The ecosystem is bottlenecked by people who have deep context on, and are committed to, EA/GCR reduction.
The value of these people's work per year is worth a lot to the ecosystem — usually more than the value of their salary. This isn't the case for someone who otherwise wouldn't work in the ecosystem.
Let's imagine a generic EA organisation.
"EA opportunity cost" = the value of this staff member's time from the perspective of EA-inclined money — roughly, how much such a funder would be willing to pay for the impact they expect this person could produce elsewhere. Total cost to EA = salary + EA opportunity cost. Everything is editable, and the charts update live; the prose describes the default numbers.
| Role | Salary (£k) | EA opportunity cost (£k) | Total cost to EA (£k) |
|---|
The founder's total cost to EA is enormous — £1M — because this person could otherwise be founding something else, leading another critical project, shaping policy. Almost all of that cost is their scarce, aligned time. The graphic designer's total cost to EA is less than their salary: they're an excellent professional, but the EA-specific component of their role is small.
(In fact, I think the 'EA opportunity cost' of the graphic designer should be modelled as negative for the period during which they're in the role — which is what the table above does. This is because they're building career capital and interest in the ecosystem, so overall they're becoming more valuable to the ecosystem over time.)
Here's the hypothetical: the founder starts out doing everything herself, and whatever the organisation achieves in that world is our baseline — call it 100%. Then ask how much better things get as she brings each person in, one at a time, in the order above: first the Head of Research, then the Research Associate, and so on. Each hire's contribution is expressed as a percentage of that founder-alone baseline (made-up figures, editable):
Cumulative impact as the org grows from one person to five, as a % of what the founder achieves alone. Total impact keeps rising with every hire — it's the per-person increments that shrink.
This creates an interesting result for organisations staffed by a combination of these people: if you look at returns per staff member, they might diminish: the founder contributes more than the head of research, who contributes more than the research associate, and so on. But if you look at returns per EA resource properly considered — where the founder costs £1M in EA resources and the graphic designer costs £35k — the picture can actually show increasing returns. The marginal staff members are almost free in EA-resource terms, because their opportunity cost is mostly just their salary (which comes from regular funding markets), while their contribution to the project is real.
(I've deliberately chosen the numbers so each column moves monotonically — per-person returns only fall, per-£100k returns only rise — because that's neat. Real figures will be quite hard to reason about and very different between organisations.)
Returns per staff member — monotonically decreasing — each hire adds a smaller % than the last.
Returns per £100k of total cost to EA — monotonically increasing. Later hires are the efficient ones in the currency that's scarce.
This is why you don't want to think about some of these marginal staff members as consuming 10% of the project's resources. In EA-resource terms, they might be consuming 1–3%.
The asymmetry pushes towards building larger projects around a small core of deeply aligned people, rather than spreading that alignment thinly across many small projects — each of which consumes a "deeply gets it" founder. (This is quite a bad oversimplification. But there is an effect here.)