There are three ways EAs typically do good:
- Donating to effective charities.
- Working on high impact cause areas.
- Getting others to become EAs.
All of these require either time and/or money. To donate to effective charities, one needs to have a sufficiently high level of financial security to justify their donations. If someone wants to work in a high impact cause area, they need enough time and money to pursue their desired career. Lastly, if one wants to get others to become EAs, they need enough time to find others who may be interested in EA.
Despite this, I’ve observed almost no references to the importance of saving money or how to save money within the EA forum or sites dedicated to EA outreach such as effectivealtruism.org, 80,000 Hours, and Giving What We Can.
As such, I think that frugality, the optimization of one’s financial resources to maximize one’s time, should be more widely discussed and promoted within the EA community.
Pros:
- Saving even small amounts of money can enable one to donate much more money to high impact cause areas.
- For example, by cutting one’s own hair rather than getting a professional haircut, one can save around $30 every 8 weeks. If one does this for fifty years, one can save around $10,000 in today’s money.
- Sufficient savings can enable one to engage in more risk taking.
- If one has sufficient money, they may be able to justify taking time out of their career to work on an important project or to make a major career change.
- Similarly, if one has a lot of money and is extremely frugal, they may be able to retire early and devote even more of their time to doing good.
- By asking for donations, EA organizations are implying that people have enough money to donate. By giving examples of people who save money to donate to and how they do it, these organizations can reduce the view that the EA community is asking people to excessively financially burden themselves.
- Frugality has many valuable second-order effects:
- Frugality reduces how many resources one consumes and waste one produces.
- This can help the environment, which can reduce future harm from global warming and other known and unknown risks.
- Frugality reduces animal suffering.
- If one is trying to spend as little as possible on food, they will likely avoid meat because it is one of the most expensive proteins. This would ultimately result in less animal suffering overall.
Cons:
- If EA organizations are seen promoting frugality, their actions could be perceived as an example of the rich promoting their own interests over those of the poor. This would increase the view that EA is an elitist movement.
- This is because, if EAs are encouraging poor people in their own country to donate to people who are poor on a global scale, it would be seen as EAs supporting their own interests over those of poor people in their own country.
- If EA organizations promote frugality, their actions could be seen as encouraging people to accept harm to themselves for the sake of reducing a greater harm to others. This would increase the view that EA is synonymous with utilitarianism.
- By focusing on how to reduce one’s spending, EAs could become distracted from doing goo, especially if their money saving techniques are especially time-consuming.
- If discussions of frugality become more common in EA spaces, it may dilute the focus of EA, making the movement as a whole less impactful.
- Frugality encourages people to move to lower cost of living areas. If EAs did an exodus from EA hotspots such as New York, the Bay Area, or London, this would substantially reduce how often EAs talk to each other in-person. This could significantly reduce the rate of knowledge transfer and innovation, which could reduce the impact of EA.
- Personal finance is a taboo subject. By discussing it, EAs could alienate people who would otherwise be interested in doing good effectively.
I thought a lot about frugality when I was getting involved in EA (ex: Living Frugally So We Can Give Away More, from 2010), but I think I (and some other early EAs) could be shortsighted here. For example, in retrospect I think it would have been really valuable for @Julia_Wise🔸 and me to meet other EAs in person in the UK, but we didn't go there until 2014. And only then because we could tack it it onto travel for my sister's wedding.
A focus on minimizing spending can also be a distraction from other ways of increasing your impact. For example, when I wrote that post I was earning (all numbers in 2025 dollars) $106k in a research group. Two years later when I realized I should be trying harder to earn money and Carl Schulman suggested I join Google, my starting salary was $149k and in my first full calendar year I earned $301k. Very quickly I was able to donate more than I had been earning before. A focus on increasing earnings would have resulted in more donations.
On the other hand, I do think some frugality is really valuable. If we had let our expenses grow proportionately during the period when I was earning $700k+ I could easily have become trapped earning to give, but frugality ("a low personal burn rate" if you want to appeal to startup folks) allowed me to leave Google to join an early-stage biosecurity project that spun out into a non-profit that still can't afford to pay super well. And it has allowed me to take a voluntary salary reduction, allowing the non-profit to get more done with the same funding.
Overall, I think it would probably be good for EA to be moderately more frugal, but to be very aware of the downsides in burnout and turning people away.
You might also be interested in the top comments on Free-spending EA might be a big problem for optics and epistemics (posted at the height of the FTX-funding era) for some discussion on the pros and cons of EA's more frugal past.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. It seems like, if someone wants to earn to give, they do need some conscientiousness about lifestyle inflation in general, but:
On the other hand though, if one's able to live on a very small amount, their level of self control, problem solving, and numeracy might be a strong indicator that, if they go in the right direction, they could substantially increase their salary.
Your comment about saving enough money to join a start-up though does make me, at least personally, skeptical about giving donations. It seems like, if someone's project-oriented, having significant savings will enable them to embark on much more ambitious and potentially impactful projects.
Also, in regards to that post, this comment is a great list of cons for others who are curious.