Next week the Effective Altruism Forum is doing a Pledge Highlight week, and they asked if I could post an Ask Me Anything (AMA) about my experiences.
Most of the helpful background on me is in my post from last year, 10 years of Earning To Give. To highlight some potential prompts for questions:
- I work as a quantitative trader in London.
- I took the Giving What We Can pledge in 2013 upon leaving university, with a pledged percentage of 20%.
- My household has donated £1.5m over the last decade, or just under 50% of our household income.
- I've had a relatively high level of involvement in the EA community during much of that time period, though less in the past few years.
- My wife and I have 4 kids (14, 7, 3, 0).
I plan to answer questions on Tuesday 17th December, likely during the London afternoon.
You've mentioned your experience with burnout in a previous post - I wondered if you were willing to share more about that, and how it influenced your approach to EtG if at all.
I sometimes think about whether we have or should have language for a mental health equivalent of Second-Impact syndrome. At the time I burned out I would say I was dealing with four ~independent situations or circumstances that most people would recognise as challenging, but my attitude to each one was 'this is fine, I can handle this'. Taken one at a time that was probably true, all at once was demonstrably false.
Somehow I needed to notice that I was already dealing with one or two challenging situations and strongly pivot to a defensive posture to avoid taking on even more, similar to how you shouldn't risk a second concussion shortly after your first one. I think this is a more helpful takeaway than 'well make fewer missteps next time', which was my first reaction.
I have taken that posture once or twice since then, but the nature of doing prevention correctly is that you never really know if what you're doing is actually making a difference. Still, it seems the logical thing to do.
I am way late to this so I understand if you don’t get to this comment, but:
As somebody whose charitable impact relies heavily on donating money, do you have any advice for folks who want to help the world but who also want the “warm fuzzies” that come with it?
I’m asking because I know a handful of (non-EA) people who care about the world but who feel like just writing a check won’t give them the emotional gratification that they’re looking for.
It seems to me that there ought to be an EA talking point, so to speak, for that sort of person—curious to know if you have any perspective on it!
Hi Alex. It's a great idea to have this AMA! Hopefully it helps raise more awareness of earning to give as a potential path to impact for more people.
Two questions that I'd be keen to get your views on, and which may be of interest to the community:
(1) How do you balance your earning to give/effective giving commitments with your family commitments? (e.g. in my own experience, one's partner may disapprove of or be stressed out by you giving >=10%, and of course with a mortgage/kids things get even tougher)
(2) Would you say currently, the median EA should consider trying some E2G (or at least non-EA work while giving significantly) early on in their career?
The main considerations, as far as I see, relate to: (a) the EA labour market (where currently, demand for jobs outstrip supply - so chances of landing a job are low & counterfactual impact relative to next best hire is small); (b) whether money is the bottleneck for EA (it does seem so, at least for GHD/AW - and importantly, you can't always choose to work at the most effective charities but can choose to donate to them); and (c) miscellaneous issues like financial stability, building career capital, and ability to switch career paths (traditional work in finance/consulting/tech for 1-3 years of E2G seem to be stronger on all three counts, relative to the marginal EA job that a fresh grad is likely to land)
Cheers,
Joel
That's quite a cautious phrasing! Let me strengthen it a bit then respond to that:
My thoughts on this now depend a fair bit on where you draw the boundaries of 'EA'.
For the median EA survey taker, I pretty strongly lean 'yes' here. Full disclosure that I am moderately influenced by my partner's experience of trying to get an 'impactful' job straight out of university, but I've seen a lot of others in similar spots, just they mostly aren't married to EAs and they mostly bounce right out of the movement rather than writing it up.
For the median student or early-career EAG attendee in 2024, I am much less confident but lean no for 'median', my entirely guessed percentage would hover more around 35%. That's a crowd which has roughly been selected for having the skills to contribute directly to important EA causes[1].
Somewhere in between is the actual audience of this post, EA forum readers. I don't have a clear lean here, but I would note the following:
E.g., from recent post:
An applicant might be rejected if: They do not seem well-placed to take impactful actions as a result of the event....
EAG is first and foremost a professional networking event.
