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10 years of Earning to Give
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AGB 🔸
Credibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
This EA Forum post is a personal reflection on the 'earning to give' strategy within effective altruism; it is tangential to AI safety but relevant for understanding EA community norms and career decision-making frameworks that influence who funds and prioritizes AI safety work.
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713
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30
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eaforum
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CuratedForum Tags
CommunityEffective givingOpportunities to take actionBuilding effective altruismCause prioritizationGiving Season (2023)Community experiencesEarning to giveImportanceJob listing (open)
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Importance: 30/100blog postcommentary
Summary
A personal retrospective by an EA community member reflecting on a decade of 'earning to give' — the practice of pursuing a high-income career specifically to donate a significant portion to effective charities. The post likely covers lessons learned, impact achieved, and reflections on whether the strategy lived up to its promise.
Key Points
- •Documents a 10-year personal commitment to earning to give as a primary EA career strategy
- •Reflects on the real-world outcomes, trade-offs, and personal costs of prioritizing income for donation
- •Offers insights on how the EA community's views on earning to give have evolved over the decade
- •Provides a ground-level perspective on sustaining long-term altruistic career commitments
- •May inform decisions for others considering high-earning careers as a form of effective altruism
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Earning to Give: The EA Strategy and Its Limits | -- | 63.0 |
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10 years of Earning to Give — EA Forum
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by AGB 🔸 Nov 7 2023 10 min read 30 713
Community Effective giving Opportunities to take action Building effective altruism Cause prioritization Giving Season (2023) Community experiences Earning to give Importance Job listing (open) Curated 10 years of Earning to Give Introduction Post goals My path Work Lifestyle Inflation Savings Donations Community Why engage? Why stop? Closing Thoughts 29 comments General note: The bulk of this post was written a couple of months ago, but I am releasing it now to coincide with the Effective Giving Spotlight week. I shortly expect to release a second post documenting some observations on the community building funding landscape.
Introduction
Way back in 2010, I was sitting in my parents' house, watching one of my favourite TV shows, the UK's Daily Politics. That day's guest was an Oxford academic by the name of Toby Ord. He was donating everything above £18000 (£26300 in today's money) to charity, and gently pushing others to give 10%.
"Nice guy," I thought. "Pity it'll never catch on."
Two years later, a couple of peers interned at Giving What We Can. At the same time, I did my own internship in finance, and my estimate of my earning potential quadrupled [1] . One year after that, I graduated and took the Giving What We Can pledge myself. While my pledge form read that I had committed to donate 20% of my income, my goal was to hit far higher percentages.
How did that go?
Post goals
Earning To Give was one of EA's first ideas to get major mainstream attention , much of it negative. Some was mean-spirited, but some of it read to me as a genuine attempt to warn young people about what they were signing up for. For example, from the linked David Brooks piece:
From the article, Trigg seems like an earnest, morally serious man...
First, you might start down this course seeing finance as a convenient means to realize your deepest commitment: fighting malaria. But the brain is a malleable organ....Every hour you spend with others, you become more like the people around you.
If there is a large gap between your daily conduct and your core commitment, you will become more like your daily activities and less attached to your original commitment. You will become more hedge fund, less malaria. There’s nothing wrong with working at a hedge fund, but it’s not the priority you started out with.
At the time, EAs had little choice but to respond to such speculation with speculation of their own. At this point, I can at least answer how some things have played out for me personally. I have divided this post into reflections on my personal EtG path and on the EA community.
My path
First, some context. Over the past decade:
My wife Denise and I ha
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