There’s a bit of a false dichotomy here between ‘earning to give’ and ‘altruistic career’. I’ll talk about one of them which we’ll need to go macro to see. I will also implicitly complain that ‘earning to give’ allows companies to deflect on charitable giving in a way that satisfies individual actors but may result in less charitable giving overall.
Working on Wall Street and practicing an ‘earning to give’ plan may not be a great way to maximize giving to high-ROI aligned charities.
I work at an HFT of order 1000 employees. The HFT itself makes no charitable donations. When employees ask about charity the HFT points at their large bonuses and says if a cause is important to you go ahead and donate your (huge) bonus to that cause. The HFT occasionally invites representatives from GiveWell and similar to come talk to us about pledging to donate a portion of our income to high-ROI charities. The bonuses can be big and if you do some multiplication you really can come away with the impression that you and your coworkers are collectively contributing enormous value to charity.
Is this a fantasy though? I can’t know how everyone spends their bonuses but projecting from intimate discussions with my peer group has led me to believe that most employees, if they do donate, donate token amounts of $500-5000. Usually to more “name brand” causes like MSF or EFF. I’m aware of one person who donates their entire bonus to charity and a handful of others who have taken the GiveWell pledge.
(Don’t take this as an endorsement of GiveWell or anything, I’m simply holding them up as a symbol of the idea)
I don’t mean to overstate the progressiveness of the company either. There are also the more familiar Hollywood renditions of Wall Street employees who appear to spend their bonuses on sweet apartments and fancy cars before they’ve even been paid.
Obviously this is anecdotal. I’m only describing a practice inside of one Wall Street firm. This may not be an accurate picture; it’s frowned upon to discuss compensation with one another so it’s hard to know the amounts at stake. There could be a handful of extremely high earners that secretly plow all of their wealth into high-ROI charities, which would more than make up for all of the modest earners who save their bonuses or take very nice holidays in the tropics.
(btw, I’m not making an absolute value judgment on how people spend their bonuses, only speaking about how to maximize value to charity)
Wait, why are we talking about what the entire company does when we’re trying to figure out what individual actors should do? Here’s why.
All-in, if you can’t make a more valuable altruistic career choice it’s not strictly true that earning to give on Wall Street is the only reasonable alternative. If you could find an organization whose policy is to donate, say, 10% of all profits to charity, that number may be much larger than the discretionary charitable gifts made by employees at an equivalently sized Wall Street firm. If you’re concerned that the company with the 10% policy is donating to the wrong charities, you could consider joining that firm and campaigning to allocate more of the firm’s giving to charities aligned with GiveWell.
There’s a bit of a false dichotomy here between ‘earning to give’ and ‘altruistic career’. I’ll talk about one of them which we’ll need to go macro to see. I will also implicitly complain that ‘earning to give’ allows companies to deflect on charitable giving in a way that satisfies individual actors but may result in less charitable giving overall.
Working on Wall Street and practicing an ‘earning to give’ plan may not be a great way to maximize giving to high-ROI aligned charities.
I work at an HFT of order 1000 employees. The HFT itself makes no charitable donations. When employees ask about charity the HFT points at their large bonuses and says if a cause is important to you go ahead and donate your (huge) bonus to that cause. The HFT occasionally invites representatives from GiveWell and similar to come talk to us about pledging to donate a portion of our income to high-ROI charities. The bonuses can be big and if you do some multiplication you really can come away with the impression that you and your coworkers are collectively contributing enormous value to charity.
Is this a fantasy though? I can’t know how everyone spends their bonuses but projecting from intimate discussions with my peer group has led me to believe that most employees, if they do donate, donate token amounts of $500-5000. Usually to more “name brand” causes like MSF or EFF. I’m aware of one person who donates their entire bonus to charity and a handful of others who have taken the GiveWell pledge.
(Don’t take this as an endorsement of GiveWell or anything, I’m simply holding them up as a symbol of the idea)
I don’t mean to overstate the progressiveness of the company either. There are also the more familiar Hollywood renditions of Wall Street employees who appear to spend their bonuses on sweet apartments and fancy cars before they’ve even been paid.
Obviously this is anecdotal. I’m only describing a practice inside of one Wall Street firm. This may not be an accurate picture; it’s frowned upon to discuss compensation with one another so it’s hard to know the amounts at stake. There could be a handful of extremely high earners that secretly plow all of their wealth into high-ROI charities, which would more than make up for all of the modest earners who save their bonuses or take very nice holidays in the tropics.
(btw, I’m not making an absolute value judgment on how people spend their bonuses, only speaking about how to maximize value to charity)
Wait, why are we talking about what the entire company does when we’re trying to figure out what individual actors should do? Here’s why.
All-in, if you can’t make a more valuable altruistic career choice it’s not strictly true that earning to give on Wall Street is the only reasonable alternative. If you could find an organization whose policy is to donate, say, 10% of all profits to charity, that number may be much larger than the discretionary charitable gifts made by employees at an equivalently sized Wall Street firm. If you’re concerned that the company with the 10% policy is donating to the wrong charities, you could consider joining that firm and campaigning to allocate more of the firm’s giving to charities aligned with GiveWell.