I don’t have much experience with starting charities or giving career advice, but I’ve often wondered if it might be very effective for people in LMIC to advocate for various institution-design innovations that are blocked by hostile regulations across most of the rich world.
Quoting from a comment of mine in response to the Forecasting Newsletter bemoaning the USA’s failure to recognize the immense potential value of prediction markets:
Okay, so the USA has mostly dropped the ball on [allowing prediction markets that could inform national decisionmaking] for forty years. But what about every other country? China seems pretty ambitious and willing to make things happen in order to secure their place on the world stage—where is the CCP-subsidized market hive-mind driving all the crucial central planning decisions? Well, maybe a prediction market doesn’t play well with wanting to exert lots of top-down control and suppress free speech. Okay, what about countries in Europe? What about Taiwan or Singapore? Nobody has yet achieved some kind of Hansonian utopia, so what is the limiting factor?
...But maybe it’s misleading to frame the question this way, as “why is EVERY COUNTRY failing in the SAME WAY”, because most prediction market advocates have all been inside the USA/anglosphere, so other countries haven’t really had a fair shot at being persuaded? (In this case, maybe all that’s necessary is to fund some prediction-market advocacy groups in Taiwan, Singapore, India, Dubai, South Korea, and other diverse locations until somebody finally takes the offer! Then, once one country is doing it, that will make it easier for the innovation to spread elsewhere.
So it seems to me like it could be very impactful for a group of university students in LMIC to start advocating for greater adoption of prediction markets, since if the idea took off in just one country, their example might inspire many others. And there are a variety of other issues, besides prediction markets, that seem to have this same structure:
Human challenge trials of new vaccines often face strong headwinds in western nations, despite their potential to save many lives for low risk by accelerating medical progress. These scientists in Malawi, working on a tuberculosis vaccine, seem to me like they are in a position to really do pioneering work with global impact even beyond the vaccine they’re developing, by changing the wider narrative around human challenge trials. Beyond just the issue of human challenge trials, there are a variety of other ways that broken regulations can block progress in medical science.
Improved voting systems (like approval voting), and other fundamental governance reforms, are not in the unique situation of “opposed by western countries, allowed in developing countries” like prediction markets or human challenge trials. But it is another area where policy experimentation is rare and very valuable—I think the whole world could benefit from seeing successful experiments pulled off in a few small countries.
I always get excited about the idea of implementing Georgist land taxes and other efficiency-boosting “Pigouvian” taxes, although these ideas (like congestion pricing to reduce traffic in crowded city centers) often take a lot of administrative capacity to implement, so might be more suited to places like the EU than the leaner, less-experienced government bureaucracies of many LMICs.
Finally, the idea of “Charter cities” might be one of the most impactful things for people in LMIC to advocate for. This is similar the common practice of “special economic zones” that provide support for developing industries, except bigger and more ambitious—instead of just giving a tax break to some businesses that agree to set up factories in a local port, a charter city creates a special jurisdiction for a whole city, and has more freedom to create its own laws and governing structures according to international best practices. Charter cities thus have a dual promise: as laboratories for institutional innovation, they can help test out new ideas (like the ones I’ve mentioned above) that could later spread to many countries (Prospera, Honduras is a good example of a very cutting-edge, experimental charter city that is trying to leapfrog the developed world with a dazzling array of new concepts). But by starting with proven best practices in development economics that helped the growth of cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai, they can also act as a powerful engine for growth of their home country, providing prosperity to both the people who move to the new city and the country where the city is located. (Nkwashi, Zambia, is another promising project that is more closely following what has worked for developing countries in the past. Here is a whole map of similar such projects in different nations.)
All that is to say, that I would be super-excited to see some fellow effective altruists in India, or the Spanish-speaking world, or etc, set up an organization to advocate for whichever of the above ideas make the most sense in their local context. And I think EA as a whole should consider providing more support to people in diverse countries who are helping humanity as a whole take more “shots on goal” when it comes to implementing ideas that might improve democratic governance, economic growth, or scientific progress.
I don’t have much experience with starting charities or giving career advice, but I’ve often wondered if it might be very effective for people in LMIC to advocate for various institution-design innovations that are blocked by hostile regulations across most of the rich world.
Quoting from a comment of mine in response to the Forecasting Newsletter bemoaning the USA’s failure to recognize the immense potential value of prediction markets:
So it seems to me like it could be very impactful for a group of university students in LMIC to start advocating for greater adoption of prediction markets, since if the idea took off in just one country, their example might inspire many others. And there are a variety of other issues, besides prediction markets, that seem to have this same structure:
Human challenge trials of new vaccines often face strong headwinds in western nations, despite their potential to save many lives for low risk by accelerating medical progress. These scientists in Malawi, working on a tuberculosis vaccine, seem to me like they are in a position to really do pioneering work with global impact even beyond the vaccine they’re developing, by changing the wider narrative around human challenge trials. Beyond just the issue of human challenge trials, there are a variety of other ways that broken regulations can block progress in medical science.
Improved voting systems (like approval voting), and other fundamental governance reforms, are not in the unique situation of “opposed by western countries, allowed in developing countries” like prediction markets or human challenge trials. But it is another area where policy experimentation is rare and very valuable—I think the whole world could benefit from seeing successful experiments pulled off in a few small countries.
I always get excited about the idea of implementing Georgist land taxes and other efficiency-boosting “Pigouvian” taxes, although these ideas (like congestion pricing to reduce traffic in crowded city centers) often take a lot of administrative capacity to implement, so might be more suited to places like the EU than the leaner, less-experienced government bureaucracies of many LMICs.
Finally, the idea of “Charter cities” might be one of the most impactful things for people in LMIC to advocate for. This is similar the common practice of “special economic zones” that provide support for developing industries, except bigger and more ambitious—instead of just giving a tax break to some businesses that agree to set up factories in a local port, a charter city creates a special jurisdiction for a whole city, and has more freedom to create its own laws and governing structures according to international best practices. Charter cities thus have a dual promise: as laboratories for institutional innovation, they can help test out new ideas (like the ones I’ve mentioned above) that could later spread to many countries (Prospera, Honduras is a good example of a very cutting-edge, experimental charter city that is trying to leapfrog the developed world with a dazzling array of new concepts). But by starting with proven best practices in development economics that helped the growth of cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai, they can also act as a powerful engine for growth of their home country, providing prosperity to both the people who move to the new city and the country where the city is located. (Nkwashi, Zambia, is another promising project that is more closely following what has worked for developing countries in the past. Here is a whole map of similar such projects in different nations.)
All that is to say, that I would be super-excited to see some fellow effective altruists in India, or the Spanish-speaking world, or etc, set up an organization to advocate for whichever of the above ideas make the most sense in their local context. And I think EA as a whole should consider providing more support to people in diverse countries who are helping humanity as a whole take more “shots on goal” when it comes to implementing ideas that might improve democratic governance, economic growth, or scientific progress.
Yes, I was surprised not to see policy work in LMICs on this list to be honest!