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Earning to Give

Although it is possible to earn an average income and still donate enough to do a lot of good, it remains true that the more you earn, the more you can donate. That idea, which led Matt Wage to his current career, must have occurred to many people before the effective altruism movement existed. In the eighteenth century John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, told his congregations to “earn all you can, give all you can, save all you can.”1 Another was Jim Greenbaum, who heard the term effective altruism when viewing, on TED.com, a talk I had given in 2013. He realized that now there is a name for what he had been doing for most of his life. Because Jim has been quite deliberately earning money in order to be able to give money away for longer than anyone else I know, his life demonstrates that this can be done successfully over several decades.

Jim was born in 1958 and grew up in a Jewish family living in Louisiana, in the heart of America’s Bible Belt. As a child, he recalls, “when something didn’t seem reasonable, logical, or fair, I’d fight against it.” He saw footage of the Nazi concentration camps and heard rabbis give sermons and say, “Never again!” They would condemn the Allies for doing nothing to stop the Holocaust, while newspapers carried stories of atrocities still being committed around the world. The hypocrisy began to gnaw at him, and that influence can still be seen in a line he uses on the website of the foundation he set up: “Being a bystander to suffering is not an option.”

When Jim graduated from college, he was thinking of going to law school with the goal of practicing civil rights law. But he didn’t get into the top law schools and didn’t fancy another three years’ study somewhere that was not at the highest level, so he decided to go into business, make money quickly, and use it to change the world. After some false starts, he founded Access Long Distance, which grew into a nationwide telecommunications company. In 1990, when Jim was thirty-two, he happened to catch a television program about an American who had gone to Romania to help orphans who were living in atrocious conditions. Jim set himself a deadline: eight more years in business would take him to forty, and then he would quit and start using his money to help others. He missed the deadline but not by much: when he sold his company in 1999 he had just turned forty-one, and his net worth was about to peak at $133 million. He has committed to contributing 85 percent of that during his lifetime to projects aimed at reducing the suffering of both humans and nonhuman animals, with the remainder of his wealth going to the same purpose after his death. So far he has contributed more than $40 million to the Greenbaum Foundation, which he runs together with his wife, Lucie Berreby-Greenbaum. The foundation has supported projects aimed at preventing and alleviating animal suffering and abuse, improving health in developing countries, educating people in Africa about human rights, and rescuing victims of human trafficking for sex and labor.

Compared to the other effective altruists we have met, Jim lives an affluent life and lives in a luxurious home. He once owned a few sports cars and a share in a private jet but soon came to see those as excesses. While he now drives a Toyota, he still struggles to find a balance between his lifestyle and using his money to help others. As early as 2003, before effectiveness was as widely talked about as it is today, Jim was mostly supporting overseas projects. When he was asked for donations to local projects, he would say, “I can give you this much money, or I can save this many lives. You tell me what to do.”2 Nevertheless, he is very conscious of the need, when motivating wealthy people to give, to start where they are, so he accepts some “ineffective passion” in their giving, as long as at least half goes to effective giving.

How does earning a lot of money and giving a lot away compare with becoming an aid worker for an effective charity? Will MacAskill puts forward this argument: Suppose you could have worked for an effective charity but instead you accept a job with an investment bank that pays you $200,000 a year. There is usually no shortage of applicants for jobs with charities, so the charity will appoint someone else who will probably do almost as good a job as you would have done. “Almost” because if you had been offered the job, we can assume the charity considered you the best applicant for the position; but the difference between you and the next-best applicant is unlikely to be great. As a charity worker, therefore, you are largely replaceable. Working in finance, however, you earn much more than you need and give half of your earnings to the charity, which can use that money to employ two extra workers it would not, without your donation, have been able to employ at all. The amount of work they can do for the charity will greatly exceed the difference between what you would have done and what the next-best applicant for your position will do. Whereas you would have been replaceable as a charity worker, you are not replaceable as a donor. If you had not taken the job with the investment bank, someone else would have and almost certainly would not have donated half of her or his salary to charity (very few people in the finance sector do). So if you take the finance job, the charity will be better able to achieve its aims than it would have been if you had accepted their offer of employment.3

Will also points out that we sometimes learn that a charity is not as effective as we thought it was. Donors can then easily switch their giving to a better charity. If you are already working for the charity when you find out that it is not particularly effective, however, it will not be easy to find a new job with the most effective charity. If you are able to change the charity that employs you, making it more effective than it was, you may have a bigger impact still; but many organizations, whether charities or not, are resistant to change.

