Summary
- I think EA is under centralised
- There are few ‘large’ EA organisations but most EA opportunities are 1-2 person projects
- This is setting up most projects to fail without proper organisational support and does not provide good incentives for experienced professionals to work on EA projects
- EA organisations with good operations could incubate smaller projects before spinning them out
Levels of Centralisation
We could imagine different levels of centralisation for a movement ranging from fully decentralised to fully centralised.
- Fully decentralised, everyone works on their own project, no organisations bigger than 1 person
- Fully centralised, everyone works inside the same organisation (e.g. the civil service)
It seems that EA tends more towards the decentralised model, there are relatively few larger organisations with ~50 or more people (Open Phil, GiveWell, Rethink Priorities, EVF), there are some with ~5-20 people and a lot of 1-2 person projects.
I think EA would be much worse if it was one large organisation but there is probably a better balance found between the two extremes then we have at the moment.
I think being overly decentralised may be setting up most people to fail.
Why would being overly decentralised be setting people up to fail?
- Being an independent researcher/organiser is harder without support systems in place, and trying to coordinate this outside of an organisation is more complicated
- These support systems include
- Having a manager
- Having colleagues to bounce ideas off/moral support
- Having professional HR/operations support
- Health insurance
- Being an employee rather than a contractor/grant recipient that has to worry about receiving future funding (although there are similar concerns about being fired)
- When people are setting up their own projects it can take up a large proportion of their time in the first year just doing operations to run that project, unrelated to the actual work they want to do. This can include spending a lot of the first year just fundraising for the second year
How a lack of centralisation might affect EA overall
- Being a movement with lots of small project work will appeal more to those with a higher risk tolerance, potentially pushing away more experienced people who would want to work on these projects, but within a larger organisation
- Having a lot of small organisations will lead to a lot of duplication of operation/administration work
- It will be harder to have good governance for lots of smaller organisations, some choose to not have any governance structures at all unless they grow
- There is less competition for employees if the choice is between 3 or 4 operationally strong organisations or being in a small org
What can change?
- Organisations with good operations and governance could support more projects internally - One example of this already is the Rethink Priorities Special Projects Program
- These projects can be supported until they have enough experience and internal operations to survive and thrive independently
- Programs that are mainly around giving money to individuals could be converted into internal programs, something more similar to the Research Scholars Program, or Charity Entrepreneurship’s Incubation Program
I still strongly disagree if, as it seems from the OP, you mean 'we want more larger orgs' rather than 'we want to make large orgs smaller'. The larger the org, the less fidelity you get from any competition.
If Org 1 and Org 2 each do only one activity, they can compete perfectly, in that funders can express an unambiguous preference between those two activities by donating a marginal $ to one or other of them.
But for each further activity an org does, ignoring restricted donations (which on my understanding are counterfactually not very effective), they approximately multiply the number of preference-orderings consistent with donating to either org by the total number of activities. If I'm thinking about this correctly, the number of preference orderings consistent with a donation to one of two orgs is (mn)! - m!n! where m and n are the number of activities each org does.
For example, if Org 1 does activities A, B, and and Org 2 does C and D, then giving to Org 1 is consistent with any combination of preferences such that at least one activity at Org 1 is preferred to at least one activity at Org 2. This gives 4! - 2!*2! = 20 consistent orderings:
A > B > C > D
A > B > D > C
A > C > B > D
A > C > D > B
A > D > B > C
A > D > C > B
B > A > C > D
B > A > D > C
B > C > A > D
B > C > D > A
B > D > A > C
B > D > C > A
C > B > A > D
C > B > D > A
C > A > B > D
C > A > D > B
C > D > B > AC > D > A > BD > B > C > A
D > B > A > C
D > C > B > AD > C > A > BD > A > B > C
D > A > C > B
Obviously this is a bit abstract/oversimplified, but if we think it's a reasonable approximation of reality, it implies that the difference in fidelity of competition between small and large organisations is colossal. Depending on how you think about CEA (the sub-org, not EVF) alone, their activities might include
Arguably software development and any other in-house services they provide. Even by comparison to a hypothetical org who was only doing one of those things, that would mean a donation to either org would be consistent with 8! preference orderings (or 9! if you include software): that's 40320 or 362880, respectively. Obviously take these numbers with a large grain of salt in the real world, but I think the picture isn't totally unreasonable, and the numbers are large enough that they could outweigh a very great number of inside view considerations, to make any organisation provided an alternative to have close to zero value in the sense of incentivising either org to perform better.
This is before you're even looking at the umbrella orgs, where the picture gets even murkier - in theory their sub-orgs seem to be expected to arrange their own funding independently, but in principle their sources of funding seem to be extremely correlated.