Yes I agree with you with regards to amount of funding—one EA initiative I’d actually like to see is funding EA students from LMICs to go to the world’s best universities.
And yes, my idea is more about fine-tuning the funding to go to people where the counterfactual impact is higher (another plus would be that less EA money is used up by wealthier people, freeing it up for less wealthy people).
I think means-testing is fairly widely used (at least in the UK). I use it myself to selectively distribute products from my social enterprise towards kids from lower income backgrounds. I’m fairly confident that the downsides of means-testing - weird incentives, people trying to “game” the system and the indignity it makes some people feel, generally don’t outweigh the benefits of the better targeting of funding. And in the EA context, I think the benefits of better targeting funding will be larger than usual because of the cost effectiveness with which the saved EA money will be spent.
Yes I agree with you with regards to amount of funding—one EA initiative I’d actually like to see is funding EA students from LMICs to go to the world’s best universities.
And yes, my idea is more about fine-tuning the funding to go to people where the counterfactual impact is higher (another plus would be that less EA money is used up by wealthier people, freeing it up for less wealthy people).
I think means-testing is fairly widely used (at least in the UK). I use it myself to selectively distribute products from my social enterprise towards kids from lower income backgrounds. I’m fairly confident that the downsides of means-testing - weird incentives, people trying to “game” the system and the indignity it makes some people feel, generally don’t outweigh the benefits of the better targeting of funding. And in the EA context, I think the benefits of better targeting funding will be larger than usual because of the cost effectiveness with which the saved EA money will be spent.