Notwithstanding exceptions like Jim Greenbaum, most of those earning to give are from the generation that started to think about their career choices around the turn of the millennium. They have been prepared to go in new directions. In the nineties if you had said that you were going into finance in order to earn more to give more, people would have looked at you oddly, and you would have felt very alone in what you were doing. For millennials, however, connecting with like-minded people via social media comes naturally. So it is easy to find websites on which you can exchange experiences with people like Aveek Bhattacharya, who put aside plans for an academic career in order to earn more and donate more with a London-based firm of strategy consultants. Or you may meet Alex Foster, whose Christian beliefs led him to want to do something about poverty. Alex is now launching his own company and is committed to donating everything he earns above £15,000 a year.⁴ If you are earning to give in order to reduce animal suffering, you can discuss the best options with Simon Knutson, who works for an investment company in Gothenburg, Sweden, and donates about 40 percent of his after-tax income to support Animal Charity Evaluators, which tries to find the most effective charities helping animals. Ben West, after being employed as a software developer in Madison, Wisconsin, started his own company in order to be able to donate more. He gives to Animal Charity Evaluators and the Global Priorities Project at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which investigates the problem of how to allocate scarce resources among different global needs.

These people are all giving far beyond conventional standards of philanthropy, but of all the effective altruists I have encountered, Ian Ross offers the most remarkable example of a life committed to maximizing giving. Ian started working full-time in 2006 and between then and the time of writing has donated or earmarked for future donation about $1 million. In 2014 he earned more than $400,000, and more than 95 percent of his after-tax earnings goes to charities. The ethical motivation for Ian’s lifestyle began in college, when he became a vegan. For the best part of the next decade, a friend, also vegan, subjected him to merciless cross-examination. The outcome was that Ian came to accept the following argument:

1.Modern animal agriculture causes an immense amount of suffering.

2.We are responsible both for what we do and for what we refrain from doing.

3.We have the means to reduce the suffering caused by modern animal agriculture. Therefore:

4.It is imperative for each of us to do so.

Ian then began to put that logic into practice in his own life. He worked for four years at McKinsey, the management consultants, and then at the Disney Corporation before moving to a more senior role in a video gaming startup. Outside his day job, Ian helped start Hampton Creek Foods, which produces plant-based egg substitutes that are already cutting into the demand for eggs from caged hens. The majority of his donations go to organizations like the Humane League and Mercy for Animals because their education and outreach campaigns have been shown to be effective in encouraging people to stop eating animal products. Ian also gives to global public health organizations like Population Services International because he sees bringing family planning to people without access to it as win-win, preventing the birth of unwanted children and giving adults more control over their lives. At the same time, because most humans eat meat, fewer children means less demand for animal products, which in turn reduces animal suffering.

Ian can focus on his goal of reducing suffering because he doesn’t have a partner or children and has no plans to change that situation. He doesn’t see this as a sacrifice because his lack of interest in having a partner predates his effort to follow his ethical ideas to their logical conclusions. He plays soccer with friends, enjoys listening to music, and goes cycling most weekends, all within an annual budget of around $9,000. Outside that budget, though, he did spend $8,000 to pay the veterinary expenses for the companion animal of a friend with whom he is very close. He admits he can’t really justify this, so he considers it a kind of “luxury spending.”

