The thing is, lots of jobs at charities just aren’t that impactful.

Some charities focus on programmes that don’t work, like Scared Straight, which actually caused kids to commit more crimes. Others focus on ways of helping that, while thoughtful and helpful, don’t have much leverage, like knitting individual sweaters for penguins affected by oil spills (this actually happened!) instead of funding large-scale ocean cleanup projects.

But there are also many organisations out there — both for-profit and nonprofit — focused on pressing problems, implementing effective and scalable solutions, run by great teams, and in need of people.

If you can build skills that are useful for helping an organisation like this, it could well be one of the highest-impact things you can do.

In particular, organisations often need generalists able to do the bread and butter of building an organisation — hiring people, management, administration, communications, running software systems, crafting strategy, fundraising, and so on.

We call these ‘organisation-building’ skills. They can be high impact because you can increase the scale and effectiveness of the organisation you’re working at, while also gaining skills that can be applied to a wide range of global problems in the future (and make you generally employable too).

Why are organisation-building skills valuable?

A well-run organisation can take tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people working on solving the world’s most pressing problems and help them work together far more effectively.

An employee with the right skills can often be a significant boost to an organisation, either by directly helping them deliver an impactful programme or by building the capacity of the organisation so that it can operate at a greater scale in the future. You could, for example, set up organisational infrastructure to enable the hiring of many more people in the future.

What’s more, organisation-building skills can be applied at most organisations, which means you’ll have opportunities to help tackle many different global problems in the future. You’ll also be flexibly able to work on many different solutions to any given problem if you find better solutions later in your career.

As an added bonus, the fact that pretty much all organisations need these skills means you’ll be employable if you decide to earn to give or step back from doing good all together. In fact, organisational management skills seem like some of the most useful and highest paid in the economy in general.

It can be even more valuable to help found a new organisation rather than build an existing one, though this is a particularly difficult step to take when you’re early in your career. (Read more on whether you should found an organisation early in your career.) See our profile on founding impactful organisations to learn more.

What does organisation-building typically involve?

A high-impact career using organisation-building skills typically involves these rough stages:

1. Building generally useful organisational skills, such as operations, people management, fundraising, administration, software systems, finance, etc.
2. Then applying those skills to help build (or found) high-impact organisations

The day-to-day of an organisation-building role is going to vary a lot depending on the job.

Here’s a possible description that could help build some intuition.

Picture yourself working from an office or, increasingly, from your own home. You’ll spend lots of time on your computer — you might be planning, organising tasks, updating project timelines, reworking a legal brief, or contracting out some marketing. You’ll likely spend some time communicating via email or chatting with colleagues. Your day will probably involve a lot of problem solving, making decisions to keep things going.

If you work for a small organisation, especially in the early stages, your “office” could be anywhere — a home office, a local coffee shop, or a shared workspace. If you manage people, you’ll conduct one-on-one meetings to provide feedback, set goals, and discuss personal development. In a project-oriented role, you might spend lots of time developing strategy, or analysing data to evaluate your impact.

What skills are needed to build organisations?

Organisation builders typically have skills in areas like:

• Operations management
• Project management (including setting objectives, metrics, etc.)
• People management and coaching (Some manager jobs require specialised skills, but some just require general management-associated skills like leadership, interpersonal communication, and conflict resolution.)
• Executive leadership (setting and achieving organisation-wide goals, making top-level decisions about budgeting, etc.)
• Entrepreneurship
• Recruiting
• Fundraising
• Marketing (which also benefits from communications skills)
• Communications and public relations (which also benefits from communications skills)
• Human resources
• Office management
• Events management
• Assistant and administrative work
• Finance and accounting
• Corporate and nonprofit law

Many organisations have a significant need for generalists who span several of these areas. If your aim is to take a leadership position, it’s useful to have a shallow knowledge of several.

You can also pick just one skill to specialise in — especially for areas like law and accounting that tend to be their own track.

Generally, larger organisations have a greater need for specialists, while those with under 50 employees hire more generalists.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

There’s no need to focus on the specific job or sector you work in now — it’s possible to enter organisation-building from a very wide variety of areas. We’ve even known academic philosophers who have transitioned to organisation-building!

Some common initial indicators of fit might include:

• You have an optimisation mindset. You frequently notice how things could be done more efficiently and have a strong internal drive to prevent avoidable errors and make things run more smoothly.
• You intuitively engage in systems thinking and enjoy going meta. This is a bit difficult to summarise, but involves things like: you’d notice when people ask you similar questions multiple times and then think about how to prevent the issue from coming up again. For example: “Can you give me access to this doc” turns into “What went wrong such that this person didn’t already have access to everything they need? How can we improve naming conventions or sharing conventions in the future?”
• You’re reliable, self-directed, able to manage your time well, and you can create efficient and productive plans and keep track of complex projects.
• You might also be good at learning quickly and have high attention to detail.

Of course, different types of organisation-building will require different skills. For example, being a COO or events manager requires greater social and system building skills, whereas working in finance requires fewer social skills, but does require basic quantitative skills and perhaps more conscientiousness and attention to detail.

If you’re really excited by a particular novel idea and have lots of energy and excitement for the idea, you might be a good fit for founding an organisation. (Read more about what it takes to successfully found a new organisation.)

You should try doing some cheap tests first — these might include talking to someone who works at the organisation you’re interested in helping to build, volunteering to do a short project, or doing an internship. Then you might commit to working there for 2–24 months (being prepared to switch to something else if you don’t think you’re on track).

How to tell if you’re on track

All of these — individually or together — seem like good signs of being on track to build really useful organisation-building skills:

• You get job offers (as a contractor or staff) at organisations you’d like to work for.
• You’re promoted within your first two years.
• You receive excellent performance reviews.
• You’re asked to take on progressively more responsibility over time.
• Your manager / colleagues suggest you might take on more senior roles in the future.
• You ask your superiors for their honest assessment of your fit and they are positive (e.g. they tell you you’re in the top 10% of people they can imagine doing your role).
• You’re able to multiply a superior’s time by over 2–20X, depending on the role type.
• If you’re aiming to build a new organisation, write out some one-page summaries of ideas for new organisations you’d like to exist and get feedback from grantmakers and experts.
• If founding a new organisation, you get seed funding from a major grantmaker, like Open Philanthropy, Longview Philanthropy, EA Funds, or a private donor.

This said, if you don’t hit these milestones, you might still be a good fit for organisation-building — the issue might be that you’re at the wrong organisation or have the wrong boss.

How to get started building organisation-building skills

You can get started by finding any role that will let you start learning one of the skills listed above. Work in one specialisation will often give you exposure to the others, and it’s often possible to move between them.

If you can do this at a high-performing organisation that’s also having a big impact right away, that’s great. If you’re aware of any organisations like these, it’s worth applying just in case.

But, unfortunately, this is often not possible, especially if you’re fresh out of college, for a number of reasons:

• The organisations have limited mentorship capacity, so they most often hire people with a couple of years of experience rather than those fresh out of college (though there are exceptions) and often aren’t in a good position to help you become excellent at these skills.
• These organisations usually hire people who already have some expertise in the problem area they’re working on (e.g. AI safety, biosecurity), as these issues involve specialised knowledge.
• We chose our recommended problems in large part because they’re unusually neglected. But the fact that they’re neglected also means there aren’t many open positions or training programmes.

As a result, early in your career it can easily be worth pursuing roles at organisations that don’t have much impact in order to build your skills.

The way to do this is to work at any organisation that’s generally high-performing, especially if you can work under someone who’s a good manager and will mentor you — the best way to learn how to run an organisation is to learn from people who are already excellent at this skill.

Then, try to advance as quickly as you can within that organisation or move to higher-responsibility roles in other organisations after 1–3 years of high-performance.

It can also help if the organisation is small but rapidly growing, since that usually makes it much easier to get promoted — and if the organisation succeeds in a big way, that will give you a lot of options in the future.

In a small organisation you can also try out a wider range of roles, helping you figure out which aspects of organisation-building are the best fit for you and giving you the broad background that’s useful for leadership roles in the future. Moreover, many of the organisations we think are doing the best work on the most pressing problems are startups, so being used to this kind of environment can be an advantage.

One option within this category we especially recommend is to consider becoming an early employee at a tech startup.

If you pick well, working at a tech startup gives you many of the advantages of working at a small, growing, high-performing organisation mentioned above, while also offering high salaries and an introduction to the technology sector. (This is even better if you can find an organisation that will let you learn about artificial intelligence or synthetic biology.)

We’ve advised many people who have developed organisation-building skills in startups and then switched to nonprofit work (or earned to give), while having good backup options.

That said, smaller organisations have downsides such as being more likely to fail and less mentorship capacity. Many are also poorly run. So it’s important to pick carefully.

Another option to consider in this category is working at a leading AI lab, because they can often offer good training, look impressive on your CV, and let you learn about AI. That said, you’ll need to think carefully about whether your work could be accelerating the risks from AI as well.

One of the most common ways to build these skills is to work in large tech companies, consulting or professional services (or more indirectly, to train as a lawyer or in finance). These are most useful for learning how to apply these skills in very large corporate and government organisations, or to build a speciality like accounting. We think there are often more direct ways to do useful work on the problems we think are most pressing, but these prestigious corporate jobs can still be the best option for some.

However, it’s important to remember you can build organisation-building skills in any kind of organisation: from nonprofits to academic research institutes to government agencies to giant corporations. What most matters is that you’re working with people who have this skill, who are able to train you.

Should you found your own organisation early in your career?

For a few people, founding an organisation fairly early in your career could be a fantastic career step. Whether or not the organisation you start succeeds, along the way you could gain strong organisation-building (and other) skills and a lot of career capital.

We think you should be ambitious when deciding career steps, and it often makes sense to pursue high-upside options first when you’re doing some career exploration.

