Hi everyone!

80,000 Hours now has several full time staff able to work on research. What questions would you like them to work on?

We're happy to work on any questions about effectively helping others, whether with your career, volunteering or philanthropy. These questions could be at the conceptual or ethical level, or they could concern nitty-gritty practicalities.

We'll work on the most popular questions we think we can make progress on. This content will also form part of our guide to high impact ethical careers.

If you don't want to post your questions here, send them to careers@80000hours.org.

Ben

Profesional philanthropists need to have a way to gain an impression of which jobs earn the most. It would make sense to start with countries that are rich and/or populated with many 80,000 Hours members. I would suggest the UK, USA, Australia and Sweden, although a subset would still help.

The key careers that need to be considered are:
1. Investment Banking and Finance
2. Entrepreneurship
3. Medicine

It seems unbalanced to provide such detailed advice about how to donate money, but so little information about how to obtain money in the first place. Both seem equally important. However, the latter is something that CEA are uniquely interested in, and ideally positioned to research.

The starting point ought to be national census data from these respective countries. Although I find that their occupational categories are at times too vague to be useful, so this should be corroborated with other data and possibly original research, via survey, data mining or something.

I agree with RyanCarey and would be interested in additional work from the opposite side -- how to live a more frugal lifestyle to keep costs down in order to have more income (from the high income job) to donate.

I'd also be interested in the good that can be accomplished from "ethical eating" (veg*nism).

Furthermore, I'd be interested in what can be done with research, especially social science research, because this is what I personally want to go into and I think there are promising avenues here.

Lastly, I'd like more interviews with people in "high impact careers".

Although much remains to be done, Carl Shulman has written a series of great posts on the impact of various careers. See, in particular, Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers, Entrepreneurship: a game of poker, not roulette and 5 ways to be misled by salary rankings.