The Psychology of Earning to Give

In 2013 an article in the Washington Post featured Jason Trigg, an MIT computer science graduate working in finance and giving half of his salary to the Against Malaria Foundation. Trigg was described as part of “an emerging class of young professionals in America and Britain” for whom “making gobs of money is the surest way to save the world.”6 In the New York Times the columnist David Brooks wrote that Trigg seemed to be “an earnest, morally serious young man” who might well save many lives. Nevertheless, Brooks urged caution. He warned, first, that our daily activities change us, and by working in a hedge fund your ideals could slip so that you become less committed to giving. Second, he thought that choosing a profession that does not arouse your passion for the sake of an “abstract, faraway good” might leave you loving humanity in general but not the particular humans around you. Third, and most important, Brooks worried about “turning yourself into a means rather than an end ... a machine for the redistribution of wealth.” Taking a job just to make money could be “corrosive,” Brooks wrote, even if you use the money for charity.⁷

The first two objections make factual psychological claims that can be checked against people who are earning to give. The third objection is moral, rather than psychological, so I will postpone discussion of it until we come to ethical objections in the next section.

In 2013 Matt Wage spoke to the Princeton class he had taken four years earlier. He told the students that when he went to work in finance some people raised concerns about his unusual choice. One worry was that an idealistic young person surrounded by cutthroat bankers wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure and would quit. That hadn’t happened. Matt doesn’t regard the people he works with as cutthroats, and he finds the work itself interesting. The other major concern was one that Brooks mentions, which Matt put as follows: “By being around a lot of wealthy people who drive Ferraris, I would soon say, never mind about the charities, what I really want is a Ferrari.” A Ferrari is still not on Matt’s shopping list. His strategy for trying to prevent it ever getting there is to be very public about his pledge to donate 50 percent of his income. He has told all his friends that if he doesn’t keep his pledge, they should ridicule him. (He has also given permission for his pledge to be mentioned in this book, making it even more public.) Overall, though, Matt gave no signs of being under any unusual psychological burden caused by earning to give. “I’m extremely happy with my life,” he told me. “I’d still do this altruistic stuff even if I thought it was making my life worse, but, by a strange coincidence about how human minds work, I think it’s actually making me happier.”

Jim Greenbaum found his initial years frustrating, but only because it was taking him longer than he expected to create the wealth he needed to help others. It did not make him less committed to his ultimate goal. He enjoyed business, which in some ways seemed to him like a game. He also valued the people with whom he worked. He advocates balance between a comfortable life and doing good. Jim has already given away so much that his decision to earn money in order to give it away has obviously worked out very well.

Ben West points out that even from a selfish perspective, earning to give allows you to have things that people believe make them happy, like money and a high-status job, while still getting the fulfillment that comes from knowing you are helping to make the world a better place. Ian Ross doesn’t see any risk of burnout and anticipates continuing along his current path. Alex Foster may be the most enthusiastic of all the earning-to-give people I have had contact with: he says he finds his career “insanely fulfilling—more satisfaction than any other period of my life. Despite heavily reduced social life.” On the other hand, Aveek Bhattacharya is sometimes frustrated that his work does not allow him to probe issues as deeply as he would like. He always saw earning to give as an experiment, and, to him, the possibility of doing a doctorate and having an academic career remains open.8

Brooks would be on solid ground if he were merely warning his readers that earning to give is not for everyone. Some people can’t work up much enthusiasm for making profits for their employer. Others, however, seem to enjoy earning money and thrive on the extra motivation provided by giving a large slice of it to good causes. They thus avoid the problem nicely summed up in a New Yorker cartoon in which a businessman on the phone complains, “I’m working harder than I ever have, but all I get out of it is larger and larger paychecks.”⁹

Brooks speculates on the damage that could flow from turning yourself into a means for the redistribution of wealth, overlooking the fact that it is, unfortunately, the fate of many people to spend their lives supporting themselves and their families by doing work they do not find intrinsically interesting or enjoyable. Why would such work have a more corrosive effect on you if you are doing it in order to help others rather than to help yourself and your family?

The Ethics of Earning to Give

When Brooks objects to earning to give on the grounds that you are turning yourself into a means rather than an end, he is echoing an objection to utilitarianism made forty years earlier by the British philosopher Bernard Williams. Williams, in a critique of utilitarianism, asks us to imagine that George, an unemployed man with a chemistry degree, is offered a position in a laboratory developing new forms of chemical weapons. (Williams was writing before chemical weapons were banned by international treaty.) George is opposed to the development of chemical weapons, but if he does not take the job it will go to someone who will be much more zealous in pursuing the research than he would have been, and the outcome of George’s rejection of the offer is likely to mean more, not fewer, new forms of chemical weapons.10 If George is to do the most good, he must take the job, keeping his views about chemical weapons to himself while doing as little as possible to advance the goal for which he is being paid to work. To retain his position, however, he will have to do some things that advance the development of new chemical weapons. He may feel bad about that, but a utilitarian can reassure him that what really matters is that fewer deadly weapons will be developed.