This is particularly true if you:

• Have an idea that you’ve seriously thought about, stress tested, and got positive feedback on from relevant experts
• Have real energy and excitement for your idea (not for the idea of being an entrepreneur)
• Understand that you’re likely to fail, and have good backup plans in place for that

It can be hard to figure out if your idea is any good, or if you’ll be any good at this, in advance. One rule of thumb is that if, after six months to a year of work, you can be accepted to a top incubator (like Y Combinator), you’re probably on track. But if you can’t get into a top incubator, you should consider trying to build organisation-building skills in a different way (or try building a completely different skill set).

There are many downsides of working on your own projects. In particular, you’ll get less direct feedback and mentorship, and your efforts will be spread thinly across many different types of tasks and skills, making it harder to develop specialist expertise.
To learn more, see our article on founding new projects tackling top problems.

Find jobs that use organisation-building skills

See our curated list of job opportunities for this path, which you can filter by ‘management’ and ‘operations’ to find opportunities in this category (though there will also be jobs outside those filters where you can apply organisation-building skills).

View all opportunities

Once you have these skills, how can you best apply them to have an impact?

The problem you work on is probably the biggest driver of your impact, so the first step is to decide which problems you think are most pressing.

Once you’ve done that, the next step is to identify the highest-potential organisations working on your top problems.

In particular, look for organisations that:

1. Implement an effective solution, or one that has a good chance of having a big impact (even if it might not work)
2. Have the potential to grow
3. Are run by a great team
4. Are in need of your skills

These organisations will most often be nonprofits, but they could also be research institutes, political organisations, or for-profit companies with a social mission.¹

For specific ideas, see our list of recommended organisations. You can also find longer lists of suggestions within each of our problem profiles.

Finally, see if you can get a job at one of these organisations that effectively uses your specific skills. If you can’t, that’s also fine — you can apply your skills elsewhere, for example through earning to give, and be ready to switch into working for a high-impact organisation in the future.

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use organisation-building skills

These are some reviews of career paths we’ve written that use ‘organisation-building’ skills:

• Operations management
• Helping build the effective altruism community
• Non-technical roles in leading AI labs
• Earning to give
• Founding new projects tackling top problems
• Become an executive assistant for someone doing especially high-impact work
• Working at effective nonprofits
• Research management

Read next:  Explore other useful skills

Want to learn more about the most useful skills for solving global problems, according to our research? See our list.

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The post Organisation-building appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

In a nutshell: For the right person, becoming a journalist could be very impactful. Good journalists help keep people informed, positively shape public discourse on important topics, and can provide a platform for people and ideas that the public might not otherwise hear about.

But the most influential positions in the field are highly competitive, and journalists face a lot of mixed incentives that may detract from their ability to have a positive impact.

Why journalism could be a high-impact career

Some of the most promising ways to have a positive impact with a career in journalism include:

• Encouraging the adoption of good policies or discouraging the adoption of bad policies
  • A single article or reporter is unlikely to be solely responsible for a given policy change, but they can play a significant role in influential coverage.
• Acting as a check on bad or dangerous actors in the public arena
  • Public officials and figures can be forced out of their positions as a result of news reporting, and fear of exposure might have a chilling effect on bad acts.¹
• Inspiring readers to take specific high-impact actions, like making donations or changing their careers to work on pressing problems
• Helping to promote positive values, such as respect for the interests of nonhuman animals
• Supporting social or political movements that are trying to do good — we’re especially excited about journalism that informs people about the ideas of the effective altruism community
  • Also, you can potentially strengthen ideas and communities you agree with by subjecting them to analysis and criticism.
• Instilling better reasoning skills in readers — often by acting as a model — and keeping the public informed to promote good decision-making
• Positively shaping the discourse to better prioritise major problems and solutions, including introducing new topics for wider debate
  • Though note that sometimes drawing attention to an important topic can backfire.²

We believe the most neglected yet important problems in the world are those that involve existential risks or impact future generations. So we’d be particularly excited to see journalists who could eventually help us make progress as a society toward preserving the potential for a bright and flourishing future by, for example, prioritising coverage of the threats from nuclear war, pandemic disease, artificial intelligence, climate change, and the possible decline of liberal democracy. We discuss some of the potential for this kind of impact in our review of communications careers.

Despite the potential, though, much of journalism probably has minimal impact (and, as discussed below, some is actively harmful). Based on my experience in the industry, a lot of journalistic work is duplicative, and news outlets often compete in zero-sum contests to see whose story can rank the highest on Google search results. Even many prestigious outlets prioritise breaking news stories faster than their competitors, despite there being little to no benefit to the news consumer. For instance, journalists might race to be the first to report who a presidential candidate has picked to be their running mate, even though there’s actually little or no benefit to readers knowing this information a day or two before it’s officially announced.

But the news industry as a whole tends to reward these priorities.

If you plan to prioritise helping others, though, there is clearly the possibility of having a big influence — with the right role and the right content.

Some journalists do have considerable discretion in what they write about, though they often need to spend several years to get into this position.

Journalists who work for nonprofits like ProPublica can have more freedom to write about important issues due to the smaller role that market pressures play in these organisations. Future Perfect, a subsection of Vox, was launched with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation (though it now has separate sources of funding) to tell stories about big and neglected problems in the world.

And even within for-profit journalism, there are many examples of journalists writing about important causes. Vox journalist Dylan Matthews, before founding Future Perfect in 2018, was already writing about topics like immigration policy and effective giving.

There have been more opportunities in recent years for journalists with an interest in effective altruism, longtermism, and related topics. In addition to Future Perfect, outlets such as BBC Future, Works in Progress, and the newly founded Asterisk magazine present exciting opportunities for writers who want to publish on these kinds of ideas. There may be even more opportunities like these in the coming years, given some funders’ interests in impactful writing.

But even if there are more opportunities like these, the specific area of journalism focused on the issues that we think are most pressing is likely to remain quite small in the broader media landscape. And if you’re successful in journalism, there might be greater opportunities for impact within traditional news outlets.

One path we’d be particularly excited to see some readers take is to establish themselves as credible reporters in the areas of science and technology, especially because emerging technologies are related to many of the problems we think are most pressing.

You don’t necessarily need technical expertise to excel in this way — and in fact, if you have technical skills related to some of the world’s most pressing problems, there are likely more promising career opportunities for you outside of journalism. But you’ll need to develop a sophisticated understanding of the field and a set of critical thinking skills to assess complicated claims and degrees of evidence. Otherwise, you may fall into the trap of perpetuating overly sensationalist and sometimes misleading science journalism, which some incentives in the industry encourage.

Some examples of high-impact journalism

One strong reason to believe journalism can be a high-impact career is that there seem to be many examples of journalism causing concrete benefits and harms for the world. By considering some examples, you can get a sense of how journalism can have an impact — and how it might go wrong.

A note of caution: It’s inevitably contentious to make historical claims of causation, so there’s likely no example on this list that is beyond dispute. Assessing the practical difference made by a single article or reporter, or even a group of stories, is difficult, and we have struggled to find systematic studies of the impact of journalism.³ (Please let us know if you have any!) It’s completely possible, for example, that positive effects that appear to be attributable to a given work of journalism would have come about regardless.

But it still seems quite likely that journalism does often have an impact, and it’s worth examining some plausible cases, such as:

• Zeynep Tufekci advocated for mask-wearing in March 2020 to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by publishing an op-ed in The New York Times when public health experts argued the opposite.
  • Ben Smith later wrote for the same newspaper: “The C.D.C. changed its tune in April, advising all Americans above the age of 2 to wear masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Michael Basso, a senior health scientist at the agency who had been pushing internally to recommend masks, told me Dr. Tufekci’s public criticism of the agency was the ‘tipping point.'”
  • This seems like a very big deal. It’s unclear, though, how impactful Tufekci’s piece was. Was the CDC on a clear path to recommending masks regardless? Did she only speed up the trajectory by a few days or weeks? Though it’s also possible she was more influential than that — other health agencies in the world were very slow to adopt masking recommendations. And in general, it seems good to have incisive writers applying critical scrutiny to public health pronouncements.
• Coverage of surprise medical bills in the US appears to have led to a new law restricting providers’ ability to catch patients off-guard after treatment with large, unexpected service charges.
  • Trudy Lieberman, a public health professor and a journalist, wrote for USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism: “In many ways, the law is also a victory for the media since it was their sustained coverage that spurred public outrage. In particular, I would say it was the product of a continued focus on surprise medical bills by Sarah Kliff, now at The New York Times but who started collecting such outrageous bills when she was at Vox, and Kaiser Health News and NPR, whose joint bill of the month series beginning in 2018 kept the focus on this insidious practice.”
• 538‘s Nate Silver argued in May 2017 that the media coverage around the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton likely played a significant role in determining the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election.
  • Of course, any election is probably dramatically influenced by the media coverage of the relevant events and candidates. And no one person or even one outlet is wholly responsible for the general pattern of how an issue is covered. But this case does point to decisions made in the news media that plausibly contributed to an extremely significant course change in American politics.
• Reporting on former US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s conduct in office, particularly his personal use of public funds, led to his resignation. He explicitly cited what he called the “unrelenting attacks” he faced in his resignation letter.
  • While the resignation was very plausibly an effect of the reporting on Pruitt’s scandals, one can question the impact of the reporting, because he was replaced by someone who was ideologically similar.
• Elizabeth Warren, then a law professor, published a story in the journal Democracy in 2007 arguing for the creation of a federal agency to regulate financial products.
  • In 2009, then-President Barack Obama referenced her arguments about the need for such protection.
  • Obama later signed into law the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which, in part, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Warren had envisioned.
• Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at The New York Times, as well as Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker, published pieces in October 2017 surfacing allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse against Harvey Weinstein.
  • While this may have seemed at the time to be a narrow story about a single figure in the entertainment industry, it helped spur a wider movement that exposed patterns of sexual harassment and abuse in many different industries.
• Anecdotally, we’ve heard of several policy advocates who’ve found the existence of highly accessible, mainstream coverage of issues they think are important to be very useful for showing policymakers what the issue is all about and why people might care.

