With much of the $200B/year in Official Development Assistance going to interventions of question effectiveness and over a trillion dollars sitting in private foundations, the EA movement can and should open the aperture of how it thinks about what it recommends beyond the marginal donation.
We’re optimistic the movement could influence existing pots of money orders of magnitude larger than what it does today, thus doing even more good in the world. This could perhaps have been more clearly argued in the post, open to your thoughts / feedback!
FWIW I think this is quite interesting and worth putting in the original post. Fundamentally, EAs might (reasonably) disagree with the best use of $500M in the realm of global health but I think the argument that direct cash transfers could be a cost-effective use of $200B/year in Official Development Assistance, where other interventions we’ve found aren’t maybe that scalable, is one worth talking about.
Similarly, I think the ambition to move past just influencing marginal EA dollars (very small relatively) to government aid funding is also exciting and gets around some of the critiques by folks on this post (e.g. it’s much better than the counterfactual, more scalable than GiveWell interventions, governments can’t/won’t fund policy advocacy to improve their own aid, etc etc.)
FWIW I think this is quite interesting and worth putting in the original post. Fundamentally, EAs might (reasonably) disagree with the best use of $500M in the realm of global health but I think the argument that direct cash transfers could be a cost-effective use of $200B/year in Official Development Assistance, where other interventions we’ve found aren’t maybe that scalable, is one worth talking about.
Similarly, I think the ambition to move past just influencing marginal EA dollars (very small relatively) to government aid funding is also exciting and gets around some of the critiques by folks on this post (e.g. it’s much better than the counterfactual, more scalable than GiveWell interventions, governments can’t/won’t fund policy advocacy to improve their own aid, etc etc.)
Good call! Added