no ground experience in other countries don't realize this problem well enough.

Migration is anyway a rather drastic step. It is far from easy. Even getting a visa is not easy, and there is a large amount of uncertainty around it.

Suggesting going to other countries to pick up some relevant educational or work skills makes sense to me. But migration as a recommended EA approach seems decidedly odd. Just my thoughts as a resident of a not-so-rich country who works as a full-time volunteer.

I think we need to de-emphasize the notion of having a 'big social impact', as opposed to an 'optimal individual social impact'. The word 'big' implies an objective measure of largeness, which seems absurd to me. If I were to compare my social impact to Bill Gates, I would consider myself to have a 'tiny' social impact, no matter what I do.

Basically, I don't think that people should spend too much time comparing their social benefit to the absolute best people in the world, in part because that makes a very weak signal for individual optimization (If I do action A I would be doing 0.001% of Bill Gates' work, if I do action B I would be doing 0.002%). The much more high-signal alternative is to understand what the a relatively good outcome for the decider is, and consider their actions compared to that.

I realize that the content of this post really isn't about that specific point, but hear it brought up often, so would like to point that out.

You didn't mention policiing or accountability campaigning, which the politics/development literature suggests is often a necessary step for a country to come out of poverty - depending on which country you're in.

Many of the countries rated by the Corruption Perceptions Index as being among the world's most corrupt are also among the world's poorest. My understanding is economists like Daron Acemoglu believe this association is causal and countries with corrupt, extractive institutions keep their citizens poor by stealing from their citizens and dis-incentivizing the wealth creation that could lift the country out of poverty.

Thus I think the politics/military/civil service option is especially promising. Ideally shoot to become a top general, the chief of police, a media figurehead, or a judge on the supreme court (note that the judge in this story had to work with the system in order to achieve a position of power, which I suspect is realistically necessary). The media is an especially interesting option if you could use Tor or similar to expose corruption at little risk to yourself.

Another thing to note about this approach is that it is likely to be a person in the third world's comparative advantage: their first world counterpart will find it relatively easier to pursue other options on your list, but relatively harder to get themselves taken seriously as a candidate for an important politics/military/civil service role in a third world country they weren't born in.

I think you need to think a bit deeper about the corruption thing. A political-economists view might be that there isn't that much harm in corruption per se, but there is a lot of harm in certain types of corruption. Sometimes corruption is a means of achieving fantastic policy goals, anti-corruption one of them. The key thing is to keep an eye on what matters and the effects of your actions, and make sure you're completely honest with those you love. Imagine saying to someone they should go into consultancy but never wear a suit - in some environments its a signal, and that signal can't be changed below in a meaningful way. But there are always counter-examples, like Dora Akunyili - but she wouldn't have done what she did without being a first class pharmacist with a fiery personality in the right place at the right time.