Journalism might also have a more diffuse impact, though these effects will be even harder to directly measure and assess. For example, Naina Bajekal wrote a cover story for TIME in August 2022 about the effective altruism community, which likely introduced many people to a number of ideas that we think are important, and which could have a profound impact on what they choose to do in their lives (she even mentioned 80,000 Hours in the article!).

A lot of important journalism might have its biggest impacts in this way — by influencing a large number of people in ways that are small at the individual level but add up to being a substantial impact on the world.

And sometimes, the highest-impact decision a news outlet can make is not to publish a story. For instance, in 2006, Bill Keller, then an editor at The New York Times, revealed that his paper had withheld stories “that, if published, might have jeopardised efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material.”

Why having a positive impact in journalism might be challenging

Because they rely on ad revenue or paid subscriptions, many news outlets are most motivated to maximise the engagement of their readers. This leads to a focus in a lot of the news media on dramatic current events and contentious hot-button issues. While some of this coverage is surely important, much of it is not, and a lot of it may be actively harmful.

Examples of generally harmful types of journalism include:

• Hyper-partisan journalism
• Unnecessarily inflammatory coverage
• Misleading reporting or outright misinformation
• Journalism that promotes or embodies bad values, such as racist stereotyping
• Overly credulous reporting
• Reporting that distracts from more important issues
• Reporting that reveals information that is dangerous for the public to know (e.g. private personal information or national security secrets)

Unfortunately, even well-intentioned and thoughtful journalism may end up being harmful. Consider, for instance, the following possibilities:

• The story draws attention to an important cause, but it creates more backlash than support.
• Policymakers react to address a problem highlighted in a story, but they overcorrect and create a new problem.
• Critical mistakes in the reporting spread falsehoods.

One now-infamous and concrete example of harmful reporting is The New York Times 2002 story “US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” about Iraq’s supposed effort to create weapons of mass destruction. This report, which relied heavily on anonymous sources in the Bush administration, was found to be based on dubious claims, and the idea that Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear weapon in the run-up to the 2003 invasion was discredited.

Historian Daniel Strieff noted that many other media outlets played a role in pushing the narrative, but this story played an outsized role in pro-war rhetoric.⁴

For a more hypothetical example, consider that some people who are concerned about potential risks from artificial intelligence worry that coverage that focuses on the impressive capabilities of AI systems could help inspire an arms race in the technology, potentially increasing the dangers.

In general, you might care a lot about avoiding harmful journalism. But once you have a job, you’ll likely face a lot of incentives that distort your priorities. You might work for an editor who assigns you stories, and you may have little say in what you get to write about or what the final product looks like. In many cases, journalists have complained that they have no say over misleading headlines that top their articles — a particularly troubling situation, since many more people will see the headline than will read the content of the story.⁵

Even if you get more autonomy, you’ll be aware that keeping your job is often contingent on keeping readers engaged.

And indeed, having an impact is often contingent on keeping readers engaged. A story that few people read is less likely, in most cases, to have much influence on the real world. So even in the ideal scenario, you’ll have to find a balance between writing stories that grab readers’ attention and those that share important information. Sometimes doing so is easy — other times, it’s much harder. And navigating these mixed incentives may distort your assessment of what really matters in your work.

Striking the balance between important writing and writing stories that people want to read is an extremely valuable skill, and if you think you’d be good at it, you should definitely consider becoming a journalist (or some other kind of communicator). But if you think you’d feel uncomfortable in this position, or find it too difficult to weigh up these competing priorities, it may be a challenging career path for you to pursue.

It may be quite difficult on the whole to be confident you’re having a positive impact with a career as a journalist. But we also think the world would be better off for having more people in journalism who are motivated to work on the most pressing problems.

Tips for picking high-impact stories

Two of the most critical types of decisions a journalist makes in their work are which story to write and what angle they write it from.

The ‘angle’ of a story refers to the specific focus, framing, and context the journalist uses to convey the facts they’re reporting. For example, a journalist writing about the launch of a new phone app could choose from a wide range of angles to focus on in the story, such as:

• The technical breakthrough a developer achieved to create the app
• The positive experiences users are having with the app
• The negative experiences users are having with the app
• Externalities created by the app that impact third parties (such as if a delivery app creates a surge in downtown traffic)

In terms of the impact the reporting has, the angle a story takes can be at least as important as the topic the journalist is covering. This is especially true since the angle is likely to dictate the headline, and many more readers will ever read the headline than will actually read the body of any article.

And this is one way in which journalists’ discretion can be very influential, even as they aim to be impartial observers. Articles with each of the angles listed above about the hypothetical app could all include the same basic facts, just with different orderings, tone, and emphases, but the impression readers walk away with — whether the app is good or bad, brilliant or short-sighted — could be quite different based on the journalist’s choices.

Depending on the role they have, their level of seniority, and the institution they work for, journalists will have widely varying degrees of discretion over the stories they cover and the angles they use to cover them. Typically, as you advance in seniority, you’ll have more discretion. Freelancers, though, have a lot of autonomy, but they may struggle to publish frequently, especially if they’re not willing to conform their story ideas to particular outlets’ niches.

Assuming you have some autonomy over the stories you write and how you write them, how can you pick a topic and angle to have a positive impact? The decision criteria will vary a lot, based on factors like what kind of audience you’re writing for and how frequently you’re expected to publish. (And of course journalists typically aim to write stories that their readers will find interesting, because if they can’t do this, they likely won’t have a job for very long.)

But within these constraints, journalists aiming to have an impact could apply the ITN framework to choosing stories. Under this framework, you would aim to write stories that are:

• Important: involve impact to the wellbeing of a significant number of individuals
• Tractable: are about a problem that could potentially be solved or mitigated with more attention
• Neglected: are getting insufficient attention relative to their importance and solvability

These are very rough heuristics, and we don’t think they’ll apply to every story. Sometimes a journalist will cover a story just because it would seem like a huge omission to their audience if they ignored it — like a local news outlet failing to report a major celebrity came to town to shoot a movie.

And it might be worth covering stories that don’t clearly meet all the ITN criteria. For example, a journalist might cover a deadly conflict in a war zone that, at least from all appearances, seems intractable to solve. Or reporters might find themselves, as many journalists did in April 2020, writing about a major story like the coronavirus pandemic, even though it was getting covered in every outlet, and it was hardly neglected. (It was arguably neglected as a story in early February 2020, though!)

But even in these cases, it could be particularly impactful and advantageous for reporters to look for angles on the story that do more closely match the ITN framework.

For example, while conflict in the war zone may be intractable, there may be solutions to certain problems within the conflict, such as a lack of medical supplies, that could be tractable if more attention were paid to them. Or if you’re covering a pandemic that is already widely talked about in the news, you might be able to apply the framework by avoiding discussion of the day-to-day controversies and instead drawing attention to policies that would reduce the longer-term risk of similar pandemics arising.

How to pursue a career in journalism

Getting started

Many journalists in print or online media start off as interns or entry-level reporters. It typically helps to have a bachelor’s degree, though it doesn’t need to be in journalism⁶ — and you may be fine without one if you demonstrate an ability to get published or bring a highly valuable knowledge base.

If you’re just starting your career out of university or college, experience at a student newspaper can be valuable for getting your foot in the door.

For certain roles, such as legal or financial reporting, employers often seek job candidates with some level of subject matter expertise.

Master’s degrees in journalism are rarely if ever required, and getting them can be extremely costly — it’s probably better to learn on the job. This is especially true because many jobs in journalism aren’t particularly high-paying — so having a lot of student debt might be a big problem.

If you’re not looking for an entry-level position or internship, and you don’t have any publishing experience, it makes sense to start by writing articles part-time to build up a personal library of content you can link to on a personal blog (Medium is quick and easy to set up) or Substack. Substack can allow you to charge your readers for access to your posts, but that’s probably only a viable business strategy after you’ve already developed a large audience.

Once you’ve gotten in the habit of blogging, try getting pieces published in existing media outlets. Your first instinct may be to go for well-known names like The Guardian or Vox, or even more prestigious newspapers, but you’ll likely have an easier time publishing at smaller outlets or local publications. You’ll be able to use your blog posts as writing samples.

Some writers even get noticed for having a strong Twitter presence. It’s not unheard of to have a story solicited based only on your tweets. If you’re able to impress people in the news industry with thoughtful and insightful posts on social media, you may have a leg up on those who avoid Twitter. (But be warned: there are many risks to spending too much time on Twitter, and careers can be ruined at least as easily as they can be started by a tweet. So post carefully.)

Getting your first piece published is often the hardest step. If you do a good job, it will be much easier to publish with that same publication and editor in the future. Having been published by a mainstream outlet will make your future pitches much more likely to succeed, or at least be seriously considered, and you may be able to use your published work to get a full-time job.

Newer journalists typically don’t get to choose what they cover, particularly at large organisations, and are instead assigned stories by editors. However, even new journalists can sometimes earn more autonomy if they become successful at pitching stories that they want to write to their editor.

This is most likely to happen if you successfully carve out a “beat” for yourself — a specialty subject that you’re deeply familiar with. Once an editor trusts that you know the area well, they may come to rely on you to shape the course of your outlet’s reporting on the topic. You’ll likely still be subject to the same incentives that drive the rest of the media, but you’ll have more discretion in deciding how to navigate competing demands.

Some key roles in journalism

Investigative reporters are highly prestigious, and there are many cases in history of them having a positive impact.⁷ But it may be difficult to optimise for impact in these roles, because the goal of investigative reporters is to uncover exciting and newsworthy facts — which isn’t necessarily correlated with having a positive impact. (Though one potentially underexplored route to impact would be an investigative journalist who specialises in scrutinising charities.)

When journalists establish themselves in the industry, they sometimes progress to roles in which they have more freedom to choose what topics they write about, as well as add opinion, perspective, and more complex analysis. These include columnists, who write opinion pieces, and correspondents, who cover various locations distant from their main workplace (e.g. the White House) while adding their perspective on the news.

