To state a point in the neighborhood of what Stefan, Ben P, and Ben W have said, I think it’s important for LTTF to evaluate the counterfactual where they don’t fund something, rather than the counterfactual where the project has more reasonable characteristics.
That is, we might prefer a project be more productive, more legible or more organized, but unless that makes it worse than the marginal funding opportunity, it should be funded (where one way a project could be bad is by displacing more reasonable projects that would otherwise fill a gap).
To state a point in the neighborhood of what Stefan, Ben P, and Ben W have said, I think it’s important for LTTF to evaluate the counterfactual where they don’t fund something, rather than the counterfactual where the project has more reasonable characteristics.
That is, we might prefer a project be more productive, more legible or more organized, but unless that makes it worse than the marginal funding opportunity, it should be funded (where one way a project could be bad is by displacing more reasonable projects that would otherwise fill a gap).