earning to give Concepts

The Richest Man in Babylon

by George S. Clason · 10 Jun 2019 · 127pp · 39,771 words

may not condemn a man for succeeding because he knows how. Neither may one with justice take away from a man what he has fairly earned, to give to men of less ability.” “But why,” demanded the King, “should not all the people learn how to accumulate gold and therefore become themselves rich

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy

by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake · 7 Nov 2017 · 346pp · 89,180 words

equity vesting. Since equity vesting periods are set years in advance, this seems like prima facie evidence that managers are cutting intangible investment to improve earnings to give their stock price a boost when it matters most to them. A second study by Bernstein (2015) is also revealing, but in a different way

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis

by Scott Patterson · 5 Jun 2023 · 289pp · 95,046 words

as Bankman-Fried to pursue career paths that would produce the highest possible winnings, resulting in the highest possible giving, a model of philanthropy called “earning-to-give.” Rather than a career in medicine or chemistry, EAs sought jobs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley—or in crypto. By the early 2020s

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Swans and, 145–46 Tesla and, 239 Druckenmiller, Stanley, 48 Dynamic Hedging (Taleb), 13, 59, 60, 62 Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy (DICE) model, 230–31 earning-to-give model, 281 Eastbridge Capital, 49, 50 Economic Policy Institute, 122 Edge Foundation, 124, 126, 190–91 Edsall, Thomas, 34 effective altruism, 281 Electric Reliability Council

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver · 12 Aug 2024 · 848pp · 227,015 words

.” He’d first met SBF in 2012, when Bankman-Fried approached him following a lecture that MacAskill gave at MIT centered around the concept of “earning to give”—basically making as much money as you can, and then donating a substantial fraction of it to charity. This is a classic EA idea, one

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makes $10 million a year and then donates half of his earnings, enough for the NGO to hire a hundred idealistic twentysomethings? Personally, I think earning to give has a compelling logic to it, even if it’s surely also sometimes used to rationalize self-interested behavior. And evidently it also was compelling

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Hood, or a woke pirate creating Ponzi-like crypto tokens to redistribute wealth to good causes…hey look, I’m not against the idea of earning to give. But believing all of this required placing a lot of faith in a founder’s complicated story. It was going to select for a different

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, 90, 104–5, 116, 120, 230 Dunst, Tony, 95 Dwan, Tom “durrrr,” 96n, 237–38 dystopias, 483 E e/acc (effective accelerationism), 411–12, 483 earning to give, 341–42 economist brain, 483 edge, 13, 21–22, 63, 86, 158, 396n, 483 edge cases, 484 Edwards, Paul, 424n effective altruism (EA) AI and

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, 21, 344, 348, 355, 359, 380 AI existential risk and, 21, 456, 457 bednets, 479 defined, 352, 484 earning to give and, 341–42 futurism and, 379–80 government spending and, 360n Great Man Theory and, 344 impact of, 357–58 impartiality and, 358–59, 366

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

by Zeke Faux · 11 Sep 2023 · 385pp · 106,848 words

their money and time. They dubbed their movement “effective altruism.” Over lunch at Au Bon Pain, MacAskill told Bankman-Fried about one of his ideas: “earning to give.” He said that for someone of Bankman-Fried’s mathematical talents, it might make sense to pursue a high-paying job on Wall Street, then

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in the Crypto Legislation Backed by FTX’s Founder,” CoinDesk, November 15, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “weird brand-building exercises”: Sam Harris, “Earning to Give: A Conversation with Sam Bankman-Fried,” Making Sense, December 24, 2021. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT ultramarathon running record: Mercury News, “Saratogan Nishad Singh

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, 152, 157 Crypto Capital and, 62 cryptocurrencies and, 19, 28 in Puerto Rico, 116 traffickers in Bahamas, 77 DuckTales, 55–56 E Eagle, Ryan, 100 earning to give, 82–83 Economic Club of New York, 78–79 The Economist, 168 effective altruism movement Alameda and, 86, 223 Bankman-Fried and, 73, 75, 81