Opinion columnists may have the most latitude of anyone to pursue whatever stories they think are important, and we’d be excited to see more people interested in effective altruism take these roles at prestigious media outlets. However, precisely because these roles are so valuable and influential, they’re among the most competitive positions in the industry.

Senior roles are usually as editors or producers, who coordinate the work of other journalists. These too might be among the most impactful roles in journalism, because they can shape the coverage of a much wider range of stories. But even editors, producers, and publishers are subject to the financial incentives of the news business (unless they are philanthropically funded), so they’re not typically free to focus completely on having a positive impact.

Freelance journalists aren’t employed full-time by a news outlet but instead get paid a set amount for each article or column that an editor agrees to publish. Sometimes they have arrangements with outlets to contribute a certain number of stories or columns on a regular basis.

Usually, freelancers submit story pitches to editors, who will decide whether they want to pay for the story. In theory, anyone can submit a pitch and get something published — but editors are most likely to accept submissions from experienced writers, experts, or people with unique experiences. Sometimes editors will reach out to an established journalist or writer to solicit a story that hasn’t been pitched.

It’s difficult to make a living as a full-time freelance journalist. But freelance writing can be a productive way to start out a journalism career, and it may be financially sustainable when supplemented with income from other sources.

Training for Good has launched the Tarbell Fellowship, which provides financial support to early-career journalists who are looking to have a positive impact. There may be other opportunities for funding from philanthropists who are eager to support this kind of writing.

Changing paths

One of the benefits of journalism is that you can explore it as a career option without investing in an advanced degree, which makes it easier to keep your options open while testing your fit. If you have a clear idea of how you want to have an impact as a journalist, and you have an aptitude for it, it may well be worth trying your hand at it for a few years.

(A caveat to this point, however, is that you should expect anything you publish will be accessible forever. Publicly taking controversial stances on hot-button issues may limit some of your career options down the road.)

You can try freelancing as a side gig and see how it goes, or if you’re early in your career, you may just try getting an entry-level job in the industry. If, after a few years, you find it’s not working out as you hoped, you should still have other options open to you. For example, roles in communications, research, policy, and advocacy can make good use of skills developed in journalism.

What is journalism like day to day?

The day-to-day activities of journalists vary by industry, role, and level of seniority, but almost all journalist jobs involve researching stories and interviewing people, preparing content for publication, and staying up to date with the area they cover.

Here’s how Kelsey Piper of Future Perfect described her typical day when she spoke with us in 2019:

Vox has a very fast pace, which was definitely something I was a little apprehensive about going in. Like can I write that much? But it’s been very good for me because I think the push to think about something you want to tell people every day just keeps you moving. On most days I will try and send my editor about three story ideas. Things that I’ve thought of that I want to write about, things that I have a lead on, things that I saw in the news that I felt like we needed a Future Perfect take on. My editor will get back to me with the one or two that he’s most excited about and say, Yeah, go ahead and write this story.

So, then I’ll email people who I want to talk to. I’ll try and get introductions. I’ll research for the piece. I’ll have those conversations and phone calls. I’ll try and write the piece. I’ll try and file it before I go home. Then often at the same time, my editor and I will be going back and forth with edits on yesterday’s story to get it to a state where we’re both proud of it and confident of it and ready to put it on the site.

Now, in practice, some pieces take longer to come together. Or they come partway together and then we realise there’s not a good story here. Or the situation is confusing enough that our initial take on it didn’t work. A fair number of stories get scrapped. In practice, I think I end up publishing four things a week. But yeah, the goal is certainly to have a week where every day we put out a new story.

She also added:

It’s amazing to call people up and just ask about their research or ask about what they’re doing. I feel like I’ve learned a ton about lots of fields, just by having the luxury of spending a day talking to five experts. Then doing a lot of reading and trying to put together an accurate, if limited, picture of something I didn’t know much about before.

How to assess your fit for journalism

To assess if this path might be a good fit for you, consider these questions:

• Are you a fast writer? One of the most distinctive things about journalism jobs is they tend to have very rapid deadlines following current events and a very regular publication schedule.
• Are you an excellent communicator? The key skill you need to have is writing stories that get a big audience — and/or good speaking skills for working in podcasts, radio, or television — plus comfort with interviewing people.
• Do you have experience working for a college newspaper or an internship, or a portfolio of published work? If you do have journalism experience, did you enjoy it?
• Are you willing to work long hours, including nights and weekends? This is common in journalism careers, though some positions offer reasonable hours.⁸
• How important is a high salary to you? It’s hard to get paid work early on, and even after you get a full-time paid position, the average salary for a journalist is relatively low.
• Have you written a blog? Do you find it relatively easy to produce large amounts of content?
• Do you get good feedback on your content?
  • Don’t forget that most public communicators have honed their craft for years, often long before they were famous.

Want one-on-one advice on pursuing this path?

If you think this path might be a great option for you, but you need help deciding or thinking about what to do next, our team might be able to help.

We can help you compare options, make connections, and possibly even help you find jobs or funding opportunities.

APPLY TO SPEAK WITH OUR TEAM

Learn more about journalism careers

• Historian Daniel Strieff has compiled a list of more than 20 highly influential pieces of journalism in US history
• Podcast: Ezra Klein on covering the most important topics in journalism (or watch on our YouTube channel)
• Podcast: Kelsey Piper on what this kind of journalism is like day to day
• Podcast: Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
• Podcast: Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit’s fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good
• What do journalists say about journalism as a high-impact career? — interviews with Dylan Matthews, Derek Thompson, and Shaun Raviv

Read next:  Learn about other high-impact careers

Want to consider more paths? See our list of the highest-impact career paths according to our research.

Continue →

Special thanks to Roman Duda and Arden Koehler for their contributions to this article.

The post Journalism appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

I then explore how this growth has changed the priorities for the movement, and argue that we should be more ambitious.

The talk was given at Effective Altruism Global in London in October 2021. You can see the video and a transcript below. The talk was 30 minutes, followed by a Q&A with audience-submitted questions.

It summarises several recent pieces of research, including Is effective altruism growing?, How are resources allocated across causes?, Why to be more ambitious, and Why we need more megaprojects.

I added an explanation of why the large amount of additional funding available doesn’t mean that it’s easy to fundraise (and why me talking about a ‘funding overhang’ was probably a mistake). A better framing is that there is a lot of funding available for any projects that can clear the current funding bar, but this bar is still pretty high.

Finally, I suggest that the recent success of Sam Bankman-Fried is an additional reason to aim high.

First, he shows that it’s possible. Back in 2015, perhaps only about 1,000 people were seriously directing their careers on the basis of effective altruism. And now one of them has made billions of dollars to donate, and become the world’s richest person under 30 — that’s not bad odds!

Second, the increase in the funding available to the community means that new projects that couldn’t have happened before should now be possible.

Watch the talk

Listen to the talk

Read the transcript

Hey everyone. Today, I’m going to talk about why I think the resources available to the effective altruism community have been growing, how that might change our priorities, and why I think it means we should try to be more ambitious.

The first part of the talk is about whether effective altruism has been growing. Lots of people have been saying that effective altruism isn’t growing, and they cite things like this chart, which is the number of people searching for the term ‘effective altruism’ on Google. And it does indeed look like this isn’t growing, which is not ideal.

But to get a better picture of the growth of the movement, it’s useful to make a couple of distinctions. The first distinction is between the number of people finding out about effective altruism each year, and the total number of people involved — so that’s the difference between the flow and the stock. And then the second is, it’s useful to distinguish between different levels of engagement. So there’s the number of people who’ve just heard about effective altruism, the number of people kind of reading a lot, and then there’s highly engaged people. And people often call this the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.

The search volume chart basically shows that the flow into the top of the funnel is not growing, and that is obviously bad — it would be better if all aspects of the funnel were growing. But if I was going to pick just one thing to focus on in order to evaluate whether effective altruism is growing or not, it would be the growth rate of the stock at the bottom of the funnel. And then that could then further be divided into a couple of different things we could look at.
You can think of the impact of effective altruism as a function of how many people there are and how much funding there is, where the efficiency with which that’s turned into impact depends on how good our ideas are.

So this is an illustration of that. As you get more funding and people, impact hopefully goes up, though at a diminishing rate. And then if we have better ideas, it shifts how much impact we’re able to have with each level of people and funding. There’s a lot more complications you could add to this — like there’s probably some complementarities between funding and people and so on — but just as a very rough illustration.

I’m now going to look at the growth in funding and then the growth in people. Earlier this year, I made these estimates of how much funding is committed to effective altruism in total. These are all very rough figures — they could easily vary by a factor of five, either side — but in total, I added up to about $46 billion. And maybe more strikingly, I estimated that that seems to have grown almost fivefold since 2015, which is a 37% annual rate of growth.

What drove the growth? One thing was that Dustin Moskovitz’s net worth — he’s the main source of the funds behind Open Philanthropy — has grown a lot, as Facebook stock has gone up and his new company Asana also IPO’d.

And then perhaps more strikingly is Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX and Alameda. We met Sam in 2012 when Will was giving a talk at MIT at a student group event. And he made the arguments for earning to give, and then Sam turned around and actually went and did it. And the Financial Times now estimates that he’s the world’s richest person under 30, and Forbes recently estimated his net worth is over $20 billion — actually gone up another five or six billion since I made the estimates a few months ago. I definitely wouldn’t have predicted this would’ve happened back in 2012 when we started 80,000 Hours.

It’s not just Sam though; all these other sources I think have grown a lot as well since 2015. So for instance, Founders Pledge in 2015 only had under $100 million dollars pledged when I made the estimate. I was using a figure of $3 billion pledged, and I’ve heard that’s now actually more like over $5 billion. So there’s a lot of growth in other terms as well.

