People are over-averse to moving, even if it moving leads to much better opportunities (e.g., when a volcano destroyed a fraction of nearby houses, their inhabitants who were forced to move ended up better off on earnings and education, conditional on being young; see this paper). Research and incentivization can help reduce this over-aversion.
It is plausible that even EAs underconsider relocation.If so, it means a lot of impactful value may be achieved by convincing and facilitating EAs’ relocation to high-impact career opportunities.
Personally I believe that we should go even further, and look into using assurance contracts to help create “affinity cities” and zoom-towns based on common interests—we should create new EA hubs in well-chosen parts of the USA, then when people move there we can experiment with various kinds of community support (childcare, etc) and exciting new forms of community governance/decisionmaking (maybe all the EAs who use a coworking space pay a fee that gets spent on community-improvement projects as decided by a quadratic-funding process).
Besides the direct effect of creating new, well-functioning EA community hubs in a variety of useful locations, I think that supporting “affinity cities” in general (making them easier for other groups to start, providing a best-practices template of what they can be, etc) would have powerful effects for creating “governance competition” (cities and towns trying to improve and reform themselves in order to sell themselves as a zoom-town destination) and encouraging more cultural/legal/institutional experimentation which has positive externalities for the whole society (since everyone benefits from adopting the fruits of the most successful experiments).
I have numerous additional thoughts on this subject, which unfortunately this comment is too small to contain. Hopefully it’ll become a Forum post soon. In the meantime, just facilitating individual moves like you’re saying would probably be helpful, although it would be strange to have an independent group working solely on this. Better perhaps to build a culture where large EA organizations especially willing to help their employees with moving. (IMO they are already trying to do this to some extent, for instance many EA orgs try to have the ability to easily hire internationally.) This would be similar to how many EA orgs make a special effort to compensate people for time spent applying for EA jobs—getting paid for time spent on a job application is much more common in EA than in most other fields.
Thanks for the great big-picture suggestions! Some of these are quite ambitious (in a good way!) and I think this is the level of out-of-the-box thinking needed on this issue.
This idea goes hand-in-hand with a previous post “Facilitate U.S. voters’ relocation to swing states.” For a project aiming to facilitate relocation to well-chosen parts of the US, it could be additionally impactful to consider geographic voting power as well, depending on the scale of the project.
Facilitating relocation
Economic growth, Effective altruism
People are over-averse to moving, even if it moving leads to much better opportunities (e.g., when a volcano destroyed a fraction of nearby houses, their inhabitants who were forced to move ended up better off on earnings and education, conditional on being young; see this paper). Research and incentivization can help reduce this over-aversion.
It is plausible that even EAs underconsider relocation.If so, it means a lot of impactful value may be achieved by convincing and facilitating EAs’ relocation to high-impact career opportunities.
Personally I believe that we should go even further, and look into using assurance contracts to help create “affinity cities” and zoom-towns based on common interests—we should create new EA hubs in well-chosen parts of the USA, then when people move there we can experiment with various kinds of community support (childcare, etc) and exciting new forms of community governance/decisionmaking (maybe all the EAs who use a coworking space pay a fee that gets spent on community-improvement projects as decided by a quadratic-funding process).
Besides the direct effect of creating new, well-functioning EA community hubs in a variety of useful locations, I think that supporting “affinity cities” in general (making them easier for other groups to start, providing a best-practices template of what they can be, etc) would have powerful effects for creating “governance competition” (cities and towns trying to improve and reform themselves in order to sell themselves as a zoom-town destination) and encouraging more cultural/legal/institutional experimentation which has positive externalities for the whole society (since everyone benefits from adopting the fruits of the most successful experiments).
I have numerous additional thoughts on this subject, which unfortunately this comment is too small to contain. Hopefully it’ll become a Forum post soon. In the meantime, just facilitating individual moves like you’re saying would probably be helpful, although it would be strange to have an independent group working solely on this. Better perhaps to build a culture where large EA organizations especially willing to help their employees with moving. (IMO they are already trying to do this to some extent, for instance many EA orgs try to have the ability to easily hire internationally.) This would be similar to how many EA orgs make a special effort to compensate people for time spent applying for EA jobs—getting paid for time spent on a job application is much more common in EA than in most other fields.
Thanks for the great big-picture suggestions! Some of these are quite ambitious (in a good way!) and I think this is the level of out-of-the-box thinking needed on this issue.
This idea goes hand-in-hand with a previous post “Facilitate U.S. voters’ relocation to swing states.” For a project aiming to facilitate relocation to well-chosen parts of the US, it could be additionally impactful to consider geographic voting power as well, depending on the scale of the project.