Epistemic Status: This seems obvious to me, but my Google Fu did not bring up any previous conversations about it. Forgive me if this has already been discussed in depth somewhere, and I just missed it.
Effective Altruists should move to cities with a high cost of living.
I have seen discussions about migrating in very specific instances (e.g. Should doctors move to a different country? Should engineers move to Silicon Valley?), but I don't think I've seen people ask whether it’s good in general to migrate to a city with high cost of living.
Donate More.
If your salary was constant, it would obviously be better to pay lower rent. However, cities with a high cost of living tend to have similarly high salaries (with exceptions). A job that pays $50k in Houston would pay $111k in Manhattan, if the company gave cost of living adjustments. If all your money is going towards your living expenses then this wouldn't be important, but if you are donating a set percentage of your income (or paying off student debt, or saving for retirement), this doubles the amount you give (or pay off, or save). Even if you’re not donating a set percentage of your income, if your cost of living is less than most others in your job, then you will still end up ahead.
Be Green.
If global warming is something you care about, another factor is that big cities are significantly greener than elsewhere. Despite our ideas of big cities being pollution spewers, the high population density (a bunch of people live in a single apartment building, instead of a single family sprawled out in a large suburban home) and availability of public transportation make cities have significantly less greenhouse gas per capita. It seems like the cities with the highest cost of living do the best, which makes sense because there is a strong causal correlation between high rents, people living in small spaces, people living close together, there being good public transportation or walking availability, etc. In the US, New York and San Francisco do noticeably better than other cities.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Per Capita for select US cities (source: World Bank):
- New York City: 7.9
- San Francisco: 10.1
- Seattle: 14.1 <-- known for "green" culture
- Menlo Park: 16.4
- US Overall Average: 23.6
Build a Movement.
If building the effective altruism movement is something you care about, then you will probably also have a better opportunity to do that in a larger city, even if that requires paying higher costs of living. For instance, the two largest cities for effective altruism, San Francisco and Oxford both have high costs of living but effective altruists there can reap some social and other benefits.
So if you can work remotely or your salary is fixed, it’s probably good to be where living costs are low but for most effective altruists, it seems like the opposite might be the case.
1. Do most jobs actually account for cost of living in their salary offers, so that we can offer this as generalized advice (though of course there may be exceptions)?
2. Are the cost of living salary adjustments not as big as the actual cost of living differences? So that the job might pay slightly more in a big city, but not a full adjustment more?
3. Are there other factors I'm not thinking of which would make this NOT be good advice?
Acknowledgements: I'd like to thank Ryan Carey and Lincoln Quirk for editing, adding, proof reading, discussing, and being generally helpful. Thanks!
I would be really surprised if cost-of-living salary adjustments were near 100% of the increased cost, on average.
The way I think of it is this: Expensive cities typically make companies better able to find and attract talented workers in a close proximity, which is good for business, and they'll have an incentive to pay extra for that. But a city is expensive because lots of people want to live there relative to the space available, and living in an expensive city is somewhat like buying an expensive car. To that extent companies would not pay for the increased cost -- being able to live in that city is part of what you're getting for working at that company.
My only "evidence" that the cost is only partially covered is only from my own job searching in various cities as a software engineer though. I don't know what a wider reading of available data would indicate. But I suspect that cost-of-living is covered less than a simple reading of average salary/cost-of-living data, because part of that correlation will be that the average worker in a high-cost city is better than the average worker elsewhere. Also, if you account for periods of unemployment, being in a higher-cost city would hit harder during those times, which wouldn't show up in salary/cost-of-living data.
One interesting thing is that, in my company, you do get a pay bump for cost-of-living increases if you are hired in, or are moved to, a more expensive location, but if you then move to a cheaper location within the same company, there is not an automatic cost-of-living salary decrease. I wonder if that could be a common practice in many large companies due to sticky wages.