Tradeoffs — Salaries and location
One of the areas where NGOs and people who claim to care about particular issues make illogical decisions that make the world a less-good place is around tradeoffs. There are a lot of mistakes made around tradeoffs, and specifically with not admitting that tradeoffs exist, and that to make tradeoffs is not just acceptable thing to do but the ethical thing to do. Many folks who self-identify as advocates for a cause or set of causes seem unwilling to accept or admit we have to choose between different good outcomes, consider which ones matter more, and choose one to the exclusion of the other.
Accept it or not, it’s the reality, and to pretend the tradeoff does not exist will almost always result in making sub-optimal decisions that do less good than the more optimal decision, no good, or active harm.
One area is salaries. There has been a continued push among animal protection NGOs in the US in particular and to a lesser extent Europe for higher salaries for staffer. It is viewed as a question of fairness. To pay below some certain arbitrarily-defined level (essentially, a comfortable middle to upper middle class American lifestyle-supporting salary) is viewed by an increasing number of both staffers themselves and some donors as being abusive.
But every salary is a tradeoff between the money that goes to make one person very slightly more comfortable and happy, and a huge amount of good that can be done for a large number of animals if used in a different way. If we are paying for added performance — ie, Person A achieves 20% more success than the average staffer, but you have to pay 15% more based on Person A’s salary requirements—then fine, of course that is the optimal decision. Even if Persona A has 2x or 3x higher salary requirements, if their impact and performance justify it on a dollar-per-outcome basis, then we should pay it. Similarly, pay structures that incentivize performance, where higher performance leads to higher pay, also makes sense.
But that is very different from increasing everyone’s salary significantly on the grounds of “treating workers well.” This latter approach is easy to feel good about, and will make the ones around you happy because it benefits them. But it the result is far more animals suffering severely, so it’s the wrong ethical decision to make in my opinion. For any given position, we should optimize for the most performance per dollar, and that’s it. (Given that the same amount of money, be it $1,000 or $20,000, can achieve a dramatic reduction in suffering for thousands of animals when used toward just that end, versus only a very minor change in happiness for the human staffer at an NGO.) This could mean paying extremely high salaries for people that are worth it and that are personally not willing to work for less. It could also mean paying what are viewed as low (or even extremely low) salaries for people whose work is easily replacable and for which there are others willing to do the work for that salary or lower. In other words, we should pay what the market requires for impact per dollar of salary, and not more.
A way to view this in stark relief: average salaries for intelligent, hard-working college-educated English speaking professionals in Eastern Europe in knowledge worker roles is $10–15,000. Average salaries for NGO workers at animal protection groups in the US appear to very roughly average around $50,000 currently (of course with some above and some below).
If our options are to a) have 4 full-time workers for animals or b) have 1 full-time worker for animals, and the skill levels are close to equivalent (which they are), the outcome for animals of a) is dramatically better. Obviously this example only holds true for work that can be done remotely, but the same principle holds true for any role. If person A is willing to do a job for $25,000, and person B is only willing to do the job for $50,000, assuming the latter is not going to produce twice as many results, then it makes sense to hire person A without regard for whether $25,000 is “fair”. (Or rather, with regard to how fair it is, but weighing the positive impact on the staffer of increasing that wage, versus the benefit of using that money in another way.)
Having a salary of even $20,000 annually would already put one roughly in the top 5% of the world in terms of income. A salary of $10,000 would put one in the top 20%.
So it does seem a bit…gross?…to make an ethical fuss about moving average staff salaries at NGOs from being at roughly the top 4% globally to the top 2% globally (which is what has happened in the past several years), and suggesting that NGOs that do not do so are being abusive and unfair to their staffers. You want how many additional animals to suffer incredibly (due to the dilution of impact per dollar of staff salary) so that a handful of the world’s richest 3–4% can move into the top 2–3%?
