EA was never recommending "Open up a sweat shop and violate as many labor practices as possible to maximize income", "become a successful drug dealer" or "market for tobacco companies"
It was "Go work at Google, in finance, high frequency trading, or become a corporate lawyer and donate a large portion of your income to the world." All jobs where the impact is close to neutral.
You may be helping plutocrats syphon resources and public funds away from developing countries.
You may be promoting the inequality of arms in access to justice, given that regulators and citizens cannot pay for the best legal advice, therefore enabling corporate regulatory capture over the long term.
Given the ubiquity of offshore vehicles in many international legal transactions, you may enable companies to evade contributing fairly to the countries in which they operate, thereby fuelling a decline in funding available for public services, and increasing the tax burden on wage-earning citizens.
And you may even have little awareness you are even doing these things because of the relative opacity and abstraction of the ownership of the corporate vehicles that make up your client base.
This is debatable. If they are renting out the houses this could reduce rents which would improve the lives of the poor who rent much more often than own. If they are sitting on them it's much more likely to be negative.
> You may be helping plutocrats syphon resources and public funds away from developing countries.
I'll give you that you shouldn't earn to give by working for Gaddafi. I think the vast majority of EA would agree.
The third rule at 80,000 hours the biggest proponent of earn to give is
3. Doesn’t cause harm
And their actual recommendations given are
Tech startup founder
Quantitative trading
Software engineering
Startup early employee
Data science
Management consulting
Marketing
Actuarial science
Executive search
Nursing
Allied health
> Startup early employee
Plenty of these have caused harm. Many modern startups have the explicit goal of "disrupting" traditional labor rights or unions.
> Marketing
There's so much variability here, ranging from pretty benign activities to outright lying to people's faces about health outcomes of dangerous products.
My larger point is not that marketers or tech founders are inherently evil people, but that the system is rotten. For example, despite all the charities and philanthropy going to undeveloped countries, the net flow of resource is out of these countries and into more developed ones[1]. Nothing about ETG seems to contradict these tendencies, if you work in actuarial science and help a company minimize the taxes they pay in South Africa, but then donate 50% of your paycheque back to charitable causes in the country, your actions have not been a net benefit to the people of that country.
[1] https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/actual-flow-resources-de...
Large investors don't tend to be drawn to projects offering affordable housing to local residents because they are not as profitable as the alternatives. Many large European cities are currently suffering a housing affordability crisis driven in part by properties increasingly catering to tourists (esp. Air B&Bs) and luxury properties for investment for international high-net worth individuals.
> I'll give you that you shouldn't earn to give by working for Gaddafi. I think the vast majority of EA would agree.
It usually wouldn't be as clear cut and easy to spot a case as that. But for example, until the war in Ukraine, European law firms were happy to act for any number of Russian businesses or oligarchs, provided they don't figure on any anti-money laundering lists (themselves, often relatively simple to circumvent). Or say, an African business person who has acquired their huge wealth in domestic assets and infrastructure through nepotism and is salting away the wealth offshore or into Europe via various direct or opaque investments, all legally facilitated by big law firms.
>The third rule at 80,000 hours the biggest proponent of earn to give is
3. Doesn’t cause harm
Not causing harm is much harder to tease out than one might think. The first order effects might appear harmless, but what about the second and third order effects? Is one often even in a position to know given the levels of abstraction in global financial markets? Are you lifting up developing countries by investment, or unwittingly enabling more to be extracted from them than is being put in?