I think young people really don't always realise this, so to say it outright: bad hires are expensive. Even in countries like the UK/US with minimal worker protections. Personally I knew this in the abstract but it wasn't until I became a manager that I really 'got' this.
Thanks for the thoughts!
(1) I'm in strong agreement with worries over people leaving/disengaging from EA due to applying for a huge number of jobs and getting disillusioned when not landing any. From my conversations with various EAs, this seems a genuine problem, and there are probably structural reasons for this: (a) the current EA job market (demand > supply); and (b) selection effects in terms of who gives advice (by definition, us EA folks at EA organizations giving advice on EA jobs, have been successful in landing a direct EA job, and may underrate the difficulties of doing so).
(2) On whether the average early career EA should try for E2G - I'm not sure about this. It's true that they've been selected for, but they're still fundamentally at a big disadvantage in terms of experience, and I'm seriously worried about a lot of selection into low career-capital but nominally EA roles that disadvantage them later on, both in terms of impact and financial security.
In any case, at EAGx Singapore last weekend, I did a talk to a crowd of mainly these early career EAs on having impact with and without an EA career, and I basically pitched trying for an EA job but also seriously considering impact by effective giving in a non-EA job as a Plan B. I think it's especially relevant for LMIC EAs, who cannot move to the UK/US for high-impact roles (or find it harder to do so).
To your last observation, I actually think this has gotten easier over the years. When I was younger I had so much uncertainty about my life/career trajectory that I found it difficult to understand the marginal value of both spending and saving. What if I save too little and then turn down an opportunity to move abroad as a result? What if I save too much and then my interest in EA turns out to be a youthful fad? What if I need to spend more to network effectively?
It's not that such uncertainty is totally gone, but in general I expect it does diminish as you get older. Allan Saldanha made similar observations in his podcast[1].
My partner is independently very on board with EA, so I can't speak much to challenges there. Our kids don't know much about it, but as long as we're appropriately planning for their futures and our retirement there is some sense in which it isn't much to do with them. I do lean generous/conservative in later life planning though; given the amount we've donated I would really hate to ever end up in a spot where I was leaning on my kids for financial support, even more than I expect most parents would.
Comes up at a few points, but e.g.:
I don't know if I would have taken the pledge right after university - there's so much more uncertainty now, you don't have jobs for life like you might have 30-40 years ago.
What could EA do better to help earn-to-givers maximise their impact?
EA's relationship with earn-to-givers is weird.
On the one hand, my post from last year is currently the 2nd-highest-upvoted post of all time on this Forum. People in EA are mostly nice about what I do, especially online. And when EA comes in for criticism, I often feel like my donations are effectively being wheeled out as a defense. To be clear, in many ways this is reasonable; I probably wouldn't have donated anything like as much if it weren't for EA.
On the other hand, I'm sometimes reminded of the observation that it is 'necessary to get behind someone in order to stab them in the back'. Some of the people and groups who are using me as a shield are the same groups who have spent the last several years trying to get me to stop earning to give or at least stop donating to Givewell charities, and this has had meaningful impacts on my motivation that I have mostly mitigated by talking to them less. In these cases I am doing what I do in spite of them, not because of them, and any lives I save aren't theirs to claim.
I don't want EA to stop thinking about questions whose answers may challenge people's life choices, this seems too core to the project. I do want to flag that non-genuine support isn't as useful or as harmless as people perhaps think it is. I don't gain anything from someone praising my choices in public while privately thinking my choices are dumb, and would mostly encourage people not to do the former if they feel the latter. Trust is hard to regain once lost.
One obvious issue here is that if you're earning to give you're donating, and many people in EA are searching for money. So I get the incentives, but silence is also an option. Probably not a coincidence that the dynamics I'm describing here bear a lot of resemblance to what people much richer than me grumble about.
Pragmatically, I think the best path forward is for people on the Effective Giving/EtG side of things to support each other more and look to the wider movement less. There are some things starting to shift in this direction.
How do you decide the timing of your donations?
