Some Thoughts On Frugality In Effective Altruism

Pay your workers and donate money

[Related to e.g. Why Altruists Can’t Have Nice Things but these are my thoughts on a discourse that has been happening for a long time.]

Non-Rich People Exist

Some of them are reading your blog posts, even.

A lot of the effective altruism frugality discourse strikes me as assuming the reader has enough money for almost all their selfish wants. Even in the developed world, this is a rare state. Even among effective altruists in the developed world, this isn’t that common! The amount of money most people spend is not purely a matter of personal choice. Many people have to be frugal whether they want to or not.

I swear to God, some people should put “I AM VERY RICH. MANY PEOPLE POORER THAN ME HAVE INTERNET CONNECTIONS” on a Post-It note and stick it to their monitor.

Stop Micromanaging Charity Spending On The Effective Altruism Forum

When wikiwalking from Why Altruists Can’t Have Nice Things, I discovered a lengthy discussion of the Atlas Fellowship’s coffee table. Sadly, while glaring, this is not an isolated incident.

Guys. Here is how effective altruism is supposed to work:

1. Charities get money.

2. Charities report what outcomes they produced using this money.

3. Donors decide whether producing those outcomes is the best use of the money spent, and whether the money should go elsewhere.

There is not an intervening step where you have to figure out whether people spent too much money on coffee tables. I, personally, have no idea whether the Against Malaria Foundation has ever bought a coffee table of any sort, much less whether they got a good deal on it. I treasure my ignorance.

The whole idea behind effective altruist donations is that we should care about buying good outcomes as cheaply as possible. I don’t care about whether the Against Malaria Foundation has nice coffee tables for the same reason that I don’t care about whether Amy’s Kitchen has nice coffee tables. I do not care about whether the CEO of Amy’s Kitchen is a personally virtuous human being; I care that they are the most delicious vegan frozen meals available at their price point. Similarly, I do not care about whether the CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation is a frugal person; I care that it is the cheapest way to convert dollars into lives.

Don’t track whether the Atlas Fellowship has a nice coffee table. Track how its graduates are doing and how much impact they have.

There are, of course, people whose job is to care about the Atlas Fellowship’s interior design budget: the Atlas Fellowship’s managers, its ops people, and its board. Maybe someone should found a meta-charity that inspects effective altruist charities’ budgets and gives them ideas for how to spend their money more efficiently. These people have the full context of how money is being spent and how a purchase fits into the organization’s theory of change. This is not my job and I resent every neuron of brain space that has been taken up with it.

The Bay Area Is An Insane Place

Rent in the Bay Area is really, really expensive. People who don’t live here don’t get how expensive it is.¹ As a person who has lived in the Bay Area for over a decade, my internal model of wealth is like:

1. Me, a normal person with a normal amount of money: “well, if we have a new baby, we can put our first kid in a privacy-curtained-off part of the living room while we’re sleep training, never killed anybody.”

2. Rich people: have more non-bathroom rooms in the house than individuals living there.

3. Unfathomably rich and/or financially irresponsible people: live by themselves? Without roommates?

A lot of expenses that seem really lavish to someone who isn’t from the Bay Area—unlimited snacks, free meals, masseuse—pale in comparison to the expense of having an office to which your employees go at all. Catered lunch at $30/weekday is about the price of ten square feet of Class B real estate in San Francisco for that same month.

A retreat in the Bahamas might seem expensive. But even a very nice retreat won’t begin to outweigh the savings from getting your employees to concentrate all their face-to-face interaction in one week so you don’t have to pay rent on an office the rest of the time.

Really, the most complaint-worthy thing about the Atlas Fellowship’s coffee table is that they had a place in which to put it.

Treating Your Workers Well Is Important

In general, if it’s economically viable, nonprofits should pay their workers a living wage: enough money that they can afford to live in a house without mold and which is a reasonable distance from their office,² to pay their bills every month, to have children, to cover small emergencies without worrying, to save for retirement, and maybe to have a vacation sometimes. In many cases, nonprofits should pay significantly more.

A high salary often gets better work performance, even from the same person. Someone who is stressed out about how they’re going to pay for their kids’ daycare or their mom’s nursing home is going to have a harder time focusing on work. You want your employees to get therapy when they need it without having to worry about the price tag. You don’t want your employees to spend a bunch of time while they’re at work on the phone with the landlord trying to get them to fix the plumbing. In many cases, being able to order in delivery sometimes or hiring a cleaning service frees people up to work more.

