EA - Grantees: how do you structure your finances and career? by Jackson Wagner

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Grantees: how do you structure your finances & career?, published by Jackson Wagner on August 4, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary: Is being a grant-funded solo researcher compatible with any level of job security? How are grants taxed, and how do solo researchers handle healthcare, retirement savings, etc? For a movement obsessed with both grantmaking and career advice, there are surprisingly few answers online. I was recently talking to a friend who was trying to hype me up on the idea that I should dream big, apply for an EA grant, and try to build a career as a full-time researcher/blogger/public-intellectual. This concept strikes me as somewhat insane, albeit enticing for many reasons. But I realized during the conversation that a lot of my hesitance was coming from the fact that I can’t picture what the life of a solo-researcher grant recipient is like. All you people getting grants from EA Funds, FTX, and so forth — how do you think about your long-term career plans? How do the basics of personal finance work when you’re not a traditional W-2 employee? These questions might not matter to eager college graduates just out of school, who are happy to take a 1-year grant in order to work on developing their career. But if you are already mid-career, and value maintaining a stable living situation suitable for raising a family, are EA grants a viable option at all? (If not, that is okay, since there are many other ways to contribute — like donating cash to top charities, writing blog posts in your spare time, or getting hired into a traditional employer/employee relationship at an EA org. But I want to know whether or not my friend's advice is crazy.) Here are some questions that came to mind as I tried to understand what life would be like in the EA grant-based ecosystem. I tried to look this stuff up on the Forum, but didn't find many answers -- there is plenty of 80K-style career advice, a lot of lists of funding opportunities, some descriptions of what the life of an independent researcher feels like day-to-day, and a bunch of "Effective Altruism Lifestyle" advice about how the philosophy of EA might influence stuff like parenting decisions. The closest thing I found to what I wanted was this comment thread wherein people debated the merits of long-term funding for independent researchers. Questions about long-term career planning: What is the long-term picture here? Do some people intend to just keep getting grants forever, each year, for the rest of their career? Is the idea that the grants would come just from one organization, or that you would hop around continuously? (This seems to me like a scary situation with essentially zero job security, but maybe I’m wrong about this?) Which EA funders are even capable of potentially making a long-term funding commitment? (For instance, in the case of FTX Future Fund regrantors or Survival & Flourishing “S-process” participants, won’t the group of people making the grants be different every year?) If “grants forever” isn’t feasible, is everyone planning to use grants as temporary career-transition stepping-stones, eventually getting hired at a think-tank or something? (In this case, mid-career people who value stability should eschew grants and just apply for jobs at EA orgs. But jobs at organizations often have specific roles, structured research agendas, etc — this is different from the grantmaking world where people are pitching their own projects and composing their own independent research agendas. So jobs and grants don’t perfectly substitute. Should there be some Rethink-Priorities-esque organization that offers people “EA Tenure” to pursue more independent projects?) Some people might be able to develop their careers until they are profitable on their own by selling substack subscriptions or spea...