I have a friend who is casually engaged with EA. They went on https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/grants and was browsing some of the grants and asking me about them. I get the impression this was well-intentioned curiosity, but I was at a loss to explain the dollar amount of some of the grants my friend pointed out to me, in light of the short "project description" provided.
The last thing I want to do in this post is call anyone out-- I'm sure the rationale behind these grants was sound, and there is relevant information missing from the provided description-- but I was surprised to find out that there are grants for university group organizing in the five and six figures, and some of these are not even for an entire year. I do think this is something that will (perhaps justifiably) raise eyebrows for the average person, if they are just learning about EA as a movement very focused on cost effectiveness, and haven't yet internalized some of the expected value calculations that probably went into these grants. But also, in a couple cases, I personally am having a hard time imagining how these numbers make sense.
If you are reading this post and willing to comment-- could you (1) help me make sense of these grants first for myself and (2) provide any pointers on how to explain them to someone who isn't yet totally onboard with EA? I don't want to indicate specific grants, but specifically, what e.g. is the argument for a 5 or 6 figure grant for one semester of university organizing at a specific school? I don't understand how so much money could be needed. As far as I'm aware, most organizers are volunteers (but maybe that is changing?). Happy to take this to a private conversation if that would be more appropriate.
Good question, and I think this is definitely healthy discussion. In general, money is a sensitive issue, and I would encourage all parties to show nuance, this includes (but not limited to) when: "judging" someone's salary, when asking for a salary, and when granting a salary.
Two steelmen for decent chunky grants 1) Bounded loss and unbounded wins - while theoretically salaries could be cut in half, impact could easily be 10-100x. I.e. the focus should be opportunity cost and not expenditure 2) many smart people in ea, and the people granting, may have previously been earning decent significant salaries as programmers/executives/consultants. You and I may see 80k USD as a lot of money, but its pretty normal for developers in Cali to earn hundreds of USD. Therefore, expecting people to earn 50k a year may effectively be asking them to donate 75% of their income.
And 2 steelmen for keeping salary low - 1) this is a movement about charity, helping others, and donating. We put a lot of effort and time into building health communities around these principles built on a heavy basis of trust. It's important to feel like people are in it for the right reason, and high salaries can jeopardise that. 2) it's pretty easy to justify a high salary with some of the above reasoning, perhaps too easy. As a community builder myself, it seems totally plausible we could attract people that are a poor fit for ea by being too relaxed around the money pedal.
For my own personal opinion, I think it's far too easy to ignore opportunity cost, and concentrate on short term expenditure and salary. However, I can very much imagine myself leaving the community if I salaries became too inflated. And I am likely to feel less aligned with others who require large salaries (just being honest here). Looking at recent posted receipts, I don't see anything that catches my eye in a bad way, although it could be said to be unfair that some community builders will be working 3x harder on a volunteer basis than other community builders on a competitive salary. I think this partially reflects the incentives which produced a world we currently live in (I.e. largely unaltruistic).
Whilst I find the arguments for working hard, and concentrating on impact, rather than earning little, pretty compelling - it's worth pointing out that there's some fantastic work coming out of Charity Entrepreneurship charities (who's employees generally earn little) , so it's not clear the tradeoff is always present.
Lastly, I would say its likely that I've made tradeoffs with my own salary, which have likely significantly negatively effected my social impact. I suspect this is easy to do, and would encourage people to avoid failing into this trap.