The counterfactual is definitely something that I think I should examine in more detail.
Agreed that marginal effect would be fairly logarithmic and I probably should have considered the fact that there is quite a lot of competition for employment at Earthjustice (i.e. need to be top 0.001% of lawyers to have counterfactual impact).
I am pretty completely convinced by the argument that seeking to work for Earthjustice is worse than ETG actually, so I might go and make some rather sweeping modifications to the post.
I think that the exercise does at least stand as a demonstration of the potential impact of systems change nonprofits with new/neglected focus and that Earthjustice is a success story in this realm.
Do you have a high level of confidence that Earthjustice is too large/established for it to compete with funding new and/or neglected projects?
I have moderate to high confidence that it is too diversified to be a viable big funding target, compared to the alternative of standing up our own org devoted to effective climate litigation. I surmise that the amount of its resources EJ wants to spend on (e.g.) anti-carbon litigation would be fairly insensitive to our org’s existence, because it wants to be seen as active in that area. Thus, I think there would be significantly less internal funging than for bringing EJ on as a grantee.
Hi Brad,
The counterfactual is definitely something that I think I should examine in more detail.
Agreed that marginal effect would be fairly logarithmic and I probably should have considered the fact that there is quite a lot of competition for employment at Earthjustice (i.e. need to be top 0.001% of lawyers to have counterfactual impact).
I am pretty completely convinced by the argument that seeking to work for Earthjustice is worse than ETG actually, so I might go and make some rather sweeping modifications to the post.
I think that the exercise does at least stand as a demonstration of the potential impact of systems change nonprofits with new/neglected focus and that Earthjustice is a success story in this realm.
Do you have a high level of confidence that Earthjustice is too large/established for it to compete with funding new and/or neglected projects?
I have moderate to high confidence that it is too diversified to be a viable big funding target, compared to the alternative of standing up our own org devoted to effective climate litigation. I surmise that the amount of its resources EJ wants to spend on (e.g.) anti-carbon litigation would be fairly insensitive to our org’s existence, because it wants to be seen as active in that area. Thus, I think there would be significantly less internal funging than for bringing EJ on as a grantee.