Thanks for your thoughtful question, but I think you’re thinking about this incorrectly for a few reasons:
Firstly, while we raised $10.7M, most of that was earmarked for 2023 as we usually raise money in the current year for the following year. In 2022, we spent around $6.8M on RP core programs, not including special projects and operations to support special projects.
Secondly, we actually have published less than half of our 2022 research. My rough guess is that in 2022 we produced over 100 pieces of work, not ~64 as you estimate. This is for two reasons:
Some research is confidential for whatever reason and is never intended to be published
Some research is intended to be published but we haven’t had the resources or time to publish it yet because public outputs are not a priority for our clients and their funding does not cover it (this is actually something we’d love to get money from the EA public for).
To give a more clear substitute figure, we generally say that $20K-$40K pays for a typical short-term research project and $70K-$100K pays for a typical in-depth research project.
But more importantly I’d add that counting outputs per dollar is not a good way to view RP’s work. This is for a few reasons:
“Outputs” are a vanity metric and we don’t want to take a quantity-focused approach to our work where we aim to produce as many outputs as cheaply as possible. Instead, the quest to quantify the impact – and the impact per dollar – of Rethink Priorities is much more difficult.
“Outputs” vary a lot in size, scope, and funding and aren’t really apples-to-apples comparable in a way that would work for an aggregated metric/count. Some research reports take >12 months of full-time work whereas other research reports (especially internal ones not meant for publication) are completed in two weeks or less.
A lot of the most important work that happens with our research isn’t the time spent actually producing the report, but also engaging with stakeholders, presenting findings, and/or providing feedback on others’ research. We also spend a fair amount of time after we produce research reports engaging with the client — answering follow-up questions and/or otherwise helping people understand the research.
Doing good research at scale requires a sizable operations budget, management budget, strategy work, etc., that doesn’t immediately translate into concrete publishable research outputs.
We also produce other endpoints that aren’t research. We also incubate organizations and spend researcher time advising those organizations and we spend money to organize conferences and other events.
Hi James,
Thanks for your thoughtful question, but I think you’re thinking about this incorrectly for a few reasons:
Firstly, while we raised $10.7M, most of that was earmarked for 2023 as we usually raise money in the current year for the following year. In 2022, we spent around $6.8M on RP core programs, not including special projects and operations to support special projects.
Secondly, we actually have published less than half of our 2022 research. My rough guess is that in 2022 we produced over 100 pieces of work, not ~64 as you estimate. This is for two reasons:
Some research is confidential for whatever reason and is never intended to be published
Some research is intended to be published but we haven’t had the resources or time to publish it yet because public outputs are not a priority for our clients and their funding does not cover it (this is actually something we’d love to get money from the EA public for).
To give a more clear substitute figure, we generally say that $20K-$40K pays for a typical short-term research project and $70K-$100K pays for a typical in-depth research project.
But more importantly I’d add that counting outputs per dollar is not a good way to view RP’s work. This is for a few reasons:
“Outputs” are a vanity metric and we don’t want to take a quantity-focused approach to our work where we aim to produce as many outputs as cheaply as possible. Instead, the quest to quantify the impact – and the impact per dollar – of Rethink Priorities is much more difficult.
“Outputs” vary a lot in size, scope, and funding and aren’t really apples-to-apples comparable in a way that would work for an aggregated metric/count. Some research reports take >12 months of full-time work whereas other research reports (especially internal ones not meant for publication) are completed in two weeks or less.
A lot of the most important work that happens with our research isn’t the time spent actually producing the report, but also engaging with stakeholders, presenting findings, and/or providing feedback on others’ research. We also spend a fair amount of time after we produce research reports engaging with the client — answering follow-up questions and/or otherwise helping people understand the research.
Doing good research at scale requires a sizable operations budget, management budget, strategy work, etc., that doesn’t immediately translate into concrete publishable research outputs.
We also produce other endpoints that aren’t research. We also incubate organizations and spend researcher time advising those organizations and we spend money to organize conferences and other events.