• Posts
  • RSS
  • ◂◂RSS
  • Contact

  • Funding Constraints for EA Orgs

    July 26th, 2017
    ea
    How much better is time than money? While I do think currently in EA it's generally better to use your time than earn to give, the ratio matters a lot. One way to express this is, for each person there's a (very hard to estimate) number: the donation amount that would have the same expected impact as if they did direct work. For example, someone who would be ok at direct work might have a threshold around $50k/y, while someone who's really good might have one around $500k/y. [1]

    The relative value of money vs talent depends on what current options are for turning more money into work. For EA organizations, one way to get at it is to look at how they currently trade off between them. For example, imagine each organization has a guideline for its staff in the form of "be willing to spend $X to save yourself 1hr". I'm very curious where organizations would put this division.

    Similarly, we could try and figure out how many people there are who would be a good fit for EA organizations, but aren't willing to work at current salary levels. My impression is salary ("I'm pretty altrusistic, but I'm not altruistic enough to do the equivalent of donating 75%") is currently a common reason for going into earning to give.

    We could also look at things organizations currently hire EAs for, but that could be contracted out or done by non-EA employees. To take a probably too extreme example, could EA Global be run by non-EA professional conference organizers? Speaker selection, say, would still need to be handled by people familiar with the community, but most of the work of planning and running a conference is probably pretty transferable.

    Where EA organizations currently are getting work done externally, my impression is the orgs lean towards cheaper options that take longer, require more staff time, or have other downsides. In general, you can pay more for better and faster work.

    As I wrote last week, I think there's still a lot of room for EA organizations to adjust to more abundant funding, and as this happens we'll keep seeing more ways to turn money into things we care about.


    [1] And someone who's really bad at direct work might have a threshold well less than $0; it's much easier to cause damage with bad direct work than by being bad at earning to give.

    Comment via: google plus, facebook

    Recent posts on blogs I like:

    A Big Problem With The Going To Bed Book

    One day my dad was reading this book called the "Going to Bed Book" to my sister Nora. The book is basically about a bunch of animals who are getting ready for bed on a boat. They go down the stairs, take a bath, hang their towels on the wall, find…

    via Lily Wise's Blog Posts September 18, 2023

    Investing in boundaries with young kids

    Putting in some work to get the behavior you want The post Investing in boundaries with young kids appeared first on Otherwise.

    via Otherwise August 15, 2023

    Self-driving car bets

    This month I lost a bunch of bets. Back in early 2016 I bet at even odds that self-driving ride sharing would be available in 10 US cities by July 2023. Then I made similar bets a dozen times because everyone disagreed with me. The first deployment to pot…

    via The sideways view July 29, 2023

    more     (via openring)


  • Posts
  • RSS
  • ◂◂RSS
  • Contact