Debate: Are enough EAs earning to give?

By Toby Tremlett🔹 @ 2025-07-23T13:57 (+75)

Here's a Career Conversations Week debate for you:

 

Clarifications:

Table from this Forum post

 

Reading list:

calebp @ 2025-07-23T21:15 (+62)

The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low


(I wasn't going to comment, but rn I'm the only person who disagrees)

Some reasons against the current proportion of e2g'ers being too low.
* There aren't many salient examples of people doing direct work that I want to switch to e2g.
* Doing direct work gives you a lot more exposure to great giving opportunities.
* Many people doing direct work I know wouldn't earn dramatically more if they switched to e2g.
* Most people doing e2g aren't doing super ambitious e2g (e.g. earning putting themselves in a position to donate >> $1M/year).
* E2g is often less well optimised for learning useful object-level knowledge and skills than direct work.

* Some EAs were early at AI companies and now have net worths of >> $100M - they will likely spend some of this on EA aligned philanthropy 
* There are already billions of dollars in philanthropic capital for EA-aligned projects, and basically all funders I've spoken to feel that there aren't enough very exciting fundable projects - so directionally, I'd feel a bit surprised if fewer people should be following paths that are less optimised for directly working on exciting projects.



Otoh, if someone has a very small chance of donating as much as Dustin Moskovitz did, then it's very plausible they should do that - I certainly wouldn't discourage people from earning to give if they are succeeding at it.

mhendric🔸 @ 2025-07-24T02:26 (+20)

This is a cool list. I am unsure if this one is very useful:

* There aren't many salient examples of people doing direct work that I want to switch to e2g.
 

This is because I think that we are not able to evaluate what replacement candidate would fill the role if the employed EA had done e2g. My understanding is that many extremely talented EAs are having trouble finding jobs within EA, and that many of them are capable of work at the quality that current EA employees do.

This reason I think bites both ways:

* E2g is often less well optimised for learning useful object-level knowledge and skills than direct work.

My understanding is that many non-EA jobs provide useful knowledge and skills that are underrepresented in current EA organizations, albeit my impression is that this is improving as EA organizations professionalize. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if on average, a highly talented undergrad would likely become a more effective employee of an EA organization if they spent 2 years ETG at anonymous corporation before they started doing direct work. And if we're lucky, such experiences outside EA would promote epistemic diversity and reduce the risk of groupthink in EA organizations.

 

calebp @ 2025-07-24T10:14 (+7)

This is because I think that we are not able to evaluate what replacement candidate would fill the role if the employed EA had done e2g.


Idk I feel like you can get a decent sense of this from running hiring rounds with lots of work tests. I think many talented EAs are looking for EA jobs, but often it's a question of "fit" over just raw competence.

> My understanding is that many non-EA jobs provide useful knowledge and skills that are underrepresented in current EA organizations, albeit my impression is that this is improving as EA organizations professionalize

This seems plausible, though I personally think it's somewhat overstated on the forum. I agree that more EAs should be "skill maxing" over direct work or e2g, but I don't think we should use e2g as a shorthand for optimising for developing valuable skills in the short term.

Jason @ 2025-07-26T00:05 (+4)

I think many talented EAs are looking for EA jobs, but often it's a question of "fit" over just raw competence.

 

For the significant majority of EAs, does there exist an "EA job" that is a sufficiently good fit as to be superior to the individual's EtG alternative? To count, the job needs to be practically obtainable (e.g., the job is funded, the would-be worker can get it, the would-be worker does not have personal characteristics or situations that prevent them from accepting the job or doing it well).

I would find it at least mildly surprising for the closeness of fit between the personal characteristics of the EA population and the jobs available to be that tight.[1]

 

  1. ^

    For most social movements, funding only allows a small percentage of the potentially-interested population to secure employment in the movement (such as clergy or other religious workers in a religious movement. So they do not face this sort of question. But I'd be skeptical that (e.g.) 85% of pretty religious people are well-suited to work as clergy or in other religious occupations.

calebp @ 2025-07-26T01:10 (+6)

I don’t understand why this is relevant to the question of whether there are enough people doing e2g. Clearly there are many useful direct impact or skill building jobs that aren’t at ea orgs. E.g. working as a congressional staffer.

