I’m curating this post — thank you so much for writing it.
I agree with other commenters that replication is extremely precious, and I think this post chooses an excellent work to replicate — something that is quite influential for discussionsabout whether we should prioritize economic growth or more direct types of global health and wellbeing interventions. (Here’s a pretty recent related piece by Lant Pritchett.) I also really appreciate that the conclusion about economic growth seems to rely on three very different but independently strong arguments (straightforward estimation of impact given Easterlin’s values, noting that the conclusions are very sensitive to small tweaks in the methodology, and suggesting that GDP interventions might be a better approach to improving wellbeing even if Easterlin’s interpretations are accurate).
Re: the discussion on tractability, I want to note that most problems [seem to] fall within a 100x tractability range (assuming that effort on the problems has ~logarithmic returns, which seems very roughly reasonable for, say, research on economic growth or better global health interventions). (“For a problem to be 10x less tractable than the baseline, it would have to take 10 more doublings (1000x the resources) to solve an expected 10% of the problem. Most problems that can be solved in theory are at least as tractable as this; I think with 1000x the resources, humanity could have way better than 10% chance of starting a Mars colony, solving the Riemann hypothesis, and doing other really difficult things.”) If I’m interpreting things correctly, I think this means a more plausible reason other interventions might be more impactful is if they’re much more neglected (rather than much more tractable). Alternatively, we should simply not expect them to be more impactful. (Disclaimer: I read the tractability post quite a while back, didn’t follow the links in this post, and didn’t try very hard to understand the parts that I didn’t understand after a first read. I also don’t have any proper expertise in economics, so I might be getting things significantly wrong. I’m also writing quickly while tired.)
Finally, for those who like Our World in Data charts (and for those who’d appreciate a reference on what we should expect in terms of the relationship between GDP and measures of happiness) — here’s a chart showing self-reported life satisfaction vs GDP per capita in different countries (note that this is different from Easterlin’s approach for the paradox, which looks at differences in GDP and happiness within countries over time):
I think the question of the the plausible range for tractability is an interesting one. I suspect that most global health interventions seriously considered by EA fall within a 100x range. But I would guess that the reason this is true is that the only interventions with enough evidence are already in the process of solving more than 0.5% of the problem. At the other end of the spectrum, I suspect intervention trying to influence the very long term trajectory of human culture might fall into a range that spans at least 6 orders of magnitude. There are probably plenty of interventions we could consider that we should expect to have much less than a one in a million chance of solving 10% of the problem. Because there is little evidence and feedback for what would work in this context, we should not expect most things we consider to have a non-tiny chance of working.
I am also a little skeptical of how much information we get out of neglectedness when working with these sorts of problems. I think something being neglected might often be a sign that experts in the space don’t consider the approach plausible, or that some experts have tried it and given up on it. If that is the case, then that effect may swamp the diminishing marginal returns we might expect. Additionally, diminishing marginal returns might not be as common in fields where it’s not obvious what the next good thing to do is (because there are poor feedback mechanisms).
I’m curating this post — thank you so much for writing it.
I agree with other commenters that replication is extremely precious, and I think this post chooses an excellent work to replicate — something that is quite influential for discussions about whether we should prioritize economic growth or more direct types of global health and wellbeing interventions. (Here’s a pretty recent related piece by Lant Pritchett.) I also really appreciate that the conclusion about economic growth seems to rely on three very different but independently strong arguments (straightforward estimation of impact given Easterlin’s values, noting that the conclusions are very sensitive to small tweaks in the methodology, and suggesting that GDP interventions might be a better approach to improving wellbeing even if Easterlin’s interpretations are accurate).
Re: the discussion on tractability, I want to note that most problems [seem to] fall within a 100x tractability range (assuming that effort on the problems has ~logarithmic returns, which seems very roughly reasonable for, say, research on economic growth or better global health interventions). (“For a problem to be 10x less tractable than the baseline, it would have to take 10 more doublings (1000x the resources) to solve an expected 10% of the problem. Most problems that can be solved in theory are at least as tractable as this; I think with 1000x the resources, humanity could have way better than 10% chance of starting a Mars colony, solving the Riemann hypothesis, and doing other really difficult things.”) If I’m interpreting things correctly, I think this means a more plausible reason other interventions might be more impactful is if they’re much more neglected (rather than much more tractable). Alternatively, we should simply not expect them to be more impactful. (Disclaimer: I read the tractability post quite a while back, didn’t follow the links in this post, and didn’t try very hard to understand the parts that I didn’t understand after a first read. I also don’t have any proper expertise in economics, so I might be getting things significantly wrong. I’m also writing quickly while tired.)
Finally, for those who like Our World in Data charts (and for those who’d appreciate a reference on what we should expect in terms of the relationship between GDP and measures of happiness) — here’s a chart showing self-reported life satisfaction vs GDP per capita in different countries (note that this is different from Easterlin’s approach for the paradox, which looks at differences in GDP and happiness within countries over time):
Thanks so much for the kind words.
I think the question of the the plausible range for tractability is an interesting one. I suspect that most global health interventions seriously considered by EA fall within a 100x range. But I would guess that the reason this is true is that the only interventions with enough evidence are already in the process of solving more than 0.5% of the problem. At the other end of the spectrum, I suspect intervention trying to influence the very long term trajectory of human culture might fall into a range that spans at least 6 orders of magnitude. There are probably plenty of interventions we could consider that we should expect to have much less than a one in a million chance of solving 10% of the problem. Because there is little evidence and feedback for what would work in this context, we should not expect most things we consider to have a non-tiny chance of working.
I am also a little skeptical of how much information we get out of neglectedness when working with these sorts of problems. I think something being neglected might often be a sign that experts in the space don’t consider the approach plausible, or that some experts have tried it and given up on it. If that is the case, then that effect may swamp the diminishing marginal returns we might expect. Additionally, diminishing marginal returns might not be as common in fields where it’s not obvious what the next good thing to do is (because there are poor feedback mechanisms).