Thanks for these comments Alex. I agree that it would be best to look at how growth translates into subjective wellbeing, and I am planning to do this or to get someone else to do it soon. However, I’m not sure that this defeats our main claim which is that research on and advocacy for growth are likely to be better than GW top charities. There are a few arguments for this.
(1) GW estimates that deworming is the best way to improve economic outcomes for the extreme poor, in expectation. This seems to me very unlikely to be true since deworming explains almost none of the variance in economic outcomes across the world today, and research on and advocacy for growth looks a much better bet unless you endorse extreme scepticism about growth economics, which no EA has yet argued for. On the welfare metrics endorsed by GiveWell’s staff, deworming is roughly as good as their top charities. It is therefore very unlikely that GW’s top charities are better than research and advocacy for growth.
(2) The cost-effectiveness argument. Many of the huge growth episodes analysed by Lant occurred in countries that were extremely poor before those growth episodes. Looking to the past, it seems unreasonable to deny that funding research on and advocacy for growth is better than the best that one could do with a randomista intervention. The Chinese experience alone seems to me to clearly make this case. Looking to the future, our conjecture is that a 4 person year research effort will show that research and advocacy targeted at LMICs is better than the best GW charities. This takes account of the diminishing marginal utility of money. The case for this claim is unproven, but I think our argument provides strong support for it being probably true.
On the ‘risk-lovers would work on animals/long-termism’ point, I don’t think i agree. To me it seems that people work on these causes because of ethical assumptions about the weight of animals and future beings rather than because of attitudes to risk.
I agree that getting into the weeds is important for our predictive conjecture: the aim of our piece was precisely to motivate getting into these weeds. Moreover, someone needed to make these general arguments at some point as they had been around for many years without response.
Thanks for these comments Alex. I agree that it would be best to look at how growth translates into subjective wellbeing, and I am planning to do this or to get someone else to do it soon. However, I’m not sure that this defeats our main claim which is that research on and advocacy for growth are likely to be better than GW top charities. There are a few arguments for this.
(1) GW estimates that deworming is the best way to improve economic outcomes for the extreme poor, in expectation. This seems to me very unlikely to be true since deworming explains almost none of the variance in economic outcomes across the world today, and research on and advocacy for growth looks a much better bet unless you endorse extreme scepticism about growth economics, which no EA has yet argued for. On the welfare metrics endorsed by GiveWell’s staff, deworming is roughly as good as their top charities. It is therefore very unlikely that GW’s top charities are better than research and advocacy for growth.
(2) The cost-effectiveness argument. Many of the huge growth episodes analysed by Lant occurred in countries that were extremely poor before those growth episodes. Looking to the past, it seems unreasonable to deny that funding research on and advocacy for growth is better than the best that one could do with a randomista intervention. The Chinese experience alone seems to me to clearly make this case. Looking to the future, our conjecture is that a 4 person year research effort will show that research and advocacy targeted at LMICs is better than the best GW charities. This takes account of the diminishing marginal utility of money. The case for this claim is unproven, but I think our argument provides strong support for it being probably true.
On the ‘risk-lovers would work on animals/long-termism’ point, I don’t think i agree. To me it seems that people work on these causes because of ethical assumptions about the weight of animals and future beings rather than because of attitudes to risk.
I agree that getting into the weeds is important for our predictive conjecture: the aim of our piece was precisely to motivate getting into these weeds. Moreover, someone needed to make these general arguments at some point as they had been around for many years without response.