I wouldn’t find it surprising at all if most EAs are a good fit for good non e2g roles. In fact, earning a lot of money is quite hard, I expect most people won’t be a very good fit for it.

I think we’re talking past each other when we say “ea job”, but if you mean job at an ea org I’d agree there aren’t enough roles for everyone, but most useful direct work/skill building roles aren’t at ea orgs so it doesn’t seem very relevant, and if you mean directly impactful job or useful for skill building your claim seems wrong, seems like there are many jobs that will be better fits for people than e2g motivated ones (imo).

mhendric🔸 @ 2025-07-25T16:44 (+1)

I agree that we shouldn't use e2g as a shorthand for skillmaxing. 

 

I am less optimistic about the 'fit' vs raw competence point. It's not clear to me that a good fit for the work position can easily be gleaned by work tests - a very competent person may be able to acquire that 'fit' within a few weeks on the job, for example, once they have more context for the kind of work the organization wants. So even if the candidates at the point of hiring looked very different, their comparison may differ unless we imagine both in an applied job context, having learned things they did not know at the time of hiring.

I am more broadly worried about 'fit' in EA hiring contexts, because as opposed to markers of raw competence, 'fit' provides a lot of flexibility for selecting traits that are relatively tangential to work performance and often unreliable. For example, value-fit might select for hiring likeminded folks who have read the same stuff the hiring manager has, and reduce epistemic diversity. A fit for similar research interests reduces epistemic diversity and locks in certain research agendas for a long time. A vibe-fit may select simply for friends and those who have internalized norms. A worktest that is on an explicitly EA project may select for those already more familiar with EA, even if it would be easy for an outsider candidate to pick up on basic EA knowledge quickly if they got the job. 

My impression is that overall, EA does have a noticeable suboptimal tendency to hire likeminded folks and folks in overlapping social circles (i.e. friends; friends of friends). Insofar as 'fit' makes it easier to justify this tendency internally and externally, I worry that it will lead to suboptimal hiring. I acknowledge we may have very different kinds of 'fit' in mind here. I do think the examples I provide above do exist in EA hiring decisions.

 

I haven't done hiring rounds for EA, so I may be completely wrong - maybe your experience has been that after a few worktests it becomes abundantly clear who the right candidate is.

Nathan Young @ 2025-07-24T11:46 (+4)

It feels like if there were more money held by EAs some projects would be much easier:

  • Lots of animal welfare lobbying
  • Donating money to the developing world
  • AI lobbying
  • Paying people more for work trials

I don't know if there are some people who are much more suited to earning than to doing direct work. It seems to me they're quite similar skill sets. But if they're really sort of at all different, then you should really want quite different people to work on quite different things.

calebp @ 2025-07-30T08:52 (+2)

But if they're really sort of at all different, then you should really want quite different people to work on quite different things.

 

I agree, but I don't know why you think people should move from direct work (or skill building) to e2g. Is the argument that the best things require very specialised labour, so on priors, more people should e2g (or raise capital in other ways) than do direct work?

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-07-30T15:32 (+3)

Hi Caleb,

Donating 10 % more of one's gross earnings to an organisation 10 times as cost-effective as one one could join is 10 (= 0.1*10/0.1) times as impactful as working there if the alternative hire would be 10 % less impactful? If you agree, do you have any thoughts on what is implied by it, and the distribution of cost-effectiveness across the jobs of people replying to the EA Survey?

calebp @ 2025-07-30T16:22 (+10)

I think I follow and agree with "spirit" of the reasoning, but don't think it's very cruxy. I don't have cached takes on what it implies for the people replying to the EA survey.