I initially felt a strong sense of urgency to donate as soon as I can:
I'm considering leaning a bit on the "investing to give later" side for 2025:
But I don't know how to balance all those considerations, and if I do decide to give later I wouldn't know how to decide when.
I found this post arguing that we should donate more when interest rates are lower interesting, but I'm not a finance professional so I don't know if it holds any water.
Even with attempts to prevent it, I think annual risk of value drift for me is greater than the annual expected real return on equities, which tends to defeat the usual argument for giving later.
Another exercise I've done occasionally is to look at my donations from say 5-10 years ago and muse on whether I would rather have invested the money and given now. So far that hasn't been close to true, and that's in spite of an impressive bull market in stocks over the last decade. Money was just so much more of an issue back then. I thought this from Will MacAskill was a good reflection on just how money-constrained things were 'in the old days', for those who didn't see it:
Of course the directly relevant question is: When I look back on this relatively abundant period in 2034, will I feel the same way? I honestly don't know, realistically the biggest factors will be what Good Ventures decides to do with their money and how well EA attracts other money.
Which donations do you think had the highest EV in retrospect?
It's either my 2014 donations to 80k or my 2015 donations to Charity Science, which eventually evolved into AIM. Both orgs were pretty small at the time, from memory we were >15% of their budgets in those years.
You've decided to give mostly to established institutions (GWWC, 80k, AMF, GW) – why those over more hits-based approaches (including things that wouldn't be a burden on your time like giving to AIM or deputizing someone else to make risky grants to promising individuals/small orgs on your behalf)?
This was a surprising question to me, because that's not how I think about my donations. I think there are a few things going on there:
Still, even with that said I think you're pointing at something real; my approach has certainly been more institution-heavy than say EAIF. So to show some cards, I'm roughly of the opinion that the 'give a promising individual a one-off grant' setup that's common in EA is pretty dysfunctional and I'm reluctant to pour much money into it. It requires a lot of evaluation time on the funder side and causes a lot of pain and heartache on the grantee side. There's a reason most people prefer to be employees not contractors, and I think even contractors have way better average job security than the individuals and tiny orgs inside this model.
Then I'm also not sold the outputs are better as they would need to be to justify those non-financial costs. In the private sector my understanding is that large orgs are generally more productive than smaller ones, at least up to sizes way larger than all EA orgs, due to fixed overheads and better ability to allow employees to specialise.
None of this is a hard no, and clearly I have done this sometimes. AIM mitigates some of these issues about as well as I think they can be mitigated. Sometimes I'm just much closer to a grant opportunity than other funders and it makes sense for me to take it. But mostly I do end up preferring to give to institutions.
This isn't about your giving per se, but have your views on the moral valence of financial trading changed in any notable ways since you spoke about this on the 80K podcast?
(I have no reason to think your views have changed, but was reading a socialist/anti-finance critique of EA yesterday and thought of your podcast.)
The episode page lacks a transcript, but does include this summary: "There are arguments both that quant trading is socially useful, and that it is socially harmful. Having investigated these, Alex thinks that it is highly likely to be beneficial for the world."
In that section (starts around 43:00), you talk about market-making, selling goods "across time" in the way other businesses sell them across space, and generally helping sellers "communicate" by adjusting prices in sensible ways. At the same time, you acknowledge that market-making might be less useful than in the past and that more finance people on the margin might not provide much extra social value (since markets are so fast/advanced/liquid at this point).
My views have not changed directionally, but I do feel happier with them than I did at the time for a couple of reasons:
With my more recent work it seems much too soon to say anything definitive about social impact, so I always try to acknowledge some chance that I'll feel bad when I look back on this.
How much time do you spend on deciding where to donate? Or do you mostly have enough trust to delegate to e.g. GiveWell in your decisions?
Relatedly, do you spend much time evaluating the donations from previous years for impact?
(As a smaller scale EtGer myself I often struggle with how much time I should be spending on these things, which are plausibly extremely important)
This really depends how broadly I define things; does reading the EA Forum count? In terms of time that feels like it's being pretty directly spent on deciding, my sense is ~50 hours per year. That's roughly evenly split between checking whether the considerations that inform my cause prioritisaition have changed - e.g. has a big new funder moved into a space - and evaluating individual opportunities.
