My experience is that many global-poverty-focused EA likes to refer to their field as āglobal health and developmentā but the existing literature in institutional development economics has been mostly ignored in favor of constantly retreading the same old streetlight-illuminated ground of bednets and deworming. This may in part because it might be problematic for EA Political Orthodoxy. @Ben Kuhn has made this point cogently here and here.
Iām not sure I understood your point. What charities or programs do you think GiveWell should be funding, but arenāt, that are supported by āexisting literature in institutional development economicsā?
Thatās what I mean by āconstantly retreading the streetlight-illuminated groundā. And lack of established charities hasnāt stopped the longtermist wing (and to a certain extent the animalist wing) of EA before?
Is it possible weāre talking to past each other? āInstitutional reformsā isnāt something a donor can spend money or donate to. But EA global health efforts are open to working on policy change; an example is the Lead Exposure Elimination Project.
I still feel that you havenāt really answered the question, what do you think GiveWell should recommend, which they currently arenāt?
I donāt know how to make it clearer. Longtermist nonprofits get to research world problems and their possible solutions without having to immediately show a randomized controlled trial following the ITN framework on policies that donāt exist yet. Why is the same thing seemingly impossible for dealing with global poverty?
The academic fields most relevant to GH&D work are fairly mature. Because of that, itās reasonable for GH&D to focus less on producing stuff that is more like basic research /ā theory generation (academia is often strong in this and had a big head start) and devote its resources more toward setting up a tractable implementation of something (which is often not academiaās comparative advantage for various reasons).
GH&D also has a clearly successful baseline with near-infinite room for more funding, and so more speculative projects need to clear that baseline before they become viable. You havenāt identified any specific proposed area to study, but my suspicion is that most of them would require sustained political commitment over many years in the LDC and/āor large cash infusions beyond the bankroll of EA GH&D to potentially work.
GH&D also has a clearly successful baseline with near-infinite room for more funding, and so more speculative projects need to clear that baseline before they become viable.
Again, that is exactly what I am calling āconstantly retreading the streetlight-illuminated groundā. I do not think most institutional development economists would endorse the idea that LDCs can escape the poverty trap through short-term health interventions alone.
I donāt think most development economists would endorse the idea that a viable pathway exists for LDCs to escape the poverty trap based on ~$600-800MM/āyear in EA funding (even assuming you could concentrate all GH&D funding on a single project) and near-zero relevant political influence, either. And those are the resources that GH&D EA has on the table right now in my estimation.
To fund something at even the early stages, one needs either the ability to execute any resulting project or the ability to persuade those who do. The type of projects youāre implying are very likely to require boatloads of cash, widespread and painful-to-some changes in the LDCs, or both. Even conditioned on a consensus within development economics, I am skeptical that EA has that much ability to get Western foreign aid departments and LDC politicians to do what the development economists say they should be doing.
Okay, so why is the faction of EA with ostensibly the most funds the one with ānear-zero relevant political influenceā while one of the animalist factionās top projects is creating an animalist movement in East Asia from scratch, and the longtermist faction has the president of RAND? That seems like a choice to divide influence that way in the first place.
My experience is that many global-poverty-focused EA likes to refer to their field as āglobal health and developmentā but the existing literature in institutional development economics has been mostly ignored in favor of constantly retreading the same old streetlight-illuminated ground of bednets and deworming. This may in part because it might be problematic for EA Political Orthodoxy. @Ben Kuhn has made this point cogently here and here.
Iām not sure I understood your point. What charities or programs do you think GiveWell should be funding, but arenāt, that are supported by āexisting literature in institutional development economicsā?
Institutional reforms to help LDCs escape the poverty trap.
That doesnāt sound like a charity or charitable program to me?
Thatās what I mean by āconstantly retreading the streetlight-illuminated groundā. And lack of established charities hasnāt stopped the longtermist wing (and to a certain extent the animalist wing) of EA before?
Establishing a new charity is one thing, but I havenāt seen you propose a charitable program or intervention yet?
Why are the animalist and longtermist wings of EA the only wings that consider policy change an intervention?
Is it possible weāre talking to past each other? āInstitutional reformsā isnāt something a donor can spend money or donate to. But EA global health efforts are open to working on policy change; an example is the Lead Exposure Elimination Project.
I still feel that you havenāt really answered the question, what do you think GiveWell should recommend, which they currently arenāt?
I donāt know how to make it clearer. Longtermist nonprofits get to research world problems and their possible solutions without having to immediately show a randomized controlled trial following the ITN framework on policies that donāt exist yet. Why is the same thing seemingly impossible for dealing with global poverty?
The academic fields most relevant to GH&D work are fairly mature. Because of that, itās reasonable for GH&D to focus less on producing stuff that is more like basic research /ā theory generation (academia is often strong in this and had a big head start) and devote its resources more toward setting up a tractable implementation of something (which is often not academiaās comparative advantage for various reasons).
GH&D also has a clearly successful baseline with near-infinite room for more funding, and so more speculative projects need to clear that baseline before they become viable. You havenāt identified any specific proposed area to study, but my suspicion is that most of them would require sustained political commitment over many years in the LDC and/āor large cash infusions beyond the bankroll of EA GH&D to potentially work.
Again, that is exactly what I am calling āconstantly retreading the streetlight-illuminated groundā. I do not think most institutional development economists would endorse the idea that LDCs can escape the poverty trap through short-term health interventions alone.
I donāt think most development economists would endorse the idea that a viable pathway exists for LDCs to escape the poverty trap based on ~$600-800MM/āyear in EA funding (even assuming you could concentrate all GH&D funding on a single project) and near-zero relevant political influence, either. And those are the resources that GH&D EA has on the table right now in my estimation.
To fund something at even the early stages, one needs either the ability to execute any resulting project or the ability to persuade those who do. The type of projects youāre implying are very likely to require boatloads of cash, widespread and painful-to-some changes in the LDCs, or both. Even conditioned on a consensus within development economics, I am skeptical that EA has that much ability to get Western foreign aid departments and LDC politicians to do what the development economists say they should be doing.
Okay, so why is the faction of EA with ostensibly the most funds the one with ānear-zero relevant political influenceā while one of the animalist factionās top projects is creating an animalist movement in East Asia from scratch, and the longtermist faction has the president of RAND? That seems like a choice to divide influence that way in the first place.