Some general confusions I have that make this exercise hard:
* not sure how predictive choice of org to work at is of choice of org to donate to, lots of people I know donate to the org they work at because they think it's the best, some donate to think they think are less impactful (at least on utilitarian grounds) than the place they work (e.g. see CEA giving season charity recs) - you seem to think that orgs people donate to are better than orgs they work at but Idk if that's true
* a bit confused about the net effects of joining an org on its capital, e.g. lots of hires unlock more funding via fundraising capacity, credibility, etc.
* most people earning to give (at least people that I meet) aren't (imo) salary max-ing (i.e. earning way more than they do in direct work roles). If we were to restrict e2g to the top earners (e.g. stratup founders, AI company employees, lawyers, hedgies etc.) then I think. it's much easier to consider the hypotehtical - if you buy value drift claims maybe donations from direct workers go up from being surrounded by EAs?
* replacement arguments are confusing, it actually matters what the person you would have otherwise hired goes on to do (and so on)
* It's not super clear to me that rough ex-ante impact distributions are extremely skewed like ex-post ones are
* I don't know how to value the effects of collecting information being much easier in direct work than in e2g (hopefully, EA Funds and similar make this a little less important)

I don't really like my comment here, I feel like I'm pulling away from the actual question but I don't think a myopic response is very helpful for discourse - the above considerations are actual cruxes for me in the real sense (I could imagine my overall take changing if I changed my mind on them). 

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-07-30T17:30 (+2)

Thanks for the good points, Caleb.

* not sure how predictive choice of org to work at is of choice of org to donate to, lots of people I know donate to the org they work at because they think it's the best, some donate to think they think are less impactful (at least on utilitarian grounds) than the place they work (e.g. see CEA giving season charity recs) - you seem to think that orgs people donate to are better than orgs they work at but Idk if that's true

I am assuming people would donate to organisations which are more cost-effective than their own in expectation because donating to ones which are less cost-effective would decrease their impact. This still leaves open the possibility of people donating to their own organisation (or asking to earn less), but they selected this partly for personal fit reasons which do not apply to donations, so I would expect most unbiased people to think there are other organisations which are more cost-effective than their own.

* a bit confused about the net effects of joining an org on its capital, e.g. lots of hires unlock more funding via fundraising capacity, credibility, etc.

Roles unlocking funds should ideally be paid more until the point where increasing earnings by 1 $ only increases funds by 1 $.

calebp @ 2025-07-30T19:37 (+4)

Roles unlocking funds should ideally be paid more until the point where increasing earnings by 1 $ only increases funds by 1 $.


Do you think in real life that's a sensible expectation, or are you saying that's how you wish it worked?

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-07-31T07:13 (+2)

Both. I do not have reasons to believe organisations are under or overspending on fundraising. Some organisations say they have a hard time finding people who are a good fit for fundraising (being "talent-constrained"), but I think this only means there are steep diminishing returns on spending more on fundraising by increasing the earnings of possible fundraising roles. It does not mean they are underspending on fundraising. In general, I think it is sensible to at least have a prior expectation that the various activities on which an impact-focussed organisation can spend more money on have similar marginal cost-effectiveness. Otherwise, they would be leaving impact on the table by not moving money from the least to the most cost-effective activities at the margin. At the same time, I expect to find inefficiencies after learning more.

Ian Turner @ 2025-07-25T19:37 (+3)

Some EAs were early at AI companies and now have net worths of >> $100M - they will likely spend some of this on EA aligned philanthropy

I would argue that this work was highly net-negative, possibly so bad as to offset all the positive benefits of EA.

Yonatan Cale @ 2025-07-24T12:10 (+34)

Hey, the post of mine that you linked is an attempt to simplify this question a lot, here's the TL;DR in my own words:

Instead of considering whether more EAs should E2G or not: apply to a few EA orgs you like, and if any of them accept you, ask them if they'd rather hire you or get some $ amount that is vaguely what you'd donate if you'd E2G. 

