text:
Q: data.frame to spatial polygone data frame I have this data.frame
data <- read.table(text="Id            x             y valecolo valecono
1     1  12.18255221  29.406365240        4      990
2     2   9.05893970  20.923087170        4     1090
3     3   1.11192442   2.460411416        0      420
4     4  15.51290096  27.185287490       16     1320
5     5  20.41913438  32.166268590       13     1050
6     6  12.75939095  17.552435030       60     1010
7     7  28.06853355  30.839057830       12     1030
8     8   6.96288868   7.177616682       33     1010
9     9  30.60527190  20.792242110       23      640
10   10  12.07646283   7.658266843       19      810
11   11  10.42878294   5.520913954        0      700
12   12  23.61674977  11.111217320        0      838
13   13  27.16148898  12.259423750       11     1330
14   14  28.00931750   6.258448426       20      777
15   15  20.79999922  -0.000877298        4      630
16   16  21.59999968  -0.005502197       38      830
17   17  19.46122172  -1.229166015        7      740
18   18  28.20370719  -6.305622777       12      660
19   19  29.94840042  -7.192584050        0     1030
20   20  29.28601258 -12.133404940       10      870
21   21   5.88104817  -3.608777319        0     1050
22   22  30.37845976 -26.784308510        0      900
23   23  13.68270042 -12.451253320        0      300
24   24  26.01871530 -26.024342420       22     1330
25   25  20.17735764 -20.829648070       21     1190
26   26   5.04404016  -5.550464740        7     1030
27   27  17.98312114 -26.468988540        0     1200
28   28   8.50660753 -12.957145840        9      850
29   29  10.79633248 -18.938827100       36     1200
30   30  13.36599497 -28.413203870        7     1240
31   31  10.77987946 -28.531459810        0      350
32   32   8.35194396 -24.410755680       28      910
33   33   1.55014408 -12.302725060       10      980
34   34  -0.00388992 -17.899999200       12     1120
35   35  -2.82062504 -16.155620130       12      450
36   36  -4.75903628 -22.962014490       20      920
37   37  -6.07839546 -15.339592840       28      840
38   38 -11.32647798 -24.068047630        0      665
39   39 -11.88138209 -24.245262620       12     1180
40   40 -14.06823800 -25.587589260       36      350
41   41 -10.92180227 -18.461223360        7     1180
42   42 -12.48843186 -20.377660600        0      400
43   43 -18.63696964 -27.415068190       18     1220
44   44 -16.73351789 -23.807549250        0      500
45   45 -22.49024869 -29.944803740        7     1040
46   46 -22.66130064 -27.391018580        0      500
47   47 -15.26565038 -17.866446720       16     1060
48   48 -24.20192852 -23.451155780        0      600
49   49 -21.39663774 -20.089958090        0      750
50   50 -12.33344998  -9.875526199       16      980
51   51 -30.94772590 -22.478895910        0      790
52   52 -24.85783868 -15.225318840       25      720
53   53  -2.44485324  -1.145728097       54      970
54   54 -24.67985433  -7.169018707        4      500
55   55 -30.82457650  -7.398346555        4      750
56   56 -23.56898920  -5.265475270        4      760
57   57  -3.91708603  -0.810208045        0      350
58   58 -26.86563675  -4.251776497        0      440
59   59 -26.64738877  -1.675324623        8      450
60   60  -8.79897138  -0.134558536       11      830
61   61 -21.78250663   1.716077388        0      920
62   62 -28.98396759   6.007465815       24      980
63   63 -34.61607994   8.311853049        8      500
64   64 -25.63850107   7.453677191       15      880
65   65 -22.98762116  11.266290120       11      830
66   66 -33.48522130  19.100848030        0      350
67   67 -25.53096486  16.777135830       21      740
68   68 -18.95412327  15.681238150        0      300
69   69  -8.94874230   8.144324435        0      500
70   70 -10.91433241  10.579099310        4      750
71   71 -13.44807236  14.327310800        0     1090
72   72 -16.24086139  20.940019610        0      500
73   73 -17.51162097  24.111886810        0      940
74   74 -12.47496424  18.363422910        0     1020
75   75 -17.76118016  27.990410510        0      660
76   76  -5.54534556   9.730834410        0      850
77   77 -11.30971858  29.934766840        0      950
78   78 -10.38743785  27.493148220        0      740
79   79  -8.61491396  25.166312360        0      950
80   80  -3.40550077  14.197273530        0      710
81   81  -0.77957621   3.770246702        0      750
82   82  -3.01234325  21.186924550        0     1200
83   83  -2.05241931  32.685624900        0     1200
84   84  -2.26900366  36.128820600        0      970
85   85   0.82954518   5.790885396        0      850
86   86  22.08151130  19.671119440       19      870
87   87  12.60107972  23.864904860        0     1260
88   88   9.78406607  26.163968270        0      600
89   89  11.69995152  33.091322170        0     1090
90   90  20.64705880 -16.439632140        0      840
91   91  24.68314851 -21.314655730        0     1561
92   92  30.33133300 -27.235396100        0     1117
93   93 -26.24691654 -22.405635470        0     1040
94   94 -21.68016500 -24.458519270       10     1000
95   95  -1.57455856 -30.874986140        0      500
96   96 -29.75642086  -5.610894981        0      350
97   97  -3.66771076  26.448084810        0      900
98   98 -26.54457307  29.824419350        0     1050
99   99 -17.90426678  18.751297440        0      200
100 100  10.22894253  -6.274450952        0      880")

And I would like to create a visualization with the polygons of thiessen, then colorize the polygons according to their "valecono" value.
I tried this:
> library(deldir)
> z <- deldir(x,y,rw=c(-34.51608,30.7052719,-30.774986,36.2288206))
> w <- tile.list(z)
> plot(w, fillcol=data$valecono, close=TRUE)

Which seems weird to me, and I'm not sure how R attributed these colors.
Do you have any other suggestions for this case?
I also tried to convert my data.frame in SpatialPolygonsDataFrame, what I did not manage. I tried to convert my data.frame into SpatialPointsDataFrame, which was not a problem, but was not very useful, because I did not find how to convert it then to a SpatialPointsDataFrame.
spdf <- SpatialPointsDataFrame(coords = coords, data = data,
                               proj4string = CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 +ellps=WGS84 +towgs84=0,0,0"))

I try all this because I think that with a SpatialPointsDataFrame, it would be easier to have this visualization of polygons with colors according to the valecono of the points.

A: You can do
library(dismo)
coordinates(data) <- ~x + y
v <- voronoi(data)
spplot(v, "valecolo")

With base plot
s <- (floor(sort(v$valecono)/400) + 1)
plot(v, col=rainbow(60)[v$valecolo+1])
points(data, cex=s/2, col=gray((1:4)/4)[s])


text:
Empirical data on value drift
by Joey5 min read22nd Apr 201871 comments
Value DriftMovement Strategy
Why It's Important to Know the Risk of Value Drift
The concept of value drift is that over time, people will become less motivated to do altruistic things. This is not to be confused with changing cause areas or methods of doing good. Value drift has a strong precedent of happening for other related concepts, both ethical things (such as being vegetarian) and things that generally take willpower (such as staying a healthy weight).
Value drift seems very likely to be a concern for many EAs, and if it were a major concern, it would substantially affect career and donation plans.
For example, if value drift rarely happens, putting money into a savings account with the intent of donating it might be basically as good as putting it into a donor-advised fund. However, if the risk of value drift is higher, a dollar in a savings account is more likely to later be used for non-altruistic reasons and thus not nearly as good as a dollar put into a donor advised fund, where it's very hard not to donate it to a registered charity.
In a career context, a plan such as building career capital for 8 years and then moving into an altruistic job would be considered a much better plan if value drift were rare than if it were common. The more common value drift is, the stronger near-term focused impact plans are relative to longer-term focused impact plans. For example, you might get an entry-level position at a charity and build up capacity by getting work experience. This has the potential, though not always, to be slower at building your CV than getting a degree or working in a low-impact but high-prestige field. However, it has impact right away, which matters more if the risk of value drift is high.
Despite the importance of value drift to important questions, it's rarely been talked about or studied. One of the reasons it is so under-studied is that it would take a long time to get good data.
I have been in the EA movement for ~5 years. I decided to pool some data from contacts who I met in my first year of EA. I only included people who would have called themselves EAs for 6 months or longer (I would not include someone who was only into EA for a month and then disappeared), and who and took some sort of EA action (working for an EA org, taking the GWWC pledge, running an EA group). I also only included people who I knew and kept in touch with well enough to know what happened to them (even if they left the EA movement). It is ultimately a convenience sample, but it was based on working for 4 current EA orgs and living in 4 different countries over that time, so it's not focused on a single location or organization.
I also broke the groups down into ~10% donors and ~50% donors, because many times I have heard people being more or less concerned about one of these groups vs the other. These broad groups are not just focused on people doing earning to give. Someone who is working heavy hours for an EA organization and making most of their life decisions with EA as their number one priority would be considered in the 50% group. Someone running an EA chapter who makes decisions with EA as a factor, but prioritizes other factors above it, would be put in the 10% group. The percentages are aimed at rough proxies of how important EA is in these people's lives, not strictly financial donations. I did not count changing cause areas as value drift (e.g. changing from donating 10% to MIRI to AMF) -- only different levels of overall altruistic involvement.
