But when I look at this chart, my main takeaway is that there’s a ton of money being spent on welfare, and that working to make sure that money is spent as efficiently as possible could have a huge impact.
I think this is basically true.
A while back I thought that it was false—in particular, I thought that the public money was extremely tight, and that fighting to change a budget was an extremely political issue where one would face a lot of competition.
My experience collaborating with public organizations and hearing from public servants so far has been very different. I still think that budgets are hard to change. But within public organizations there is usually a fair amount of willingness to reconsider how their allocated budget is spent, and lots of space for savings and improvement.
This is still more anecdote than hard evidence. Yet I really think this is worth thinking more about. I think one very effective thing EAs can do is study closely public organizations (by eg interviewing their members or applying for jobs in the organization), and then think hard about how to help the organization better achieve their goals.
Thank you for sharing that! I like your idea about talking to people within these orgs—I know that my sense of how things work has been really changed by actually seeing some of this firsthand.
I think another element to consider is what level of government we’re talking about. My sense is that the federal budget tends to be more politicized than many state and local-level budgets, and that with state and local budgets there’s more room for a discussion of “what is actually needed here in the community” vs. it becoming a straightforward red/blue issue (at least here in the states). I wonder if this means that, at least in some instances, interventions related to state and local-level would be more tractable than national ones. I’m reminded of the Zurich ballot initiative, for example.
I think this is basically true.
A while back I thought that it was false—in particular, I thought that the public money was extremely tight, and that fighting to change a budget was an extremely political issue where one would face a lot of competition.
My experience collaborating with public organizations and hearing from public servants so far has been very different. I still think that budgets are hard to change. But within public organizations there is usually a fair amount of willingness to reconsider how their allocated budget is spent, and lots of space for savings and improvement.
This is still more anecdote than hard evidence. Yet I really think this is worth thinking more about. I think one very effective thing EAs can do is study closely public organizations (by eg interviewing their members or applying for jobs in the organization), and then think hard about how to help the organization better achieve their goals.
Thank you for sharing that! I like your idea about talking to people within these orgs—I know that my sense of how things work has been really changed by actually seeing some of this firsthand.
I think another element to consider is what level of government we’re talking about. My sense is that the federal budget tends to be more politicized than many state and local-level budgets, and that with state and local budgets there’s more room for a discussion of “what is actually needed here in the community” vs. it becoming a straightforward red/blue issue (at least here in the states). I wonder if this means that, at least in some instances, interventions related to state and local-level would be more tractable than national ones. I’m reminded of the Zurich ballot initiative, for example.