What is the main issue in EA governance then, in your view? It strikes me [I’m speaking in a personal capacity, etc.] the challenge for EA is a combination of the fact the resources are quite centralised and that trustees of charities are (as you say) not accountable to anyone. One by itself might be fine. Both together is tricky. I’m not sure where this fits in with your framework, sorry.
There’s one big funder (Open Philanthropy), many of the key organisations are really just one organisation wearing different hats (EVF), and these are accountable only to their trustees. What’s more, as Buck notes here, all the dramatis personae are quite friendly (“lot of EA organizations are led and influenced by a pretty tightly knit group of people who consider themselves allies”). Obviously, some people will be in favour of centralised, unaccountable decision-making—those who think it gets the right results—but it’s not the structure we expect to be conducive to good governance in general.
If power in effective altruism were decentralised, that is, there were lots of ‘buyers’ and ‘sellers’ in the ‘EA marketplace’, then you’d expect competitive pressure to improve governance: poorly run organisations will be wracked by the “gales of creative destruction” as donors go elsewhere.
If leaders in effective altruism were accountable, for instance, if EVF became a membership organisation and the board were elected by its (paying?) members, that would provide a different sort of check and balance. I don’t think it’s reasonable for individual donors, i.e. Dustin Mosktovitz and Cari Tuna, or cause-specific organisations, to submit their money to the democratic will, but it seems more sensible for central organisations, those that are something like natural monopolies and ostensibly serve the whole community, to have democratic elements.
As it is, the governance structure across EA is, essentially, for its leaders to police themselves—and wait for media stories to break. Particularly in light of recent events, it’s unclear if this is the optimal approach. I am reminded of the following passage in Pratchett.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Your Grace.” “I know that one,” said Vimes. “Who watches the watchmen? Me, Mr. Pessimal.” “Ah, but who watches you, Your Grace?” said the inspector with a brief little smile. “I do that, too. All the time,” said Vimes. “Believe me.”
Upvoted. I think there is an assumption lurking in here, though. It seems likely that EVF would be a pale shadow of itself without Open Phil and other big-donor money. I dont member fees can plausibly replace that.
So there seemingly has to be an assumption that the big donors should continue funding EVF even if they strongly disagree with who the demos elects, as opposed to funding whatever the old guard starts up after being deposed. There seems to be some tension with the idea that donors aren’t obliged to defer to the democratic will.
Something OpenPhil could do is fund explicit alternatives to core EA orgs. They don’t have to be ‘competitors’ per se, in that there’s no market they have to vie for, but they could do the same thing in a different context—events in Europe vs events in North America for example, or longtermist events vs animal welfare events, and be available for the occasional encroachment into the others’ remit if someone asks them to. That way you could have multiple organisations with similar competence, and a visible signal if one was consistently doing better than the others, and funding could explicitly follow that signal.
This would be a lot easier the more focused the orgs/the less mission creep they had, since then the comparisons would be a lot higher fidelity. EVF’s current structure doesn’t seem ideal for this.
This is an interesting idea, but I don’t know how feasible or realistic it is. I find it really helpful to think of EA as a marketplace for maximum impact goods and services. Like your local farmers’ market, but instead of selling fruit and vegetables, people are offering charities, charity recommendations, and so on. (I’ve been reflecting on this for a while, and might write it up as a standalone post). The analogy doesn’t have to be perfect to be informative. In this framing, what we’d want, presumably, is for there to be lots of competition and choice, so that consumers get a better deal. You don’t want there to be just one guy that sells fruit, and only sells oranges, for example.
The challenge for EA is that one buyer dominates the market: Open Philanthropy is, I think, 50+% of total. In effect, you’re going to get about as much variety as OP wants, when they do their own ‘shopping’: if OP wants to buy your fruit, you’re in business; if they don’t, it’s much harder to survive in the market. If they want there to be a greater variety of sellers, they can create demand for them—equivalent to saying “hey, if you start selling apples in the market, we’ll buy 10 crates” or whatever. But it’s not clear if it’s a good use of their money, by their lights, to create a market for products they don’t really want and other people may not want. It puts the new vendors in an odd, risky position too if they only exist because they have one, questionably enthusiastic consumer. They could see it as a good use of money: they’d be subsiding the creation of products in the hope of creating demand and bringing other people into the market. Hence, it’s not obvious the main buyer in a marketplace would want to creat variety vs just seek out the specific things they want.*
*Mutatis mutandis, there are the same issues if major funders engage in regranting, which is like giving your friends some of your money and asking them to buy stuff in the market. If your friends have the same preferences to you, they’ll buy the same stuff, so there’s no point. If they buy stuff you’d hate, then you’ll think you shouldn’t have given them money. Either way, unless you keep giving them money, it’s only an artificial spike in consumption.
