When I tell people that they might want to consider professional philanthropy as a career choice, they react in a lot of different ways. Some people raise an eyebrow. “Seb,” they say as if explaining something very obvious, “if everybody quit their jobs and took a high earning career to give money to charities, then there wouldn’t be anybody to give the money to!”
In my last article I looked at how it sometimes the best option is to take a high-earning job, even in an industry one thinks is harmful, in order to donate more to charity. There were a lot of caveats. The job has to earn more than you could have made otherwise to make up for the marginal harm you do by taking it. But, for a competitive job market in a mainstream job, that marginal harm is often much smaller than the total harm caused by the job.
It’s difficult to work out which jobs will suit you. To help with this problem, a variety of personality tests have been developed. It’s hoped these tests provide understanding of your personality in a way that can be used to predict what sorts of job might suit.
One of the most widely used tests is the Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI). According to Malcolm Gladwell, 2.5 million Americans every year take the test and 89 out of the fortune 100 companies use it.
But it turns out there are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about its use in choosing careers…
Like most of the people here, I’m asking myself what I could do that would have a positive impact on others about what would have the most positive impact on others. One important part of this is making decisions about what to do with money. This matters for anyone with more money than they feel they need for themselves and those close to them; and it matters especially for people who plan to do good by earning a lot and giving a lot away. I think it’s fair to say that, so far, this site has generally answered this question by focusing on the good that can be done by giving to well-functioning charities. There is a lot to be said for this. The questions, though, seem wider to me. I’ll try to explain here why I think so…
In the last post, I argued that self-sacrifice is not, on its own, relevant to the moral value of an act. But if that’s the case, then why (again) do people love charity workers just because their work involves greater self-sacrifice?
How can you best use your time to make a difference? 80,000 Hours now has several people working full time on research, and they would like your questions!
Many careers guides and agencies suggest that ethically minded folks go into the nonprofit sector. And some use the phrase “ethical careers” as a near-synonym for charity work. Of course, some charity workers do a lot of good. But there seem to be many career options that do at least as much good as charity workers. Why, then, do people love charity workers..?
I’ve noticed a bias in my thinking about career options that I’d like to help you avoid: I often group several careers together into a ‘high impact’ category even when the careers are very different in their potential to make an impact…
Suppose you could identify a really important research topic – one that could yield huge benefits to millions of people something like ending ageing, developing a cheap, clean supply of energy, or discovering a cheap vaccine for HIV/AIDs. Suppose you think that carrying out this research is one of the most important things for humanity to do.
At this point, it’s easy to think ‘how can I get involved with this field..?’
Can it be ethical to take a job working for an immoral corporation if one does so with the aim of making the world a better place?
Suppose, for example, that you could work for an arms company, supplying munitions to soldiers fighting an unjust war, in order that you could earn enough money to save thousands of lives? You know that, if you don’t take that job, someone else more ruthless than you will take it, hurting more people than you would.
Is that sufficient? Intuitively, it seems that it just can’t be ethical to do this. But a historical case suggests otherwise…
Effective altruism focuses on efficiency. Any action that fails to effect the maximum possible reduction in suffering is considered suboptimal. But isn’t this standard for use of one’s time and money too harsh? As long as one is making some sort of positive impact on the world, isn’t that enough? Can’t one live ethically without devoting all of one’s energy and attention to helping others?
I believe that the answers ought to be ‘no’…
Fundraising sometimes has a bad reputation, but there are a lot of reasons to think that being a fundraiser, or perhaps more likely, managing fundraisers may be a very effective career…
Here’s a claim to supplement the replacement effect (RE):
The flat margin effect: If you take a job that seems to have a strong (positive or negative) impact on the economy, the actual difference it makes to social welfare will be minimal.
So who is this relevant to? And why should you believe it?
Philosophy is often impractical. That’s an understatement. It might therefore be surprising to think of a career as a philosopher as a potentially high impact ethical career – the sort of career that enables one to do a huge amount of good in the world. But I don’t think that philosophy’s impracticality is in the nature of the subject-matter. In fact, I think that research within certain areas of philosophy is among some of the most important and practical research that one can do. This shouldn’t be surprising when one considers that philosophy is the only subject that addresses directly the fundamental practical question: what ought I to do?
How much you give and the effectiveness of the organisations that you give to together determine the impact of your donations. The seemingly trivial decision of whether to pay by cheque or credit card may affect both these factors, so it’s worth considering which payment method will help you do the most good…
Here’s a crucial issue for altruists.
The Haste Consideration: Resources for improving the world are vastly more valuable if you have those resources sooner.
I’ll first explain one way to see that the haste consideration is true, and then I’ll talk about one important implication of this consideration.
In his recent talk, Aubrey de Grey argued that the SENS foundation’s life extension research should be the most important project for any effective altruist. I collared him for an interview afterwards…
Women donate more than men. They are more likely to give, and they give more money. So why is the smart giving/effective philanthropy/whatever-you-want-to-call-it movement so skewed male?
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I wondered what careers or the like help other people the most. Tyler reposted my question, adding:
(Let’s) rule out ‘become a billionaire and give away all your money’ and ‘cure cancer’ by postulating that said person ends up at the 90th percentile of achievement in the specified field but no higher.
Unfortunately calculating the net costs and benefits of all the things one could do with oneself is notoriously impossible. So how about some heuristics for discerning what types of jobs tend to be more socially beneficial?
High earning careers are often perceived as unethical careers. It’s not just that people think earning lots of money is bad, it’s also that a lot of the careers that make you really rich involve things that also seem immoral… This article will look at something called the replaceability effect. It’s the idea that, often, if you don’t take a job, someone else will take it. For some types of jobs, this is a very safe assumption, and it makes the harm you do by taking a job in an unethical industry much smaller than you might first guess.