AG: Ah, but it’s not higher spending. Because of our accounting practices, it’s rather an increase in future funding commitments. So your chart isn’t about “spending” it’s about “locked-in spending commitments”. And in fact, in the next few years, spending-as-recorded goes down because the locked-in-funding is spent.
NS: But why the increase in locked-in funding commitments in 2019. It still seems suspicious, even if marginally less so.
AG: Because we frontload our grants; many of the grants in 2019 were for grantees to use for 2-3 years.
NS: I don’t buy that. I know that many of the grants in 2019 were multi-year (frontloaded), but previous grants in the space were not as frontloaded, or not as frontloaded in that volume. So I think there is still something I’m curious about, even if the mechanistic aspect is more clear to me now.
AG: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (I don’t know what you would say here.)
So this doesn’t really dissolve my curiosity.
In dialog form, because otherwise this would have been a really long paragraph:
NS: I think that the spike in funding in 2019, right after the GiveWell’s Top Charities Are (Increasingly) Hard to Beat blogpost, is suspicious
AG: Ah, but it’s not higher spending. Because of our accounting practices, it’s rather an increase in future funding commitments. So your chart isn’t about “spending” it’s about “locked-in spending commitments”. And in fact, in the next few years, spending-as-recorded goes down because the locked-in-funding is spent.
NS: But why the increase in locked-in funding commitments in 2019. It still seems suspicious, even if marginally less so.
AG: Because we frontload our grants; many of the grants in 2019 were for grantees to use for 2-3 years.
NS: I don’t buy that. I know that many of the grants in 2019 were multi-year (frontloaded), but previous grants in the space were not as frontloaded, or not as frontloaded in that volume. So I think there is still something I’m curious about, even if the mechanistic aspect is more clear to me now.
AG: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (I don’t know what you would say here.)