 

I think, for various reasons, this would be a better decision-making process than considering what more EAs should do.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-07-30T15:52 (+3)

Hi Yonatan,

Would it be better to assume organisations are indifferent between having a person work for them, and receiving what they would pay the person? I think so. It corresponds to the organisations' revealed preferences, and I believe these are more reliable than their stated preferences. Organisations wanting to maximise their own impact (at the expense of global impact) have an incentive to overestimate the money they would have to receive to be happy to let the person go because they know the person could then donate to many other organisations.

mhendric🔸 @ 2025-07-24T02:18 (+22)

My understanding is that competition for EA jobs is extremely high, and that roles that are being posted attract sufficient numbers of outstanding candidates. This seems to be strong evidence to me that a fair share of people applying to EA jobs should consider ETG unless they have reason to believe that they specifically outshine other applicants for EA jobs (i.e., that the job would not be filled by an equally competent person).

Eva Lu @ 2025-07-30T22:01 (+2)

If competition for jobs is high, I think that could also mean a field needs more community-builders, entrepreneurs, or operations and management people. (Maybe more funding would let orgs offer higher salaries to attract more non-EA talent, but maybe EA-alignment is really important in those roles)

David_Moss @ 2025-07-23T15:27 (+21)

We can treat the 15% figure from the 2024 Rethink Priorities EA Survey results as an approximation of the current %. However, I'm sure this number varies a lot based on your definition of 'earning to give'. I.e. It's likely that some of these people are 10% pledgers who aren't actively maximising their earning potential/ exposure to upside.

 

I agree with both parts of this. 

We haven't asked directly about donation levels since EAS 2020[1]. But looking at that data (which didn't seem to vary substantially year-on-year), the median person reporting earning to give was donating 4.58% of their income and $2000 in total.[2]

That probably seems strikingly (and perhaps dispiritingly) low- only ~30% of the E2Gers are even donating 10%. This is partly explained by a lot of EAs being new to the movement (the median percentage donated among E2Gers who joined the movement between 2009-2014 is around 20% and their median donation is more like $20,000). But it does still mean that a large number of the recorded E2Gers may not actually, directly, be E2Ging any significant amount yet.[3]

  1. ^

    Due to a combination of (i) extreme pressure on space and it seeming like other questions with the highest decision-relevance to decisionmakers were most important, (ii) donation/income data is relatively sensitive, (iii) it seems like the community has other sources of aggregate level data on donations, even if we lose a lot of individual level data by cutting questions.

  2. ^

    Donation amounts are winsorized at $50,000 to make the lower end of the scale more visible, donation percentages are winsorized at 100% (note that donations might be from accumulated wealth, not annual income).

  3. ^

    This is one reason why the best time to dramatically grow the movement might have been several years ago, even if the second best time is today.

Tyner @ 2025-07-26T03:08 (+1)

I'm having a hard time understanding what you're saying with these graphs.  Are these for self-identified ETG people, or for everyone in your survey?  Donation_w shows something like 60% (no y scale so not sure) of population don't give at all, is that right?  And around 10% give $20K or more?  Thanks.

David_Moss @ 2025-07-26T10:45 (+7)

Thanks for your question. Yes, these show the distribution for E2G people only (otherwise these plots could not inform us about the E2G question).

Donation_w shows something like 60% (no y scale so not sure) of population don't give at all, is that right?

Only 12.8% are literally donating $0. But a larger percentage are donating close to $0 (31% donating <$500, 38.3% donating <$1000). And around 10% give $20K or more?

You can tell from the median of $2000 that 60% of people are not donating $0. The 60th percentile is around $4000.

20.7% were giving $20,000 or more.

Tyner @ 2025-07-27T01:18 (+3)

Thank you David, I understand much better now.  It is indeed perplexing to hear that 38% of self-identified earning to give folks are giving $1000 or less, but I think your explanations do seem plausible.  I guess there could also be people saving and investing now to do giving later, unless this category was a separate option in your survey.

Angelina Li @ 2025-07-23T15:00 (+13)

The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low

I'm voting yes because I think more people interested in EA should seriously consider earning to give as a career path, which is much higher absorbency and (IMO) important for the health of our movement.

