We’d obviously be very excited to take 10x our budget if you’re offering ;)
Right now, 10x our budget would be ~$14M, which would still be 8x smaller than large think tanks like the Brookings Institution. I think if we had 10x the budget, the main thing we would do is expand our research staff as rapidly as non-financial constraints (e.g., management, operations, and team culture) allow.
There are definitely many more areas of research we could be working in, both within our existing cause areas (currently farmed animal welfare, wild animal welfare, invertebrate welfare, longtermism, and EA movement building) and other cause areas we aren’t working in yet. We’d also need more operations staff and management to facilitate this.
As for specific research questions, I think we have a much clearer vision of what we would do with 2x the money than 10x the money. I personally (speaking for myself not the rest of the org) would love to see us hire staff to work more directly on farmed animal welfare policy and to investigate meat alternatives, do much more to understand EA community health and movement building, do more fundamental research (e.g., like our work on moral weight and investigating well-being metrics), and potentially investigate new charities that could be launched (similar to CE’s work). But that is just a wishlist and it would change as I talk to more people.
We’re already working a lot to prioritize what questions we want to tackle—our longtermist and wild animal departments, for example, just recently expanded beyond one person and we’re in the process of making new research agendas, so it is hard to recommend ideas in those areas right now.
One benefit of hiring more people, though, is we’d have more people to do the important work of figuring out what it is we should do!
What would you do if Rethink Priorities had significantly more money? (Eg, 2x or 10x your current budget)
Hi Neel,
We’d obviously be very excited to take 10x our budget if you’re offering ;)
Right now, 10x our budget would be ~$14M, which would still be 8x smaller than large think tanks like the Brookings Institution. I think if we had 10x the budget, the main thing we would do is expand our research staff as rapidly as non-financial constraints (e.g., management, operations, and team culture) allow.
There are definitely many more areas of research we could be working in, both within our existing cause areas (currently farmed animal welfare, wild animal welfare, invertebrate welfare, longtermism, and EA movement building) and other cause areas we aren’t working in yet. We’d also need more operations staff and management to facilitate this.
As for specific research questions, I think we have a much clearer vision of what we would do with 2x the money than 10x the money. I personally (speaking for myself not the rest of the org) would love to see us hire staff to work more directly on farmed animal welfare policy and to investigate meat alternatives, do much more to understand EA community health and movement building, do more fundamental research (e.g., like our work on moral weight and investigating well-being metrics), and potentially investigate new charities that could be launched (similar to CE’s work). But that is just a wishlist and it would change as I talk to more people.
We’re already working a lot to prioritize what questions we want to tackle—our longtermist and wild animal departments, for example, just recently expanded beyond one person and we’re in the process of making new research agendas, so it is hard to recommend ideas in those areas right now.
One benefit of hiring more people, though, is we’d have more people to do the important work of figuring out what it is we should do!