I think ETG basically advocates for a kind of central planning - replacing a large bureaucracy with a class donors who believe they have special knowledge about what would help the lives of others.
Wait, what? That's just not true. You can be very highly productive without exploiting anyone. Even if you happen to be in an industry where exploiting others is the status quo, you can do outsized amounts of good (rivaling the best outcomes of charity) by being even a bit less exploitive. Stated another way, social responsibility - even in profit-seeking enterprises - is quite compatible with EA.
That's what corporations are — large, complex machines under steady selective pressure to maximize efficiency and externalities. If you're lucky, they will go the efficiency route. But if it's easier, or they're already pretty efficient, they will tend to maximize negative externalities instead.
So guardrails are needed. Reasonable people disagree about where the guardrails should be. One thing that is hard to dispute, though, is that seeking profit, and continuing to focus your attention on increasing profit, will bias your thinking about where the guardrails should be.
I think a better argument is that earning to give emphasizes careers that produce the "most" value as measured by the market. But there are plenty of valuable careers that the market probably undervalues, like teaching.
This is completely untrue. Let's say you choose the rather extreme example of corporate executive who outsources jobs to Asia for purely selfish motivations. They are still undeniably injecting wealth to a poorer economy that otherwise would not have happened , and this wealth allows people purchase goods that dramatically increase their livelihoods like antibiotics, electricity, or cleaner burning stoves.
Even if you want to approach this from a "capitalism bad" angle, this still doesn't make sense. It's not like EA is a primary motivation of people wanting to work lucrative jobs. On the internet, you can see endless number of comments about wanting to work a FAANG job, and none of them have anything to do with EA.
EA was never recommending "Open up a sweat shop and violate as many labor practices as possible to maximize income", "become a successful drug dealer" or "market for tobacco companies"
It was "Go work at Google, in finance, high frequency trading, or become a corporate lawyer and donate a large portion of your income to the world." All jobs where the impact is close to neutral.
You may be helping plutocrats syphon resources and public funds away from developing countries.
You may be promoting the inequality of arms in access to justice, given that regulators and citizens cannot pay for the best legal advice, therefore enabling corporate regulatory capture over the long term.
Given the ubiquity of offshore vehicles in many international legal transactions, you may enable companies to evade contributing fairly to the countries in which they operate, thereby fuelling a decline in funding available for public services, and increasing the tax burden on wage-earning citizens.
And you may even have little awareness you are even doing these things because of the relative opacity and abstraction of the ownership of the corporate vehicles that make up your client base.
This is debatable. If they are renting out the houses this could reduce rents which would improve the lives of the poor who rent much more often than own. If they are sitting on them it's much more likely to be negative.
> You may be helping plutocrats syphon resources and public funds away from developing countries.
I'll give you that you shouldn't earn to give by working for Gaddafi. I think the vast majority of EA would agree.
The third rule at 80,000 hours the biggest proponent of earn to give is
3. Doesn’t cause harm
And their actual recommendations given are
Tech startup founder
Quantitative trading
Software engineering
Startup early employee
Data science
Management consulting
Marketing
Actuarial science
Executive search
Nursing
Allied health
Large investors don't tend to be drawn to projects offering affordable housing to local residents because they are not as profitable as the alternatives. Many large European cities are currently suffering a housing affordability crisis driven in part by properties increasingly catering to tourists (esp. Air B&Bs) and luxury properties for investment for international high-net worth individuals.
> I'll give you that you shouldn't earn to give by working for Gaddafi. I think the vast majority of EA would agree.
It usually wouldn't be as clear cut and easy to spot a case as that. But for example, until the war in Ukraine, European law firms were happy to act for any number of Russian businesses or oligarchs, provided they don't figure on any anti-money laundering lists (themselves, often relatively simple to circumvent). Or say, an African business person who has acquired their huge wealth in domestic assets and infrastructure through nepotism and is salting away the wealth offshore or into Europe via various direct or opaque investments, all legally facilitated by big law firms.
>The third rule at 80,000 hours the biggest proponent of earn to give is
3. Doesn’t cause harm
Not causing harm is much harder to tease out than one might think. The first order effects might appear harmless, but what about the second and third order effects? Is one often even in a position to know given the levels of abstraction in global financial markets? Are you lifting up developing countries by investment, or unwittingly enabling more to be extracted from them than is being put in?
> Startup early employee
Plenty of these have caused harm. Many modern startups have the explicit goal of "disrupting" traditional labor rights or unions.
