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.
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.