So I'd be interested in a world where folks learning about EA seriously consider earning to give more, and if they do so I expect the population of people EtG would increase. (I'm also with 80K here that I'd only advocate for more EtG if your job doesn't do direct harm).

I haven't thought hard about whether people currently working in direct impact jobs should switch over to earning to give.

I'd be interested in hearing more career stories of people who have been earning to give for a while!

Joel Tan🔸 @ 2025-07-24T03:55 (+12)

The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low


Money is the major bottleneck for high impact charities, at least in GHD and AW (and some GCR causes). Meanwhile, there's an excess in demand for EA jobs relative to the supply (everyone knows it's extremely competitive). Hence, the marginal value of getting more money in via earning to give (loosely defined - not everyone needs to be in finance or tech) is probably higher than trying to squeeze into a direct role where replaceability is extremely high.

Tobias Häberli @ 2025-07-23T16:15 (+11)

The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low

I think there are 3 questions that feed into this for me:

  1. Should EAs doing direct work switch to Earning to Give?
    1. My opinion: Strongly no, on a population level.
  2. Should EAs not doing direct work start Earning to Give?
    1. My opinion: Yes, on a population level. Ideally after having ruled out direct work.
  3. Should the EA community grow & use Earning to Give as one central way to contribute?
    1. My opinion: I'm pretty uncertain, but leaning towards yes. 
       
emre kaplan🔸 @ 2025-07-23T21:56 (+10)

I'm not sure what the right proportion of E2Gers should be. But I tend to think having thoughtful people who put their money where their mouth is and do not depend on EA financially is valuable for community epistemics. I'd like having more of them around.

SofiaBalderson @ 2025-07-24T14:01 (+9)

The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low

I chose this because I believe that at this point in EA, especially in animal welfare, a relatively small amount of money (e.g. 30k) can go pretty far in terms of opportunity cost and impact per dollar. E.g. this could be a solid seed fund for a new charity, or cost for a full-time employee for an effective charity in the global south. 
My uncertainty is about how many people need to earn to give and how much they'd need to donate, and if they should test their fit in effective non-profits first. 
I also think that sometimes there is a case for people to earn to give to volunteer, e.g. they take a well-paid job 3 days a week and volunteer for two days for a high-impact non-profit because this adds more value without giving money. It lowers the need to fundraise for that labor and decreases admin time. 

NickLaing @ 2025-07-23T18:02 (+9)

Strong agree 

Epistemic status: neutral and unbiased

We need way more people earning to give truckloads of cash specifically to my organization....

Kestrel🔸 @ 2025-07-25T09:27 (+7)

The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low

 

Yes, with the caveat that it's the percentage of altruistically-inclined ordinary people earning to give that's too low, actually. It's not at all an issue with the individual EAs who do EA work.

Anyways, I'd say it's about the EA movement not really being the kind of place that smaller donors particularly want to hang out in. It's optimised to engage potential workers because its infrastructure is all funded by CEA whose goal is to develop a worker talent pool that Open Philanthropy can throw grants at. Like, everything from CEA's recruitment spots (students at top unis) to its events (EAG is for those who are "taking action on EA principles" i.e. working, all CEA events are structured professionally) are about community-building for EA workers.

If you want to engage more small donors, you need to restructure community spaces to account for that goal. Do we actually want to do that?

Nathan Young @ 2025-07-24T11:49 (+6)

I guess my questions are:

My guess would be that people should have some sense of how much they would earn to give for, and then how much impact they would stop earning to give and work for, and then they should move between the two. That would also create some great on-the-job learning, because I imagine that earn-to-give roles teach different skills, which can be fed back into the EA community. 

Jason @ 2025-07-24T20:48 (+5)

I speculate that there are enough differences at play that a significant fraction of people should choose direct work and a significant fraction who should choose EtG.

