global health and development will almost permanently be a pressing cause area
I don’t find this likely over the medium-long term, unless we have large-scale stagnation or civilizational collapse.
As a sanity check, 4% economic growth (roughly the rate in Africa in the last 20 years; many developing countries have higher growth rates) over 100 years translates to 50x growth. So under such conditions, the equivalent (positionally) of someone living on $1.50 today for someone in 2123 is someone living on $75/day or $27k/year in 2023 dollars, well into the standards of developed countries today. [1]
Will there still be large economic disparities and/or significant health problems sans intervention? Well, yeah, probably. But in a world that’s fabulously wealthy, a dire need case for drastic EA interventions doesn’t just rely on market failure but also state and civil society failure as well. So you should expect many problems that today look like global health and development to be solved then via more traditional public health and civil society means.
I also think it’s reasonably plausible that progress in public health will outstrip GDP improvements, such that people living on (say) $5k/year in the future will not have many of the public health problems associated with people living on $5k/year today. Both because of specific technological changes and because catchup growth on health might be faster than catchup growth on development (similar to how people in countries with median incomes of $5k/year today do not have to worry about smallpox or polio, or (in most cases) even malaria).[2]
And of course crazy AI stuff might make all of this close to irrelevant.
This might be too optimistic. But even at 3% GDP growth (roughly global average), we’re looking at a 20x increase, or about $10k/year for someone positionally equivalent to living on $1.50/day today.
Eyeballing some graphs, US real GDP per capita was between 6k and 9k in the 1930s (~9k at the beginning and the end, middle was lower. The Great Depression was rough). There was significant malaria in the US during that time, and of course it’d be multiple decades before smallpox and polio were eradicated in the US.
I don’t find this likely over the medium-long term, unless we have large-scale stagnation or civilizational collapse.
As a sanity check, 4% economic growth (roughly the rate in Africa in the last 20 years; many developing countries have higher growth rates) over 100 years translates to 50x growth. So under such conditions, the equivalent (positionally) of someone living on $1.50 today for someone in 2123 is someone living on $75/day or $27k/year in 2023 dollars, well into the standards of developed countries today. [1]
Will there still be large economic disparities and/or significant health problems sans intervention? Well, yeah, probably. But in a world that’s fabulously wealthy, a dire need case for drastic EA interventions doesn’t just rely on market failure but also state and civil society failure as well. So you should expect many problems that today look like global health and development to be solved then via more traditional public health and civil society means.
I also think it’s reasonably plausible that progress in public health will outstrip GDP improvements, such that people living on (say) $5k/year in the future will not have many of the public health problems associated with people living on $5k/year today. Both because of specific technological changes and because catchup growth on health might be faster than catchup growth on development (similar to how people in countries with median incomes of $5k/year today do not have to worry about smallpox or polio, or (in most cases) even malaria).[2]
And of course crazy AI stuff might make all of this close to irrelevant.
This might be too optimistic. But even at 3% GDP growth (roughly global average), we’re looking at a 20x increase, or about $10k/year for someone positionally equivalent to living on $1.50/day today.
Eyeballing some graphs, US real GDP per capita was between 6k and 9k in the 1930s (~9k at the beginning and the end, middle was lower. The Great Depression was rough). There was significant malaria in the US during that time, and of course it’d be multiple decades before smallpox and polio were eradicated in the US.