Yes this is absolutely not a thing that just GPP did—which is why I tried to call out in this post that several other groups were important to recommending it! (And also something I emphasised in the facebook post you link to.)
I don’t know how many groups fed into the overall process and I’m sure there were big parts of the process I have no knowledge about. I know of two other quite significant entities that have publicly made very similar recommendations (Angus Deaton and the Centre for Global Development) as well as about half a dozen other entities that made similar but slightly narrower suggestions (many of which we cited). The general development aid sector is clearly enormous, but the field of people proposing this sort of thing is smaller.
Assigning causal credit for policy outcomes is very complicated. It obviously matters to us to assess it, so that we can tell if it’s worth doing more work in an area. What we do is just talk to the people we made recommendations to and ask them how significant a role our recommendation played. Usually people prefer we don’t share their reflections further, which is unfortunate but inevitable.
Yes this is absolutely not a thing that just GPP did—which is why I tried to call out in this post that several other groups were important to recommending it!
I have to admit I skimmed over that as I was reading it. It does make it especially unegregious, and I tried to be clear that I didn’t think you were doing anything wrong! I believe it was easy to skim over because it wasn’t flagged as a qualification to the claim that this was a tangible result, but as I said I understand you can’t really make qualifications explicit when needing to raise money.
(And also something I emphasised in the facebook post you link to.)
Yes this is absolutely not a thing that just GPP did—which is why I tried to call out in this post that several other groups were important to recommending it! (And also something I emphasised in the facebook post you link to.)
I don’t know how many groups fed into the overall process and I’m sure there were big parts of the process I have no knowledge about. I know of two other quite significant entities that have publicly made very similar recommendations (Angus Deaton and the Centre for Global Development) as well as about half a dozen other entities that made similar but slightly narrower suggestions (many of which we cited). The general development aid sector is clearly enormous, but the field of people proposing this sort of thing is smaller.
Assigning causal credit for policy outcomes is very complicated. It obviously matters to us to assess it, so that we can tell if it’s worth doing more work in an area. What we do is just talk to the people we made recommendations to and ask them how significant a role our recommendation played. Usually people prefer we don’t share their reflections further, which is unfortunate but inevitable.
I have to admit I skimmed over that as I was reading it. It does make it especially unegregious, and I tried to be clear that I didn’t think you were doing anything wrong! I believe it was easy to skim over because it wasn’t flagged as a qualification to the claim that this was a tangible result, but as I said I understand you can’t really make qualifications explicit when needing to raise money.
That’s entirely true.