I don’t think it makes sense to compare buying real estate to grant funding. Grant money gets spent and goes away. Real estate you can still sell, and of course rent it out in the meantime when you yourself aren’t running event. The super-prime English property market may be very volatile (I don’t actually know) but even in the very worst market conditions I would expect CEA to get at least half their money back if they decided they want to sell.
Note that if they sell, the money stays in EVF, and doesn’t go back to OpenPhil. So you could look at this as OpenPhil making a £15M grant to EVF, earmarked for the purchase but with an unrestricted fallback option. Where’s the justification for the grant in that scenario?
“OpenPhil has a lot of money from one guy and he doesn’t give a shit”
Look EA has always been largely a small cabal of people passing money around in a non-transparent fashion. I don’t think this is a bad thing! Conspiracies are good and they can achieve an awful lot! But somehow it’s news to people on the EA forum???
Half their money is still 8 million pounds. Even if they sold it today at the same price they would be down 2 million pounds in stamp duty.
I would also find it bad if they allocated a 2 million grant to something I found dubious, like highly expensive vacation retreats for CEA members or something. If you take the “$5000 to save a life” figure seriously, that’s money could have saved hundreds of lives. It’s still the kind of money that requires thorough justification, at the very least.
I think it’s more complex than that, but if you want to make that assumption then that consideration can be worked into the calculations—but that still requires we have actual numbers to work with.
I don’t think it makes sense to compare buying real estate to grant funding. Grant money gets spent and goes away. Real estate you can still sell, and of course rent it out in the meantime when you yourself aren’t running event. The super-prime English property market may be very volatile (I don’t actually know) but even in the very worst market conditions I would expect CEA to get at least half their money back if they decided they want to sell.
Note that if they sell, the money stays in EVF, and doesn’t go back to OpenPhil. So you could look at this as OpenPhil making a £15M grant to EVF, earmarked for the purchase but with an unrestricted fallback option. Where’s the justification for the grant in that scenario?
“OpenPhil has a lot of money from one guy and he doesn’t give a shit”
Look EA has always been largely a small cabal of people passing money around in a non-transparent fashion. I don’t think this is a bad thing! Conspiracies are good and they can achieve an awful lot! But somehow it’s news to people on the EA forum???
Half their money is still 8 million pounds. Even if they sold it today at the same price they would be down 2 million pounds in stamp duty.
I would also find it bad if they allocated a 2 million grant to something I found dubious, like highly expensive vacation retreats for CEA members or something. If you take the “$5000 to save a life” figure seriously, that’s money could have saved hundreds of lives. It’s still the kind of money that requires thorough justification, at the very least.
I think it’s more complex than that, but if you want to make that assumption then that consideration can be worked into the calculations—but that still requires we have actual numbers to work with.