I’m interested in seeing a second post on impact purchases and would personally consider selling impact in the future. I have a few general comments about this:
Impact purchases seem similar to value-based fees that are sometimes used in commercial consulting (instead of time- or project-based fees) and may be able to provide a complementary perspective. Although in business the ‘impact’ would usually be something easy to track (like additional revenue) and the return the consultant gets (like percentage of revenue up to a capped value) would be agreed on in advance. I wonder if a similar pre-arrangement for impact purchase could work for EA projects that have quantifiable impact outcomes, such as through a funder agreeing to pay some amount per intervention distributed, student educated, etc. Of course, the tracked outcome should reflect the funders true goals to prevent gaming the metric.
It seems like impact purchases would be particularly helpful for people coming into the EA community who don’t yet have good EA references/prestige/track-record but are confident they can complete an impactful project, or who want to work on unorthodox ideas that the community doesn’t have the expertise to evaluate. If they try something out and it works then they can get funds to continue and preliminary results for a grant, if not, it’s feedback to go more mainstream. For this dynamic to work people should probably be advised to plan relatively short projects (say a up too few months), otherwise they could spend a lot of time on something nobody values.
This could be a particularly interesting time to trial impact purchases used in conjunction with government UBI (if that ends up being fully brought in anywhere). UBI then removes the barrier of requiring a secure salary before taking on a project.
From my experience applying to a handful of early-career academic grants and a few EA grants, I agree that almost none provide any/useful feedback (beyond accepted or declined), either for the initial application or for progress or completion reports. However, worse than having no feedback is that I once heard from an European Research Council (ERC) grant reviewer that their review committees are required to provided feedback on rejected applications, but also instructed to make sure the feedback is vague and obfuscated so the applicant will have no grounds to ask for an appeal, which means the applicant gets feedback the reviewers know won’t be useful for improving their project… Why do they bother???
With regards to implementation. I think one point to consider is the demand from impacters relative to funds of purchasers. At least in academia, funding is constrained and grant success rates are often <20%, and so grantees know that it is unlikely they’ll get a grant to do their project (academic granters often say they turn away a lot of great projects they want to fund). If impact purchasers were similarly funding constrained relative to the number of good projects, I think the whole scheme would be less appealing as then even if I complete a great project, getting its impact bought would still involve a bit/lot of luck.
This could be a particularly interesting time to trial impact purchases used in conjunction with government UBI (if that ends up being fully brought in anywhere). UBI then removes the barrier of requiring a secure salary before taking on a project.
Impact purchases + EA Hotel seems like a match made in heaven. EA Hotel even talks about taking a hits-based approach, so having a pool of funds to award both EA Hotel (or whatever it’s new name is) and the persons staying at the hotel who did the work that earned the funding sounds like a pretty interesting idea!
I’m interested in seeing a second post on impact purchases and would personally consider selling impact in the future. I have a few general comments about this:
Impact purchases seem similar to value-based fees that are sometimes used in commercial consulting (instead of time- or project-based fees) and may be able to provide a complementary perspective. Although in business the ‘impact’ would usually be something easy to track (like additional revenue) and the return the consultant gets (like percentage of revenue up to a capped value) would be agreed on in advance. I wonder if a similar pre-arrangement for impact purchase could work for EA projects that have quantifiable impact outcomes, such as through a funder agreeing to pay some amount per intervention distributed, student educated, etc. Of course, the tracked outcome should reflect the funders true goals to prevent gaming the metric.
It seems like impact purchases would be particularly helpful for people coming into the EA community who don’t yet have good EA references/prestige/track-record but are confident they can complete an impactful project, or who want to work on unorthodox ideas that the community doesn’t have the expertise to evaluate. If they try something out and it works then they can get funds to continue and preliminary results for a grant, if not, it’s feedback to go more mainstream. For this dynamic to work people should probably be advised to plan relatively short projects (say a up too few months), otherwise they could spend a lot of time on something nobody values.
This could be a particularly interesting time to trial impact purchases used in conjunction with government UBI (if that ends up being fully brought in anywhere). UBI then removes the barrier of requiring a secure salary before taking on a project.
From my experience applying to a handful of early-career academic grants and a few EA grants, I agree that almost none provide any/useful feedback (beyond accepted or declined), either for the initial application or for progress or completion reports. However, worse than having no feedback is that I once heard from an European Research Council (ERC) grant reviewer that their review committees are required to provided feedback on rejected applications, but also instructed to make sure the feedback is vague and obfuscated so the applicant will have no grounds to ask for an appeal, which means the applicant gets feedback the reviewers know won’t be useful for improving their project… Why do they bother???
With regards to implementation. I think one point to consider is the demand from impacters relative to funds of purchasers. At least in academia, funding is constrained and grant success rates are often <20%, and so grantees know that it is unlikely they’ll get a grant to do their project (academic granters often say they turn away a lot of great projects they want to fund). If impact purchasers were similarly funding constrained relative to the number of good projects, I think the whole scheme would be less appealing as then even if I complete a great project, getting its impact bought would still involve a bit/lot of luck.
These posts about impact prizes and altruistic equity may also be of interest to consider.
Impact purchases + EA Hotel seems like a match made in heaven. EA Hotel even talks about taking a hits-based approach, so having a pool of funds to award both EA Hotel (or whatever it’s new name is) and the persons staying at the hotel who did the work that earned the funding sounds like a pretty interesting idea!