The reason to make that assumption is that EA is just a very small component of the global budget and we are typically dealing with large problems, so our funding usually does little to change marginal returns.
In some cases, like AI risk, the problem is “small” (i.e. our small amount of extra funding can meet the main practical requirements for the time being). However, for big economic issues, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
We should disaggregate down to the level of specific funding opportunities. Eg, suppose the top three interventions for hits-based development are {funding think tanks in developing countries, funding academic research, charter cities} with corresponding MU/$ {1000, 200, 100}. Suppose it takes $100M to fully fund developing-country think tanks, after which there’s a large drop in MU/$ (moving to the next intervention, academic research). In this case, despite economic development being a huge problem area, we do see diminishing returns at the intervention level within the range of the EA budget.
I think that kind of spikiness (1000, 200, 100 with big gaps between) isn’t the norm. Often one can proceed to weaker and indirect versions of a top intervention (funding scholarships to expand the talent pipelines for said think-tanks, buying them more Google Ads to publicize their research) with lower marginal utility that smooth out the returns curve, as you do progressively less appealing and more ancillary versions of the 1000-intervention until they start to get down into the 200-intervention range.
The reason to make that assumption is that EA is just a very small component of the global budget and we are typically dealing with large problems, so our funding usually does little to change marginal returns.
In some cases, like AI risk, the problem is “small” (i.e. our small amount of extra funding can meet the main practical requirements for the time being). However, for big economic issues, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
We should disaggregate down to the level of specific funding opportunities. Eg, suppose the top three interventions for hits-based development are {funding think tanks in developing countries, funding academic research, charter cities} with corresponding MU/$ {1000, 200, 100}. Suppose it takes $100M to fully fund developing-country think tanks, after which there’s a large drop in MU/$ (moving to the next intervention, academic research). In this case, despite economic development being a huge problem area, we do see diminishing returns at the intervention level within the range of the EA budget.
I think that kind of spikiness (1000, 200, 100 with big gaps between) isn’t the norm. Often one can proceed to weaker and indirect versions of a top intervention (funding scholarships to expand the talent pipelines for said think-tanks, buying them more Google Ads to publicize their research) with lower marginal utility that smooth out the returns curve, as you do progressively less appealing and more ancillary versions of the 1000-intervention until they start to get down into the 200-intervention range.
Do you think that affects the conclusion about diminishing returns?