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, 83, 91–92 beginning of, 82 described, 73, 92 “the Drowning Child” experiment and, 81 earning to give, 82–83 Ellison and, 85–86 FTX’s bankruptcy and, 216 Future Fund, 228–229, 231 risk and, 223–224 Singh and, 85 Wang and

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

by William MacAskill · 27 Jul 2015 · 293pp · 81,183 words

less than that. He therefore chose a different path, one that brings together many of the considerations we’ve covered so far. I call it earning to give. • • • Earning to give means exactly what it sounds like: rather than trying to maximize the direct impact you have with your job, you instead try to increase your

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no reason to assume the best careers are only those that benefit people directly through the work itself. If we’re serious about doing good, earning to give is a path we should consider. Let’s look at Greg Lewis’s options. If he worked as a doctor in a rich country and

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-year-old self who wanted to make the world a better place.” In 2014, Greg donated £20,000, enough to save ten lives. Importantly, by earning to give, Greg is making a difference that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. If he weren’t a doctor, someone else would take his place, but that

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’s salary, or on medical supplies. Because he’s making a difference that wouldn’t have happened anyway, Greg will do even more good by earning to give than he would have done if he worked directly in poor countries. And he can do so without having to give up the comforts of

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that Louis Theroux’s sentiment, while understandable, is misplaced. It’s the cosmetic surgeon’s decision about how to spend his money that really matters. Earning to give seems to be an enormously powerful way of doing good. It exploits the fact that even typical workers in developed countries are among the top

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are some charities that do huge amounts to help the world’s poorest people for relatively little money. Moreover, unlike the conventional “ethical” careers guidance, earning to give is a path that’s open to everyone. The conventional advice is that if you want to make a difference you should work in the

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, and the whole of chapter nine will be devoted to it. But before we can address this question properly, and before we can see why earning to give is merely one path and not always the most effective career choice, we need to look at another key question of effective altruism. SIX WHY

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concrete, measurable ways of doing good with more speculative but potentially higher-payoff strategies. One example of this concerns how to compare different careers. Whereas earning to give in order to donate to charities like Deworm the World Initiative provide a reliable way of doing good, others, like politics, are much less certain

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up with a reasonable answer. At 80,000 Hours, we did a very rough calculation to see if entering politics could plausibly be competitive with earning to give. First, one has to work out the odds of success. The most naive estimate of the odds of becoming an member of Parliament (MP) would

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, it is at least as much as the lower-bound estimate. If Laura’s expected impact from going into politics is greater than that through earning to give even based on this lower-bound estimate, then we should think it likely that her expected impact really is greater through politics than through

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earning to give. In the spirit of being conservative, therefore, we’ll first assume that Laura’s impact would only come through becoming an MP (or serving in

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underestimate of her expected impact. However, £8 million is considerably more than she could donate if she earned to give. Even given our pessimistic assumptions, for Laura, politics therefore seems to have a greater expected impact than earning to give. She wanted to have as big an impact as she could, so, in part on the

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basis of this reasoning, she chose to enter a political career. The conclusion that earning to give isn’t always the highest-impact career path isn’t a conclusion that’s unique to Oxford PPE graduates. In chapter nine we’ll discuss

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paths that have a low probability of success but a very high upside given success, such as research and entrepreneurship, that seem highly competitive with earning to give. As well as assessing careers, the concept of expected value can be used to assess efforts to effect political change. Donating to highly effective charities

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if you’re later in your career but are considering changing jobs so you can have a bigger impact? In chapter five, we saw that earning to give is one powerful way to make a difference, but it’s certainly not the only way. There are a dizzying number of career paths, each

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who would have been in your shoes. Third, there are many other ways of making a difference. Earlier, we saw the arguments in favor of earning to give, and helping others through your donations rather than through your direct labor. As we’ll discuss later in this chapter, there are also very compelling