Williams objects that George is being forced to “step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which utilitarian calculation requires.” To do such a thing, Williams argues, would alienate him from his actions and his convictions, with which he identifies, and is, “in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity.”¹¹ Is this true? And if it is, is there a parallel with what those who earn to give are doing when they choose to go into a profession they do not regard as intrinsically desirable? Investment banking is not morally on a par with developing chemical weapons. Nor would people who earn to give be deliberately working against the aims of their employer, as George would have been. On the contrary, they would want to do as well as possible so as to receive the highest possible salary and bonus and be able to donate the most. Nevertheless, to fit into the ethos of the organization in which they want to succeed, people earning to give may have to disguise their views about the intrinsic value of their work. It is also true that some of those who change their career in order to earn to give have stepped aside from their own projects (as Matt stepped aside from his original plan of going to graduate school and becoming a professor) and have instead taken the career required by “utilitarian calculation.” But does this really mean, as Williams asserts, that they are alienated from their convictions and have lost their integrity? Does it, as Brooks suggests, turn you into a mere means to an end, with corrosive effects on your character?

Those who earn to give are, to a greater extent than most people, living in accord with their values—that is, with their core conviction that we ought to live our lives so as to do the most good we can. It is hard to see any alienation or loss of integrity here. On the contrary, for people who share that conviction, integrity would be lost if they were to follow their passion to, let’s say, go to graduate school, write a thesis on Beowulf, and become a professor of medieval literature.12

Perhaps people who earn to give have integrity, yet they may be participating in activities that do harm? One critic puts it like this: “Capitalism in its current global form is worsening inequality. ... A few people are gaining more wealth while many, many more are driven to more extreme poverty as a symptom of the market. The gap is widening between the very rich and very poor. ... [W]orking in the financial industry in order to give to global poverty charities is akin to arsonists giving donations to the local fire department.”¹³ Capitalism does appear to be increasing inequality, but that does not prove that it is driving people into extreme poverty because inequality can also increase when the rich become richer and the poor stay the same, or even when the poor gain but not by as much as the rich. As we saw in the preface, effective altruists typically value equality not for its own sake but only because of its consequences.14 It isn’t clear that making the rich richer without making the poor poorer has bad consequences, overall. It increases the ability of the rich to help the poor, and some of the world’s richest people, including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have done precisely that, becoming, in terms of the amount of money given, the greatest effective altruists in human history. No doubt capitalism does drive some people into extreme poverty—it is such a vast system that it would be surprising if it did not—but it has also lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty. It would not be easy to demonstrate that capitalism has driven more people into extreme poverty than it has lifted out of it; indeed there are good grounds for thinking that the opposite is the case.¹⁵

In any case, those who think the entire modern capitalist economy should be overthrown have conspicuously failed to demonstrate that there are ways of structuring an economy that have better outcomes. Neither have they indicated how, in the twenty-first century, a transition to an alternative economic system might occur. Like it or not, for the foreseeable future we seem to be stuck with some variety of capitalism, and along with it come markets in stocks, bonds, and commodities. These markets serve a variety of roles, including raising investment capital, reducing risk, and smoothing out swings in commodity prices. They don’t seem inherently evil.