  1. It is often asserted that impact/success is significantly right-tailed. If that's so, a modest raw difference in an individual's suitability for EtG vs. suitability for direct work might create a large difference in expected outcome. Making numbers up, even the difference between being 99.99th percentile in one suitability (compared to the general population) versus the 99.9th percentile in the other might make a big difference. And it's plausible to think that even if the two suitabilities are highly correlated, people could easily have these sorts of differences. I don't think the difference needs to be anywhere near being "very mediocre [at] EA jobs" vs. "great at earning money."
  2. There have been discussions about the relative importance of value alignment in hiring for direct work. Although the concept is slippery to define, it seems less likely that the concept as applied to direct work significantly predicts success at EtG. There is a specific virtue that is needed for success at EtG -- related to following through on your donation plans once the money rolls in -- but it's questionable whether this is strongly correlated with the kind of alignment that factors into success for "EA jobs."
  3. The differences involve not only skill sets but also idiosyncratic personal attributes such as presence of other obligations (e.g., family commitments), psychological traits, individual passions, and so on. These things differ among potential workers, and one would expect them to point in different directions.
Grayden 🔸 @ 2025-08-05T17:28 (+2)

I agree except that suitability is only part of the equation. Luck plays a very important role.

Joseph_Chu @ 2025-07-28T14:40 (+5)

The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low

I'm not very confident in this view, but I'm philosophically somewhat against encouraging Earning-To-Give as it can justify working at what I see as unethical high paying jobs (i.e. finance, the oil industry, AI capabilities, etc.) and pretending you can simply offset it with enough donations. I think actions like this condone the unethical, making it more socially acceptable and creating negative higher order effects, and that we shouldn't do this. It's also a slippery slope and entails ends justifies the means thinking, like what SBF seems to have thought, and I think we should be cautious about potentially following such an example.

I also, separately, think that we should respect the autonomy of the people making decisions about their careers, and that those who want to EtG and who have the personal fit for it are likely already doing that, and suggesting more people should do so is somewhat disrespectful of the autonomy and ability to make rational, moral decisions of those who choose otherwise.

RobertHarling @ 2025-07-24T10:50 (+5)

The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low

I'd be excited for more people to consider it as an option - particularly given how funding landscape continues to evolve, and particularly thinking of Earning to Give as 'career to maximise donations' and not 'normal career while donating 10%'

Robi Rahman @ 2025-07-28T15:49 (+4)

I think most of us should get direct work jobs, and the E2G crowd should do high-EV careers, even if risky (to the extent that they're personally sustainable).

Nathan Young @ 2025-07-24T11:39 (+4)

I really like this format. Props to the forum team.

NickLaing @ 2025-07-24T15:47 (+4)

Yeah man, those polls you were trying to run for ages now be looking awesome :D.

Nathan Young @ 2025-07-24T11:38 (+4)

The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low


Resources are useful. The movement is very built around one large donor.

Patrick Hoang @ 2025-07-23T23:26 (+4)

It’s less that we need more earning-to-give people, but rather many people trying to become EAs can be more effective if they go for earning-to-give than trying to do direct work right away.

Arthur Malone🔸 @ 2025-07-23T19:54 (+4)

The large number of EAs who respond "I'm not focusing my career on impact right now" seems a ripe field for more ETG. I think a small fraction of very talented direct workers in EA could have a higher counterfactual impact by switching to ETG (or Founding to Give) because their current position is likely to be filled by one of the many competent and dedicated EAs competing for scarce roles.

Dave Cortright 🔸 @ 2025-07-25T16:31 (+3)

To scale solutions, we need more money than people, since money can not only deploy solutions but also hire more people

Chidi Odinanwa @ 2025-07-30T19:03 (+1)

Even though it's not practiced yet and very debatable, EA aligned organisations should have an employment policy for the deduction of at least 10% from employee's earning or salary. It could be from a certain pay grade or amount. Methinks, earning to give should be a default thing for everyone who identifies with the EA community, especially those engaged with direct work. 

Let's start putting our money where our mouth is.