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’t place too much weight on the immediate impact he could have in the job he worked for. If he looked at immediate impact only, earning to give and nonprofit work were his best options, with graduate school and law school following. However, these options differed significantly in terms of the impact they

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to work out whether he should ultimately transition into full-time nonprofit work, or whether he should stick to his current path and focus on earning to give. • • • By using this framework, you can assess the different career options available to you, but what are some of the best options? There are a

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be in the midst of the action. Alternatively, you might worry that your values will wane if you pursued something with either indirect benefits, like earning to give, or later benefits, like building skills. Perhaps you find it helpful and inspiring to surround yourself with like-minded people, and working for a place

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be an effective means to have an impact. I’ll discuss the potential of for-profits more under the Entrepreneurship section later in this chapter. Earning to give Earning to give enables you to start having a significant positive impact via the very most cost-effective organizations right from the beginning of your career. Often, it

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also allows you to build valuable skills and a valuable network that will prove useful later on in life. If you’re aiming to pursue earning to give over the long term, it’s important to work out the long-run earning potential of different careers. On the Internet, you can often find

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within the medical profession, such as radiation therapists, nuclear medicine technologists, or dental hygienists. One important issue to consider for all careers, but especially when earning to give through trade professions, is whether a job will be around in the future. A job might be outsourced (as IT support has been to some

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least likely to become automated. Jobs that require physical proximity or high levels of training are also unlikely to be outsourced. Another important consideration regarding earning to give is the risk of losing your values by working in an environment with people who aren’t as altruistically inclined as you are. For example

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, David Brooks, writing in The New York Times, makes this objection in response to a story of Jason Trigg, who is earning to give by working in finance: You might start down this course seeing finance as a convenient means to realize your deepest commitment: fighting malaria. But the

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you certainly shouldn’t pursue it. But there are reasons for thinking that this often isn’t too great a problem. First, if you pursue earning to give but find your altruistic motivation is waning, you always have the option of leaving and working for an organization that does good directly. At worst

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you’ll have strong support to ensure that you live up to your aims. Finally, there are many examples of people who have successfully pursued earning to give without losing their values. Bill Gates and the other members of the Giving Pledge (a group of billionaires who have pledged at least 50 percent

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to philanthropy as he ever was, donating more that 50 percent of his assets. There is certainly a risk of losing one’s values by earning to give, which you should bear in mind when you’re thinking about your career options, but there are risks of becoming disillusioned whatever you choose to

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, giving her the option to become a full-time writer after her PhD if she chooses. High-potential long shots Working for an effective organization, earning to give, and skill building are all safe bets because if you pursue them, you can be confident that you will either have an impact immediately or

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be consider GiveDirectly, which we discussed in the chapter on effective charities. With an economics PhD from Harvard, the founder, Paul Niehaus, had very good earning-to-give options. However, he clearly made the right choice to set up GiveDirectly. Since its official launch in 2011, GiveDirectly has raised more than $20 million

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been able to promote and discuss ideas he thinks are important, such as more liberal immigration policies, a universal basic income, and the idea of earning to give. In advocacy, we would expect the distribution of impact to be highly fat-tailed: it’s a winner-takes-all environment, where a small number

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you’ve developed) become a lot more important. For people who didn’t set out to build skills that are useful for making a difference, earning to give can be a particularly good option. Often, people move from high-paying jobs to something that directly makes a difference even though they have limited

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expertise in the area they move into, when they could have done much more good by keeping their high salary and earning to give. For example, after graduating with a PhD in philosophy from Brown University in the seventies, Frederick Mulder left academia in order to become an art

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for-profit companies, 163 in research, 171–73 and skill building, 167–68 and volunteering, 175–76 working for effective organizations, 162–63 See also earning to give Case, Steve and Jean, 2–3 Case Foundation, 5, 9 cash transfers to aid recipients, 106, 111, 113, 115–16, 122 cattle, 141–42 Causevox