That’s the stock of available funds. Just to talk quickly about the amounts of funding deployed each year, I estimated that’s around $400 million. It’s just important to remember with this one, it’s very lumpy from year to year. Open Philanthropy accounts for a lot of those funds, and you can see that that grew very rapidly from 2015 to 2017. It’s very lumpy each year, but then they’ve held it roughly constant from 2017 — but that was a deliberate decision to consolidate their existing cause areas, build up staff capacity. The plan with Open Philanthropy is that Good Ventures — so Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna — want to spend down all the money before they die. And in order to do that, they need to hit something more like a billion per year fairly soon, so that’s definitely expected to go up. Sorry, ignore the 2021 figure, that’s incomplete.

So that was funding. Estimating the number of people involved is a lot more difficult. This is my favourite way to do it. This is probably not obeying best practice for slides, but the basic idea is you look at the Effective Altruism Survey, you see how many people say they’re engaged, and then you adjust it by the response rate. And the way you estimate the response rate is you take a group, like everyone who works at CEA, and then find out exactly how many filled out the survey, and then that gives you a proxy for that.

Applying that method in 2019, there were 900 or so people who filled out the survey saying they were very engaged, and then we estimated a 40% response rate, so there were 2,300 highly engaged members of the community. If you used a wider definition, then that number would be a lot larger, but just focusing on that very core at the centre. Applying the same method in 2020, around the same number of people said that they were engaged, but we estimated the response rate was a bit lower, so this method ended up with a 13% growth rate.

I’ve tried a number of other methods, and I generally end up with estimates between zero and 30%. Many ways of estimating it don’t really work, because they don’t take account of the fact that it takes people several years between hearing about effective altruism and getting involved. And so if you look at like 2020 data, it’s missing almost everyone who actually came in in 2020.

Just one interesting thing I was figuring out today is, I also estimated last year that around maybe 3% of people leave each year in that group of engagement. That’s also very uncertain, but if that holds up, then the stock of the community would eventually tend to around 10,000 people at equilibrium size, if the flow stays constant. So even if we don’t grow the number of people getting involved each year, this will naturally drift up to around 10,000 — though hopefully we can.

That was number of people and funding. I just want to do a final bit of this section, just to talk about how that’s allocated across issues. I also made these rough estimates of the breakdown of funding by cause area. This is mainly Open Philanthropy’s funding — averaged over a couple of years to take account of the lumpiness — and then GiveWell added in. Open Philanthropy is about 60%, then GiveWell 20%, and then I made rough estimates of the remaining 20%. And you can see the big thing here is there’s a big allocation to global health, which is driven by GiveWell.

The situation for people is actually really different. This is people who said five out of five for engagement on the Effective Altruism Survey — so this is the most engaged people. But you can see, firstly, they’re much more spread out over issues, and then these more meta things and AI are actually at the top when it comes to the most engaged people. This is actually exactly what we should hope for in some ways, because in a cause where you can hire people outside the community to do really useful work — like in global health — then you can deploy lots of funding quickly. And then people who are engaged in effective altruism should focus on the areas where it’s hardest to hire people outside of the community. For instance, in movement building, you can’t really hire people who don’t believe in effective altruism to do movement building for it. And same with AI alignment, because there’s not such an existing field there. You need people who are really into the ideas themselves.

So in some ways, we should expect quite different allocation for both funding and people. Some final speculations around what might be the ideal allocation of people across issues. This was a survey in the 2019 Coordination Forum shown in blue there, where people were asked what would be the ideal fraction of resources put into each area. And then also, shown in red, is users of the Effective Altruism Forum in the EA Survey — which is about 1,000 people — saying which their top cause preference was. And you can see those two actually line up quite well, which is interesting.

Now, I made this very made-up actual figure, which is a combination of people and funding, where I used a $100,000 per year conversion rate to get the total in each one. And then I’ve compared that to one estimate of the ideal portfolio. And what jumps out here potentially — though it’s very sensitive to exactly how you aggregate them — is that it seems like global poverty is a bit overallocated. I wouldn’t suggest we cut back funding to global poverty, but rather my hope is that the other causes will be able to grow faster over the next 10 years.

The other thing that really leapt out to me is the biggest gap is actually the bottom one, which is broad longtermism. That’s things like reducing great power conflict and improving institutional decision-making — efforts to make society generally better at dealing with big risks or other important challenges. And people in the survey thought that that area should have 5% to 15% of resources, depending on the person. But as far as I can tell, it’s under 1% currently, so on a proportional basis, that’s the biggest gap in the portfolio currently.

That’s the first section. The second section is about what might be some of the implications of this, and in particular, what are the implications of how much funding there is now? $46 billion — what should we be doing in response to this? And you could see there being two main options.

Option 1 is just to find the most scalable thing we can find, and spend the money as quickly as possible on that. Within more neartermist issues, that might be something like GiveDirectly or other cash transfers, which could absorb billions of dollars of funding and achieve a lot. Within longtermism, it might be something more like green energy research and development, which currently receives $35 billion per year of funding. You could add billions of dollars to that with probably similar returns to the current amounts. Maybe even better might be scaling up some existing biosecurity pandemic prevention methods on a billion-dollar basis. So that’s Option 1.

Option 2 is to try to find something even more effective than these. This seems to be what funders are doing currently — basically, funders are holding their bar significantly higher than GiveDirectly. And that’s because they believe that by waiting, we’ll be able to find and also create new opportunities that are significantly more cost effective than GiveDirectly, and therefore over the long term have a much bigger impact. I’d say the current bar of funding within Global Development is more around the level of Against Malaria Foundation, which GiveWell estimates is 15 times more cost effective than GiveDirectly. Generally, charities that are around that level of cost effectiveness, that level of evidence base, and good in the same other ways, have a good shot of getting funding.

Within longtermism, it’s a bit harder to say where the bar is. Maybe projects that have reasonable shots of doing something useful in AI safety or global catastrophic biorisks have a reasonable shot of getting funded, which you could think of as some of the recent things that have been funded by the Effective Altruism Long-Term Fund. The hope is that these things might be 10 or even more times more effective than something like green energy R&D. Meta-charities would then be expected to provide a multiplier on either of the other two.

To get a more concrete thing, there was a good post on the Effective Altruism Forum recently, which is called “List of EA funding opportunities.” It lists specific places you can get funding from, which also helps to give an idea of what funders are currently focusing on. One point I want to make about this is that these are hard bars to clear — green energy R&D might well be one of the best things within climate change, and we’re saying people are trying to find things that are 10 or 100 times more cost effective than that. And the same within global health versus GiveDirectly. It’s even harder to clear those bars if you take account of the fact that funders are going to be worried about things like the estimates being too optimistic, discount rates, opportunity costs, lots of other complications.

So a startup charity might well need to be targeting a level that’s even 10 times higher than those bars again, with the expectation that it will come down over time. The challenge that the community faces is, can we prove these funders right and actually generate all these opportunities that they’re hoping to find, and perhaps even expecting to find? And therefore have much greater impacts with this money than if we just donated it all now?

And so this means in terms of careers, there are these opportunities to have a lot more impact than something like earning to give and then donating to GiveDirectly. Which is already an extremely impactful level — I wouldn’t be surprised if something like earning to give and giving to GiveDirectly was more impactful than 98% of jobs that people take, and it’s really making a big difference in the lives of hundreds of people over the course of your career.

But because of this huge amount of funding, there’s an opportunity to go even beyond that. Here are some of the things that seem like priorities based on it. The first would be active grantmakers: people able to help find and also cultivate opportunities and projects that are above those funding bars that I mentioned before. If you’re earning to give currently, this could be the direction you could take your giving — can you get into the position where you could be like an angel donor in effective altruism and spotting things that other donors aren’t yet spotting? That’s a really valuable way of kind of adding value as a donor currently.

Secondly, we need researchers to figure out what these ideas for spending a lot more funding above the bar would be, or other ways to make the portfolio more effective. We need people founding projects that are more at this level of cost effectiveness. We need managers who are able to take the projects that are already there and help scale them up and reach their full potential. Then we also need people doing movement building to find all the people, those types of people above. There’s also a big need for feeder roles and supporting roles for all of these kinds of things — things like being a research assistant and all types of organisation-building roles, like operations management, office management, recruiting, things like that.

I would roughly say that if I had to put an estimate on it — so you could imagine we could magically create someone who’s earning to give donating certain amounts of money each year, or we could magically create someone who’s a good fit for one of these roles (especially the more senior versions) — I would often prefer the person to around millions of dollars of funding per year, in some cases over $10 million. That’s just a rough way that I would try to quantify the value of some of these positions in terms of earning to give; you could scale those figures down for the more junior equivalents.

Then based on this, I would say some rough priorities early career… Oh yeah, actually just before that… These things here are just the roles that impact has been changed by the funding situation. But there’s loads of roles that don’t require funding from the effective altruism community that are still really impactful. Some quick examples of those would be, people could have a lot of impact by improving things in government and policy, but they don’t require funding to do that — they can just take those positions. And I just want to flag, I’m not talking about all positions here, just the ones that have been changed by the funding situation. Just as another example, lots of people could work in journalism or the media, and promote really neglected and pressing issues and have a big impact doing that. And again, they don’t particularly need funding from effective altruism to do that necessarily.

Here’s very, very rough early-career priorities based on those roles. I’d say a big priority early would be trying to test out your fit for those roles, and then if you find a good opportunity, aiming at them. Secondly, there’s building career capital for those roles or building career capital for 20 years in the future when effective altruism will hopefully be a lot bigger and it’ll need a much wider range of skills — skills need to become broader over time. And then a third option is to just find a job that’s a good fit, and then on the side, don’t just donate, but you could also do community building and being a sensible advocate for some of these effective altruism issues. I think that can be a route to having just as much impact, and perhaps more than donating.

If you are currently earning to give, then I would say it’s worth seriously doing a round of applying to these types of roles and seeing whether there’s any opportunities that are a good fit — so seriously considering switching. It will be the best role for many people in the end.

In the past, I think I’ve helped to be fairly confusing a couple of times. One was by talking about talent constraints, the community being talent constrained. It makes it sound like it’s easy to get a job. And then more recently, talking about there being a funding overhang. It makes it sound like it’s easy to get funding.