But it’s not clear if it’s a good use of their money, by their lights, to create a market for products they don’t really want and other people may not want
I’m thinking more about separating existing markets, or perhaps setting up new orgs to catch the overflow from when existing ones expand. Fwiw FTX Foundation explicitly wanted to do this—they had a category for ‘competition to existing EA orgs’. This could have been because as a different org they were sceptical of OP’s priorities, though this seems unlikely given the substantial overlap between the people involved, so it seems more like a genuine desire for a better marketplace.
If your friends have the same preferences to you, they’ll buy the same stuff, so there’s no point. If they buy stuff you’d hate, then you’ll think you shouldn’t have given them money. Either way, unless you keep giving them money, it’s only an artificial spike in consumption.
This seems too simplistic and worrying if we genuinely think this is how OP think. Most people recognise that there’s a wisdom in crowds, and epistemic advantage to a diversity of thoughtful viewpoints.
Ah. I should probably have flagged I’m pointing to an ideal world. As goes (almost) without saying, all this is easier said than done. You could say that EA’s challenge is that it has only one mega-donor. It seems much better that it has one than none, but having just one creates distinctive governance challenges compared to if there was no mega-donor but lots of small donors; this latter scenario is a bit closer to a democracy in terms of how power is distributed.
But your comment does rather make my point. In a world where there is only one major donor, that is, effectively a monopsony (a market with single buyer) you could say “look, all this talk about good governance is nice, but it’s practically irrelevant; the only question to ask is ‘what does the big funder want?’”.
I don’t think donors can or should be forced to defer to the democratic will. People, qua citizens in their democracy, can be forced to do things, but charity is a necessarily private act. I think it would be good if EVF had some democratic elements and also that someone paid for it to keep going. But, who am I to tell people what they ought to do, a moral philosopher, or something? :)
So EA is currently in a regime wherein the large majority of capital flows from a single source, and capital allocation is set by a small number of decision-makers.
Rough estimate: if ~60% of Open Phil grantmaking decisioning is attributable to Holden, then 47.2% of all EA capital allocation, or $157.4M, was decided by one individual in 2017. 2018 & 2019 will probably have similar proportions.
It seems like EA entered into this regime largely due to historically contingent reasons (Cari & Dustin developing a close relationship with Holden, then outsourcing a lot of their philanthropic decision-making to him & the Open Phil staff).
It’s not clear that this structure will lead to optimal capital allocation...
What is the main issue in EA governance then, in your view? It strikes me [I’m speaking in a personal capacity, etc.] the challenge for EA is a combination of the fact the resources are quite centralised and that trustees of charities are (as you say) not accountable to anyone. One by itself might be fine. Both together is tricky. I’m not sure where this fits in with your framework, sorry.
There’s one big funder (Open Philanthropy), many of the key organisations are really just one organisation wearing different hats (EVF), and these are accountable only to their trustees. What’s more, as Buck notes here, all the dramatis personae are quite friendly (“lot of EA organizations are led and influenced by a pretty tightly knit group of people who consider themselves allies”). Obviously, some people will be in favour of centralised, unaccountable decision-making—those who think it gets the right results—but it’s not the structure we expect to be conducive to good governance in general.
If power in effective altruism were decentralised, that is, there were lots of ‘buyers’ and ‘sellers’ in the ‘EA marketplace’, then you’d expect competitive pressure to improve governance: poorly run organisations will be wracked by the “gales of creative destruction” as donors go elsewhere.
If leaders in effective altruism were accountable, for instance, if EVF became a membership organisation and the board were elected by its (paying?) members, that would provide a different sort of check and balance. I don’t think it’s reasonable for individual donors, i.e. Dustin Mosktovitz and Cari Tuna, or cause-specific organisations, to submit their money to the democratic will, but it seems more sensible for central organisations, those that are something like natural monopolies and ostensibly serve the whole community, to have democratic elements.
As it is, the governance structure across EA is, essentially, for its leaders to police themselves—and wait for media stories to break. Particularly in light of recent events, it’s unclear if this is the optimal approach. I am reminded of the following passage in Pratchett.
