This is a great post and the most passionate defense I’ve seen of something like ‘improving institutional decision-making’, but broader, being an underrated cause area. I’m sympathetic to your ideas on the importance of good leadership, and the lack of it (and of low-trust, low-coordination environments more generally) as a plausible root cause behind many of the problems EAs care about most. However, I don’t think this post has the evidence to support your key conclusions, beyond the general intuition that leadership is important.
Some of your thoughts:
If you want to have maximum impact you typically want to focus on leadership and governance. Most solvable problems in the world are really leadership and governance problems at their core.
If you want that impact to be lasting, you should focus on building organizations, institutions, or ecosystems that endure over time.
If you are trying to positively impact any group or initiative, leadership is most often your point of maximum leverage.
Corruption is Mexico’s one fundamental problem.
Note the last point isn’t a key conclusion, but is illustrative of the lack of evidence in this post. Is corruption Mexico’s fundamental problem? The IADB report pretty convincingly argues that societal trust is vital to economic development, and is your best piece of evidence. But it doesn’t argue that trust is the most (or most fundamental) factor, especially outside of Latin America, as opposed to things like effective institutions or more basic economic factors. And note that it indicates that Mexico has the second-highest level of trust in Latin America. Trust isn’t lack of corruption isn’t leadership/governance; they’re all related, but it leaves me confused as to what specifically you’re arguing for.
The rest of your points are huge claims, but other than the IADB report your evidence seems to be the blog post about Haiti and DR’s divergence, and your list of real-world examples. The post about Haiti is suggestive, but is a fundamentally limited example as the history of one small, idiosyncratic country. It discusses the corruption of the Duvaliers, but also a host of other factors, and furthermore argues that the divergence began decades before François came to power. So corruption vs trust isn’t the slam-dunk takeaway that it would need to be to even start thinking about generalizing from Haiti to the world.
Your list of places where ecosystem-building “actually [is] already working” is DARPA, a building at MIT, a math team, and a bunch of clubs. Regarding evidence of their cost-effective impact relative to the current EA paradigm, I’ll give you the first three, which are your “building ecosystems on a limited budget” category. But again, this doesn’t get us far beyond the general intuition that everyone already agrees with, that good leadership is good.
It’s true that the best interventions can often only be identified with hindsight, but that’s less applicable to meta-level criticisms of EA like yours. There are a lot of wonderful-sounding ideas like ecosystem-building out there, that hit all the right intuitions and are hard to explicitly argue against. But should EA make this pivot? That question needs more evidence than what’s in this post.
Thank you for the reply Martin!! And I completely agree that I made some large claims without sufficient evidence. That’s primarily because I got feedback that the post was very long as-is, and I made a decision not to flesh out the leadership part (which could be a very long post of its own).
I just want to be clear that I actually don’t want EA to make any significant pivot. I do think that leadership/governance is not discussed by the community to the level of its importance, but I don’t know if corruption/poor governance is a tractable problem for EA (maybe it is, I genuinely don’t know).
My main recommendation, and what I’m fundamentally arguing for, is that EA become a bigger tent organization that builds ecosystems of altruistic leaders and builders, and that engages with the larger nonprofit community in order to systematically improve it.
There are a lot of wonderful-sounding ideas like ecosystem-building out there, that hit all the right intuitions and are hard to explicitly argue against.
Totally agree. Which is why I recommend a series of (relatively) small scale ecosystem building experiments to learn from. As I say, this could be done at low cost, but it does represent a shift from the current strategies that I’ve seen. I think a lot of these experiments would fail, but the ones that didn’t could be quite impactful and could yield some very important insights. But I’m not suggesting a fundamental EA pivot in funding priorities or anything like that.
In terms of the governance/corruption stuff.
I would just say that the link between good governance and desirable outcomes is a very strong one, and that counterexamples are more an exception to the rule (typically places that are extraordinarily gifted with natural resources like Kuwait). There is of course a lot of evidence to back that up, but here is once piece (Human Development Index vs. Corruption Perception Index).
I’ve heard many people say that the Chinese economic miracle is the largest poverty reduction program in history. That was set in motion (I think pretty much uncontroversially) by a change in leadership from Mao to Deng. Singapore’s economic transformation under Lee Kuan Yew was perhaps even more miraculous given the city’s lack of resources and foreign support in the beginning.
There is of course a lot more to be said here, but I would just say the Mexico/governance/corruption points were secondary to my main points. And I completely agree they were not adequately supported. I could make a much stronger support of those points, but that would be an entire post.
Agree that the impactfulness of working on better government is an important claim, and one you don’t provide much evidence for. In the interest of avoiding an asymmetric burden of proof, I want to note that I personally don’t have strong evidence against this claim either. I would love to see it further investigated and/or tried out more.
I don’t think asymmetric burden of proof applies when one side is making a positive claim against the current weight of evidence. But I fully agree that more research would be worthwhile.
It’s perhaps not that surprising that this specific counterpoint calling for a ton of more analysis comes from a student still in academia / undergrad…
I very strongly downvoted this comment because I think that personal attacks of any sort have a disproportionately negative impact on the quality of discussion overall, and because responding to a commenter’s identity or background instead of the content of their comment is a bad norm.
Respectfully, I must inquire: what’s the actual personal attack that I have been, most egregiously I might add, accused of making? There’s nothing wrong with being an undergrad. That is a value neutral statement. Just saying consider the source my internet fren. No attack intended and labeling it as such to pile onto a mob of downvotes strikes me as a bit of cyberbullying, perhaps most accurately described as “white knighting” to use the parlance of the Very Online crowd. I must say though. I’m a little hurt and honestly a bit offended by your behavior. I would urge you to reflect on the moral certainty implicit in this interaction and what this says about the EA community.
