This is a great post—thanks a lot for writing it. I work at GPI, so want to add a bit of context on a couple of points, and add some of my own thoughts. Standard disclaimer that these are my personal views and not those of GPI though.
First, on GPI’s research agenda, and our progress in econ:
“(One economics student told me that when reading the GPI research agenda, the economics parts read like it was written by philosophers. Maybe this contributes to the lack of headway on their economics research plans.)”
I think this is accurate and a reflection of how the research agenda was written and has evolved. For what it’s worth, we’re currently working on refreshing the research agenda to reflect some of the ‘exploration research’ we’ve done in economics in the past ~18 months—we should have an updated version in the next few months. More generally, we’ve had very little econ research capacity to date beyond pre-doctoral researchers (very junior in academic terms). This will improve very shortly—as Phil notes in a previous comment, we’ve hired two postdocs to start in the next month—but as others have noted, high quality academic work is hard and takes quite a lot of time, so this may not result in a step change in actionable econ research coming out of GPI in the short run, which leads on to my second comment…
Second, on theories of change—your point D1 is really important. We’ve actively discussed various ‘theories of change’ internally at GPI and how these should affect our strategy. A decent part of this discussion depends on what others are doing in EA and how we think GPI fits into the overall EA movement portfolio. Even within the (relatively narrow) scope of doing academic GP research in econ and philosophy, possible theories of change for GPI include (but are not limited to!) prioritising building up academic credibility for long-run influence, prioritising research that is more actionable for EAs/philanthropists and policymakers, prioritising influencing policymakers / the general public, or prioritising influencing the next generation through higher education. These are not mutually exclusive, but placing different emphasis on one or the other may imply different strategy. We are still very young, and so far we have mostly been focused on laying foundations for the first of these, and have so far made much more progress on this in philosophy than econ, though I expect things will evolve in the next few years. Personally, I don’t think we’ll be able to effectively target all of the possible theories of change, and I’d love to see more people and groups working on these.
This is a great post—thanks a lot for writing it. I work at GPI, so want to add a bit of context on a couple of points, and add some of my own thoughts. Standard disclaimer that these are my personal views and not those of GPI though.
First, on GPI’s research agenda, and our progress in econ:
“(One economics student told me that when reading the GPI research agenda, the economics parts read like it was written by philosophers. Maybe this contributes to the lack of headway on their economics research plans.)”
I think this is accurate and a reflection of how the research agenda was written and has evolved. For what it’s worth, we’re currently working on refreshing the research agenda to reflect some of the ‘exploration research’ we’ve done in economics in the past ~18 months—we should have an updated version in the next few months. More generally, we’ve had very little econ research capacity to date beyond pre-doctoral researchers (very junior in academic terms). This will improve very shortly—as Phil notes in a previous comment, we’ve hired two postdocs to start in the next month—but as others have noted, high quality academic work is hard and takes quite a lot of time, so this may not result in a step change in actionable econ research coming out of GPI in the short run, which leads on to my second comment…
Second, on theories of change—your point D1 is really important. We’ve actively discussed various ‘theories of change’ internally at GPI and how these should affect our strategy. A decent part of this discussion depends on what others are doing in EA and how we think GPI fits into the overall EA movement portfolio. Even within the (relatively narrow) scope of doing academic GP research in econ and philosophy, possible theories of change for GPI include (but are not limited to!) prioritising building up academic credibility for long-run influence, prioritising research that is more actionable for EAs/philanthropists and policymakers, prioritising influencing policymakers / the general public, or prioritising influencing the next generation through higher education. These are not mutually exclusive, but placing different emphasis on one or the other may imply different strategy. We are still very young, and so far we have mostly been focused on laying foundations for the first of these, and have so far made much more progress on this in philosophy than econ, though I expect things will evolve in the next few years. Personally, I don’t think we’ll be able to effectively target all of the possible theories of change, and I’d love to see more people and groups working on these.