Upvoted. I think there is an assumption lurking in here, though. It seems likely that EVF would be a pale shadow of itself without Open Phil and other big-donor money. I dont member fees can plausibly replace that.
So there seemingly has to be an assumption that the big donors should continue funding EVF even if they strongly disagree with who the demos elects, as opposed to funding whatever the old guard starts up after being deposed. There seems to be some tension with the idea that donors aren’t obliged to defer to the democratic will.
Something OpenPhil could do is fund explicit alternatives to core EA orgs. They don’t have to be ‘competitors’ per se, in that there’s no market they have to vie for, but they could do the same thing in a different context—events in Europe vs events in North America for example, or longtermist events vs animal welfare events, and be available for the occasional encroachment into the others’ remit if someone asks them to. That way you could have multiple organisations with similar competence, and a visible signal if one was consistently doing better than the others, and funding could explicitly follow that signal.
This would be a lot easier the more focused the orgs/the less mission creep they had, since then the comparisons would be a lot higher fidelity. EVF’s current structure doesn’t seem ideal for this.
This is an interesting idea, but I don’t know how feasible or realistic it is. I find it really helpful to think of EA as a marketplace for maximum impact goods and services. Like your local farmers’ market, but instead of selling fruit and vegetables, people are offering charities, charity recommendations, and so on. (I’ve been reflecting on this for a while, and might write it up as a standalone post). The analogy doesn’t have to be perfect to be informative. In this framing, what we’d want, presumably, is for there to be lots of competition and choice, so that consumers get a better deal. You don’t want there to be just one guy that sells fruit, and only sells oranges, for example.
The challenge for EA is that one buyer dominates the market: Open Philanthropy is, I think, 50+% of total. In effect, you’re going to get about as much variety as OP wants, when they do their own ‘shopping’: if OP wants to buy your fruit, you’re in business; if they don’t, it’s much harder to survive in the market. If they want there to be a greater variety of sellers, they can create demand for them—equivalent to saying “hey, if you start selling apples in the market, we’ll buy 10 crates” or whatever. But it’s not clear if it’s a good use of their money, by their lights, to create a market for products they don’t really want and other people may not want. It puts the new vendors in an odd, risky position too if they only exist because they have one, questionably enthusiastic consumer. They could see it as a good use of money: they’d be subsiding the creation of products in the hope of creating demand and bringing other people into the market. Hence, it’s not obvious the main buyer in a marketplace would want to creat variety vs just seek out the specific things they want.*
*Mutatis mutandis, there are the same issues if major funders engage in regranting, which is like giving your friends some of your money and asking them to buy stuff in the market. If your friends have the same preferences to you, they’ll buy the same stuff, so there’s no point. If they buy stuff you’d hate, then you’ll think you shouldn’t have given them money. Either way, unless you keep giving them money, it’s only an artificial spike in consumption.
I’m thinking more about separating existing markets, or perhaps setting up new orgs to catch the overflow from when existing ones expand. Fwiw FTX Foundation explicitly wanted to do this—they had a category for ‘competition to existing EA orgs’. This could have been because as a different org they were sceptical of OP’s priorities, though this seems unlikely given the substantial overlap between the people involved, so it seems more like a genuine desire for a better marketplace.
This seems too simplistic and worrying if we genuinely think this is how OP think. Most people recognise that there’s a wisdom in crowds, and epistemic advantage to a diversity of thoughtful viewpoints.
Ah. I should probably have flagged I’m pointing to an ideal world. As goes (almost) without saying, all this is easier said than done. You could say that EA’s challenge is that it has only one mega-donor. It seems much better that it has one than none, but having just one creates distinctive governance challenges compared to if there was no mega-donor but lots of small donors; this latter scenario is a bit closer to a democracy in terms of how power is distributed.
But your comment does rather make my point. In a world where there is only one major donor, that is, effectively a monopsony (a market with single buyer) you could say “look, all this talk about good governance is nice, but it’s practically irrelevant; the only question to ask is ‘what does the big funder want?’”.
I don’t think donors can or should be forced to defer to the democratic will. People, qua citizens in their democracy, can be forced to do things, but charity is a necessarily private act. I think it would be good if EVF had some democratic elements and also that someone paid for it to keep going. But, who am I to tell people what they ought to do, a moral philosopher, or something? :)
Why so?
I wrote in this direction a few years ago, and I’m very glad to see you clearly stating these points here.
From What’s the best structure for optimal allocation of EA capital? –