> Marketing
There's so much variability here, ranging from pretty benign activities to outright lying to people's faces about health outcomes of dangerous products.
My larger point is not that marketers or tech founders are inherently evil people, but that the system is rotten. For example, despite all the charities and philanthropy going to undeveloped countries, the net flow of resource is out of these countries and into more developed ones[1]. Nothing about ETG seems to contradict these tendencies, if you work in actuarial science and help a company minimize the taxes they pay in South Africa, but then donate 50% of your paycheque back to charitable causes in the country, your actions have not been a net benefit to the people of that country.
[1] https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/actual-flow-resources-de...
I've had a long, albeit shallow, exposure to EA, and my model of altruism has roughly matched up with it for even longer. Most of the formulations of Earn-to-Give I've encountered don't fit your description here, of maximizing profit blindly, at any expense[1]. The formulation I'm familiar with is ceterus-paribus: choosing between two jobs as with much of EA, a gentle pushback against intuitive notion that you should privilege doing good with your own two hands over doing good with money. The exemplar here is not "sell meth to kids to buy mosquito nets", it's "be an accountant for a widget firm to donate enough to hire two Peace Corp workers instead of working directly as a PC worker".
For a more explicit but more recent example, 80k Hrs published, 5 years ago, an explicit rejection of what you're describing:
> We believe that in the vast majority of cases, it’s a mistake to pursue a career in which the direct effects of the work are seriously harmful, even if the overall benefits of that work seem greater than the harms.
https://80000hours.org/articles/harmful-career/
> ETG basically advocates for a kind of central planning - replacing a large bureaucracy with a class donors who believe they have special knowledge about what would help the lives of others.
Tangential, but I don't follow this. How does ETG give donors more control than working in an altruistic career, or than donors with a more traditional mindset?
ETG encourages people to think of the positive side of what they're doing (donating money) without considering the negatives (harmful careers). Being rich, and focusing on getting rich as a goal, distorts your thinking.
BigTech ads are instead non-consensually forced upon people and steal their attention (best case) or manipulate their thoughts/desires (worst case)
Those who make the ads and those who view them are voluntarily exchanging their time and attention with each other. They're traders in the same way high-frequency traders are.
My understanding of ETG is that people have the goal to earn as much money as possible so they can donate more. But if you take the idea of rationally deciding how to do most god, of course you have to balance the good you do with your donations against the bad you do in your job. And you are the worst person to evaluate that rationally.
I'll admit it's tricky to figure out when this really matters. On the margins, it is clearly the case for plenty of people, maybe even most people, that they can do more good by earning to give than they can by directly providing charitable services. But by earning to give, you're relying on and presupposing the existence of other people doing the direct service provision. If everyone becomes a stock broker and no one becomes a nurse, the world does not end up better off. And the line where that happens is nebulous and not necessarily at the 100% mark or even at a majority mark. A world with more stock brokers and fewer nurses gradually gets worse. I don't know where that point is, but maybe at least when a charitable organizations reaches some threshold where the bottleneck to providing more service is labor rather than money? "Pay more" to solve the labor problem doesn't necessarily work, either, because if you pay your employees a high salary, then Givewell will rank you as less efficient and all those charitable people will stop giving you money. This isn't true of all non-profits, of course. Employees of the University of Alabama Athletic Department and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art can earn 7 and even 8 figures and still receive massive donations, but real charities usually can't do that.
To be clear, I'm sympathetic to the marginal focus. I don't vote. Why? Because obviously, one vote has never made a difference in any voting precinct I've ever lived in for any election. The vast majority of the time, a single vote will never make a difference in any election. But obviously, someone has to vote. And we're probably at a level of civic engagement in the US where the percentage of people who vote arguably leaves the country worse off, with an unrepresentative government and citizens who feel disconnected and ineffective and don't identify with or agree with the goals and mission of the their nation.
For all those reason, even though I don't vote, I'm not going to start a campaign trying to convince people in general that they also shouldn't vote. Earning to give seems in a similar category. Go ahead and do it, but it feels dangerous to advocate for it in a general way implying that it is what all sufficiently intelligent and high-skill people should do. You're creating a class-divided society where anyone who directly cares for others is looked down on as low status and ineffective. This is unfortunately much harder to quantify than "how many malaria cases can I prevent in the next ten years," but we know at some point it becomes a real problem. Inability to quantify doesn't make it go away.