Share via Email Organisations such as 80, Hours and Giving What We Can encourage people to donate a portion of their salaries to charities they identify as effective.
More than that, though, MacAskill and his colleagues at 80, Hours β named for the number of hours people will spend at work during their lives β argue that passion does not lead to job satisfaction. Nor, necessarily, will the most obvious career choices open to a socially-concerned college student or young graduate, like working for a nonprofit. Those opportunities are more likely to present themselves in the business world, which has more resources to devote to training.
The idea is that some people β not all or most, by any means β should pursue work to make as much money as they can and then commit to giving a significant portion of their earnings away. Consider Ben West, a software engineer and self-identified effective altruist in Madison, Wisconsin. Seeking career guidance, West read about earning to give on the 80, Hours website and left his job at a software firm to launch Health eFilings , a startup whose software helps healthcare providers report data required by Medicare.
The love versus logic debate The idea of earning to give has helped persuade people like West and traders Sam Bankman-Fried and Matt Wage to donate significant amounts of money to charity. Exploding the productivity myth: jobs, cuts and carbon slaves Read more However, earning to give is controversial. Like the effective altruism movement as a whole, some say, the idea of earning to give is driven by logic, not love. Of course, no one who gives career advice advocates a one-size-fits-all approach and MacAskill has expressed regret that earning to give has received a disproportionate amount of attention relative to the wider effective altruism movement.
But I realised that by being an advocate I could convince hundreds of other people to pursue those paths; so I could have hundreds of times the impact than if I were to enter one of those fields directly.
