One context note that doesn’t seem to be reflected here is that in 2014, there was a lot of optimism for a bipartisan political compromise on criminal justice reform in the US. The Koch network of charities and advocacy groups had, to some people’s surprise, begun advocating for it in their conservative-libertarian circles, which in turn motivated Republican participation in negotiations on the hill. My recollection is that Open Phil’s bet on criminal justice reform funding was not just a “bet on Chloe,” but also a bet on tractability: i.e., that a relatively cheap investment could yield a big win on policy because the political conditions were such that only a small nudge might be needed. This seems to have been an important miscalculation in retrospect, as (unless I missed something) a limited-scope compromise bill took until the end of 2018 to get passed. I’m not aware of any significant other criminal justice legislation that has passed in that time period. [Edit: while this is true at the national level, arguably there has been a lot of progress on CJR at state and local levels since 2014, much of which could probably be traced back to advocacy by groups like those Open Phil funded.]
This information strongly supports the “Leverage Hypothesis,” which was cited by Open Phil staff themselves, so I think it ought to be weighted pretty strongly in your updates.
I don’t have any inside info here, but based on my work with other organizations I think each of your first three hypotheses are plausible, either alone or in combination.
Another consideration I would mention is that it’s just really hard to judge how to interpret advocacy failures over a short time horizon. Given that your first try failed, does that mean the situation is hopeless and you should stop throwing good money after bad? Or does it mean that you meaningfully moved the needle on people’s opinions and the next campaign is now likelier to succeed? It’s not hard for me to imagine that in 2016-17 or so, having seen some intermediate successes that didn’t ultimately result in legislation signed into law, OP staff might have held out genuine hope that victory was still close at hand. Or after the First Step Act was passed in 2018 and signed into law by Trump, maybe they thought they could convert Trump into a more consistent champion on the issue and bring the GOP along with him. Even as late as 2020, when the George Floyd protests broke out, Chloe’s grantmaking recommendations ended up being circulated widely and presumably moved a lot of money; I could imagine there was hope at that time for transformative policy potential. Knowing when to walk away from sustained but not-yet-successful efforts at achieving low-probability, high-impact results, especially when previous attempts have unknown correlations with the probability of future success, is intrinsically a very difficult estimation problem. (Indeed, if someone at QURI could develop a general solution to this, I think that would be a very useful contribution to the discourse!)
I do not believe this explains the funding rationale. If you look at the groups funded (as per my comment), these are not groups interested in bipartisan political compromise. If OP were interested in bipartisan efforts there are surely better and more effective groups to fund in that direction rather than the groups funded here with very particular, and rather strong, political beliefs which cannot in many cases (even charitably) be described as likely to contribute to bipartisan efforts at reform.
One context note that doesn’t seem to be reflected here is that in 2014, there was a lot of optimism for a bipartisan political compromise on criminal justice reform in the US. The Koch network of charities and advocacy groups had, to some people’s surprise, begun advocating for it in their conservative-libertarian circles, which in turn motivated Republican participation in negotiations on the hill. My recollection is that Open Phil’s bet on criminal justice reform funding was not just a “bet on Chloe,” but also a bet on tractability: i.e., that a relatively cheap investment could yield a big win on policy because the political conditions were such that only a small nudge might be needed. This seems to have been an important miscalculation in retrospect, as (unless I missed something) a limited-scope compromise bill took until the end of 2018 to get passed.
I’m not aware of any significant other criminal justice legislation that has passed in that time period.[Edit: while this is true at the national level, arguably there has been a lot of progress on CJR at state and local levels since 2014, much of which could probably be traced back to advocacy by groups like those Open Phil funded.]This information strongly supports the “Leverage Hypothesis,” which was cited by Open Phil staff themselves, so I think it ought to be weighted pretty strongly in your updates.
So this is good context. What are your thoughts on why they kept donating?
I don’t have any inside info here, but based on my work with other organizations I think each of your first three hypotheses are plausible, either alone or in combination.
Another consideration I would mention is that it’s just really hard to judge how to interpret advocacy failures over a short time horizon. Given that your first try failed, does that mean the situation is hopeless and you should stop throwing good money after bad? Or does it mean that you meaningfully moved the needle on people’s opinions and the next campaign is now likelier to succeed? It’s not hard for me to imagine that in 2016-17 or so, having seen some intermediate successes that didn’t ultimately result in legislation signed into law, OP staff might have held out genuine hope that victory was still close at hand. Or after the First Step Act was passed in 2018 and signed into law by Trump, maybe they thought they could convert Trump into a more consistent champion on the issue and bring the GOP along with him. Even as late as 2020, when the George Floyd protests broke out, Chloe’s grantmaking recommendations ended up being circulated widely and presumably moved a lot of money; I could imagine there was hope at that time for transformative policy potential. Knowing when to walk away from sustained but not-yet-successful efforts at achieving low-probability, high-impact results, especially when previous attempts have unknown correlations with the probability of future success, is intrinsically a very difficult estimation problem. (Indeed, if someone at QURI could develop a general solution to this, I think that would be a very useful contribution to the discourse!)
I do not believe this explains the funding rationale. If you look at the groups funded (as per my comment), these are not groups interested in bipartisan political compromise. If OP were interested in bipartisan efforts there are surely better and more effective groups to fund in that direction rather than the groups funded here with very particular, and rather strong, political beliefs which cannot in many cases (even charitably) be described as likely to contribute to bipartisan efforts at reform.