The results over 5 years are as follows:
16 people were ~50% donors → 9/16 stayed around 50%
No one moved from the 10% category to the 50% category, and I only counted fairly noticeable changes (if someone changed their donations from 50% to 40%, I would not have the resolution to notice).
Value drift was high across both groups, with roughly 50% of the population drifting over 5 years. I talked to many of those people about value drift and their thoughts on long term altruism, and most of them, like most people I talk to now, had previously been very confident that they would stay altruistic in the long term. Why people generally value drifted was a mix of reasons with no clear consistent source, although life changes were a large factor for many (e.g. people moving from university to the workforce, changing cities or workplaces, marrying or having kids).
Interestingly, this data also sheds a little light on concerns of "pushing yourself too hard" and vs "taking it too easy on yourself", with generally more involved or dedicated people value drifting noticeably less (~30% vs ~60%).
Overall, these results seem pretty scary to me, especially since there's a natural selection effect where I tend to make friends who are more dedicated and drift apart from the ones who leave the movement. It's also worth noting that there have not been particularly major controversies or problems in the EA movement that would cause a lot of value drift over this period of time vs. any other. Historically, many EAs have been young non-family-starters, so we've arguably been seeing a period of artificially low value drift that is not sustainable as the movement gets older and goes through standard life changes.
Of course, the data could be a lot better quality, and I wish it were measured in a more rigorous way. I would be keen to see any more data that anyone else has along these lines. Despite quality concerns, I still think we can draw some conclusions from it, particularly given that people are already effectively drawing conclusions about the likelihood of value drift from no data at all. I also spoke to a few EAs who have been around the movement awhile, and this data broadly fit their intuitions, which gives me more confidence that it's not 100% off the mark.
The implications of this data are that people should be cautious of deferring impact to later, and should set up commitment devices to help them stick to what they care about.
One example: be wary of building capacity for very long periods of time, particularly if the built capacity is broad and leaves open appealing non-altruist paths. Instead, see if you can build capacity in such a way that it also does good at the moment, such as getting work experience with non-profits.
For instance, if you want to do direct impact, volunteering for an organization and showing how good your work is is often better than having a degree, especially an unrelated one. It's also substantially faster and does good directly. Degrees are largely a way to signal that you're a hard worker with a decent amount of intelligence, and if all you are is a CV in somebody's inbox, that's very important. However, if you've been working alongside them for months, they'll already know these traits of yours.
Another way to build career capacity with value drift in mind is to get experience and credentials that make it harder to work in a non-altruistic area. This could be getting a degree in development economics instead of economics generally, or working for prestigious nonprofits instead of other prestigious organizations. Option value is great if the risk of value drift is low, but if it's high, it makes it easier for you to slip. It's like only having healthy food in the house. If the only easy options are also altruistic, you're much more likely to stick it out in the long haul.
If your primary path to impact is donations and you want to keep value drift in mind, but you don't know where you want to give yet, don't save those donations. Put them into a donor-advised fund. That way, even if you become less altruistic in the future, you can't back out on the pledged donations and spend it on a fancier wedding or a bigger house. You can also set up monthly donations, or ask your employer to automatically donate a preset portion of your income to charity before you even see it in your bank account.
Overall, if 50% of the EAs I met 5 years ago have value drifted, this should factor into your plans. Nobody thinks they'll value drift, just like no teenager with a fast metabolism thinks they'll be the one who gains weight when they hit middle age. By all means, indulge in junk food every once in awhile and don't constantly stress about calories, but put some time into setting up your life to make it easier for you to reach for a banana instead of the ice cream, or in this case, the altruistic path instead of the less altruistic one.
For a deeper dive into concrete ways to reduce value drift, check out this post.
Value Drift10Movement Strategy4
129A Qualitative Analysis of Value Drift in EA
103More empirical data on 'value drift'
95Concrete Ways to Reduce Risks of Value Drift and Lifestyle Drift
68Effective animal advocacy movement building: a neglected opportunity?
67Estimating the Philanthropic Discount Rate
I would be keen to see any more data that anyone else has along these lines.
The reference class I've always used when casually thinking about something like "value drift" is the original CEA team from 2011.
Here's my summary of the public information relevant to their "EA dedication" today (please do comment with additional relevant public info):
Will MacAskill - if anyone is the face of EA, it's probably Will
Toby Ord - FHI research fellow
Nick Beckstead - OPP program officer (GCRs)
Michelle Hutchinson - GPI operations director
Holly Morgan - EA London strategy director
Mark Lee - unknown
Tom Ash - Rethink Charity board member
Matt Wage - I think is still donating ~50%
Ben Todd - 80k CEO
Tom Rowlands - unknown
Niel Bowerman - 80k coach
Robbie Shade - the homepage of his website (last updated in 2017 AFAICT) simply says, "I'm Robbie Shade, and I work at Google. I'm interested in effective altruism, and maximising the good I can do through my career."
Matt Gibb - unknown
Richard Batty - 80k researcher as of Oct 2017, but doesn't appear to be currently
Sally Murray - International Growth Centre senior country economist
Rob Gledhill - unknown
Andreas Mogensen - GPI research fellow
If I had to sum that up I'd say: ~75% of the CEA founding team (n=17) are still highly dedicated to doing the most good, 6.5 years on.
If early involvement and higher involvement/dedication are correlated (which I suspect they are), this data fits well with the following observation:
with generally more involved or dedicated people value drifting noticeable less (~30% vs ~60%)
[-]Thomas Kwa9mo
The CEA founding team seems like the absolute best case for value drift, because to found CEA one must have a much higher baseline inclination towards EA than the average person. Also probably a lot of power, which helps them control their environment while many EAs would be forced into non-EA lifestyles by factors beyond their control. So 25% drifters of the original CEA team feels more scary to me than 40-70% of average EAs.
[-]Michelle_Hutchinson8mo
I'm not so convinced on this. I think the framing of 'this was the founding team' was a little misleading: in 2011 all of us were volunteers and students. The lower bar for doing ~5 hours a week of volunteering for EA for ~1 year. Obviously students are typically in a uniquely good position for having time to volunteer. But it's not clear all the people on this list had uniquely large amounts of power. Also, I think situational effects were still strong: I felt it made a huge difference to what I did that I made a few friends who were very altruistic and had good ideas of how to put that into practice. I don't think we can assume that all of us on this list would have displayed similarly strong effective altruist inclinations without having met others in the group.
[-]Benjamin_Todd9mo
I think that's basically right, though I also have the intuition that drift from the very early days will be higher, since at that point it was undecided what EA even was, and everyone was new and somewhat flung together.
This is really helpful, thanks.
It's interesting to note that it's now two years later, and I don't think the picture above has really changed.
So the measured marginal drift rate is ~0%.
On the previous estimate of 25% leaving after 6.5 years, that's about 5% per year, which would have predicted 1.4 extra people leaving in two years.
Of course these are tiny samples, but I think our expectation should be that 'drift' rates decrease over time. My prior is that if someone stays involved from age 20 to age 30, then there's a good chance they stay involved the rest of their career. I guess my best guess should be that they stay involved for another 10 years.
If I eyeball the group above, my guess is that this pattern also holds if we look back further i.e. there was more drift in the early years among people who were involved for less time.
One small comment on the original analysis is that in addition to how long someone has already been involved, I expect 'degree of social & identity involvement' to be a bigger predictor of staying involved than 'claimed level of dedication' e.g. I'd expect someone who works at an EA org is more likely to stay involved than someone who says they intend to donate 50% but doesn't have any good friends in the community. It would be cool to try to do an analysis more based around that factor, and it might reveal a group with lower drop out rates. The above analysis with CEA is better on these grounds but could still be divided further.
That doesn't seem right - since this comment was made, Holly's gone from being EA London strategy director to not really identifying with EA, which is more like the 5% per year.
[-]Denise_Melchin3y
Thanks for collecting the data Joey! Really useful.
i) I'm not sure whether 'value drift' is a good term to describe loss of motivation for altruistic actions. I'm also not sure whether the data you collected is a good proxy for loss of motivation for altruistic actions.
To me the term value drift implies that the values of the value drifting person are less important to them than they used to be, as opposed to finding them harder to implement. Your data is consistent with both interpretations. I also wouldn't call someone who still cares as much about their values but finds it harder to be motivated having 'value drifted'.
If we observe someone moving to a different location and then contributing less EA wise, then this can have multiple causes. Maybe their values actually changed, maybe they lost motivation or EA contributions have just become harder to do because there's less EA information and fewer people to do projects with around.
As the EA community we should treat people sharing goals and values of EA but finding it hard to act towards implementing them very differently to people simply not sharing our goals and values anymore. Those groups require different responses.
ii) This is somewhat tangential to the post, but since having kids came up as a potential reason for value drifting, I'd like to mention how unfortunate it can be for people who have had kids if other EAs assume they have value drifted as a result.
