Thanks Joel, I think your arguments are good, but on balance I think more EA aligned foundations can be a good thing.
Some people with entrepreneurial spirit might be wired in a way that they and the EA movement would be better served launching and growing their own foundation rather than joining an established big one. Comparative advantage and EV might be higher. Having freedom as a founder and entrepreneur means you might be more motivated and free to take more risks, and bring more EA dollars to the party than you would have if you were absorbed by another org. I can imagine participants in the program above might well be in this category.
New foundations might be able to have more diverse focus, such as to support and grow smaller organisations, which the funders you showed generally don’t do.
New foundations might have access to different pools of money than those bigger organisations. For example a Scandinavian based org might be able to access Scandinavian govt. grants that other orgs like Givewell couldn’t. Or new foundations might form unique relationships with very rich people whose money was previously untapped.
As another kind of side note in general I think EA might need to be careful in the long term about the (almost) monopoly or at least high market share Givewell has on development focused cause prioritisation at the moment. You’re right that their processes and institutional knowledge makes it hard to imagine anyone else could do it better (although organisations like HLI are trying which is great). It’s interesting that something like 70% of the money given by CEA members went to a Givewell fund. I think there is inherent value in managing risk and potential error through foundation diversification but that is obviously arguable (this has been discussed before in forum posts). Imagine (hypothetically) that there was a corruption or sex scandal within Givewell and the overwhelming damage that might do the EA movement. That might be mitigated if there were a bunch more big orgs. I think it’s healthy to have more diversity than we do at the moment.
Thanks Joel, I think your arguments are good, but on balance I think more EA aligned foundations can be a good thing.
Some people with entrepreneurial spirit might be wired in a way that they and the EA movement would be better served launching and growing their own foundation rather than joining an established big one. Comparative advantage and EV might be higher. Having freedom as a founder and entrepreneur means you might be more motivated and free to take more risks, and bring more EA dollars to the party than you would have if you were absorbed by another org. I can imagine participants in the program above might well be in this category.
New foundations might be able to have more diverse focus, such as to support and grow smaller organisations, which the funders you showed generally don’t do.
New foundations might have access to different pools of money than those bigger organisations. For example a Scandinavian based org might be able to access Scandinavian govt. grants that other orgs like Givewell couldn’t. Or new foundations might form unique relationships with very rich people whose money was previously untapped.
As another kind of side note in general I think EA might need to be careful in the long term about the (almost) monopoly or at least high market share Givewell has on development focused cause prioritisation at the moment. You’re right that their processes and institutional knowledge makes it hard to imagine anyone else could do it better (although organisations like HLI are trying which is great). It’s interesting that something like 70% of the money given by CEA members went to a Givewell fund. I think there is inherent value in managing risk and potential error through foundation diversification but that is obviously arguable (this has been discussed before in forum posts). Imagine (hypothetically) that there was a corruption or sex scandal within Givewell and the overwhelming damage that might do the EA movement. That might be mitigated if there were a bunch more big orgs. I think it’s healthy to have more diversity than we do at the moment.