Since one way that you can have a big impact with your career is through earning to give, we want to investigate which careers hold the best earnings prospects.

Our most recent research looked at the typical career paths and salaries for five different careers: Accounting, Consulting, Investment Banking, Law and Medicine. We found that investment bankers have the highest earning potential and in the UK: they can expect to earn between £8m and £40m over the course of their career.

A common misconception is that 80,000 Hours thinks Earning to Give is typically the way to have the most impact with your career. We’ve never said that in any of our materials. All we have said, for instance in the paper we published on Earning to Give, is that there is strong reason to think that Earning to Give is better than taking a typical non-profit job.

When it comes to how to make the most difference with your career, we think there’s huge room for debate. Whether it’s best for someone to pursue Earning to Give normally depends on difficult to estimate empirical considerations unique to the situation, like some of those mentioned here, whether your cause is more talent-constrained or funding-constrained, what other people are doing, and issues like what else you could do with an Earning to Give job (often high earning jobs give you a useful platform to advance high impact causes independent of the money you donate yourself). When people have come to us in the past interested in pursuing Earning to Give, we’ve advised some to do it, and others not to do it. See our recent intro video for some examples.

This is why we welcome a recent article by ex-Givewell employee Jonah Sinick on why Earning to Give might not be optimal…

Our new videos have been released!

The concept of Earning to Give was featured in the Washington Post last week. See the article here.

In combination with Peter Singer’s TED talk on effective altruism, which mentions 80,000 Hours, we’ve been receiving very heavy and sustained web traffic - over 10,000 visitors in just two weeks.

The Washington Post article generated a number of high profile responses, including an opinion piece in the New York Times, a piece in the National Review, and a mention on Daily Mail Online - the world’s most read online newspaper. (Unfortunately they call us 8,000 Hours!)

There was much praise for the idea of Earning to Give and Effective Altruism, as well as the dedication of the people mentioned. Many of the criticisms, including those reflected more generally in the comments, are criticisms or misunderstandings we have addressed many times in the past, for instance in our FAQ about Earning to Give, in this series of three blog posts, and in Will’s original paper.

Peter Singer gave a TED talk on “The Why and How of Effective Altruism,” which you can watch here, which mentions 80,000 Hours.

It’s been interesting to look at people’s reactions both on the TED website, and on YouTube…

What can you do if you’re pursuing Earning to Give but aren’t currently sure what organisation to donate to? You can set up a donor advised fund which has all the psychological and tax benefits that go along with donating, while still holding off on your decision as to which charity is best. In this post Ben West tells you how.

The idea that it’s impossible to measure which career lets you make the most difference is silly.

If it were true, then packing meat for a living would be, for all we know, as good for the world as running Oxfam or being a great President.

Why, then, do we so often meet the idea that ‘you can’t measure the good done by a career’? - an idea that quashes debate about what’s best to do, and thus leads millions of ambitious young people to do less for the world than they could.

Here’s the mistakes I think are being made.

What are you going to do with your life?

If you’re like most young people, you care about making a difference. But who’s there to help you with that? So much of the career advice out there today is unhelpful cliches. Here’s some of the most common career advice we’ve found over the last six months that you shouldn’t follow.

Are you new to 80,000 Hours, and wondering where to start?

We’ve put together this summary of our most popular blog posts from over the past year to make it much easier to get a quick overview of our key content and ideas. Even if you’ve been around the site for a while, you might might find something here you’ve missed or forgotten about!

“Follow your passion” is the stupidest career advice I’ve ever heard. Why? Because my passion in life is for singing bad karaoke. My friend Dodgy Dave’s passion is for dealing crack cocaine. Some of my friends have many passions. Most of my friends have none.

“Do what you’re good at” is better, but still stupid. It gets things the wrong way around. For almost all activities, being “good at” something is the result of thousands of hours of practice and learning (pdf). In choosing a career, you’re almost always making the decision about what to become good at, not the other way around.

How, then, should you find a job you’ll love?