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as career choice, 64–66, 74–78 and lives saved, 63–66, 74–75 Doctors Without Borders, 30–31 Duflo, Esther, 19 Durbin, Drew, 170 earning to give and altruistic motivation, 166 and career choices, 74–78, 162, 163–67 and Giving Pledge, 166 political career compared to, 90, 93 earthquakes, 58–59

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law of diminishing returns, 58–61, 62–66 Lean Startup movement, 159 legal profession as career choice, 164 Levitt, Steven, 84–86 Lewis, Greg and earning to give, 74–78 on impact of medicine, 62–66, 74–75, 76 medical ambitions of, 55, 56 life expectancies, 19, 45 Lipeyah, Paul, 6–7 literacy

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically

by Peter Singer · 1 Jan 2015 · 197pp · 59,656 words

income that is, in purchasing power, the equivalent of as little as 1 or 2 percent of the median income in the United States. 4 Earning to Give Although it is possible to earn an average income and still donate enough to do a lot of good, it remains true that the more

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may have a bigger impact still; but many organizations, whether charities or not, are resistant to change. Notwithstanding exceptions like Jim Greenbaum, most of those earning to give are from the generation that started to think about their career choices around the turn of the millennium. They have been prepared to go in

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poverty. Alex is now launching his own company and is committed to donating everything he earns above £15,000 a year.4 If you are earning to give in order to reduce animal suffering, you can discuss the best options with Simon Knutson, who works for an investment company in Gothenburg, Sweden, and

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whom he is very close. He admits he can’t really justify this, so he considers it a kind of “luxury spending.” The Psychology of Earning to Give In 2013 an article in the Washington Post featured Jason Trigg, an MIT computer science graduate working in finance and giving half of his salary

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, even if you use the money for charity.7 The first two objections make factual psychological claims that can be checked against people who are earning to give. The third objection is moral, rather than psychological, so I will postpone discussion of it until we come to ethical objections in the next section

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be mentioned in this book, making it even more public.) Overall, though, Matt gave no signs of being under any unusual psychological burden caused by earning to give. “I’m extremely happy with my life,” he told me. “I’d still do this altruistic stuff even if I thought it was making my

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to earn money in order to give it away has obviously worked out very well. Ben West points out that even from a selfish perspective, earning to give allows you to have things that people believe make them happy, like money and a high-status job, while still getting the fulfillment that comes

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Ross doesn’t see any risk of burnout and anticipates continuing along his current path. Alex Foster may be the most enthusiastic of all the earning-to-give people I have had contact with: he says he finds his career “insanely fulfilling—more satisfaction than any other period of my life. Despite heavily

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hand, Aveek Bhattacharya is sometimes frustrated that his work does not allow him to probe issues as deeply as he would like. He always saw earning to give as an experiment, and, to him, the possibility of doing a doctorate and having an academic career remains open.8 Brooks would be on solid

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ground if he were merely warning his readers that earning to give is not for everyone. Some people can’t work up much enthusiasm for making profits for their employer. Others, however, seem to enjoy earning money

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on you if you are doing it in order to help others rather than to help yourself and your family? The Ethics of Earning to Give When Brooks objects to earning to give on the grounds that you are turning yourself into a means rather than an end, he is echoing an objection to utilitarianism made

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and bonus and be able to donate the most. Nevertheless, to fit into the ethos of the organization in which they want to succeed, people earning to give may have to disguise their views about the intrinsic value of their work. It is also true that some of those who change their career

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a variety of roles, including raising investment capital, reducing risk, and smoothing out swings in commodity prices. They don’t seem inherently evil. Granting that earning to give may lead to being involved in financial activities that harm some people does not settle the moral question of what the individual who has the

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going into banking one will be complicit in wrongdoing at all. I suspect that in a decade or two, as we get more experience with earning to give, the ethical objections Brooks and others make to the practice will come to be seen as typical of the grumblings of an older generation that

