The case for earning lots of money — and giving lots of it away

There aren’t too many people openly calling themselves effective altruists these days. You can mostly give thanks to convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried for having single-handedly made sure far more people hear “effective altruism” and think “cryptocurrency scams” rather than “donating lots of money to good causes.”

But there is still a great deal of work being done in line with the effective altruism (EA) worldview and associated principles: combating lead poisoning, work against factory farming that’s based on efficiently finding the best pressure points to improve animal welfare, work on taking down the diseases that are still major killers in poor countries, work on reforming US kidney policy, work on making sure developing advanced AI goes well.

A lot of people I talk to think this development — the downplaying of EA, if not EA causes — is all for the best. Did it ever really make sense to have all those things under one umbrella? Even if there is a benefit to all of these people learning from each other, collaborating closely, moving between roles, and sharing lots of ideas behind the scenes, does it make sense to advertise the umbrella rather than advertise the achievements?

(Disclosure: In August 2022, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project was canceled.)

But a few things fall by the wayside if you stop talking about effective altruism in favor of just talking about the specific issues that the movement tended to zero in on. One of those things? The innovation called “earning to give.”

Earning to give is the controversial effective altruist idea that one good way to make the world a better place is to take a job where you make a lot of money and donate much of that money to important, underfunded work. (To be clear, not any high-paying job would be okay, but industries like tech and finance are generally considered fine.)

It’s a sharp contrast with the more typical take that if you want to do good with your career, you should steer clear of the temptations of high-salary corporate jobs in favor of working directly at a nonprofit.

Earning to give is an idea worth salvaging

There are obviously some problems with the naive formulation of earning to give, which would amount to “Just go work at the highest-paying job you can get and donate the money.”

Some jobs definitely do enough direct harm that, by working in them, you can’t possibly accomplish good just by donating your salary. From early on, effective altruists argued not about whether there’s a line — there obviously is — but where to draw it. Marketing addictive cigarettes? Probably not acceptable. Working on advanced AI systems? Well, depends on whether you think those will do social harm on net.

(And hopefully it goes without saying that founding a cryptocurrency startup for the avowed reason of earning a lot of money to donate to charity is at absolute best only a good idea if you are very careful not to let your attached hedge fund trade away your customers’ money. Just so we’re absolutely clear.)

A problem here, of course, is that people making a lot of money generally find it easy to lie to themselves about the social harm their high-paying professions may be generating. And in many cases, the way to do good in the world is to do it directly, not pay for someone else to do it — especially if you’re a person with rare and in-demand skills.

Over the years, many of the people I know who have done earning to give ended up switching to directly working on important problems. That makes sense. If you’re a skilled tech or finance person, the kind who can earn a really high salary, there’s probably a lot of crucial work that would benefit from your skills, not just your checkbook.

But I have always found something valuable and important in the case for earning to give. It goes like this: There’s a lot of important work that needs funding, and an individual family’s donations — my wife and I give around $50,000 a year — can make a huge difference in getting some of that important work done. Billionaire foundations will never cover all of it, and it’s better for organizations to be funded by motivated individuals than by billionaire foundations anyway. It distorts their priorities less, it’s much less politically awkward, and committed individuals can take bets that foundations can’t or won’t.

I also like earning to give for its unabashed friendliness to capitalism, which is a rare quality on the do-gooder left. I believe that the last century has made the world much, much better for the vast majority of people, and while targeted scientific innovation is a huge part of the story, another huge part of the story is the astounding success of market economies. Why did the world get better? Mostly through people doing valuable stuff, often for selfish and pecuniary reasons.

Not every big-dollar job is ethical, and I’d strongly encourage thought about what specifically you do and whether it makes the world a better place. But I generally think participating in the economy is a basically good and admirable thing to do, even though many progressives think of it as a morally negative one.

And I want there to be a vision for fixing our world that proceeds from the premise that abundance is good, that wealth is good, that “growing the pie” is good, that trade-offs are real, and that we will have to create new things and generate new wealth in order to make those trade-offs more bearable. These convictions have always seemed to me like a firmer foundation for fixing the world than their ideological competitors.

Capitalism is good, actually

Just as I like earning to give for these reasons, a lot of people have always disliked earning to give for precisely the same reasons. Earning to give says that you can do a lot of moral good through active participation in our capitalist system, through trying to make a lot of money and then purchasing the things you want (research, bednets, wealth redistribution, you name it) with the money you earned. It is a capitalist ideology.

It makes a lot of sense to me that people who think of capitalism as a dirty word aren’t enthusiastic about the idea of harnessing it in the name of altruism — and that lack of enthusiasm is shared by many of my fellow travelers in the effort to make the world a better place. But if you think capitalism is a net good, like I do, I think you should be enthusiastic about the possibility of earning to give. You can see it as one among many ways to do good, but also a particular strategy that the world could use a lot more of.

And if, like my family, you’re wealthy and have high-income jobs, I’d strongly encourage you to consider making large annual donations. I won’t claim it’s easy. It makes budgeting more difficult, and delays home renovations that we’d like to get done. But the money that a high-income American family can spare without giving up any essentials is enough money to accomplish an enormous amount in the world.

We are the beneficiaries of the wealthiest society in human history. We live in material abundance our ancestors couldn’t have imagined. We can afford to set some of that aside and use it to get things done for the world.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!