Granting that earning to give may lead to being involved in financial activities that harm some people does not settle the moral question of what the individual who has the opportunity to earn a lot and give a lot should do. Moral codes of behavior often give the principle “Do no harm” priority over the principle “Do the most good you can.” Those who take this view will consider it wrong to work for a corporation that is harming innocent people, even if the good that one can then do would hugely outweigh this harm. The moral issue that lies behind this attitude arose in a dramatic form during World War II, when the Nazis were aiming their V–1 and V–2 rockets at London. Spies in London were sending them information about the accuracy of the attacks, but the spies were in fact British double agents, and the information was designed to mislead the Germans so that fewer rockets would hit London. It was estimated that this would save 12,000 casualties a month. When the British War Cabinet learned of the deception, in August 1944, Herbert Morrison, a minister and member of the Cabinet, objected that it was morally wrong for the government to determine that people living south of London would be killed rather than people living in central London. The do-no-harm principle seems to underlie this objection, for otherwise the good of preventing many deaths, by causing rockets to fall in rural areas, where they would do less damage, would have outweighed the harm of causing some deaths. Morrison was able to persuade the Cabinet to agree with him (Churchill was abroad at the time), but MI5, the British Security Service, managed to ignore Cabinet’s decision and continue the deception until the end of the war.16 If you think Morrison was right, you will probably also think that it is wrong to be involved in financial activities that harm some people, even if that brings about an equivalent benefit to many more. An effective altruist could take this view and still do a great deal of good while complying with the constraint of not doing harm. My own view, however, is that Morrison was wrong, and it was right to save the lives of many civilians.

The other relevant issue here is what we are to regard as being wrongfully complicit in a harm. For someone who judges actions by their consequences, to be complicit in wrongful harm requires that one make a difference to the likelihood of the harm occurring. As we saw earlier, if you do not take the position offered by the investment bank, someone else will, and from the bank’s perspective that person will probably be nearly as good as you would have been. If one of the bank’s capital-raising activities is funding a mine that is polluting a river on which many impoverished villagers depend, your refusal to take the job is not going to stop that happening. It will prevent you being able to donate as much to good causes, however, including charities that empower the weak so that they can better resist the depredations of mining companies. Moreover, you may have a better chance of altering the bank’s actions—or, through the bank, the actions of the corporation for which it is raising money—if you are on the inside than if you are protesting from outside. You may find, on the other hand, that you cannot have any influence on the bank’s policies because the corporate culture is to pursue profit regardless of the cost to the poor, and one junior employee cannot counteract that. Perhaps in especially egregious cases the right choice will be to quit and blow the whistle on what the bank is doing. Even then, your choice to work for the bank will have had good consequences, for it will have made you a better-informed, more credible opponent of the bank’s actions.

The consequentialist notion of complicity does have implications that many people will reject. It implies, for instance, that the guards at Auschwitz were not acting wrongly if their refusal to serve in that role would have led only to their replacement by someone else, perhaps someone who would have been even more brutal toward those who were about to be murdered there. Given that serving as a concentration camp guard was often an alternative to being sent to the Russian front, this hypothetical was probably sometimes true. One might argue that, rather than accept this implication, we should consider not the actual consequences of one person’s refusal to be a concentration camp guard but the consequences of everyone following a rule against acting for an institution engaged in wrongdoing. A Kantian might take that view, as would a rule-utilitarian—that is, someone who thinks it wrong to violate a rule if general acceptance of the rule would have good consequences.17 We might also accept a different view of wrongful complicity, one that makes me responsible for the harm done by a group, organization, or other collective in which I intentionally participate.¹⁸ Strictly utilitarian effective altruists could not accept these views and so would have to accept the implication that, on a plausible reading of the relevant facts, at least some of the guards at Auschwitz were not acting wrongly. It is possible to combine general support for effective altruism with acceptance of rule-utilitarianism or with another notion of complicity that is not consequentialist at all. If one did so and also held that investment banks and similar corporations are engaged in wrongdoing, one might see this as a sufficient reason for not going into the finance industry.¹⁹ One might also take the view that the normal functions of an investment bank serve a beneficial economic purpose, and there is no need to assume that by going into banking one will be complicit in wrongdoing at all.

I suspect that in a decade or two, as we get more experience with earning to give, the ethical objections Brooks and others make to the practice will come to be seen as typical of the grumblings of an older generation that does not really understand what the next generation is doing. A Brookings Institution study has pointed out that millennials are much more concerned about corporate social responsibility than any previous generation, and as employees, they want “their daily work to be part of, and reflect, their societal concerns.”20 There are many ways of achieving that integration between work and social values. For the right person in the right circumstances, earning to give is one of them.