I've had a lot of trouble within the last year in EA spaces after having a baby. EAs around me constantly assume that I suddenly don't care anymore about having a high impact and might just want to be a stay at home parent. This is incredibly insulting and hurtful to me. Especially if it comes from people whom I have known for a long time and who should know this would completely go against my (EA & feminist) values. Particularly bitter is how gendered this assumption is. My kids' dad (also an EA) never gets asked whether he wants to be a stay at home parent now.
I really had expected the EA community to be better at this. It also makes me wonder on how many opportunities to contribute I might have missed out on. The EA community often relays information about opportunities only informally, if someone is assumed to not be interested in contributing the information about opportunities is much less likely to reach them. Thus the belief that EAs will contribute much less once they have kids might turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[-]Joey3y
I agree regarding implementation difficulties, particularly long term ones (e.g. losing a visa for a place you were living in with a big EA community) can muddy the waters a lot. It's hard to get into the details, but I would generally consider someone not drifted if it was a clearly capacity affecting thing (e.g. they got carpal tunnel) but outside of that they are working on the same projects they would have wanted to in all cases.
A more nuanced view might be break it down into: "Value change away from EA" - defined as changing fundamental ethical views, maybe changing to valuing people within your country more than outside of it.. "Action change away from EA" - defined as changing one of the fundamental applications of your still similarly held values. Maybe you think being veg is good, but you are no longer veg due to moving to a different, less conducive living situation.
With short and long term versions of both and with it being pretty likely that "value change" would lead to "action change" over time, I used value drift as a catch-all for both the above. It's also how I have heard it commonly used as, but I am open to changing the term to be more descriptive.
I strongly agree. These seem to be very different groups. I also think you could even break it down further into "EAs who rationalize doing a bad thing as the most ethical thing" and "EAs who accept as humans that they have multiple drives they need to trade off between". Most of my suggestions in the post are aimed at actions one could take now that reduce both "action change" and "value change". Once someone has changed I am less sure about what the way forward is, but I think that could warrant more EA thought (e.g. how to re-engage someone who was disconnected for logistical reasons).
On ii)
Sorry to hear you have had trouble with the EA community and children. I think it's one of the life changes that is generally updated too strongly on by EAs and assuming that a person (of any gender) will definitely value drift upon having children is clearly incorrect. Personally I have found the EAs who I have spoken to who have kids to be unusually reflective about its effects on them compared to other similar life changes, perhaps because it has been more talked about in EA than say partner choice or moving cities. When a couple who plans to have kids has kids and changes their life around that in standard/expected ways, I do not see that as a value drift from their previous state (of planning to have kids and planning to have life changes around that).
I also think people will run into problems pretty quickly if they assume that every time someone goes through a life change that the person will change radically and become less EA. I think I see it intuitively as more of a bayesian prior. If someone has been involved in EA for a week and then they are not involved for 2 weeks, it might be sane to consider the possibilities of them not coming back. On the flip side, if an EA has been involved for years and was not involved for 2 weeks, people would think nothing of it. The same holds true for large life changes. It's more about the person's pattern of long term of behavior and a combined "overall" perspective.
My list of concerns about a new trend of EA's "relaying information about opportunities only informally" is so long it will have to be reserved for a whole other blog post.
I still think you're focussing too much on changed values as opposed to implementation difficulties (I consider lack of motivation an example of those).
With short and long term versions of both and with it being pretty likely that "value change" would lead to "action change" over time
I think it's actually usually the other way around - action change comes first, and then value change is a result of that. This also seems to be true for your hypothetical Alice in your comment above. AFAIK it's a known psychology result that people don't really base their actions on their values, but instead derive their values from their actions.
All in all, I consider the ability to have a high impact EA-wise much more related to someone's environment than to someone's 'true self with the right values'. I would therefore frame the focus on how to get people to have a high impact somewhat differently: How can we set up supportive environments so people are able to execute the necessary actions for having a high impact?
And not how can we lock in people so they don't change their values - though the actual answers to those questions might not be that different.
[-]Denkenberger3y
I second the being sorry about the trouble with EAs and kids. Having kids does make it more difficult to be a 50% EA, but there definitely examples such as Julia Wise/Jeff Kaufman, Toby Ord/Bernadette Young, and myself. As for the gendered response, about 3% of US stay-at-home parents are dads. But one time I thought through my friends, and it was 50%! Granted, they were pretty left-leaning, but so is EA. As an aside, now that young women make more money than young men (largely because women go to college at higher rates than men), if we made the decision just based on money, we could have the majority of stay-at-home parents be dads.
[-]MichaelPlant3y
Thanks very much for doing this.
Could you possibly say more (i.e. as much as you can) about why people left? Moving city, leaving university or starting a family don't have to stop someone being an EA. More explanation seems needed. For instance, "X moved city" by itself doesn't really explain what happened, whereas "X moved city, didn't know any EAs and lost motivation without group support" or "Y started a family and realised they wanted a higher quality of life than they could find working for an EA org" do. Putting this in dating terms, one reason people sometimes give when they break up with someone is "I'm moving to city Z and it would never work" but that's not quite a sufficient/honest reason, which would be "I'm moving to Z and this will make things sufficiently hard I want to stop. If I liked you a lot more I'd suggest we do long distance; but I don't like you that much, so we're breaking up". I'd want to know if people stop 'believing' in EA, kept thinking it was important but lost motivation or something else.
Equally, I'd be interested if you did a survey of the people who stayed and ask why they stayed to see what the differences were. If the explanations for the remainer and the leavers are consistent with each other than they don't provide any explanatory power.
I'd add the (usual) proviso that people don't really know why they do what they do and self-reports are to be treated with some suspicion. It's generally more useful to see what people do rather than listen to what they say.
Finally, it would be interesting to compare these retention ratios to other things - religion, using a given tech product, dieting, etc. - it strikes me that, if some sense, 50% retention after 5 years might be pretty good in some sense, though I agree it's also worrying put another way.
So I want to be pretty careful about going into details, but I can mix some stories together to make a plausible sounding story based on what I have heard. Please keep in mind this story is a fiction based off a composite of case studies I've witnessed, not a real example of any particular person.
Say Alice is an EA. She learns about it in his first year of college. She starts by attending an EA event or two and eventually ends up being a member of his university chapter and pretty heavily reading the EA forum. She takes the GWWC pledge and a year later she takes a summer internship at an EA organization. During this time she identifies strongly with the EA movement and considers it one of her top priorities. Sadly, as Alice is away at her internship her chapter suffers and when she gets back she hits a particularly rough year of school and due to long term concerns, she prioritizes school over setting the chapter back up, mainly thinking about her impact. The silver lining is at the end of this rough year she starts a relationship. The person is smart and well suited, but does not share her charitable interest. Over time she stops reading the EA content she used to and the chapter never gets started again. After her degree ends she takes a job in consulting that she says will give her career capital, but she has a sense her heart is not as into EA as she once was. She knows a big factor is her boyfriend's family would approve of a more normal job than a charity focused one, plus she is confident she can donate and have some impact that way. Her first few paychecks she rationalizes as needing to move out and get established. The next few to build up a safe 6 month runway. The donations never happen. There's always some reason or another to put it off, and EA seems so low on the priorities list now, just a thing she did in college, like playing a sport. Alice ends up donating a fairly small amount to effective charities (a little over 1%). Her involvement was at its peak when she was in college and she knows her college self would be disappointed. Each choice made sense at the time. Many of them even follow traditional EA advice, but the endline result is Alice does not really feel she is an EA anymore. She has many other stronger identities. In this story, with different recommendations from the EA movement and different choices from Alice, she could have ended up doing earning to give and donating a large percentage long term or working with an EA org long term, but instead she "value drifted".
[-]Peter_Hurford3y
Many aspects of this story sound kinda like things that have happened to me to make me less hardcore. I definitely still strongly affiliate with EA, donate ~15% / $30K, and spend about 20hrs/week on EA projects, but my college EA idealistic self expected me to donate ~$100K/yr by now or work full-time 60hrs/week on EA projects. I'm unsure how "bad" of a "value drift" this is, but definitely short of my full potential.
[-]Nekoinentr3y
Maybe your college EA idealistic self expectation's were never that likely, so you shouldn't beat yourself up about them.
Thanks. I don't feel guilty about it. I just chose a different life. EA is still very important to me, but not as important as it once was. I think a lot of it is, like Joey said, the slow build up of small path changes over time.
If you feel you've become much less EA, I wonder what many others who were very into it must feel. From the outside you seem extremely involved - .impact/Rethink Charity do a huge amount with limited resources, and it seems like you do substantial volunteering with them, which doesn't seem like putting little of yourself into EA. Thanks for what you do.
Ah, that's great. Thanks very much for that. I think "dating a non-EA" is a particularly dangerous(/negative impact?) phenomenon we should probably be talking about more. I also know someone, A, whose non-EA-inclined partner, B, was really unhappy that A wasn't aiming to get a high-paying professional job and it really wrenched A from focusing on trying do the most useful stuff. Part of the problem was B's family wanted B's partner to be dating a high earner.