Unfortunately, none of those two things are true. It’s more accurate to not use those terms. If you’re able to find opportunities that are much more effective than these funding bars — which are very, very high — then there’s a lot of funding available. But it’s not easy to think of something that’s 10 times more effective than something that’s already among the most effective things, which is earning to give to GiveDirectly, or the EA Long-Term Fund.

I should probably also be clear that allocation in the community is definitely not perfect. There’s going to be some good projects that are indeed above the bar, but getting missed. That’s always a risk. The way I would suggest orienting towards this is try to set up your life so that you can afford to fail — so make sure you have a backup plan, things like that. And then given that, try and aim as high as you can. The slogan would be, “Find ways to limit your downsides and then aim high.”

We can apply that on an individual level, and then I think also from the community, we can stand to be more ambitious. There’s many reasons why to be more ambitious. Partly there’s the general case that people who want to have an impact can afford to take more risks than people who are just in it for themselves personally — those kind of old-school effective altruism arguments.

Two new points — which I want to emphasise today — is that, firstly, I think recent events have shown that the community can achieve really, really big things by anyone’s standards. Coming back just briefly to Sam’s story: back in 2015, there were probably only around 1,000 highly engaged people in the community. So if one of those has become the world’s richest person under 30, that’s a pretty good base rate out of 1,000 people — those are pretty good odds. And I’ve seen people succeeding ahead of what I would’ve expected in other career paths as well — many people in effective altruism are just really capable of achieving a lot. And another interesting thing about Sam is, Sam had a lot going for him, and has a really privileged background — his parents are both Stanford law professors, I think. But one of his other really notable traits is that he aimed really high. I mean, he probably took the idea of becoming a billionaire more seriously than almost anyone else in the community. And I think that was maybe also necessary for his success. That’s showing that maybe we could raise our sights. It is possible.

The second point is that now there’s just a lot more funding available, so that should mean that we’re able to do things that just weren’t possible five or 10 years ago. In contrast to that though, a lot of effective altruism projects look quite similar to how they did back in 2015. Many of them would struggle to deploy more than $10 million per year effectively. And 80,000 Hours is definitely in that category. Our programmes are the same as before there was all this funding. But it seems like, looking forwards, we should be thinking about projects that are potentially a lot more scalable than our current ones.

If the challenge is we’re currently deploying $400 million a year, but we need to get that to above $1 billion a year, either we’re going to have to massively grow the community, or we’re going to have to set up projects that can deploy a lot more funding effectively than the current projects — like those higher bars of funding that I mentioned earlier. People have been talking about this idea of ‘megaprojects’ — this is just defined as a project that could cost effectively deploy $100 million a year rather than $10 million a year, which is where many of the current projects are.

I don’t know what these projects should be. There are some very rough ideas that have been floating around. One is something like a global screening programme to detect new pathogens to help with biosecurity. Another is an effective altruism–inspired school or university. A third would be to step into and try to become the biggest funders of nuclear security, because the biggest funder, MacArthur Foundation, has recently quit that area. So that could be another opportunity, and there’s a couple of talks about that at the conference.

That’s another way of seeing the challenge: what might these megaprojects be, and how could we get them started? It would be really exciting if something like this could emerge from this conference. I hope that is something to think about for the rest of the weekend. Thank you for listening.

Edit: See this note about how talking about a single bar can sometimes be misleading.

What’s next

If you think you might be able to help deal with one of the key bottlenecks mentioned here, we’ve recently ended the waitlist for our one-on-one advice, and would encourage you to apply.

Apply now

You might also be interested in:

• Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs. people
• How are resources in effective altruism allocated across issues?
• What the effective altruism community most needs. A conversation between me and Arden Koehler, covering talent vs. funding gaps in more depth.
• Think twice before talking about ‘talent gaps’
• Podcast: Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, and mental health under pressure

Stay up to date on new research like this by following me on Twitter.

The post The growth of effective altruism: what does it mean for our priorities and level of ambition? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

See a brief update Aug 2022.

In 2015, I argued that funding for effective altruism — especially within meta or longtermist areas — had grown faster than the number of people interested in it, and that this was likely to continue. This meant that there was a funding overhang, leading to a series of skill bottlenecks.

A couple of years ago, I wondered if this trend was starting to reverse. There hadn’t been any new donors on the scale of Good Ventures, which meant that total committed funds were growing slowly, giving the number of people a chance to catch up.

However, the spectacular asset returns of the last few years, and creation of FTX, seem to have shifted the balance back towards funding. Now the funding overhang seems even larger in absolute terms than 2015.

In the rest of this post, I make some rough guesses at total committed funds compared to the number of interested people, to see how the balance of funding vs. talent might have changed over time.

This will also give us an update on whether effective altruism is growing — with a focus on what I think are the two most important metrics: the stock of total committed funds, and committed people.

This analysis also made me make a small update in favour of giving now vs. investing to give later.

Here’s a summary of what’s coming up:

• How much funding is committed to effective altruism (going forward)? Around $46 billion.
• How quickly have these funds grown? ~37% per year since 2015, with much of the growth concentrated in 2020–2021.
• How much is being donated each year? Around $420 million, which is just over 1% of committed capital, and has grown maybe ~21% per year since 2015.
• How many committed community members are there? About 7,400 active members and 2,600 ‘committed’ members, growing 10–20% per year 2018–2020, and growing faster than that 2015–2017.
• Has the funding overhang grown or shrunk? Funding seems to have grown faster than the number of people, so the overhang has grown in both proportional and absolute terms.
• What might be the implications for career choice? Skill bottlenecks have probably increased for people able to think of ways to spend lots of funding effectively, run big projects, and evaluate grants.

To caveat, all of these figures are extremely rough, and are mainly estimated off the top of my head. However, I think they’re better than what exists currently, and thought it was important to try to give some kind of rough update on how my thinking has changed. There are likely some significant mistakes; I’d be keen to see a more thorough version of this analysis. Overall, please treat this more like notes from a podcast than a carefully researched article.

Which growth metrics matter?

Broadly, the future¹ impact of effective altruism depends on the total stock of:

• The quantity of committed funds
• The number of committed people (adjusted for skills and influence)
• The quality of our ideas (which determine how effectively funding and labour can be turned into impact)

(In standard economic growth models, this would be capital, labour, and productivity.)

You could consider other resources like political capital, reputation, or public support as well, though we can also think of these as being a special type of labour.

In this post, I’m going to focus on funding and labour. (To do an equivalent analysis for ideas, we could try to estimate whether the expected return of our best way of using resources is going up or down, with some kind of adjustment for diminishing returns.)

For both funding and labour, we can look at the growth of the stock of that resource, or the growth of how much of that resource is deployed (i.e. spent on valuable projects) each year.

If we want to estimate how quickly effective altruism is growing, then I think the stock is most relevant, since that determines how many resources will be deployed in the long term.

It’s true there’s no point having a big stock of resources if it’s not being deployed — so we should also want to see growth in deployed resources — however, there can be good reasons to delay deployment while the stock is still growing, such as (i) to gain better information about how to spend it, (ii) to build up grantmaking capacity, or (iii) to accumulate investment returns and career capital. So, if forced to choose between stock and deployment, I’d choose the stock as the best measure of growth.

Both the stock of resources and the amount deployed each year are also more important than ‘top-of-funnel’ metrics (like Google search volume for ‘effective altruism’) though we should watch the top-of-funnel metrics carefully — especially insofar as they correlate with future changes in the stock.

Finally, I think it’s very important to try to make an overall estimate of the total stock of resources. It’s possible to come up with a long list of EA growth metrics, but different metrics typically vary by one or two orders of magnitude in how important they are. Typically most growth is driven by one or two big sources, so many metrics can be stagnant or falling while the total resources available are exploding.

How many funds are committed to effective altruism?

Here are some very, very rough figures:

I’ve tried to focus on funds that are already ‘committed’. I mostly haven’t adjusted them for the chance the person gives up on EA (except for GWWC), but I’ve also ignored the net present value of likely future commitments.

I’m aware of at least one new donor who is likely to donate to longtermist issues on the scale of Good Ventures, at around $100 million per year, with perhaps a net present value in the tens of billions.

There are several other billionaires who seem sympathetic to EA (e.g. Reid Hoffman has donated to GPI) — these are ignored.

I’m also ignoring people like Bill Gates who donate to things that EAs would often endorse.

Bear in mind that these figures are extremely volatile — e.g. the value of FTX could easily fall 80% in a market crash, or if a competitor displaces it. Many of the stakes that the wealth comes from are also fairly illiquid — if the owners tried to sell a significant fraction, it could crash the price.

How quickly have committed funds grown?

The committed funds are dominated by Good Ventures and FTX, so to estimate total growth, we mainly need to estimate how much they’ve grown:

1. In 2015, Forbes estimated Moskovitz’s net worth was $8 billion, so it has grown by 2.6x since then (~20% per year). This is probably due to (i) Facebook stock price appreciation and (ii) the Asana IPO.

2. FTX didn’t exist in 2015.

The impact of these two sources alone is growth of $33 billion since 2015, and the new total of $39 billion from both is about five-fold growth compared to $8 billion in 2015.

My rough estimate is the other sources have grown around 2.5x since 2015.

For instance, GiveWell donors (excluding Open Phil) were giving $80 million per year in 2019, up from about $40 million in 2015. We don’t yet have the finalised figures for 2020, but it seems to be significantly higher — perhaps $120 million (see below).

Many of the sources have grown faster. As one example, in 2015 David Goldberg estimated the value of pledges made by Founders Pledge members at $64 million, compared to over $3 billion today.

In total, I’d guess that committed funds in 2015 were ~$10 billion, so have grown 4.6x. This is 37% per year over five years.

You might worry that most of this growth was concentrated in the earlier years, and that recent growth has been slow. My guess is that if anything the opposite is the case — growth has been concentrated in the last 1–2 years, in line with the recent boom in technology stocks and cryptocurrencies, and the creation of FTX.