This is a great post and the most passionate defense I’ve seen of something like ‘improving institutional decision-making’, but broader, being an underrated cause area. I’m sympathetic to your ideas on the importance of good leadership, and the lack of it (and of low-trust, low-coordination environments more generally) as a plausible root cause behind many of the problems EAs care about most. However, I don’t think this post has the evidence to support your key conclusions, beyond the general intuition that leadership is important.
Some of your thoughts:
If you want to have maximum impact you typically want to focus on leadership and governance. Most solvable problems in the world are really leadership and governance problems at their core.
If you want that impact to be lasting, you should focus on building organizations, institutions, or ecosystems that endure over time.
If you are trying to positively impact any group or initiative, leadership is most often your point of maximum leverage.
Corruption is Mexico’s one fundamental problem.
Note the last point isn’t a key conclusion, but is illustrative of the lack of evidence in this post. Is corruption Mexico’s fundamental problem? The IADB report pretty convincingly argues that societal trust is vital to economic development, and is your best piece of evidence. But it doesn’t argue that trust is the most (or most fundamental) factor, especially outside of Latin America, as opposed to things like effective institutions or more basic economic factors. And note that it indicates that Mexico has the second-highest level of trust in Latin America. Trust isn’t lack of corruption isn’t leadership/governance; they’re all related, but it leaves me confused as to what specifically you’re arguing for.
The rest of your points are huge claims, but other than the IADB report your evidence seems to be the blog post about Haiti and DR’s divergence, and your list of real-world examples. The post about Haiti is suggestive, but is a fundamentally limited example as the history of one small, idiosyncratic country. It discusses the corruption of the Duvaliers, but also a host of other factors, and furthermore argues that the divergence began decades before François came to power. So corruption vs trust isn’t the slam-dunk takeaway that it would need to be to even start thinking about generalizing from Haiti to the world.
Your list of places where ecosystem-building “actually [is] already working” is DARPA, a building at MIT, a math team, and a bunch of clubs. Regarding evidence of their cost-effective impact relative to the current EA paradigm, I’ll give you the first three, which are your “building ecosystems on a limited budget” category. But again, this doesn’t get us far beyond the general intuition that everyone already agrees with, that good leadership is good.
It’s true that the best interventions can often only be identified with hindsight, but that’s less applicable to meta-level criticisms of EA like yours. There are a lot of wonderful-sounding ideas like ecosystem-building out there, that hit all the right intuitions and are hard to explicitly argue against. But should EA make this pivot? That question needs more evidence than what’s in this post.
Thank you for the reply Martin!! And I completely agree that I made some large claims without sufficient evidence. That’s primarily because I got feedback that the post was very long as-is, and I made a decision not to flesh out the leadership part (which could be a very long post of its own).
I just want to be clear that I actually don’t want EA to make any significant pivot. I do think that leadership/governance is not discussed by the community to the level of its importance, but I don’t know if corruption/poor governance is a tractable problem for EA (maybe it is, I genuinely don’t know).
My main recommendation, and what I’m fundamentally arguing for, is that EA become a bigger tent organization that builds ecosystems of altruistic leaders and builders, and that engages with the larger nonprofit community in order to systematically improve it.
Totally agree. Which is why I recommend a series of (relatively) small scale ecosystem building experiments to learn from. As I say, this could be done at low cost, but it does represent a shift from the current strategies that I’ve seen. I think a lot of these experiments would fail, but the ones that didn’t could be quite impactful and could yield some very important insights. But I’m not suggesting a fundamental EA pivot in funding priorities or anything like that.
In terms of the governance/corruption stuff.
I would just say that the link between good governance and desirable outcomes is a very strong one, and that counterexamples are more an exception to the rule (typically places that are extraordinarily gifted with natural resources like Kuwait). There is of course a lot of evidence to back that up, but here is once piece (Human Development Index vs. Corruption Perception Index).
I’ve heard many people say that the Chinese economic miracle is the largest poverty reduction program in history. That was set in motion (I think pretty much uncontroversially) by a change in leadership from Mao to Deng. Singapore’s economic transformation under Lee Kuan Yew was perhaps even more miraculous given the city’s lack of resources and foreign support in the beginning.
There is of course a lot more to be said here, but I would just say the Mexico/governance/corruption points were secondary to my main points. And I completely agree they were not adequately supported. I could make a much stronger support of those points, but that would be an entire post.
Agree that the impactfulness of working on better government is an important claim, and one you don’t provide much evidence for. In the interest of avoiding an asymmetric burden of proof, I want to note that I personally don’t have strong evidence against this claim either. I would love to see it further investigated and/or tried out more.
I don’t think asymmetric burden of proof applies when one side is making a positive claim against the current weight of evidence. But I fully agree that more research would be worthwhile.
It’s perhaps not that surprising that this specific counterpoint calling for a ton of more analysis comes from a student still in academia / undergrad…
I very strongly downvoted this comment because I think that personal attacks of any sort have a disproportionately negative impact on the quality of discussion overall, and because responding to a commenter’s identity or background instead of the content of their comment is a bad norm.
Respectfully, I must inquire: what’s the actual personal attack that I have been, most egregiously I might add, accused of making? There’s nothing wrong with being an undergrad. That is a value neutral statement. Just saying consider the source my internet fren. No attack intended and labeling it as such to pile onto a mob of downvotes strikes me as a bit of cyberbullying, perhaps most accurately described as “white knighting” to use the parlance of the Very Online crowd. I must say though. I’m a little hurt and honestly a bit offended by your behavior. I would urge you to reflect on the moral certainty implicit in this interaction and what this says about the EA community.
I didn’t call for a ton more analysis, I pointed that the post largely relies on vibes. There’s a difference.