[-]Halstead3y
This comment comes across as a tad cult-y.
I did think that while writing it, and it worried me too. Despite that, the thought doesn't strike me as totally stupid. If we think it's reasonable to talk about commitment devices in general, it seems one we ought to talk about in particular in one's choice of partner. If you want to do X, finding someone that supports you to towards you goal of achieving X seems rather helpful, whereas finding a partner that will discourage you from achieving X seems unhelpful. Nevertheless, I accept one of the obvious warning signs of being in a cult is the cult leaders tell you to date only people inside the cult lest you get 'corrupted'...
[-]itaibn3y
A particular word choice that put me at unease is calling "dating a non-EA" "dangerous" without qualifying this word properly. It is more precise to say that something is "good" or "bad" for a particular purpose than to just call it "good" or "bad"; just the same with "dangerous". If you call something "dangerous" without qualification or other context, this leaves an implicit assumption that the underlying purpose is universal and unquestioned, or almost so, in the community you're speaking to. In many cases it's fine to assume EA values in these sorts of statements -- this is an EA forum, after all. Doing so for statements about value drift appears to support the norm that people here should want to stay with EA values forever, a norm which I oppose.
haha yeah that was my take. I think the best norm to propagate is "go out with whoever makes you happy"
[-]saulius3y
I think that there should be no norm here and we should simply consider the fact that dating a non-EA may cause a value drift before making decisions. Being altruistic sometimes means making sacrifices to your happiness. If having less money, less time and no children can be amongst the possible sacrifices, I see no reason why limiting the set of possible romantic partners could not be one of possible sacrifices as well. People are diverse. Maybe someone would rather donate less money but abstain from dating non-EAs, or even abstain from dating at all. One good piece of writing related to the subject is http://briantomasik.com/personal-thoughts-on-romance/
Males having a "dating EAs only" rule is also dangerous (for the health of the community) when 70% of the community identifies as male and only 26% as female. It'd promote unhealthy competition. What is more, communities are not that big in many of the cities which for many people would make the choice very limited. Especially since we should probably avoid flirting with newcomers because that might scare them away.
Maybe the partner doesn't have to be an EA to prevent the value drift, maybe the important thing is that the partner is supportive of EA-type sacrifices. I'll put this as a requirement in my online dating profiles. I think that people who are altruistic (but not necessarily EAs) are especially likely to be supportive.
[+]Cornelius2y
[-]Robert_Wiblin3y
This is a useful analysis, I expect it will be incorporated into our discussion of discount rates in the career guide.
Perhaps I missed it but how many of the 7 who left the 50% category went into the 10% category rather than dropping out entirely?
[-]Jeff_Kaufman3y
I think this is a direction Julia and I could have gone around 2011. We didn't donate for a year (Julia was in grad school, I took a pay cut to work at a startup trying to maximize risk neutral returns) and it would have been easy to drift away.
[-]David_Moss3y
This also fits my experience.
A few other implications if value drift is more of a concern:
Movement growth looks a lot less impactful in absolute terms
It's an open question whether this means we should therefore focus our movement-building efforts on a minority of particularly likely to be engaged people or expand our numbers more to offset attrition (depending on details of your model)
Selecting primarily for high skill/potential-impact levels may be a mistake, as a person who among the very highest skill level, but who decides to do something else, may likely produce zero impact. There are, no doubt, more implications.
Indeed. I think there are a whole set of implications of value drift when it comes to movement building, particularity recruiting younger people who will not create huge amounts of good for a while.
[-]AdamGleave3y
Upvoted because this is an important topic I've seen little discussion of. Although you take pains to draw attention to the limitations of this data set, these caveats aren't included in the conclusion, so I'd be wary of anyone acting on this verbatim. I'd be interested in seeing drop out rates in other social movements to give a better idea of the base rate.
I agree. Other movement data would be interesting. The most relevant data I have seen is various veg rate studies (which generally shows like 80% dropout overall or the average person staying veg ~4 years). e.g. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/research/dietary-impacts/vegetarian-recidivism/
Very interesting. As you say, this data is naturally rough, but it also roughly agrees with own available anecdata (my impression is somewhat more optimistic, although attenuated by likely biases). A note of caution:
The framing in the post generally implies value drift is essentially value decay (e.g. it is called a 'risk', the comparison of value drift to unwanted weight gain/poor diet/ etc.). If so, then value drift/decay should be something to guard against, and maybe precommitment strategies/'lashing oneself to the mast' seems a good idea, like how we might block social media, don't have sweets in the house, and so on.
I'd be slightly surprised if the account someone who 'drifted' would often fit well with the sort of thing you'd expect someone to say if (e.g.) they failed to give up smoking or lose weight. Taking the strongest example, I'd guess someone who dropped from 50% to 10ish% after marrying and starting a family would say something like, "I still think these EA things are important, but now I have other things I consider more morally important still (i.e. my spouse and my kids). So I need to allocate more of my efforts to these, thus I can provide proportionately less to EA matters".
It is much less clear whether this person would think they've made a mistake in allocating more of themselves away from EA, either at t2-now (they don't regret they now have a family which takes their attention away from EA things), or at t1-past (if their previous EA-self could forecast them being in this situation, they would not be disappointed in themselves). If so, these would not be options that their t1-self should be trying to shut off, as (all things considered) the option might be on balance good.
I am sure there are cases where 'life gets in the way' in a manner it is reasonable to regret. But I would be chary if the only story we can tell for why someone would be 'less EA' are essentially greater or lesser degrees of moral failure, disappointed if suspicion attaches to EAs starting a family or enjoying (conventional) professional success, and caution against pre-commitment strategies which involve closing off or greatly hobbling aspects of one's future which would be seen as desirable by common-sense morality.
[-]Lukas_Gloor3y
It is much less clear whether this person would think they've made a mistake in allocating more of themselves away from EA, either at t2-now (they don't regret they now have a family which takes their attention away from EA things), or at t1-past (if their previous EA-self could forecast them being in this situation, they would not be disappointed in themselves). If so, these would not be options that their t1-self should be trying to shut off, as (all things considered) the option might be on balance good. I am sure there are cases where 'life gets in the way' in a manner it is reasonable to regret. But I would be chary [...]
You discuss a case where there is regret from the perspective of both t1 and t2, and a case where there is regret from neither perspective. These are both plausible accounts. But there's also a third option that I think happens a lot in practice: Regret at t1 about the projected future in question, and less/no regret at t2. So the t2-self may talk about "having become more wise" or "having learned something about myself," while the t1-self would not be on board with this description and consider the future in question to be an unfortunate turn of events. (Or the t2-self could even acknowledge that some decisions in the sequence were not rational, but that from their current perspective, they really like the way things are.)
The distinction between moral insight and failure of goal preservation is fuzzy. Taking precautions against goal drift is a form of fanaticism and commonsense heuristics speak against that. OTOH, not taking precautions seems like not taking the things you currently care about seriously (at least insofar as there are things you care about that go beyond aspects related to your personal development).
Unfortunately I don't think there is a safe default. Not taking precautions is tantamount to making the decision to be okay with potential value drift. And we cannot just say we are uncertain about our values, because that could result in mistaking uncertainty with underdetermination. There are meaningful ways of valuing further reflection about one's own values, but those types of "indirect" values, where one values further reflection, they can also suffer from (more subtle) forms of goal drift.
[-]RandomEA3y
What percent of those who drifted from the 50% category ended up in the 10% category instead of out of the movement entirely?
And would the graph of the number of people remaining in the 50% category over time look roughly linear or was drifting concentrated at the beginning or near the end? What about for the 10% category?
I did not break down the data that way when I made it, but a quick look would suggest ~75% moved from 50% to 10% and drifting was mildly concentrated at the beginning.
[-]Pablo1y
a quick look would suggest ~75% moved from 50% to 10%
So, to confirm, are you saying that maybe 5 out of the 7 people who moved out of the 50% category moved in the 10% category? I think it's important to get clarity on this, since until encountering this comment I was interpreting your post (perhaps unreasonably) as saying that those 7 people had left the EA community entirely. If in fact only a couple of people in that class left the community, out of a total of 16, that's a much lower rate of drift than I was assuming, and more in line with anonymous's analysis of value drift in the original CEA team.
[-]Larks3y
I think if people promise you that they'll do something, and then they don't answer when you ask if they did it, it's quite probably they did not do the thing.
[-]zdgroff3y
This is so necessary and helpful. This is a significant update for me toward a donor advised fund (and also reinforces my current practice of donating regularly rather than saving to donate).
This data to me suggests that the EA community may have made some mistakes in modeling our decisions as more rational than they are. Specifically, whether broad career capital makes sense depends a lot on whether we are rational and will optimize or whether we need commitment devices. Maybe we all need more of a behavioral econ update.
[-]Evan_Gaensbauer3y
Do you have any opinion on the role of community or social ties in preventing value drift in addition to individualized commitment mechanisms, like the GWWC Pledge.
Social ties seem quite important, particularly close ones (best friends, partners, close co-workers).
