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D_Alex comments on What should a college student do to maximize future earnings for effective altruism? - Less Wrong
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I was going to answer "Say you found a cure for cancer while working for pharmaceutical company...", but lets consider something more mundane.
Say you are an engineer working for Unilever. With 3 months of diligent work, you design a shampoo bottle that costs 1 cent less to manufacture, maybe through reduced material usage. There are billions of these bottles made each year, giving a saving to humanity of tens of millions of dollars each year. Compared with savings of this magnitude, your actual salary will be insignificant.
I don't think your analysis adequately addresses the strongest arguments for earning to give. If you can do lots of good by innovating or researching, say, why can't you do even more good by making lots of money and using part of it to pay researchers or innovators?
Because sometimes there's a shortage of ideas, expertise etc., or just other things rather than money, that prevent a goal from being reached. For example (warning: I'm a highly unreliable source on this), the SENS Foundation gets plenty of funding; at this point it appears to need more top researchers rather than more money to make progress.
I agree that talent, rather than money, is sometimes the relevant bottleneck. However, what follows from this is that folks with the relevant talent should do research rather than earn to give. This doesn't apply to the vast majority of people, who lack such special talents.
There is substantial, although incomplete, overlap in the special talents needed for exceptional success in business and in other fields