The situation for each cause could be different. My impression is that the funds available for longtermist and meta grantmaking have grown faster than those for global health.

How much funding is being deployed each year?

In early 2020, I estimated that the EA community was deploying about $420 million per year.

Around 60% was via Open Philanthropy, 20% from GiveWell, and 20% everyone else. The Open Phil grants were based on an average of their giving 2017–2019, which helps to smooth out big multi-year grants that are attributed to the year when they’re first made.

$420 million per year would be just over 1% of committed capital.

Even those who are relatively into patient philanthropy think we should aim to donate over 1% per year, and at the 2020 EA Leaders Forum, the median estimate was that we should aim to donate 3% of capital per year.

So, if we’re now at 1% per year, that’s one argument that we should aim to tilt the balance towards giving now rather than investing to give later. In contrast, in early 2020, I thought that longtermist donors were giving more like 3% of capital per year, so it wasn’t obvious whether this was too low or too high. (This argument is fairly weak by itself — the quality of the particular opportunities and our ability to make good grants are also big factors.)

How quickly have deployed funds grown?

Since 60% comes via Open Philanthropy, we can mainly look to their grants.

Around 2014–2015, Open Philanthropy was only making grants of around $30 million per year, which rapidly grew to a new plateau of $200–$300 million by 2017.

At that point, they decided to hold deployed funds constant for several years, in order to evaluate their progress and build staff capacity before trying to scale further.

Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna have said they want to donate everything within their lifetimes. This will require hitting ~$1 billion deployed per year fairly soon, which I expect to happen. The Metaculus community agrees, forecasting donations of over $1 billion per year by 2030.

Note that the grants are very lumpy year-to-year. One reason for this is that Open Philanthropy sometimes makes three- or five-year commitments which all accrue to the first year. I think 2017 is unusually high due to the grants to CSET and OpenAI. You’ll get a more accurate impression from taking a three-year (or five-year) moving average, which currently stands at ~$240 million. (The chart below is from Applied Divinity Studies.)

FTX is new, so the founders have only been giving millions per year. Their money is not yet highly liquid, and they haven’t created a foundation, so we should expect it to remain low for a while.

Money moved by GiveWell (excluding Open Philanthropy) hit a flat period from 2015–2017, but seems to have started growing again in 2018, by over 30% per year. I believe the 2020 figures are on track to be even better than 2019, but aren’t shown on this chart (or included in my deployed funds estimate).

My impression from the data I’ve seen is that funds donated by GWWC members, EA Funds, Founders Pledge members, Longview Philanthropy, SFF, etc. have all grown significantly (i.e. more than doubling) in the last five years.

Overall, I estimate the community would have been deploying perhaps $160 million per year in 2015, so in total this has grown 2.6-fold, or 21% per year over five years — somewhat slower than the growth of the stock of committed capital, but roughly in line with the number of people.

How many engaged community members are there?

The best estimate I’m aware of is by Rethink Priorities using data from the 2019 EA Survey:

We estimate there are around 2,315 highly engaged EAs and 6,500 (90% CI: 4,700–10,000) active EAs in the community overall.

‘Highly engaged’ is defined as those who answered 4 or 5 out of 5 for engagement in the survey, and ‘active’ is those who answered 3, 4 or 5.

A 4 on this scale is a fairly high bar for engagement — e.g. many people who’ve made career changes we’ve tracked at 80,000 Hours only report ‘4’ on this scale).

In 2020, I estimate about 14% net growth (see the next section), bringing the total number of active EAs to 7,400.

You can see some more stats on what these people are like in the EA Survey.

If we were to consider the number of people interested in effective altruism, it would be much higher. For instance, at 80,000 Hours we have about 150,000 people on our newsletter, and over 100,000 people have bought a copy of Doing Good Better.

How quickly has the number of engaged community members grown?

Unfortunately, it’s still very hard to estimate the growth rate in the number of committed people, since the data are plagued with selection effects and lag effects.

For instance, the data I’ve seen shows that it often takes several years for someone to go from having first heard about EA to filling out the EA Survey, and from there to reporting themselves as ‘4’ or ‘5’ for engagement. This means that many of the new members from the last few years are not yet identified — so most ways of measuring this growth will undercount it.

In mid 2020, I made ~6 different estimates for the annual growth rate of committed members, which fell in the range of 0-30% in the last 1–2 years. My central estimate was around 20% (+900 per year at ‘4’ or ‘5’ on the engagement scale in the survey).

More recently, we were able to re-use the method Rethink Priorities used in the analysis above, but with data from the 2020 EA Survey rather than 2019. This analysis found the total number of engaged EAs has grown about 14% in the last year, so would now be 7,400.

This is fairly uncertain, and there’s a reasonable chance the number of people didn’t grow in 2020.

The percentage growth rate would have been a lot higher in 2015–2017, since the base of members was much smaller, and I also think those were unusually good years for getting new people into EA.

Around 2017, there was a shift in strategy from reaching new people to getting those who were already interested into high-impact jobs. This meant that ‘top-line’ metrics — such as web reach and media impressions — slowed down.

My take is that this shift in strategy was at least partially successful, insofar as the number of committed EAs has continued to grow, despite flattish top-line metrics. (Though there’s a reasonable chance EA could have grown even faster if the top-line growth had continued.)

Going forward, we’ll eventually need to get the top-of-funnel metrics growing again, or the stock of ‘medium’ engaged people will run out, and the number of ‘highly’ engaged people will stop growing. Outreach to new people seems to be getting more highly prioritised going forward.

What about the skill level of the people involved?

This is a big uncertainty because one influential member (e.g. in a senior position at the White House) can achieve what it might take thousands of others to achieve.

My sense is that the typical influence and skill level of members has grown a lot, partly as people have grown older and advanced their careers. For example, there are now a number of interested people in senior government positions in the U.K. and U.S. who weren’t there in 2015.

In terms of the level of ‘talent’ of members, we don’t have great data. Impressions seem to be split between the level being similar to the past and being a bit lower. So if we averaged the two, in expectation there would be a small decrease.

How much labour is being deployed?

It’s hard to estimate how much labour is being ‘deployed’.

People can at most deploy one year per year if they focus on impact, but a proper estimate should account for:

• What fraction of people are focused on impact compared to career capital. According to the 2020 EA Survey, around two community members are prioritising career capital per person prioritising immediate impact.

• Increasing productivity over time. The mean age in the community is 29, but most people only hit peak productivity around age 40–60 (though most of the increase happens by the early 30s).

• Discounting the value of future years, especially for ‘drop out’, though potentially including the labour of future recruits.

Overall, my guess is that we’re only deploying 1–2% of the net present value of the labour of the current membership. This could be an argument for shifting the balance a bit more towards immediate impact rather than career capital — though this is a really complicated question. Young people often have great opportunities to build career capital, and if these increase their lifetime impact, they should take them, no matter what others in the community are doing.

How quickly has deployed labour increased?

If the percentage of people focused on career capital vs. impact is similar over time, then it should track the stock.

To claw together some rough data, according to the 2019 EA Survey, about 260 people said they’re working at ‘an EA org’ (which includes object-level charities). With an estimated 40% response rate, that would imply 650 people in total, which seems a lot higher than what I would have guessed in 2015.

My impression is that most of the most central EA orgs have also grown headcount ~20% per year (e.g. CEA, MIRI, 80K), roughly doubling since 2015, and keeping pace with growth in the number of people.

Working at an EA org is only one option, and a better estimate would aim to track the number of people ‘deployed’ in research, policy, earning to give, etc. as well.

Changes in the overhang: How quickly has funding grown compared to people?

In 2015, I argued there was a funding overhang within meta and longtermist causes. (Though note it’s less obvious there’s a funding overhang within global health, and to a lesser extent animal welfare.) How has this likely evolved?

During 2017–2019, I thought the number of people might have been catching up, but in 2020, it seemed like the growth of each had been roughly similar. A similar rate of proportional growth would mean the absolute size of the overhang was increasing.

As of July 2021 and the latest FTX deal, I now think the amount of funding has grown faster than people, making the growth of the overhang even larger.

Here are some semi-made-up numbers to illustrate the idea:

Suppose that, in 2015:

• There was $10 billion
• There were 2,500 people
• 30% of people are to be employed by EA donors
• The average cost of employing someone is $100,000

In that case, it would take $75 million per year to employ them. But $10 billion can generate perpetual income of $200 million,² so the overhang is $125 million per year.

Suppose that in 2021:

• There is $50 billion
• There are 7,500 people.

Then, it would take $225 million to employ 30% of them, but you can generate $1,000 million of income, so the overhang is $775 million per year.

Another way to try to quantify the overhang is to try to estimate the financial value of the labour, and compare is to the committed funding. My rough estimate is that the labour is worth $50k to $500k per year. If, after accounting for drop out, the average career has 20 years remaining, that would be $1–10 million per person. (If this seems high, note that it’s driven largely by outliers.) If there are 7,400 people, that would be $7.4bn – $74bn in total (central around $20bn). In comparison, I estimated there is almost $50bn of committed capital, so the value of the labour is most likely lower. In contrast, in the economy as a whole, I think human capital is normally thought to be worth more than physical capital, so the situation in effective altruism is most likely the reverse of the norm.

Note that if there’s an overhang, the money can be invested to deploy later, or spent employing people outside of the community (e.g. funding academic research), so it’s not that the money is wasted — it’s more that we’ll end up missing some especially great opportunities that could have been taken otherwise. These will especially be opportunities that are best tackled by people who deeply share the EA mindset. I’ll talk more about the implications later.

What about the future of the balance of funding vs. people?

Financial investment returns

A major driver of the stock of capital will be the investment returns of Facebook, Asana, FTX, and Ethereum.

If there’s a crash in tech stocks and cryptocurrencies (which seems fairly likely in the short term), the balance could move somewhat back towards people.

In the longer term, I’ll leave it to the reader to forecast the future returns of a portfolio like the above.