[-]John_Maxwell3y
The social circle thing might interact in an interesting way with the apparently common insecurity of not being "EA enough". Suppose I think of myself as an EA, but due to random life fluctuation I find myself not being "EA enough" for some time. This makes me feel like an imposter at EA events, which makes me go to them less, which decreases my social ties to other EAs, which decreases my motivation for EA work, which makes me do less EA work, which makes me feel like more of an imposter at EA events. This feedback loop theory suggests that drifting out of EA social circles and having ones values drift are often intertwined phenomena.
Of course, that's just a guess. It seems like it would be valuable to get some anonymized stories from ex-EAs to see what is really going on.
Anyway, I think commenting on forums like this one can be good. Reading what other EAs are working on gets me excited about EA stuff, and leaving comments is a low-effort way to feel helpful. I don't typically feel like an imposter when I do this, because it usually seems like sharing my perspective would be valuable even if I was a complete non-EA.
What's your impression of how positively correlated close social ties are with staying altruistic among those individuals you surveyed?
My anecdata is that it's very high, since people are heavily influenced by such norms and (imagined) peer judgement.
Cutting the other way, however, people who are brought into EA _by_ such social effects (e.g. because they were hanging around friends who were EA, so they became involved in EA too rather than in virtue of having (always had) intrinsic EA belief and motivation) would be much more vulnerable to value drift once those social pressures change. I think this is behind a lot of cases of value drift I've observed.
When I was systematically interviewing EAs for a research project this distinction, between social-network EAs and always-intrinsic EAs was one of the clearest and most important distinctions that arose. I think one might imagine that social-network EAs would be disproportionately less involved, more peripheral members, whereas the always-intrinsic EAs would be more core, but actually the tendency was roughly the reverse. The social-network EAs were often very centrally positioned in higher staff positions within orgs, whereas the always-instrinsic EAs were often off independently doing whatever they thought was most impactful, without being very connected.
It appears the best of both worlds might be to seed local EA presence where the initial social network is composed of individuals who were always intrinsically motivated by EA who were also friends. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the story behind many local EA communities which became well-organized independent of one another. Of course if this is the key to bringing together local EA presences as social networks which tend toward lower rates of value drift, the kind of data we're collecting so far won't be applicable to what we want to learn for long. The anecdata of EAs who have been in the community since before there was significant investment in and direction of movement growth won't be relevant when we're trying to systematize that effort in a goal-driven fashion. As EA enters another stage of organization as a movement, it's a movement structured fundamentally differently than how it organically emerged from a bunch of self-reflective do-gooders finding each other on the internet 5+ years ago.
If your primary path to impact is donations and you want to keep value drift in mind, but you don't know where you want to give yet, don't save those donations. Put them into a donor-advised fund. That way even if you become less altruistic in the future, you can't back out on the pledged donations and spend it on a fancier wedding or a bigger house. You can also set up monthly donations, or ask your employer to automatically donate a pre-set portion of your income to charity before you even see it in your bank account.
Does a donor-advised fund let you deduct money you put into the fund from your taxes? If so, that is a huge reason to use them.
Yes it does, and indeed that is another huge pro of them when compared to a normal savings fund. There are some cons of them often they are cumbersome to first set up and require a fairly large minimum deposit. But overall something I wish more EAs considered.
The other disadvantage of donor advised funds is that they often have restricted investment options. However, my financial advisor finally found one with investment freedom called the Community Foundation in Boulder (you don't have to be in Boulder Colorado to use it, but you would need to be in the US to get the tax deduction).
[-]Yannick_Muehlhaeuser3y
Thank you very much for this important work. This should be an important consideration for everyone and an important factor in career planning. I'll make sure to say something about that in our local EA group at some point.
[-]BenMillwood3y
First of all, thanks for this post -- I think it's really valuable to get a realistic sense of how these beliefs play out over the long term.
Like others in the comments, though, I'm a little critical of the framing and skeptical of the role of commitment devices. In my mind, we can view commitment devices as essentially being anti-cooperative with our future selves. I think we should default to viewing these attempts as suspicious, similarly to how we would caution against acting anti-cooperatively towards any other non-EAs.
Implicit is the assumption that if we change, it must be for "bad" reasons. It's natural enough -- clearly we can't think of any good reasons, otherwise we would already have changed -- but it lacks imagination. We may learn of a reason why things are not as we thought. Limiting your options according to your current knowledge or preferences means limiting your ability to flourish if the world turns out to be very different from your expectations.
More abstractly, imagine that you heard about someone who believed that doing X was a really good idea, and then three years later, believed that doing X was not a good idea. Without any more details, who do you think is most likely to be correct?
(At the same time, I think we're all familiar with failing to achieve goals because we failed to commit to them, even as we knew they were worth it, so there can be value in binding yourself. It's also good signalling, of course. But such explanations or justifications need to be strong enough to overcome the general prior based on the above argument.)
GWWC says 4.8% per year attrition. If we say the OP data is half life of 5 years and exponential decay, that is 13% attrition per year. That would mean an expected duration of being an EA of eight years. I think I remember reading somewhere that GWWC was only assuming three years of donations, so eight years sounds a lot better to me. Another thought is that the pledge has been compared with marriage, so we could look at the average duration of the marriage. When I looked into this, it appeared to be fairly bimodal, with many ending relatively quickly, but many ending till death do they part. GWWC argues that consistent exponential decay would be too pessimistic. If we believe the 13% per year attrition, that means we need to recruit 13% more people each year just to stay the same size.
[-]jamie_cassidy3y
Good work, it's great to have any numbers on this at all. Given these are acquaintances I wonder could you follow up to try to get some reasons from the drifters. I would like to be able to classiy the reasons for changes in behaviour in one of the following two buckets; 1) I am lazier, more self-centred than in the past 2) I was young and naive, I know better now
In combating future potential value drift, we are considering tactics to essentially coerce our future selves. If we are confident this is because 1) then I think this coercion is merited, but if it's 2) then maybe we are compounding an error?
[-]SiebeRozendal3y
Excellent post! I think value drift is one of the largest challenges of local groups: many people who seemed enthusiastic don't show up after a couple of times and it's hard to keep them motivated to keep going for the highest expected value in the long-term option.
The thing is, how do you communicate about the risk of value drift to others who are at risk? There is the problem of base rate neglect/bias blind spot: that people think the risk does not apply to them. For example, multiple people have expressed they don't understand that I took the giving pledge to commit my future self to this, while I believe I might otherwise not act on my (current) values.
[-]MarkusAnderljung3y
Thanks for this, Joey!
I'd be very keen to see more thorough data on this, for example:
To what extent is 80k's pivot away from recommending Management Consulting due to value drift?
My impression is that one of the reasons to focus less on GWWC has been attrition (i.e. value drift in these terms). Does anyone have access to those figures?
Would e.g. CEA or 80k be able to carry out a retrospective study on this?
Even more awesome would be to conduct a longitudinal cohort study on the topic.
I think this is something we may look at with the 2018 EA Survey, hopefully in cooperation with GWWC and 80K and leveraging their data as well.
[-]James_Winterford3y
summary: changes in people's "values" aren't the same as changes in their involvement in EA and this analysis treats the two as the same thing; also, some observations from my own friendgroup on values changes v. retention
It sounds like no differentiation between "lowered involvement in EA and change in preferences" and "lowered involvement in EA while remaining equally altruistic" was made here, given the wording used in "The Data" section.
I can think of 3 people I've known who were previously EAs (by your six-months involvement definition) and then left, but who remained as altruistic as before, and two more who really liked the core ideas but bounced off within the first month and remained as altruistic as before. There's 2 I know (both met the six months involvement measure) who left and ended up being less altruistic afterwards.
Which, really, is irrelevant, since you'd need a much more systematic effort at data collection to reach any serious conclusions about 'value drift', but changes in people's "values" aren't the same as changes in their involvement in EA. I'm sure there's some non-EA literature on values and changes in values you'd benefit from engaging with.
(The two who became less altruistic were riding a surge of hope related to transhumanism that died down with time, and they left when that went out; the other five left for some mix of disliking the social atmosphere of EA and thinking it ineffective at reaching its stated goals. These are very different types of reasons to leave EA! I put scare quotes around values and value drift because I find it more informative to look at what actions people take rather than what values are important to them.)
I'd like to see this. I have some data on this from the EA Survey and intend to follow up on something similar later this year.
Please do share that data when you get a chance. You guys have a lot of fascinating data in those survey results, and while I understand you have limited time/resources, it would be a shame to see them go untapped.
Thanks. Not publishing what I have on this is a 2017 regret of mine and I hope not to repeat it in 2018.
I think the 10% versus 50% descriptions are useful, and I'm surprised I have not seen them before on the forum, except for my comment here. In that comment, I was arguing that free time could be defined as 40 hours a week, so if you volunteer effectively four hours a week, that would make you a 10% EA. But this also means if you donate 50% and spend 50% of your free time effectively (like I try to do), you would be a 100% EA. Another way is having an EA job (which is typically half of market salary, so it is like donating 50%) that is nominally 40 hours a week, but actually working 60 hours a week, so it is like you are volunteering half of your "free" time. Then it would be nice clean orders of magnitude. But 100% is not very common, and it could be misleading, so 50% is ok.
