Should effective altruism have a norm against donating to employers?

[ETA: I somewhat regret eliding the issue with donations to other issues re. interpersonal relationships. I take the opportunity to stress it wasn't written with a particular individual/s 'in mind'.]

I broadly agree with Owen. Beyond the considerations already mentioned, I prefer increasing professionalisation of those working in (at least the larger) EA orgs, and norms against salary sacrifice etc. I think would help this desirable direction of travel.

In most corporations (and most charities), including very high performing ones (e.g. Google, Deepmind, GiveDirectly, etc.) situations where employees are sacrificing considerable fractions of their salary, living in long term shared housing with their colleagues, or can name multiple fellow employees among their past or current sexual partners are rare. These arrangements are less surprising for smaller groups (e.g. the model of the start-up in the garage), but much more so when you have formal structures, a board, and turnover in the 6-7 figures.

I don't claim expertise here, but I'd suspect there's a reason for the ubiquity of 'corporate' structures, oft-maligned as they are, and I'd venture it has something to do with ensuring clarity and accuracy of decision making. It is better that, insofar as possible, corporate decisions are not interleaved with pecuniary, interpersonal, or bedroom issues. Similarly, norms that retard development of conflicts of interest like these are preferable to relying on staff to navigate them appropriately.

The failure modes are manifold. The hypothetical challenges around firing someone who is, in addition to one's subordinate, a housemate, ex, and current partner of another staff member need not be explicated. Although I do not want to regurgitate the unhappy episode around Intentional Insights, there were records of virtual assistants offering to 'donate' money to Intentional Insights, the net result of which was to reduce what InIn owed them and had been late paying. I doubt any EA org has or will do anything similar, but it illustrates the risks of a parallel financial transaction alongside salary which could be used to bypass proper process (some possibilities: maybe I'm worried you might fire me for poor performance, so I increase my salary sacrifice by way of cutting my price; I fail to negotiate a raise I think I deserve from you, so I simply reduce my salary sacrifice/donation by the requisite amount (which annoys you); I don't really take your standards re. dress, punctuality etc. seriously as although I am in principle getting paid £X, de facto you're paying me barely minimum wage etc. etc.)

I'd generally prefer EA staff get paid close to market, and there's a norm discouraging donations to ones employer.

I've often found it strange that GiveWell staff do their meta-donations primarily to GiveWell and CEA staff do theirs primarily to CEA. I'm guessing in many cases the deciding factor about who works where is whether it's more convenient to live in the Bay or in Oxford, rather than any serious ideological difference.

I'd feel better if cross-organizational giving were more common (hopefully not just in a "scratch my back I'll scratch yours" way).

The claim that it's natural to donate to one's employer given one's prior decision to become an employee assumes that EAs—or at least those working for EA orgs—should spend all their altruistic resources (i.e. time and money) in the same way. But this assumption is clearly false: it can be perfectly reasonable for me to believe that I should spend my time working for some organization, and that I should spend my money supporting some other organization. Obviously, this will be the case if the organization I work for, but not the one I support, lacks room for more funding. But it can also be the case in many other situations, depending on the relative funding and talent constraints of both the organization I work for and the organizations I could financially support.

The amount of money employees at EA organisations can give is fairly small

Agreed. Is there any evidence employee donation is a significant problem, or that it will become one in the near future? If not, and given there is no obvious solution, I suggest focusing on higher priorities (e.g. VIP outreach).

Thanks to Max Dalton, Sam Deere, Will MacAskill, Michael Page, Stefan Shubert, Carl Shulman, Pablo Stafforini, Rob Wiblin, and Julia Wise for comments and contributions to the conversation.

I think too many (brain power x hours) have been expended here.

Sorry to be a downer, just trying to help optimize.

I agree with Owen. I don't have anything to add to what's been said, other than a response to the strongest reason against having that norm: It only conflicts with the norm of "do what's most effective" if it truly is more effective to donate to one's own employer. But because of the signaling/weirdness reasons (and, yes, the bias) that doesn't seem to be true. We're sophisticated enough that we can have a hierarchy of norms, with "do what's most effective" at the top and "don't donate to your employer unless there's a special circumstance" as a lower norm--as a helpful heuristic/guideline.

How much money is saved from taxes by foregoing salary? If it's at least 20% of the donation then I might change my mind.

"They push against norms of allowing personal freedom in how to allocate resources. EA tends to not want to dictate to people what they may or may not do."

I can confirm that someone trying to stop me giving wherever I thought the money would do the most good - whether my employer or elsewhere - would infuriate me.

Another possible intermediate norm would be to discourage talking about donating to one's employer. This would reduce some of the pressure for bias, some of the conflict of interest, etc., by keeping it secret from colleagues.

It might even be possible to keep it secret from the employer -- or visible only to payroll, who would report only how much was donated in total by employees, not by whom.

A disadvantage of this is that it would push against the EA norm of being open about giving. It could even make it hard for employees to talk openly about their external giving, because a conspicuous absence of discussing external giving might mean giving to the employer instead. (That might be circumvented if everyone were giving something to external orgs and could honestly talk about where and why, and they didn't talk about the amounts they were giving to specific orgs.)

The strongest reason to have a community norm against doing this is that it’s easier to be unbiased in assessing other organisations.

I'd guess that a number of the people working at organizations take jobs there precisely because they believe they are the most effective organizations. In those cases there is no room for alleging bias. Moreover, there's still room for bias with external organizations. If I work at ACE I'm biased in favor of the charities I reviewed. If I work at FHI I'm biased in favor of MIRI because we do some stuff together. And so on.

Also note that people in an organization have inside information that outsiders lack. Are corporate employees banned from trading in their own stock because there is worry over them being optimistically biased about their own company's prospects? No, it's because such positions provide an unusual advantage in financial markets.

It might help to be more specific about what we mean by 'norms'. Obviously no one is going to ban people from donating to their employer. The first thing I would do as an organization or as a donor would be to get a third party to circumvent the ban. So what's left... social stigma? How? Why? If there is worry about bias in donations, just tell people - hey, here's some reasons to be cautious before you donate to your employer. Just give them the reasons you are using as an argument for the norm. Norms just supervene on people's opinions. If people see this idea and think it's powerful and share it with their friends, you have the norm. If they don't, then you don't have the norm.

You can argue for all kinds of norms pushing in various directions based on allegations of cognitive bias (e.g. people who grew up poor should not donate to Givewell charities because their life experiences will bias them, vegans should not donate for animal relief because their diet will bias them, etc), but actually demonstrating the problem is another matter. We don't know if biases significantly apply to this case. Donating money is a serious, occasional, major financial decision being conducted by people who are already trying to be very rational, so it's a very strange domain for one to introduce paternalism.

Finally, there's more personal value in being aligned with your workplace. Employees who donate are likely to experience having a greater stake and greater motivation for the organization.