I don’t think we should think of EA as having “not enough money to pay for all the things they’re now considering cancelling”. Open Phil has enough money for at least a decade of longtermist spending at current rates; the fact that they aren’t spending all their money right now means that they think that there will be grant opportunities in the future that are better than grant opportunities that they choose not to make now.
Decisions to cut back on spending on a community-wide level shouldn’t be made from the perspective of short-term budgetary constraints, they should be made by thinking about what opportunities we’ll have over the long term.
(That said, for practical reasons it does make sense for funders to give organizations budgets and then have those organizations try to optimize their spending subject to the budget constraint, instead of just giving all organizations a blank check and saying “please only spend money that is better than our last dollar”. But this is not the frame we should use when we’re deciding e.g. how much total funding EAGs should have.)
Your first comment sounded like you’re criticizing CEA for their allocation of resources. Your second reply now sounds more like you’re criticzing funders (like Open Phil) for not increasing CEA’s budget. (Or maybe CEA for not asking for a funding increase more aggressively.) I guess the main thing you’re saying is that you find it hard to believe everyone is acting optimally if we have to cut back on EAGs in these ways, given that money isn’t that tight in the EA movement as a whole.
Agree, the FTX loss in particular is not just “short-term budgetary constraints.” It would seem either that the EA movement was underfunding EAGs prior to these financial changes, or that reductions in funding are warranted now given the significant loss of expected money in the ecosystem.
Open Phil has enough money for at least a decade of longtermist spending at current rates; the fact that they aren’t spending all their money right now means that they think that there will be grant opportunities in the future that are better than grant opportunities that they choose not to make now.
This doesn’t match my model of philanthropic portfolio investment management. One key problem is that there is a lot of value in ongoing funding of organizations and projects, and having a donor who can fund you for a decade is easily >20x as valuable as one who will fund a bunch of work all at once, then disappear—and giving an organization a decade worth of funding all at once is far less useful than monitoring and calibrating to the organization’s success and needs.
I don’t think we should think of EA as having “not enough money to pay for all the things they’re now considering cancelling”. Open Phil has enough money for at least a decade of longtermist spending at current rates; the fact that they aren’t spending all their money right now means that they think that there will be grant opportunities in the future that are better than grant opportunities that they choose not to make now.
Decisions to cut back on spending on a community-wide level shouldn’t be made from the perspective of short-term budgetary constraints, they should be made by thinking about what opportunities we’ll have over the long term.
(That said, for practical reasons it does make sense for funders to give organizations budgets and then have those organizations try to optimize their spending subject to the budget constraint, instead of just giving all organizations a blank check and saying “please only spend money that is better than our last dollar”. But this is not the frame we should use when we’re deciding e.g. how much total funding EAGs should have.)
Your first comment sounded like you’re criticizing CEA for their allocation of resources. Your second reply now sounds more like you’re criticzing funders (like Open Phil) for not increasing CEA’s budget. (Or maybe CEA for not asking for a funding increase more aggressively.) I guess the main thing you’re saying is that you find it hard to believe everyone is acting optimally if we have to cut back on EAGs in these ways, given that money isn’t that tight in the EA movement as a whole.
Agree, the FTX loss in particular is not just “short-term budgetary constraints.” It would seem either that the EA movement was underfunding EAGs prior to these financial changes, or that reductions in funding are warranted now given the significant loss of expected money in the ecosystem.
This doesn’t match my model of philanthropic portfolio investment management. One key problem is that there is a lot of value in ongoing funding of organizations and projects, and having a donor who can fund you for a decade is easily >20x as valuable as one who will fund a bunch of work all at once, then disappear—and giving an organization a decade worth of funding all at once is far less useful than monitoring and calibrating to the organization’s success and needs.