It might be helpful to add some useful reference classes here as I think it's often forgotten how unusual EA salaries are relative to other fields. 

Average GDP of the world: £11,000 
London's living wage: £21,800
Median full-time UK employees: £26,800
Average salary nonprofit jobs: £31,700
The average annual salary in London: £39,000
Average salary nonprofit London: £39,600
Average CE employee salary: £39,300
Entry-level EA job: £48,000
Average EA job: £80,000

"My default interpretation is that someone doesn't value the role or my work very much." 

I think this is a pretty unfortunate norm that some EAs have. In practice, it results in EAs by far prioritizing the best-funded areas instead of the most impactful ones. I think the reality is that offered salaries have far more to do with funding availability and perceived counterfactuals of funding. At the end of the day, AMF can absorb more money, and thus there is a higher bar for spending in global health than there is in areas without clear benchmarks.

Salary questions and discussions always happen well before someone goes through the program (typically during the interviews or soon after an invitation is offered). Ultimately, the co-founders select how much they ask for, and many have asked for considerably higher amounts.

I think this is a pretty simple and incorrect model. Job desirability is considered based on many traits (salary being one, but far from the only one), with different individuals weighing those traits at different levels of importance. If salary is the most important factor for a job, CE will basically never compete given the talent requirements; if autonomy or impact is the most important trait, it will compete even at very low levels of salary.

I am pretty skeptical that this would be the best way to increase diversity in EA per dollar. I talk to quite a number of incubation programs, both inside and outside of EA, and for most forms of diversity, I do not think that a low salary is the top barrier. I think that for age diversity, there is a case for this, but for country-level diversity, it might pull in the opposite direction. My soft sense is that both CE staff and the CE cohort are unusually diverse relative to the EA movement as a whole and similar EA incubation programs, despite having low salaries.

Also, a factual update: I think most numbers right now for founders are more in the 40-60k range.

I think it holds up. I wrote a highly upvoted post on organisations being transparent about their scope one month ago due to similar concerns.

So far have not seen this work well for many projects but open to the idea in theory.

2021 is outdated when discussing budgets and projects we are not currently working on blog posts. With regards to the budget, I believe this is the legal minimum that has to be made public, though much of the data is combined within an EVF, making it harder to pull out specific details. I think the budget is inherently tied to the scope, as it's challenging to truly understand where an organisation is allocating its resources without this kind of basic information. For instance, if an organisation spends a large percentage of its resources on a certain area, any cause preference in that area would have a much greater impact on the overall scope of the organisation.

"I think beyond this level of transparency, CEA is probably hitting rapidly diminishing returns or taking attention away from more important topics." I would be surprised if this was the case as some pretty basic stuff is missing, e.g. I could not find a recent public budget for CEA. 

Hey Rob,

I wonder if filling out something like the template I laid out in this post could allow transparency without disclosing confidential details for the CEA group's team.