Hm. Interesting. I didnât know this was an Open Philanthropy focus area. Webpage here.
I read the book by Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson earlier this year and loved it. Itâs one of my favourite non-fiction books Iâve read recently. (Since then, other people have taken up the âAbundanceâ label, but I havenât kept track of who are they are, how similar/âdifferent their views are to Klein and Thompsonâs in the book, or whether I agree with them.)
I wouldnât say Open Philâs âAbundance & Growthâ focus area is necessarily many orders of magnitude worse than global health/âglobal poverty or conventional global catastrophic risks like pandemics. (Whether you think AGI-based global catastrophic risks are many orders of magnitude more cost-effective to focus on than âAbundance & Growthâ depends on disputed assumptions I almost certainly strongly disagree with you about.)
The two parts of the âAbundance & Growthâ focus area are currently housing policy reform, i.e. YIMBYism, and innovation policy, which seems closely related to metascience, about which there is a chapter in Klein and Thompsonâs Abundance book.
Housing policy reform is intrinsically very important. Itâs also important because of what it means for U.S. politics. Democrats need to get a handle on all aspects of affordability, especially housing affordability. The Trump administrationâs and Republican Partyâs scary tilt toward illiberalism and authoritarianism needs strong challengers. Housing affordability in particular and affordability in general is a reason Democrats arenât more popular than they are, and a reason they havenât been able to mount as strong a challenge to Trumpâs illiberal/âauthoritarian tactics as I wish they could have so far. Much not only in the U.S. but around the world depends on whether the U.S. stays a full liberal democracy. The United States has dropped considerably in comparative assessments of countriesâ level of freedom or democracy. This worries me, and although the effects are hard to quantify rigorously, obviously they are huge. USAID was one of the first casualties of Trumpâs current administration.
Metascience and innovation policy seem highly uncertain, but also extremely worth trying. The metascience chapter in the Abundance book was probably the most exciting. If the speed of progress in science and technology can be significantly increased by policy reform or institutional reform, or by creating new institutions, then the benefits are also hard to quantify rigorously but also surely must be huge.
So, overall, I think I tentatively support Open Philanthropy getting into these two areas. It, of course, depends on what exactly theyâre doing, though.
Hm. Interesting. I didnât know this was an Open Philanthropy focus area. Webpage here.
I read the book by Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson earlier this year and loved it. Itâs one of my favourite non-fiction books Iâve read recently. (Since then, other people have taken up the âAbundanceâ label, but I havenât kept track of who are they are, how similar/âdifferent their views are to Klein and Thompsonâs in the book, or whether I agree with them.)
I wouldnât say Open Philâs âAbundance & Growthâ focus area is necessarily many orders of magnitude worse than global health/âglobal poverty or conventional global catastrophic risks like pandemics. (Whether you think AGI-based global catastrophic risks are many orders of magnitude more cost-effective to focus on than âAbundance & Growthâ depends on disputed assumptions I almost certainly strongly disagree with you about.)
The two parts of the âAbundance & Growthâ focus area are currently housing policy reform, i.e. YIMBYism, and innovation policy, which seems closely related to metascience, about which there is a chapter in Klein and Thompsonâs Abundance book.
Housing policy reform is intrinsically very important. Itâs also important because of what it means for U.S. politics. Democrats need to get a handle on all aspects of affordability, especially housing affordability. The Trump administrationâs and Republican Partyâs scary tilt toward illiberalism and authoritarianism needs strong challengers. Housing affordability in particular and affordability in general is a reason Democrats arenât more popular than they are, and a reason they havenât been able to mount as strong a challenge to Trumpâs illiberal/âauthoritarian tactics as I wish they could have so far. Much not only in the U.S. but around the world depends on whether the U.S. stays a full liberal democracy. The United States has dropped considerably in comparative assessments of countriesâ level of freedom or democracy. This worries me, and although the effects are hard to quantify rigorously, obviously they are huge. USAID was one of the first casualties of Trumpâs current administration.
Metascience and innovation policy seem highly uncertain, but also extremely worth trying. The metascience chapter in the Abundance book was probably the most exciting. If the speed of progress in science and technology can be significantly increased by policy reform or institutional reform, or by creating new institutions, then the benefits are also hard to quantify rigorously but also surely must be huge.
So, overall, I think I tentatively support Open Philanthropy getting into these two areas. It, of course, depends on what exactly theyâre doing, though.