Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How good it is to donate and how hard it is to get a job, published by Elijah Persson-Gordon on April 17, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary

In this post, I hope to inspire other Effective Altruists to focus more on donation and commiserate with those who have been disappointed in their ability to get an altruistic job.

First, I argue that the impact of having a job that helps others is complicated. In this section, I discuss annual donation statistics of people in the Effective Altruism community donate, which I find quite low.

In the rest of the post, I describe my recent job search, my experience substituting at public schools, and my expenses.

Having a job that helps others might be overemphasized

Doing a job that helps others seems like a good thing to do. Weirdly, it's not as simple as that.

While some job vacancies last for years, other fields are very competitive and have many qualified applicants for most position listings.

In the latter case, if you take the job offer, you may think you are doing good in the world. But if you hadn't taken the job, there could be someone in your position doing nearly as good as you (or better, depending on if you were overstating your qualifications.)

In animal welfare in particular, jobs get many applicants.

Lauren Mee, from Animal Advocacy Careers, on the podcast How I Learned to Love Shrimp: "...there's an interesting irony in the movement where there is actually a lot of people who are interested in working in the movement and not enough roles for all of those people."

There is some social pressure within and outside of the Effective Altruism community to have a meaningful job where you help others.

Although there is a lot of focus on impactful careers, Rethink Priorities' 2020 Effective Altruism survey found that around only 10% of non-student respondents worked at an Effective Altruism organization.

Donations are an amazing opportunity, and I think they are underemphasized

I was confused to find that most people I talked to in Effective Altruism settings did not seem to be frugal or donate very much.

It seems that this is correct.

In the 2020 Effective Altruism survey

, among respondents who opted to share their donation amounts, donating $10,000 annually would place you within the top 10% of donors. The median for these respondents was close to $500 per year. (Mostly, they donate to global poverty.)

A lot of people in rich countries have flexibility in where their money goes. This money could be put toward their best bets of doing good in the world.

Which is more likely to do good: going out to eat, or helping to fund an effective charity?

It seems to me that you would have to think that the most effective charities are not that effective or that your contributions would be too small to make an impact to choose the former.

To understand more about the effectiveness of charities, I would highly recommend talking to someone from the charity and asking your specific doubts.

As for small contributions, I am not exactly sure how to think about them, and hope to write about this topic in the future. However, it seems to me that many charities make purchases in the thousands of dollars, which could be an achievable amount to donate over a year. For instance, Fish Welfare Initiative's 2024 budget includes numbers in the thousands.

I used to really want an animal welfare-related job. Then I wanted to donate more. Now I am a substitute at a public school

I graduated in May of 2023 and have since been interested in an animal welfare job.

I have applied to a handful of these positions, realizing over time that the applicant pools were larger than I thought; the researcher position at Animal Charity Evaluators had 375 applicants.

After moving back to a more rural area to be around friends and family, I looked into busin...