Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs. people by Benjamin_Todd
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs. people, published by Benjamin_Todd on the effective altruism forum. This is a cross-post from 80,000 Hours. See part 2 on the allocation across cause areas. In 2015, I argued that funding for effective altruism – especially within meta and longtermist areas – had grown faster than the number of people interested in it, and that this was likely to continue. As a result, there would be a funding ‘overhang’, creating skill bottlenecks for the roles needed to deploy this funding. A couple of years ago, I wondered if this trend was starting to reverse. There hadn’t been any new donors on the scale of Good Ventures (the main partner of Open Philanthropy), which meant that total committed funds were growing slowly, giving the number of people a chance to catch up. However, the spectacular asset returns of the last few years and the creation of FTX, seem to have shifted the balance back towards funding. Now the funding overhang seems even larger in both proportional and absolute terms than 2015. In the rest of this post, I make some rough guesses at total committed funds compared to the number of interested people, to see how the balance of funding vs. talent might have changed over time. This will also serve as an update on whether effective altruism is growing – with a focus on what I think are the two most important metrics: the stock of total committed funds, and of committed people. This analysis also made me make a small update in favour of giving now vs. investing to give later. Here’s a summary of what’s coming up: How much funding is committed to effective altruism (going forward)? Around $46 billion. How quickly have these funds grown? About 37% per year since 2015, with much of the growth concentrated in 2020–2021. How much is being donated each year? Around $420 million, which is just over 1% of committed capital, and has grown maybe about 21% per year since 2015. How many committed community members are there? About 7,400 active members and 2,600 ‘committed’ members, growing 10–20% per year 2018–2020, and growing faster than that 2015–2017. Has the funding overhang grown or shrunk? Funding seems to have grown faster than the number of people, so the overhang has grown in both proportional and absolute terms. What might be the implications for career choice? Skill bottlenecks have probably increased for people able to think of ways to spend lots of funding effectively, run big projects, and evaluate grants. To caveat, all of these figures are extremely rough, and are mainly estimated off the top of my head. I haven’t checked them with the relevant donors, so they might not endorse these estimates. However, I think they’re better than what exists currently, and thought it was important to try to give some kind of rough update on how my thinking has changed. There are likely some significant mistakes; I’d be keen to see a more thorough version of this analysis. Overall, please treat this more like notes from a podcast than a carefully researched article. Which growth metrics matter? Broadly, the future[1] impact of effective altruism depends on the total stock of: The quantity of committed funds The number of committed people (adjusted for skills and influence) The quality of our ideas (which determine how effectively funding and labour can be turned into impact) (In economic growth models, this would be capital, labour, and productivity.) You could consider other resources like political capital, reputation, or public support as well, though we can also think of these as being a special type of labour. In this post, I’m going to focus on funding and labour. (To do an equivalent analysis for ideas, which could easily matter more, we could try to estimate whether