Personally, I feel uneasy projecting that U.S. tech stocks will return more than 1–5% per year, due to their high valuations. I expect cryptocurrencies will return more, but with much higher risk.

New donors vs. new people

As noted above, I think it’s more likely than not that another $100 million per year/$20 billion NPV donor enters the community within the coming years. This would be roughly ~40% growth in the total stock, compared to 15% per year growth in people, which would shift the balance even more towards funding.

The Metaculus community also estimates there’s a 50% chance of another Good Ventures-scale donor within five years.

After this, I expect it’ll become harder to grow the pool of committed funds at current rates.

Going from $60 billion to $120 billion would require convincing a 100+ billionaire like Jeff Bezos to give a large fraction of their net worth to EA-aligned causes, or might require convincing around 10 ‘regular’ billionaires.

That said, it seems possible that the total pledged by all members of the Giving Pledge is around $600 billion. If 20% of them were into EA, that would be $120 billion; four-fold growth from today.

The total U.S. philanthropic sector is $400 billion per year, so if 1% of that was EA aligned, that would be $4 billion per year, which is 10-fold growth from today, and three-fold growth from where I expect us to be in 5–10 years.

Expanding the number of committed community members from ~5,000 to ~50,000 seems pretty achievable given enough time. Only about 10% of U.S. college graduates have even heard of EA, let alone seriously considered its ideas, and it’s even less well known in non-English-speaking countries.

A recent survey of Oxford students found that they believed the most effective global health charity was only ~1.5x better than the average — in line with what the average American thinks — while EAs and global health experts estimated the ratio is ~100x. This suggests that even among Oxford students, where a lot of outreach has been done, the most central message of EA is not yet widely known.

If it seems easier to grow the number of people 10-fold than to grow the committed funds 10-fold, then I expect the size of the overhang will eventually decrease, but this could easily take 20 years, and I expect the overhang is going to be with us for at least the next five years.

A big uncertainty here is what fraction of people will ever be interested in EA in the long term — it’s possible its appeal is very narrow, but happens to include an unusually large fraction of very wealthy people. In that case, the overhang could persist much longer.

Human capital investment returns

One other complicating factor is that, as noted, people’s productivity tends to increase with age, and many community members are focused on growing their career capital.

For instance, if someone goes from a masters student to a senior government official, then their influence has maybe increased by a factor of 1,000. This could enable the community to achieve far more, and to deploy far more funds, even if the number of people doesn’t grow that much.

Implications for career choice

Here are some very rough thoughts on what this might mean for people who want high-impact careers and feel aligned with the current effective altruism community. I’m going to focus on longtermist and meta causes, since they’re what I know the best and where the biggest overhang exists.

Which roles are most needed?

The existence of a funding overhang within meta and longtermist causes created a bottleneck for the skills needed to deploy EA funds, especially in ways that are hard for people who don’t deeply identify with the mindset.³

We could break down some of the key leadership positions needed to deploy these funds as follows:

1. Researchers able to come up with ideas for big projects, new cause areas, or other new ways to spend funds on a big scale
2. EA entrepreneurs/managers/research leads able to run these projects and hire lots of people
3. Grantmakers able to evaluate these projects

These correspond to bottlenecks in ideas, management, and vetting, respectively.

Given that many of the most promising projects involve research and policy, I’d say there’s a special need to have these skills within those sectors, as well as within the causes longtermists are most focused on, such as AI and biosecurity (e.g. someone who can lead an AI research lab; the kind of person who can found CSET). That said, I hope that longtermists expand into a wider range of causes, and there are opportunities in other sectors too.

The skill sets listed above seem likely to always be very valuable: As an illustration, these skill sets also seem very valuable within global health — and typically more valuable than earning to give — though there’s less obviously an overhang there.

But the presence of the overhang makes them even more valuable. Finding an extra grantmaker or entrepreneur can easily unlock millions of dollars of grants that would otherwise be left invested.⁴

I have thought these roles were some of the most needed in the community since 2015, and now that the overhang seems even bigger — and seems likely to remain big for 10 years — I think they’re even more valuable than I did back then.

Personally, if given the choice between finding an extra person for one of these roles who’s a good fit or someone donating $X million per year, to think the two options were similarly valuable, X would typically need to be over three, and often over 10 (where this hugely depends on fit and the circumstances).

This would also mean that if you have a 10% chance of succeeding, then the expected value of the path is $300,000–$2 million per year (and the value of information will be very high if you can determine your fit within a couple of years).

The funding overhang also created bottlenecks for people able to staff projects, and to work in supporting roles. For each person in a leadership role, there’s typically a need for at least several people in the more junior versions of these roles or supporting positions — e.g. research assistants, operations specialists, marketers, ML engineers, people executing on whatever projects are being done, etc.

I’d typically prefer someone in these roles to an additional person donating $400,000–$4 million per year (again, with huge variance depending on fit).

The bottleneck for supporting roles has, however, been a bit smaller than you might expect, because the number of these roles was limited by the number of people in leadership positions able to create these positions.

I think for the more junior and supporting roles there was also a vetting bottleneck. I’m unsure if there were infrastructure or coordination bottlenecks beyond the factors mentioned, but it seems plausible.

How should individuals respond to these needs?

If you might be able to help fill one of these key bottlenecks, there’s a good chance it’ll be the highest impact thing you can do.

Ideally, you can shoot for the tail outcome of a leadership role within one of these categories (e.g. becoming a grantmaker, manager, or someone who finds a new cause area). Aiming for a leadership position also sets you up to go into a highly valuable supporting or more junior equivalent role (e.g. being a researcher for a grantmaker, or being an operations specialist working under a manager).

Your next step will likely involve trying to gain career capital that will accelerate you in this path. Depending on what career capital you focus on, there could be many other strong options you could switch to otherwise (e.g. government jobs).

Be aware that the leadership-style roles are very challenging — besides being smart and hardworking, you need to be self-motivated, independently minded, and maybe creative. They also typically require deep knowledge of effective altruism, and a lot of trust from — and a good reputation within — the community. It’s difficult to become trusted with millions of dollars or a team of tens of people.

So, no one should assume they’ll succeed, and everyone should have a backup plan.

The ‘supporting’ roles are also more challenging than you might expect. Besides also requiring a significant amount of skill and trust (though less than the leadership roles), there’s a lack of mentorship capacity, and their creation is limited by the number of people in leadership roles.

On our job board, I counted ~40 supporting roles within our top recommended problem areas posted within the last two months, so there are perhaps 240 per year.

This compares to ~7,400 engaged community members, of which perhaps ~1,000 are early career and looking to start these kinds of jobs.

So there are a significant number of opportunities, and given their impact I think many people should pursue them, but it’s important to know there’s a reasonable chance it doesn’t work out.

If you’re unsure of your chances of eventually being able to land a supporting role, then build career capital towards those roles, but focus on ways of gaining career capital that also take you towards 1–2 other longer-term roles you find attractive.

I want to be honest about the challenges of these roles so that people know what they’re in for, but I’m also very concerned about being too discouraging.

We meet many people who are under-confident in their abilities, and especially their potential to grow over the years.

I think it’s generally better to aim a bit high than too low. If you succeed, you’ll have a big impact. If it doesn’t work out, you can switch to your plan B instead.

Trying to fill the most pressing skill bottlenecks in the world’s most pressing problems is not easy, and I respect anyone who tries.

What does this mean for earning to give?

The success of FTX is arguably a huge vindication of the idea of earning to give, and so in that sense it’s a positive update.

On balance, however, I think the increase in funding compared to people is an update against the value of earning to give at the margin.

This doesn’t mean earning to give has no value:

1. Medium-sized donors can often find opportunities that aren’t practical for the largest donors to exploit – the ecosystem needs a mixture of ‘angel’ donors to compliment the ‘VCs’ like Open Philanthropy. Open Philanthropy isn’t covering many of the problem areas listed here and often can’t pursue small individual grants.
2. You can save money, invest it, and spend when the funding overhang has decreased, or in order to practice patient philanthropy more generally.
3. You could support causes that seem more funding constrained, like global health.

But I do think the relative value of earning to give has fallen over time, as the overhang has increased.

Overall, I would encourage people early in their career to very seriously consider options besides earning to give first.

If you’re already earning to give — and especially if you don’t seem to have a chance of tail outcomes (e.g. startup exit) — I’d encourage you to seriously consider whether you could switch.

That said, there are definitely people for whom earning to give remains their overall top option, especially if they have personal constraints, can’t find another role that’s a good fit, have unusually high earnings, or are learning a lot from their job (and might switch out later).

Other jobs

I’ve focused on earning to give and jobs working ‘directly’ to deploy EA funds, but I definitely don’t want to give the impression these are the only impactful jobs.

I continue to think that jobs in government, academia, other philanthropic institutions and relevant for-profit companies (e.g. working on biotech) can be very high impact and great for career capital.

For instance, it would be possible for the community to have an absolutely massive impact via improving government policy around existential risks, and this doesn’t require anyone to get a job ‘in EA’.

I don’t discuss them more here because they don’t require EA funding to pursue, so their expected impact isn’t especially affected by the size of the funding overhang. I’d still encourage readers to consider them.

Related posts

You can comment on this post on the Effective Altruism Forum.

• Part 2: The allocation of resources across cause areas.

• What does the growth of effective altruism imply about our priorities and level of ambition?

• Small donors can still have a significant impact

What’s next

If you think you might be able to help deal with one of the key bottlenecks mentioned, or are interested in switching out of earning to give, we’ve recently ended the waitlist for our one-on-one advice, and would encourage you to apply.

Apply now

You might also be interested in:

• What the effective altruism community most needs. A conversation between me and Arden Koehler, covering talent vs. funding gaps in more depth.

• Think twice before talking about ‘talent gaps’.

• Why do some organisations say their recent hires are worth so much?

• Podcast: Sam Bankman-Fried on taking a high-risk approach to crypto and doing good

• Podcast: Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, and mental health under pressure

Stay up to date on new research like this by following me on Twitter.

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