But this also means if you donate 50% and spend 50% of your free time effectively (like I try to do), you would be a 100% EA
If you gave 60% of your income would that make you a 110% EA? If so, I think that mostly just highlights that this metric should not be taken too seriously. (I was going to criticize it on more technical grounds, but I think to do so would be to give legitimacy to the idea that people should compare their own "numbers" with each other, which seems likely to be to be a bad idea)
Correct - to make this physically realistic (not able to exceed 100%), you would need to say that someone who donates 10% of money and does no volunteering is dedicating 5% of their total "potential effort." But it is more intuitive to say that GWWC is a "10%" EA.
[-]RomeoStevens3y
I don't think the source of value drift is mysterious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmQicNmhZmg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIRvNxykvTQ
Can we get the 1-3 sentence summary before committing to 43min of talks?
Oh, I meant those as references thinking many had already seen them rather than 'watch these". They are both talks about the motivations for altruism given at EAG 2014-2015 by economists. tl;dr if you;re surprised that altruistic intentions tend to drift with age, other types of predictable value shifts your model is probably not taking into account some things known by economists.
This doesn't add much to the conversation. Obviously people get over-excited by EA and the personal and philosophical opportunities it provides to make an impact will lead lots of people being overconfident in their long-term commitment, and they'll turn out not to be as altruistic as they think. The OP is already concerned about a default state of people becoming less altruistic over time, and focuses on how we can keep ourselves more altruistic than we'd otherwise tend to be, long-term, through things like commitment mechanisms. So theories of psychology which don't specify the mechanisms by which commitment devices fail aren't precise enough to be useful in answering the question of what to do about value drift to our satisfaction.
I wasn't commenting on the overall intention but on enumerations of causal levers outlined by economists in the talks given. I was objecting to the frame that these causal levers are obfuscated. I think presenting them as such is a way around them being low status to talk about directly.
Thanks for the context. That makes a lot of sense. I've undid my downvote on your parent comment, upvoted it, and also upvoted the above. (I think it's important, as awkward as it might be, for rationalists and effective altruists to explicate their reasoning at various points throughout their conversation, and how they update at the end, to create a context of rationalists intending their signals to be clear and received without ambiguity. It's hard to get humans to treat each other with excellence, so if our monkey brains force us to treat each other like mere reinforcement learners, rationalists might as well be transparent and honest about it.)
It would appear the causal levers aren't obfuscated. Which ones do you expect are the most underrated?

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Had he been confirmed, Sessions would have had jurisdiction over Scott King's hometown in Perry County. Born there in 1927, she understood firsthand the violent history of such authoritarian enclaves. Her great-grandfather had been enslaved, her great-uncle lynched. Ten years old during the 1937–38 recession, she picked cotton to pay for the cost of her education. On Thanksgiving 1942, when Scott King was fifteen, their home was set ablaze. She lost her prized Bessie Smith albums in the fire and gained a visceral understanding of the depths to which white supremacists would go to maintain political, economic, and social dominance. When she was thirty-seven, the nephew of one of her closest childhood friends was beaten and killed by an Alabama state trooper, helping to inspire the historic civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
While a new posthumous memoir of Scott King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy (2017), ghostwritten by longtime friend Barbara Reynolds, does not fully delve into the most radical aspects of Scott King's vision of social justice, the occasion of her letter being read in the Senate is a call to remember her commitment to ending all forms of violence—chief among them, the economic violence of wagelessness. Importantly, she had held these sorts of views before she met Martin, having been influenced by her involvement with the Progressive Party of the 1940s prior to her relationship with her husband. However, for fear of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, she downplayed her own political lineage as a socialist-leaning activist. But as Scott King clarified in 1976, "I am not a ceremonial symbol—I am an activist. I didn't just emerge after Martin died—I was always there and involved." Over the course of their relationship, it might be said that Scott King pulled her husband to the left, especially on the issue of the Vietnam War.
Four days after her husband's murder on April 4, 1968, Scott King returned to Memphis to support the city's striking sanitation workers. She marched with an estimated 50,000 people before concluding at a rally at the Memphis city hall. Amidst drizzling rain, she reminded her audience of the terrain they had traversed and the journey ahead: "We moved through . . . the period of desegregating public accommodations and on through voting rights, so that we could have political power. And now we are at the point where we must have economic power." What did that mean to her in real terms? "Every man deserves a right to a job or an income," she told the crowd of supporters.
Scott King saw economic precarity as not just a side effect of racial subjugation, but as central to its functioning. Political enfranchisement was just the first step. As she explained in 1976, "People couldn't see the economics of the movement because of the drama. . . . [The] next step was parity in income distribution." The solution Scott King promoted is an old one, but its time has come: legislation to provide federal governmental guarantees to employment, at living wages, where people are located, and in areas that serve social needs—rather than those of the market.
Such politics and values had been at the heart of black freedom movements since at least the late nineteenth century. Although many histories of welfare state development foreground the importance of Germany under Otto von Bismarck, there was also a contemporaneous black radical tradition of welfare state struggle during Reconstruction. W. E. B. Du Bois called this tradition "abolition democracy," defined as a focus on creating new democratic institutions to provide safety and social provision while also seeking to eradicate institutions of racial violence.
Coretta Scott King was committed to ending all forms of violence—chief among them, the violence of economic precarity.
For Scott King the struggle for the franchise was indissolubly tied to the struggle for economic well-being and material flourishing. In practice that meant targeting the dominance of Dixiecrats in Congress, whose power had systematically limited the advance of Keynesianism across the color line. Congress's economic policies were tethered to the daily brutality of Jim Crow voter suppression, from which some of the most powerful members of Congress derived their authority.
For example, on Mother's Day, 1968, Scott King and members of the Poor People's Campaign planned to target Arkansas congressman Wilbur Mills. The Washington Post had highlighted Mills as the "most powerful advocate" of policies that kicked mothers off of welfare and obligated them, when deemed "appropriate," to be forced to work. Mills controlled the House's Ways and Means Committee, and thus the details on major revenue bills. Widely understood as "the most important man on Capitol Hill," he was a consistent roadblock to generating greater levels of social spending that might alleviate some of the economic violence that Scott King consistently decried.
By focusing protest on Mills and his fellow members of Congress, Scott King and the Mother's Day marchers were highlighting how the powerful Dixiecrats did not simply pack up their weaponized briefcases after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. They retained their power on Congressional committees. Sessions's 1980s prosecutions of voting rights activists was yet another tactic to maintain political power after the Voting Rights Act. But the Voting Rights Act did provide a means for advancing the political power of the black freedom movement. And in the decades after her husband's assassination Scott King wholly dedicated herself to using the vote to this end.
In 1974 Scott King co-founded the National Committee for Full Employment/Full Employment Action Council (NCFE/FEAC) to fight for legislation that guaranteed jobs for all Americans. Guaranteed jobs for all who wanted them—regardless of race or gender—had long been a goal of Scott King's and the black freedom movement. But in a time of rising inflation and unemployment, and fearing a growing backlash against the civil rights agenda, Scott King believed that guaranteed jobs were also necessary to mollify fears of economic competition on the part of white workers. In the 1940s her father's sawmill was burned to the ground two weeks after its opening, following his refusal to sell to it to a white man. She knew that shared feelings of precarity could provoke racist violence just as much as they might elicit solidarity. Scott King's struggle for guaranteed jobs to anyone who wanted one was as tactical as it was moral.
In current debates, demands for guaranteed jobs and demands for a basic income are often framed as diametrically opposed. But for Scott King and the broader black freedom movement, these were coupled together. Scott King was an ardent advocate for the National Welfare Rights Organization's calls for a guaranteed annual income (which, in contrast to some basic income schemes, always emphasized the need for a cash benefit of a living wage). But she spent more time campaigning for guaranteed jobs. In these proposals, there were income guarantees that would be provided for those who are unable to work due to age, ability, or care-giving responsibilities. The goal was to expand the welfare state through social movement victories, not impose workfare.
The black freedom movement did not see guaranteed jobs and basic income as opposites. The goal was to expand the welfare state, not impose workfare.
It is also important to note that "full employment" for Scott King did not mean what it more commonly means today: a certain percentage of unemployment that economists and policymakers deem necessary in order to keep inflation at bay. As this conceptualization of "full employment" was taking hold, NCFE/FEAC denounced this style of public policy. The organization described it as an "unconscionable view that the evils imposed by unemployment upon scores of millions of people whose breadwinners are unemployed are acceptable in the name of restraining inflation." Scott King and NCFE/FEAC insisted that full employment meant that the government needed to provide a good job to all who wanted one.
Likewise, NCFE/FEAC pursued a path away from the types of military Keynesianism that had become entrenched after the failure of the Progressive Party in the 1940s. As Scott King explained in 1975, "This nation has never honestly dealt with the question of a peacetime economy." For her, economic well-being could no longer rely on building weapons for the military–industrial complex. Just as her husband had emphasized the importance of safe and dignified work through his support for Memphis's sanitation workers, Scott King showed her support for human services by marching alongside the black women hospital workers of Charleston, South Carolina, during their 113-day strike in 1969.
