I think just about everyone here is familiar with High Impact Careers, but here's their Who We Are page just in case.

They're obviously of great interest to utilitarians, even if they're avoiding the U word in public - in practice their goal is simply to encourage people to maximise good.

So I've just agreed to try being a content manager for the blog they want to get up, which means I need to get a list of as many people as possible who'd be interested in contributing - ideally they want to have three posts ready within three weeks from now.

The posts need to make for interesting reading, so let me know if you want to give it a go. In principle they're happy to use material that's available elsewhere, so if you have any posts on here you're particularly proud of, they might make for good blog material, or at least the starting point for a post. Alan, if you're reading this, we specifically discussed using your 'Why Activists Should Consider...' essay, perhaps cut down for more casual readers, if you'd be up for it?

Topics can be anything related to the topic of maximising the amount of good you do, perhaps introductory to start with. To start with, I think we'll avoid discussing utilitarianism openly, though obviously it can use the same language they do. Perhaps we might have a blog post further down the line saying 'hey, have you considered that that's essentially what this is?' but I'd want to check with the organisers that they'd be happy with that first.

In any case, if there's a topic you'd be interested to write on, let me know - just about anything goes if it's relevant and interesting. If you like the idea of writing but don't have a topic in mind, let me know again - I can offer a few suggestions and see if anything grabs you.

Lastly, if you've chatted to anyone recently who's sympathetic to the ideas, but doesn't post here, could you pass the message on to them? (my email is j1nk5yatgma1ldotcom - with the numerals corresponding to the obvious letters)

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Also, if you want to help High Impact Careers in other capacities, they're looking for various people to help in various ways, many of which could be done remotely. I'll post about that separately when they let me know which positions they're still looking for help with.

Excellent idea! Love HIC

Sent you an e-mail about writing a post

Responded, ta

This reminded me that a couple of months ago I wrote a short article that applies the ideas from that talk on YouTube about high-impact careers to animal activism. My goal was to get it posted on Vegan Outreach's website, since the current parts of the website devoted to the subject don't address some of the most important factors in career choice. I got discouraged and then forgot about it. Which is weird because I e-mailed Matt Ball and he said he was interested. Here's a link to the article if you want to make any improvements or suggestions. I'll ask someone at VO about publishing it on the website in a week or so.

Hey Pat, the link to your article goes straight to the Vegan Outreach website - do you have it online somewhere? And are you willing for me to post it on HIC if it fits the subject matter?

Sorry! It's fixed now. Thanks for letting me know.

The article isn't very original, but you're welcome to put it on the blog if you'd like.

Pat wrote:the current parts of the website devoted to the subject

I read those VO pages years ago, and they strongly influenced my own trajectory.

Pat wrote:This reminded me that a couple of months ago I wrote a short article that applies the ideas from that talk on YouTube about high-impact careers to animal activism.

Superb essay, Pat. Let us know if VO does post it.

Pat wrote:For example, Matt Ball, the executive director of Vegan Outreach, was paid $39,750 in 2009; Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA, received $40,439.

One thing to keep in mind (something I omitted from my own piece on this topic) is that the cost of people like Matt Ball is higher than their nominal salaries; rather, it's their full opportunity cost, both in terms of what they earn as an animal activist and what they could have earned if they weren't one. Smart people like Matt could earn $100K in a different job, allowing them to donate at least, say, $40K per year, rather than consuming $40K per year. So the total cost of hiring Matt Ball is $80K / year, not $40K / year.

Another way to see this is to consider that Matt could work half the year and earn money to support himself in the second half. (Or, more realistically, he could work for a few years and then support himself with the savings for the next few years.) If he earned his entire annual cost of living in the first 6 months of his job, then he could work as VO's executive director for the second half without additional support. If, instead, he gets paid by donors, then he can do activism full time. So the value gained by donating $40K is an extra 6 months of Matt Ball, whicih translates again into $80K / year.

In many situations, the opportunity cost may not be as extreme as this because, for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to be empirically the case that when people don't work at a charity, they instead donate all of their spare income to that charity. They might donate some, but probably not proportionate with their increased income. If that's true, then the opportunity cost of hiring smart people might not be as high as their full potential discretionary income at more lucrative non-charity jobs.

You have to assume that Matt Ball would donate only something like 10% of his income to Vegan Outreach, making the cost his $40,000 salary plus an extra $4,000 that he would have donated. Or, supposing that he would earn a salary of $80,000 outside of the charity sector, maybe he could reasonably donate $8,000 of his income, making the overall cost $48,000, right?

RyanCarey wrote:You have to assume that Matt Ball would donate only something like 10% of his income to Vegan Outreach [...] supposing that he would earn a salary of $80,000 outside of the charity sector, maybe he could reasonably donate $8,000 of his income, making the overall cost $48,000, right?

10% seems low to me, but maybe we should ask him. Probably not more than 50% of an $80K salary, I would guess.

Alan Dawrst wrote:One thing to keep in mind (something I omitted from my own piece on this topic) is that the cost of people like Matt Ball is higher than their nominal salaries; rather, it's their full opportunity cost, both in terms of what they earn as an animal activist and what they could have earned if they weren't one.

That's an interesting point. I'll change the article. Does that mean that charities in general probably hire more people than is optimal? Charities can pay their employees relatively little, and a charity that hires a given employee may not be the charity that would have been the recipient of that person's donations.

Pat wrote:Does that mean that charities in general probably hire more people than is optimal?

Hmm, interesting question. A lot depends on the model we use, but I guess the intuition is that the charity's cost to hire someone is less than the social cost of hiring that person? One wonders how often talented people end up working for charities when they would be better off donating. (Probably it happens more often than the reverse, because of social-approval biases?)

Any luck submitting your article?

Alan Dawrst wrote:Any luck submitting your article?

It's up, sort of. It's kind of isolated from the rest of the website, though.

Cool! What's the url?

I added a link to it in the "Links" section here.

Another way to look at the situation of folks like Matt Ball is to consider what their impact on the world is in their current position and compare it to what it would have been had they chosen a different career path. If Ball wasn't working for VO, very likely someone else would be filling his role. Ball's contribution therefore is only a fraction of what one would believe if one just concentrated on his direct causal effects on the world: it equals the value of his direct impact minus the value of the impact that his substitute would have had. By contrast, if Ball were a professional philanthropist, working e.g. as an investment banker or a corporate lawyer, it is extremely unlikely that he would have been replaced by someone else who would also have been willing to donate a large portion of his or her income to the best causes. This analysis shows that the cost of having smart utilitarians like Ball working for the charity sector is considerably higher than one would have perhaps initially supposed.

Edit: After reading Pat's great essay, I see that he makes this same point and provides further elaboration.