I strongly agree that I would like there to be more people who have the competencies and resources necessary to assess grants like this. With the Open Philanthropy Project having access to ~10 billion dollars, the case for needing more people with that expertise is pretty clear, and my current sense is that there is a broad consensus in EA that finding more people for those roles is among, if not the, top priority.
I think giving less money to EA Funds would not clearly improve this situation from this perspective at all, since most other granting bodies that exist in the EA space have an even higher (funds-distributed)/staff ratio than this.
The Open Philanthropy Project has about 15-20 people assessing grants, and gives out at least 100 million dollars a year, and likely aims to give closer to a $1 billion dollars a year given their reserves.
BERI has maybe 2 people working full-time on grant assessment, and my current guess is that they give out about $5 million dollars of grants a year
My guess is that GiveWell also has about 10 staff assessing grants full-time, making grants of about $20 million dollars
I think at the current level of team-member-involvement, and since I do think there is a significant judgement-component to evaluating grants which allows the average LTF-Fund team member to act with higher leverage, plus the time that anyone involved in the LTF-landscape has to invest to build models and keep up to speed with recent developments, I actually think that the LTF-Fund team is able to make more comprehensive grant assessments per dollar granted than almost any other granting body in the space.
I do think that having more people who can assess grants and help distribute resources like this is key, and think that investing in training and recruiting those people should be one of the top priorities for the community at large.
BERI has maybe 2 people working full-time on grant assessment, and my current guess is that they give out about $5 million dollars of grants a year
Note that BERI has only existed for a little over 2 years, and their grant-making has been pretty lumpy, so I don’t think they’ve yet reached any equilibrium grant-making rate (one which could be believably expressed in terms of $X dollars / year).
I agree. Though I think I expect the ratio of funds-distributed/staff to roughly stay the same, at least for a bit, and probably go up a bit.
I think older and larger organizations will have smaller funds-distributed/staff ratios, but I think that’s mostly because coordinating people is hard and marginal productiveness of a hire goes down a lot after the initial founders, so you need to hire a lot more people to produce the same quality of output.
I strongly agree that I would like there to be more people who have the competencies and resources necessary to assess grants like this. With the Open Philanthropy Project having access to ~10 billion dollars, the case for needing more people with that expertise is pretty clear, and my current sense is that there is a broad consensus in EA that finding more people for those roles is among, if not the, top priority.
I think giving less money to EA Funds would not clearly improve this situation from this perspective at all, since most other granting bodies that exist in the EA space have an even higher
(funds-distributed)/staffratio than this.The Open Philanthropy Project has about 15-20 people assessing grants, and gives out at least 100 million dollars a year, and likely aims to give closer to a $1 billion dollars a year given their reserves.
BERI has maybe 2 people working full-time on grant assessment, and my current guess is that they give out about $5 million dollars of grants a year
My guess is that GiveWell also has about 10 staff assessing grants full-time, making grants of about $20 million dollars
I think at the current level of team-member-involvement, and since I do think there is a significant judgement-component to evaluating grants which allows the average LTF-Fund team member to act with higher leverage, plus the time that anyone involved in the LTF-landscape has to invest to build models and keep up to speed with recent developments, I actually think that the LTF-Fund team is able to make more comprehensive grant assessments per dollar granted than almost any other granting body in the space.
I do think that having more people who can assess grants and help distribute resources like this is key, and think that investing in training and recruiting those people should be one of the top priorities for the community at large.
Note that BERI has only existed for a little over 2 years, and their grant-making has been pretty lumpy, so I don’t think they’ve yet reached any equilibrium grant-making rate (one which could be believably expressed in terms of $X dollars / year).
I agree. Though I think I expect the ratio of
funds-distributed/staffto roughly stay the same, at least for a bit, and probably go up a bit.I think older and larger organizations will have smaller
funds-distributed/staffratios, but I think that’s mostly because coordinating people is hard and marginal productiveness of a hire goes down a lot after the initial founders, so you need to hire a lot more people to produce the same quality of output.