Scott King's vision of full employment emphasized jobs for social needs. "We are going to have to create meaningful jobs. . . . Jobs that would serve some human need. . . . As long as there are people you are going to have certain health care needs, educational needs, things that you know will make for a better quality of living." She believed that it was essential to move beyond jobs "that were really created with the profit-making motive." Accordingly NCFE/FEAC called for jobs programs to create housing for all; to encourage environmental conservation; to build mass transportation; and to provide more funding for the arts, cultural, and recreational programming. The organization sought to reduce the amount of time people worked, without a reduction in pay.
But these efforts were not enough. On the treacherous road from bill to law, the most innovative aspects of that law were stripped away. Provisions such as the creation of a legally enforceable right to a job—with a national planning mechanism to achieve this—were victims of intense opposition from the Business Roundtable and National Association of Manufacturers. Consequently, as Americans for Democratic Action reported to its members at the time, the Senate Banking Committee "did a real hatchet job on the bill." Although forced to compromise with some of the provisions in the Banking Committee's version of the bill, the new law still demanded that unemployment be reduced to 3 percent by 1983 and that the Federal Reserve now give biannual testimony to Congress on how the Fed was working to achieve these goals (since the Fed had been effectively ignoring its mandate to facilitate maximum employment since the 1950s). For Scott King, this partial victory was not the end, but one point in a longer journey.
Scott King's struggles to create guaranteed jobs programs continue to hold resonance for today. What is the meaning of civil rights victories in the face of persistent unemployment? "The conscious politically motivated economic policies of the past few years that are keeping large numbers of Americans unemployed, especially blacks, are nothing less than a frontal assault on the gains and victories of the civil rights movement," she said during the Full Employment Action Week. "What good is the legal right to sit in a restaurant if one cannot afford the price of food? What good is the promise of fair employment when there is no employment for black Americans?" These questions endure in this era of economic inequality: the Movement for Black Lives has similarly demanded guaranteed jobs. The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, whose leaders in the 1970s had worked alongside NCFE/FEAC, continues its longstanding efforts in this area. Each group carries on the legacy of black working-class political formations developing radical and expansive solutions to the problems of its era.
Scott King knew that precarity could provoke racist violence just as much as it might elicit solidarity.
Others draw explicitly on Scott King's legacy. In addition to Senator Warren's efforts to bring Scott King's voice to the debates around Sessions, the Center for Popular Democracy's Fed Up campaign is keeping the goal of full employment on the table. On February 15 the organization's "Full Employment Defenders" headed to Congress to attend Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen's biannual "Humphrey-Hawkins" testimony—a key remnant of the 1978 law. However, in 1979, only a year after the law was passed, under Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the hearings bordered on farcical, with Volcker asserting that controlling inflation should continue to take precedence over the Fed's employment mandate—a direct contravention of the NCFE/FEAC's goals. The infamous "Volcker Shock" then raised interests rates to heretofore-unfathomable levels and helped bring rates of unemployment for black workers to as high as 19.5 percent in 1983. And too often since, this attitude—that puts fears of inflation above the lives of unemployed people—has guided the Fed's policy. But Fed Up is using the tools Scott King helped create—such as the Fed's own testimony before legislators—to try to change that.
What will Scott King's legacy look like when and if the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the Movement for Black Lives, Fed Up, and their allies are successful in achieving governmental guarantees to jobs and income? A moment of victory can suddenly recast the past history of losses. Scott King and NCFE/FEAC sowed seeds that needed time and cultivation to eventually flower. During a time of drought, nevertheless, these seeds persist.


Multiple positions may be filled from this advertisement. Works as part of the Land Records Division. Records and verifies land records documents received electronically or in paper form. Primary assignments include Land Recordation, Verification, Judgment Processing, or Land Information Desk. All staff are cross-trained and serves as backup in each area.
Recordation - Accepts and officially records Land Record documents. Reviews documents for accuracy, completeness, and compliance with the recording requirements according to the Code of Virginia, state and county standards and procedures. Scans documents and enters information into the database system. Calculates fees and taxes and generate receipt for customers. Reviews and reconciles indexed data in the system.
Verification - Reviews land transaction documents, identifies discrepancies in the indexed data, and makes corrections in the database as necessary.
Judgment - Dockets and releases Judgment Orders issued daily by the Court, and discharges judgments in bankruptcy. Processes judgments which may include unpaid federal and state taxes, unpaid water and sewer bills and court-awarded judgments. Dockets out-of-state judgments which may require interpreting state orders, verifying affidavits, preparing triple seals and sending notices of filings. Collects fees and prepares receipts for various payments. Balances receipts and prepares daily close-out reports.
Land Information Desk - Provides information, answers questions, performs research and solves problems related to land records documents for the general public, attorneys, title examiners, real estate agents, other agencies of the City of Fairfax, Fairfax County, and other state and federal courts.
The assigned functional area is in legal records and/or court administration.
Ensures the confidentiality of court records in accordance with the Code of Virginia and the Rules of the Supreme Court.
plus two years of experience providing administrative support, technical support, customer service, or working in a court or legal environment.
Two or more years of experience in Court/legal, or the land title industry.
Ability to multitask and work with limited direction to address identified objectives.
Experience using Court Case Management systems, Scanning and Imaging software; Adobe Suite; and Microsoft Office Suite (especially Word and Outlook).
Duties are generally sedentary. Must be able to lift boxes and push a cart weighing up to 20 pounds. Must be able to enter and retrieve data from a computer. Physical requirements can be performed with or without reasonable accommodations.
Panel interview. As part of the interview process a computerized test in basic administrative functions will be administered.


"Go Bonsai" is a prototype of highly realistic interactive tree growth software that I first released in 2008. I would like to eventually build a full game around this concept. As far as I know this is the first and only 3D tree simulator available anywhere. Many features are planned for the future like ability to save and load trees, more tools, wiring, roots, pot selection, scenery, higher quality rendering, etc. Until then please enjoy what I have so far which is a pretty tight demonstration of the engine with one tree type and a simple interface.
To install the Go Bonsai simply run the self installing setup program.
If you receive a missing dll error try updating DirectX via microsoft's site here.
Hey man neat program. Loving the conept and design aspects. Any ideas when ur planning to put in the wiring and such? Also cant seem to lop off some of the bigger branches??
Thanks! The player is protected from accidentally cutting the larger branches and destroying their tree. To cut the larger branches use middle click or ctrl+left mouse if you prefer.
Hey, I have had a ton of fun playing with Go Bonsai over the past 3 days, how can I support its further development?
Thanks! Just by playing it and posting you've already helped. I hope to get back to it some day and take things to the next level but right now I have other higher priority projects.
I love the sim it's really great you should totally think about turning this into an app for all smartphone and tablet users. I could really see myself using this on my smartphone everyday.
I just wanted to say thanks, that I have enjoyed your games, and am suggesting others come and enjoy your work.
This is such a good bonsai simulation. It has so much potential. There is nothing bad about it. But (if i may be so presuming) i'd suggest a few features for the next version (if and when you get round to it).
2) be able to control sun direction… Where is it at the moment?
Thank you for your suggestions! I would like to revisit this project soon and I hope to incorporate some of those features. Regarding the sun direction, the simulation runs one day a time, so there is not a really a gradual movement of the sun across the sky. So for simulation purposes the sun is always directly overhead in order to simplify things.
I started to learn programming last year, primarily so that some day I might be able to make a simulation like this.
I have seen your program around for a little while on youtube and always admired it. Only now have I managed to get a copy installed and have a bash at it. Amazing work. The user interface and animation is excellent. Thanks for sharing this.
Thanks! Good luck with learning programming!
I love this sim. Its so cool to see a bonsai game around. I hope you plan to do more like this or different trees. And being able to wire branches would be so cool.
But all in all, I'm really impressed. Great work!
Are you still working on this? There needs to be more tree options, wire options, and some music would be nice.
Thanks, lots of good ideas I would like to add! I am not actively working on this project anymore, but I hope to reboot it soon using a new game engine.
Does it work on Windows10? I've installed the game but it fails to start.
This remade on a new game engine could be a fun and invaluable tool for anyone wanting to learn more and experiment with bonsai techniques. I think it could be cool to take it a step further and collaborate with people knowledgeable in the bonsai community. Pairing it with an encyclopedia of bonsai knowledge with optional tool tips in the sim suggesting the pros and cons of each wiring or pruning decision, suggested times of the year for each action. A nice collection of pots to choose from, you could even have winning designs each month added into a collection for DLC. Subscriptions to allow you to communicate 1 on 1 with experts. Chill music, nice sceneries, and bench spaces/stands. I just think a fully fleshed out game along these lines would be awesome and I would pay decent money for it. I would just love to have every bit of knowledge I could possibly want all packed into the one spot at my finger tips and tplays be able to experiment with what I've learned straight away.
Thank you, I would like to make a game along those lines some day! I definitely have plans about how to make it into a full product, just hard to find time with a full time job and other side projects. Someday I will get back to it!
