I mean this in a narrow sense (edited to clarify) based on marginal valuations: I’d much rather delete 1% of EA money than 1% of EA human capital. So we can think of human capital as being worth more than money. I think there might be problems with this framing, but the core point applies: even though there are far fewer people than money (when using the conversion ratio implied by industry salary), the counterfactual value of people adds up to more than money. So paying everyone 40% of their counterfactual value would substantially deplete EA financial capital.
I think this is equivalent to saying that the marginal trade we’re making is much worse than the average trade (where trade = buying labor with money)
I could still be missing something, but I think this doesn’t make sense. If the marginal numbers are as you say and if EA organizations started paying everyone 40% of their counterfactual value, the sum of “EA financial capital” would go down, and so the counterfactual value-in-“EA”-dollars of marginal people would also go down, and so the numbers would probably work out with lower valuations per person in dollars. Similarly, if “supply and demand” works for finding good people to work at EA organizations (which it might? I’m honestly unsure), the number of EA people would go up, which would also reduce the counterfactual value-in-dollars of marginal EA people.
More simply, it seems a bit weird to start with “money is not very useful on the margin, compared to people” and get from there to “because of how useless money is compared to people, if we spend money to get more people, this’ll be a worse deal than you’d think.”
Although, I was missing something / confused about something prior to reading your reply: it does seem likely to me on reflection that losing all of EAs dollars, but keeping the people, would leave us in a much better position than losing all of EAs people (except a few very wealthy donors, say) but losing its dollars. So in that sense it seems likely to me that EA has much more value-from-human-capital than value-from-financial-capital.
I mean this in a narrow sense (edited to clarify) based on marginal valuations: I’d much rather delete 1% of EA money than 1% of EA human capital. So we can think of human capital as being worth more than money. I think there might be problems with this framing, but the core point applies: even though there are far fewer people than money (when using the conversion ratio implied by industry salary), the counterfactual value of people adds up to more than money. So paying everyone 40% of their counterfactual value would substantially deplete EA financial capital.
I think this is equivalent to saying that the marginal trade we’re making is much worse than the average trade (where trade = buying labor with money)
I could still be missing something, but I think this doesn’t make sense. If the marginal numbers are as you say and if EA organizations started paying everyone 40% of their counterfactual value, the sum of “EA financial capital” would go down, and so the counterfactual value-in-“EA”-dollars of marginal people would also go down, and so the numbers would probably work out with lower valuations per person in dollars. Similarly, if “supply and demand” works for finding good people to work at EA organizations (which it might? I’m honestly unsure), the number of EA people would go up, which would also reduce the counterfactual value-in-dollars of marginal EA people.
More simply, it seems a bit weird to start with “money is not very useful on the margin, compared to people” and get from there to “because of how useless money is compared to people, if we spend money to get more people, this’ll be a worse deal than you’d think.”
Although, I was missing something / confused about something prior to reading your reply: it does seem likely to me on reflection that losing all of EAs dollars, but keeping the people, would leave us in a much better position than losing all of EAs people (except a few very wealthy donors, say) but losing its dollars. So in that sense it seems likely to me that EA has much more value-from-human-capital than value-from-financial-capital.
nit: I think “but losing its dollars” should be “but keeping its dollars”
Thanks, I agree with this comment.