Why Activists Should Consider Making Lots of Money

Utilitarianism--and activism more generally--is about effecting change: taking actions that will reduce, as much as possible, the expected amount of suffering in the world. So the natural career path for a utilitarian would seem to be one of activism. For instance, the utilitarian might work for a particularly effective nonprofit organization that engages in education campaigns and citizen-lobbying efforts. To do something different--for instance, working at a corporate law firm or investment bank--is seen as "selling out" and abandoning one's moral ideals. This common perception is reflected in the title of a Wall Street Journal article: "Social Principle vs. High Salary: Reconciling Ideals with Financial Goals Can Be a Struggle for Some in Their 20s."

However, there is a factor that is often ignored in this line of thinking: Namely, that when an organization hires one person for a competitive position, it thereby chooses not to hire another.

Example. Suppose Utilitarian Alice and ten other people are applying for the position of campaign coordinator for a utilitarian advocacy group. Alice is hired and feels good about all of the work that she's doing. She forgets, however, that because she was hired, someone else wasn't. In her place, that person would have done all sorts of great work, too.

One way to think of the situation is as follows. Consider all of the nonprofits that do utilitarian work. Those nonprofits have essentially fixed budgets that allow them to hire an essentially fixed number of employees. Since nearly all of these positions will be filled by someone, much of the work that Alice does with one of those organizations would have been done by someone else in her place. Hence, the difference that Alice makes on the world is only the amount by which she's more productive than whoever would have been hired instead.

In some cases, those productivity differences could be quite large. In other cases, even small differences in effectiveness could translate into large impacts. If, for instance, Alice were a slightly better fundraiser than the next person who would have been hired, she might be able to bring in millions of extra dollars over her lifetime. However, there are other options to consider.

Just as a utilitarian will not necessarily make a positive impact by working for an advocacy organization, she will also not necessarily make a negative impact by working for an employer that acts against utilitarian goals. The amount by which she makes a negative impact is merely the amount by which she is more productive than the next person.

Example. Utilitarian Bob works as a corporate lawyer defending slaughterhouses against lawsuits brought by animal-welfare organizations. With an annual after-tax salary of $190,000, Bob is able to donate $160,000 a year toward advocacy. In particular, he finds four people who want to be activists full time but lack the money to support themselves. He pays each of them $40,000 for their work, of which he actively keeps track.

The late animal-welfare activist Henry Spira was himself partially funded in this way. As Peter Singer reports on pp. 115-16 of Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement,

In addition to the $500 a month [Henry] receives from his retirement fund and--after he turned sixty-five--his social security payments, he pays himself $15,000 a year from Animal Rights International and reimburses himself for up to $4,800 worth of expenses annually. Luckily, he doesn’t need to spend time raising money for his efforts because he has attracted the support of a small number of people who are prepared to make substantial donations to Animal Rights International. [... One of his supporters, Helaine Lerner] finds it much more effective [contributing to Henry] than giving funding to large organizations, where the money "can go down a deep hole and you never know what the results of it are."

Jack Norris of Vegan Outreach observes:

Many activists view money and wealth as evil. As a source of power, money can be used to promote either evil or good. Just think how much better the animals would be if vegans had significant amounts of money. If each vegan had enough money to buy and distribute multiple copies of educational materials, the animals would greatly benefit. Someone who works a job that isn’t directly promoting animal rights, but who can use their money to fund the resources needed by our movement, will be doing much to help the animals.

How much could a utilitarian make with a non-activist job? In this paper, I estimate the amounts of wealth (in current US dollars) that a utilitarian could accumulate over a lifetime of work in various careers. This figure shows the main results:

Figure 1: D represents the amount of wealth (in millions of current US dollars) that a utilitarian could donate. I(0) (in thousands of current US dollars) represents the assumed annual starting salary, while R represents the amount by which that starting salary will have multiplied by the time the utilitarian reaches a senior career position. The career labels are, of course, just rough estimates.

So a utilitarian can potentially make a lot of money through a non-activist career. But how much of a difference can the money make? Is it all really worth it?

I'll give just one example of what donated money can do. The organization Vegan Outreach prints and distributes literature on vegetarianism/veganism, mainly to students on college campuses. In this piece, I estimate that a single dollar donated to Vegan Outreach prevents, on average, between 100 days and 50 years of animal suffering on factory farms. It boggles the mind to think how much suffering an investment banker or Wall Street quantitative analyst could prevent.