I'm juggling a lot of projects right now but I'd like to get back to it soon! It would be great on iOS.


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Anike Tourse
Writer and Director
Anike is a multimedia maker with accomplishments both in front of, and behind, the scenes. She has written for television series including One Life to Live, and Girlfriends, and is the writer and director of award-winning short film America; I Too now in distribution with New Day Films. Anike has penned and performed several solo shows touring her productions across the country as well as for the Edinburgh (Scotland) Fringe Festival; the largest international theater festival in the world, on a national Nigerian tour sponsored by the 7-UP Bottling Company and most recently as the keynote performance for the Bates College Student orientation. Anike's projects in development include the animated short film Frances the Fish about the little salmon that could and an Untitled Documentary Project about the history and rise of the Jews of Color Movement in the United States.
Angelica Salas - Executive Producer
Executive Director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) Angelica Salas turned to producing films to take charge of media immigrant representation. Salas has executive produced CHIRLA's Know Your Rights video, the long-time standard bearer for rights training across the country and its sequel; the multi-award winning short film America; I Too starring Academy award nominee Barkhad Abdi and featuring the music of Grammy winner Quetzal. Both short films have been broadcast on both Spanish and English networks for more than 11 million viewers combined and America; I Too is now in distribution with New Day Films, the largest social justice and education film distributor in the nation. Salas joins the ranks of what are estimated to be only 5% of women of color executive producers nationwide.
Donate to CHIRLA
Emiliana Guereca - Associate Producer
Emiliana is an entrepreneur based in Los Angeles, CA, with a passion for giving back to the community. Along with being an award-winning event producer, Emi devotes much of her time to advocacy programs for women's rights, Latino education, and gender equality. As a stellar community organizer, Emiliana brings her 10+ plus years of event experience to Women's March LA. In 2016, Emiliana founded the Women's March LA Foundation, a non-profit organization, and is the driving force behind the official Women's March in Los Angeles. Emi has become extremely involved in activism, both on a local and national level, and has served as the bridge between many organizations to combine forces in the Summer of Resistance. Emi has spoken to numerous groups, spreading the Women's March movement, including The League of Women Voters, Cal State Los Angeles, USC, UCLA, and was a panelist at 2017 Politicon, the HOPE Conference, and Hispanas Organize for Equality. Emiliana is currently a contributor for Huffington Post . Emi has been honored by the Pat Brown Institute (Civic Engagement Award), HRC (Ally for Equality Award), LA City Council (Pioneer Woman of the Year).
Womens March LA
The team that brings the story to life.
Nadia Voukitchevitch
Nadia's lifelong passion for social justice, diversity and human rights has led her to produce award-winning Public service announcements including, Farewell, Vote and Tape for CHIRLA. She has also produced commercials for Fortune 500 clients, and multimedia jobs for the U.S. Hispanic-Multicultural Market for over 20 years. Her spots have garnered such awards as Palm d'Ors, Sols, Clios, Addys and Beldings. Nadia has written and produced several short films including the award winning Ending Up and Behind Closed Doors. Nadia has made documentaries on homelessness, racism, broken childcare system and public education in the United States. Nadia has also worked for BBC Conquistadors and CNN Newsstand with Director Consuelo González. A citizen of the world, Nadia speaks French, Catalán, Valenciano, Creole, Russian, and Spanish.
Diana Haro & Paulina Villalba
This production duo based in Tijuana had a hand in "Miss Bala". Diana began about 2011 in independent films while Paulina started ten years ago at an entertainment group based in Los Angeles. In the past two years their paths crossed with the CANANA production company. This is where they worked on the project "Miss Bala" and Netflix bio series: LUIS MIGUEL. This particular project was released in Netflix Latin America and Telemundo in the US.
Raul Pacheco
Raul Pacheco is a guitarist and composer with the worldly Latin, hip hop and rock band Ozomatli. Full of high-energy, poignant lyrics, and association to all worlds of music, Pacheco is a global artist at the forefront of politics and activism. Ozomatli is known for its vocal activist viewpoints and the array of musical styles - including salsa, jazz, funk, reggae, rap, and others, having released seven studio albums. The group is also known for advocating immigration reform and has performed in various countries all over the world. As one of Ozomatli's founding members, Pacheco plays an active role in the bands' evolution and also makes his own music highlighting the sound of the urban Latin world. Pacheco is a seasoned Composer with over 30 credits including works as Meet the Fockers; Mr & Mrs. Smith; Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories; Dear John; Get Him to the Greek and The Duff.
Christian Misael Palma Montaño
Christian Palma is a Mexican photographer and cinematographer. Palma's photographs have been published in such publications as The Guardian, The New York Times, Washington Post, La Jornada, El Universal and many more. He has covered the Haíti earthquake in 2010, the Pan-American Games of Rio de Janeiro 2007; the World Cup of Soccer Germany 2006, and the Beijing Olympic Games held in 2008. He has been a long time photographer for the Associated Press and has his own production company, Copal Producciones. Christian's diverse career in cinematography includes such works as documentary Lorena Ramirez, Raramuri Runner, TV Azteca piece The Mixtec People Who Stole his Soul (Winner of the National Cultural Journalism Award 2018 in the category of Digital Journalism) and series La Piel del Desierto.


Metal Forming 101 Workshop — Bead It.
There is something so perfect about a simple pair of hoop earrings. Delicate and tough, soft and bold, these are the designs that stick with us and become staples in our everyday wear. We will learn the art of bending, curving, hammering, and straightening wire to form 2 pairs of earrings. This intro class will teach you about wire properties, wire tools, and many other basic principles of wire jewelry!
All of our classes have limited availability. In order for us to have space for all the clients who want to sign up for classes. All Classes are Non-Refundable. we get it- life stuff happens, and in those cases, with 24 hour notice, you can re-schedule a class ONE time with us. if you are a no show to your second class, you will forfeit your class purchase with us. This to applies to all of our standard 2 to 3 hour classes. Our pop Up classes and workshops, or workshops with 'out of house' teachers, cannot be re-scheduled, nor refunded. If you can't make it to that type of class that we are offering, we will happily give you store credit for you to use at a different time. Thank you for understanding our policies! We appreciate you!


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Artist Screening and Talk with Emii Alrai
Sunday 15 September 2019 | 12:30 to 2 pm | FREE – booking required
Join VITRINE at Kino cinema, Bermondsey Square, for an artist in conversation event with Emii Alrai who will discuss her current exhibition 'Tutelaries' and wider practice with London-based investigative journalist James Harkin. The in-Conversation will be followed by screenings of work by artist's Noor Abuarafeh and Ali Eyal.
This will be a great opportunity to gain insight into their respective research into Middle-Eastern artefacts and histories.
It will also be the final day to view Alrai's exhibition at VITRINE, London.
RSVP to: info@vitrinegallery.com
Emii Alrai
Emii Alrai (b. 1993, Blackpool, UK) lives and works in Leeds, UK. She studied her BA in Fine Art and MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies at The University of Leeds. Alrai is currently a Yorkshire Sculpture International Engagement Artist and had been awarded a place on the The Tetley Artist Associate Programme 2018. She has had solo exhibitions at: Two Queens, Leicester, UK (2019); GLOAM, Sheffield, UK (2018). Recent group exhibitions include: The Rectory Projects, London, UK (2019); Ladybeck, Leeds, UK (2017); Caustic Casual, Salford, UK (2017); Hutt Collective, Nottingham, UK (2017); The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds, UK (2016).
James Harkin Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism at Goldsmiths.
James is a journalist who writes about social change and political conflict for Vanity Fair, Harper's, GQ, The Smithsonian, Prospect, and The Guardian. A former director of talks at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), he once taught politics at Oxford University, and was associate producer on Adam Curtis's two BBC series The Trap and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. For the last five years, he's been reporting on the Syrian conflict from all sides; his last book Hunting Season was published in November 2015 by Little, Brown.
Noor Abuarafeh
Noor Abuarafeh (b. Palestine) lives and works in Jerusalem. Her work addresses the memory, history, archive, and the possibilities of tracing absence. Noor's videos and performances are text-based and question the complexity of history, how is it shaped, constructed, made, perceived, visualised and understood, and consider how all these elements are related to fact and fiction, and the possibility of imaging the past when there are gaps in documentation. Her videos and socially engaged artworks are based on interviews, workshops and other shared activities.
Ali Eyal
Ali Eyal (b. 1994, Baghdad, IQ) lives and works between Bierut, LB and Baghdad, IQ. He studied his BA in Fine Art at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad and will be starting his MA at the Rijksakademie next year. His work explores the complex relationships between personal history, transitory memories, politics and identity using drawing, installations, photography, text and video. Since 2011, has exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and festivals.
SCULPTURE AT Behind the Lid 2018 | Edit Oderbolz
Kate Cooper Exhibition
London Marathon Hotel Offer – Rest and Run
Lucy Tomlins – Pylon and Pier


Our square galvanized buckets with handles are both decorative and functional. Great for displaying your favorite greenery or utilize as a fruit basket in your kitchen. Display as a pair or individually in multiple spaces.


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