Many nonprofits pay their workers very poorly, because people will accept low wages because The Mission is important. That ends badly. You get widespread burnout, depression, anxiety, and other mental problems. Stressed-out people have difficulty handling emotionally sensitive situations delicately, instead of becoming apathetic or exploding in anger. They don’t come up with creative solutions to problems; they just do what they’ve always done by rote. Experienced people quit because they would like to try having savings for a change, and take institutional memory with them.

Paying low salaries also means that only privileged people can work at nonprofits. In many fields, nonprofit employees are almost all supported by their parents or their spouses—it’s just not possible for someone to raise a family on the salary they’re paid.³ In many more fields, low salaries shut out many talented people. It’s one thing to take a lowish salary if you don’t have any debts, your parents have big retirement funds, and you can always switch to working at Google if your expenses suddenly go up. But some people are paying off a huge amount of medical debt from their cancer treatment, or need to send money home to their families, or are the only source of support for a disabled loved one. Wealthy, white, educated people from the developed world are less likely to need a well-paying job, so lowering salaries risks worsening effective altruism’s diversity problem.

In order to adequately pay your worker who is supporting two disabled family members, you’re going to pay your twentysomething with no dependents way more than they “really” need. Fortunately, there’s an excellent way for effective altruists to redistribute extra money!

Effective altruist organizations ought to create a workplace culture that cultivates certain virtues in their employees: openness to changing their minds, quantification, nitpickiness. Frugality is also a virtue. But it’s strange to me to suggest (as Why Altruists Can’t Have Nice Things does) that it’s a virtue your workplace ought to inculcate. All those other virtues are stuff you’re doing on the job! Frugality is mostly about what you do when you’re off work—time your employer doesn’t get say in. My workplace shouldn’t try to create a workplace culture that makes me more frugal in the same way that it shouldn’t try to create a workplace culture that makes me nicer to my kid.

…But, Also, Frugality Is Important

Sometimes—especially if you’re a direct worker—you should spend money to buy time. And no one is perfectly altruistic, and it’s all right to spend money on yourself.

But money is the unit of caring. What you spend money on is what you care about. If you live alone in a nice house in Berkeley, and you take multiple vacations a year, and your kids are in private school, and you see a personal trainer four times a week, and the last twenty meals you ate all came from DoorDash—

Look, I’m not the frugality police here. I don’t know you, I don’t know your life. But at some point you have to stop kidding yourself. If you have the nice house and the vacations and the private school and the personal trainer and the delivery, and you don’t donate,⁴ then the thing you care about is the nice house and the vacations and the private school and the personal trainer and the delivery, not the dead kids you’ve never met.

I’m not going to judge you if you don’t care about dead kids you’ve never met; most people don’t. But you should be honest with yourself about it.

There are a lot of calculators and pledges and guidelines for how much to donate. But the one I’ve found to be the best guideline in my own life is that it ought to hurt a little bit. Not a lot! I’m not suggesting asceticism, or obsessing over every last ice cream, or donating an amount that will make you feel bitter or resentful. I support setting aside one time each year to make your donation decisions, and then spending money guilt-free afterward. And if you’re reading this going “Ozy, I am trying to choose between paying the electric bill and the water bill and you want me to donate money?”, you have my official permission to Not.

I have everything I really need in my life, and quite a few luxuries. But there are things I want that I don’t have: a bigger house, vacations, the ability to take Ubers everywhere instead of biking or taking the bus, good seats to Hamilton. I donated the money instead. I’m proud of that. I’m proud of everyone else I know who wears thrift-store clothes, cooks all their meals at home, or somehow lives without a car in Los fucking Angeles—and donates the money they saved.

This year my household is going to have negative four kills, because that’s what I care about.

1. Before you say “effective altruists should move out of the Bay Area”: yes! Great idea! What’s your plan for getting all of the non-effective-altruist artificial intelligence researchers to move too?

2. In the Bay Area, a six-figure income does not reliably get you a house without mold. The Bay Area is insane.

3. It’s not just non-effective-altruist nonprofits, either: this dynamic is not uncommon in effective animal advocacy.

4. I’m counting as donations foregone income due to working a job that pays less than the job you would have worked otherwise. I know this is controversial, but the other way involves more typing.