[Article] “Should you play to your comparative advantage when choosing your career?” by Benjamin Todd

“Do the job that’s your comparative advantage” might sound like obvious advice, but it turns out to be more complicated.

In this article, we sketch a naive application of comparative advantage to choosing between two career options, and show that it doesn’t apply. Then we give a more complex example where comparative advantage comes back into play, and show how it’s different from “personal fit”.

In brief, we think comparative advantage matters when you’re closely coordinating with a community to fill a limited number of positions, like we are in the effective altruism community. Otherwise, it’s better to do whatever seems highest-impact at the margin.

In the final section, we give some thoughts on how to assess your comparative advantage, and some mistakes people might be making in the effective altruism community.

The following are some research notes on our current thoughts, which we’re publishing for feedback. We’re pretty uncertain about many of the findings, and even how to best define the terms, and could easily see ourselves changing our minds if we did more research.

Narrated by the author.

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First published:
August 13th, 2018

Source:
https://80000hours.org/articles/comparative-advantage