So, he works hard and does a lot of low value grunt work. LOTS of people do that. People who are truly productive figure out how to devote lots of time to the highest value work they can and minimize the time spent on crap work. Wouldn't Luke do better to raise an extra $30K/year or whatever so he can hire someone to do the odd jobs and focus on whatever is the most valuable stuff he can do?

He started soliciting people for that months ago.

Maybe tiny is not a fair term but certainly unexceptional?

The SIAI is a nonprofit organization. You know how on this site we often discuss how any money one devotes to unnecessary expenditures is money that could have gone into, say, saving lives? How we can think of money as measured in terms of dead children? And how a lot of people here think the SIAI is probably the most efficient charity in terms of expected utility?

If Luke conceives of himself as an altruist, then he's not going to ask for as much money as he can get away with, because that's simply taking more resources out of a highly efficient charity, which isn't being repaid in additional work.

That's generally what organizations do, unless they have horrible agency problems. Are you saying that they had applications from really impressive candidates and turned them down for Luke? If the executive director of the Red Cross or the president of Harvard desperately wanted the job but Luke beat them out then that would be impressive.

They sought Luke out for the position. They saw what he was doing and thought "this is a guy we should seriously hire." Have you ever been offered an executive position at a workplace you didn't apply to work at because they were that impressed by your productivity?

I'm not talking about positive externalities, I'm talking about actual work being done. Some structures-- early-stage startup companies generally included-- tend to involve disproportionately large amounts of work relative to others, which is made up for by the potential for very high, if delayed, payoffs.

The "revealed preference of the economy" is difficult to actually determine in such cases given the uncertainties involved, though it could likely be estimated using reference class forecasting and similar predictive techniques.

Ah, we seem to be using different definitions of productive. I was using "productive" in the sense of "effective at performing tasks," while you seem to be using it in the sense of "producing economic value--" my mistake. I think I was confused by your statement

I have no reason to think that his output is higher than anyone else who makes the same amount of $ that he does, so I don't think he is especially productive.

which seems to conflate "output" with productivity.

Do you think you can evaluate the productivity of a group of people by looking at their combined $ output? There is this measure called GDP that does that and it is pretty popular.

But also extremely bad as a measure of wealth generation. The economists who came up with the concept in the first place basically said "by no means should this be used as a measure of wealth generation," but then we went and did it anyway for lack of an obviously better measure.

As for the relation of salary to productivity, an incompetent CEO who runs their company into the ground (and thus has a negative wealth output) can make orders of magnitude more money than, say, a highly productive academic. Salary is not a good proxy either for the usefulness of the work one produces or the amount of time and effort one spends being productive (the hardest and longest working people in the country are often among the worst paid.)

I would characterize GDP as "obviously wrong" as a measure of actual productivity.

That being said, one good reason to assume that someone is underpaid relative to their output is that they work in the nonprofit sector, where salaries are typically lower for equivalent levels of work.