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between work and social values. For the right person in the right circumstances, earning to give is one of them. 5 Other Ethical Careers Earning to give is a distinctive way of doing good. For those with the abilities required for successfully earning to give, including the ability to find the work sufficiently interesting to do it well and

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the character to maintain a strong commitment to giving much of what one earns to effective charities, earning to give can be an ethical career choice. Nevertheless, Will MacAskill does not claim that earning to give is always or even usually the best option. Rather, he thinks we should see it as a baseline

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isn’t in finance. That’s because he believes that if he can influence two other people with earning capacities similar to his own to earn to give, he will have done more good than if he had gone into finance himself—and he has already influenced many more than two. 80,000

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do more good than working for an ordinary charity because of the multiplier effect it can have—although this could also be an argument for earning to give and donating to the metacharity. As in the case of an ordinary charity, you could be replaceable, but if you have special skills that others

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York Times columnist David Brooks recognized the intellectual basis of effective altruism—and was clearly uncomfortable with it—when he was criticizing the idea of “earning to give”: “If you see the world on a strictly intellectual level, then a child in Pakistan or Zambia is just as valuable as your own child

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to Jeff Kaufman, who has discussed the history of the idea of earning to give in three postings: http://www.jefftk.com/p/history-of-earning-to-give; http://www.jefftk.com/p/history-of-earning-to-give-ii; and http://www.jefftk.com/p/history-of-earning-to-give-iii-john-wesley. 2. Associated Press, “Former Telecom Millionaire Giving Fortune to

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Children’s Causes,” http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=88335. 3. http://80000hours.org/earning-to-give; the point about replaceability seems to have been first made by Brian Tomasik, in “Why Activists Should Consider Making Lots of Money” (2006), http://www

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Theory and Utilitarianism,” in R. M. Hare, Essays in Ethical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 219n. 13. Anonymous comment made in a discussion forum about earning to give on Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics online course, April 2014. 14. It is possible to value equality for its own sake and still be very

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, (i) bureaucracies, (i) cadavers, (i) capitalism, (i) careers, (i); in advocacy, (i); in bureaucracies, (i); in organizing and campaigning, (i); in research, (i). See also earning to give cash transfers, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) charity, religious congregations and, (i); in the United States, (i) charity evaluation, (i); Charity Navigator and, (i); choosing poor

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-Year (DALY), (i) disaster relief funds, (i) discount rates, (i) do-no-harm principle, (i) dual-process theory, (i) Duflo, Esther, (i) Dunn, Elizabeth, (i) earning to give, (i); Alex Foster and, (i), (ii); Aveek Bhattacharya and, (i), (ii); Ben West and, (i), (ii); career choices and (see careers); 80,000 Hours and

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, (i), (ii) millennials, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) modest living. See living modestly Moore, Aaron, (i), (ii) morality and ethics: animal vs. human suffering, (i); of earning to give, (i); ends justifying means, (i); group evolution and, (i); improvement in reasoning abilities and, (i); and progress made in reducing human suffering, (i); rational basis

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao · 19 May 2025 · 660pp · 179,531 words

the charity route would also happen with or without them anyway. His argument would be encapsulated in one of the movement’s most popular mantras: “Earn to give.” Under the logic of expected values, the founding EA philosophers also developed a framework for identifying the highest priority problems. Such problems need to be

Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference

by Bregman, Rutger · 9 Mar 2025 · 181pp · 72,663 words

dramatically.33 What also bothered me about those effective altruists was that some went into finance so they could donate as much money as possible (‘earning to give’, they called it). This was right after the 2008 crash, when banks were being propped up using hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars. At the

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World

by Parmy Olson · 284pp · 96,087 words

job like a hedge fund, making lots of money, and then giving that money to build several more homeless shelters. The concept was known as “earning to give,” and the goal was to get as much bang for your charitable buck as possible. Sometimes effective altruists were split on the best way to