current artificially low salaries in EA often lead to people making inefficient time/money tradeoffs.
I agree that this is common, so I agree with your central point, which is important.
But I'm not sure I like your suggestions to move towards other demanding costly signals, like encouraging workaholism.
Rather, a better solution, which seems to be the norm in the not-for-profit world, might be to simply pay slightly, but non-trivially, below market rates, so if someone could earn $500/h in the private sector for similarly pleasant work, EA orgs could just pay ~80%. This should deter people who only care about money, while employees who net >$800k/y (> than current current EA non-profits exec compensation) still don't need to penny pinch and be efficient (buy a house close to work in a city like SF, raise a family, live a solidly middle-class lifestyle, fly business class), if they just forgo high-end luxury goods. There could be a progressive 'EA tax' build into the salary, so if support staff only earn $50/h, EA orgs might want to pay ~95% or something and offer Google-like perks like a catered food and laundry service to make them more efficient.
I think these are all more efficient costly signals than frugality, but my impression is that they tend to be regarded by people (both inside and outside EA) as worse signals of altruism, and I’m wondering why that is.
Some more random thoughts:
- People really don't like it when people earn very high amounts. Politicians often play up their frugality to the point where they're probably bad at their job (e.g. former Austrian chancellor who made a point of flying coach or José Mujica driving an old car)... people seem to like this though as evidenced by them being voted into office. Utilitarian arguments for higher salaries might come across as self-serving.
- Also, in finance, costly signals are long hours and conspicuous consumption, as retaining employees is very valuable and frugal people could retire after a working for just a couple of years (maybe that's why EAs did so well in finance- they didn't have diminishing returns in utility to salary increases- all without the drug habit).
- Long hours need not be cost-effective... maybe you could rather pay two EA org people $100k/y, than one person $250k/y. Especially because the nonprofit world is not as zero sum as the private sector where working very hard might pay off much more. Perhaps different work intensities lend themselves well to EtG in the for-profit world vs. say philosophy in the non-profit world. In the non-profit world, objectives are often much less clearly defined, and so it might not make sense to work very hard, but rather more deliberate... (see Bezos shifting from working very hard in the beginning of Amazon while in execution mode, to later saying he sleeps 8 hours a night because he's just making very high-level prioritization decisions (not unlike a philosopher).






This post is great, thanks for writing it.
I'm not quite sure about the idea that we should have certain demanding norms because they are costly signals of altruism. It seems to me that the main reason to have demanding norms isn't that they are costly signals, but rather that they are directly impactful. For instance, I think that the norm that we should admit that we're wrong is a good one, but primarily because it's directly impactful. If we don't admit that we're wrong, then there's a risk we continue pursuing failed projects even as we get strong evidence that they have failed. So having a norm that counteracts our natural tendency not to want to admit when we're wrong seems good.
Relatedly, and in line with your reasoning, I think that effective altruism should be more demanding in terms of epistemics than in terms of material resources. Again, that's not because that's a better costly signal, but rather because better epistemics likely makes a greater impact difference than extreme material sacrifices do. I developed these ideas here; see also our paper on real-world virtues for utilitarians.