I touched on the evaluation question in a couple of other answers.
How do you and your wife decide where to give to, collectively? Do you guys each have a budget, do you discuss a lot and fund based on consensus, something else?
It has varied. Giving both of us half the budget is in some ways most natural but we quickly noticed it was gameable to the extent we can predict each other's actions, similar to what is described here. At the moment we're much closer to 'discuss a lot and fund based on consensus'.
Not a question as much as a comment and a thank you! I always appreciate learning about donors and what motivates them to give.
We hear a lot about organisational needs -- and how money will be spent -- so it's good to hear about why money is donated.
All the best,
Rick
How do you think about opportunity costs when it comes to earning to give? Are there roles at other firms or in the US where you would expect to make substantially more (including downside risks), but pass on those for personal reasons?
Same for roles where you might make less but pass on those for ETG reasons.
I got very lucky that I was born in a city that is objectively one of the best places in the world to do what I do, so reasons to move location are limited.
More generally I don't feel like I'm doing anything particularly out of the ordinary here compared to a world where I am not donating; I like money, more of it is better than less of it, but there are sometimes costs to getting more money that outweigh the money. Though I would say that as you go up the earnings curve it gets easier and easier to mitigate the personal costs, e.g. by spending money to save time.
Perhaps the biggest risk is that if I set my marginal tax + donation rate too high I am insufficiently incentivised to earn more, to the detriment of both me and the world. Still working on that one.
Thanks for the AMA! My question has already been asked to some extent, but I wanted to phrase it a different way which gets closer to the circumstances people earning to give in software engineering might face.
Suppose that there was a dire need for people trained as quants doing direct work for some important EA cause area, or at least correlated enough that you would be close to as productive doing the direct work as quant work (controlling for who your colleagues are, difficulty of problem etc).
My question is, what is the minimum salary you would need to be offered for the direct work where you feel like the switch would be worth it?
Additionally, how would you navigate the trade-offs if the direct work was something high risk like founding a startup or non-profit?
I think my if-the-stars-align minimum is probably around £45k these days. But then it starts going up once there are suboptimal circumstances like the ones you mention. In practice I might expect it to land at 125% to 250% of that figure depending how the non-salary aspects of the job look.
I'm curious about the motivation of the question; FWIW my figure here is a complicated function of my expenses, anticipated flexibility on those expenses, past savings, future plans, etc. in a way that I wouldn't treat it as much of a guide to what anyone else would or should say.
Thanks, Alex. For roles in organisations supported by impact-focussed funders like Open Philanthropy or EA Funds, do you have guesses for the difference between hired and best rejected candidates in $/year donated to the organisation hiring? I understand this depends on the organisation and role, but any thoughts are welcome.
Abraham Rowe said:
Joey Savoi said:
It does indeed depend a lot. I think the critical thing to remember is that the figure should be the minimum of what it costs to get a certain type of talent and how valuable that talent is. Clean Water is worth thousands of dollars per year to me, but if you turned up on my doorstep with a one-year supply of water for $1k I'd tell you to stop wasting my time because I can get it far more cheaply than that.
When assessing the cost of acquiring talent, the hard thing to track is how many people aren't in the pool of applicants at all due to funding constraints. That sounds like it's Abraham's position and I think it's more common than often given credit for; there's something very low-status in EA about saying 'I could be doing this more impactful thing, but I won't because it won't pay me enough'.
Funding isn't the only constraint on salaries of course; appearances matter too. Once your org is paying enough that you can't really pay more without getting a lot of sideways glances you don't want to get, that's when I would mostly stop calling you funding-constrained* and then I imagine this number can get really really high; cost of talent becomes ~infinite and we're back to looking at 'value'. Open Phil's hiring is perhaps in approximately that position.
If you are still in a position where you could raise salaries if it weren't for funding constraints, I tend to think this number struggles to make it out of low six figures. Possible exceptions are positions that want a very specific combination of skills and experiences, like senior leadership at central EA orgs.
*Assuming you are mostly turning money into people into impact, rather than e.g. money into nets into impact.