Personally, I think EA’s global health and development wing has become stale. There are very few new ideas these days, very little dynamism or experimentation with things beyond the typical GW/OP grant. In that spirit, I think we should invite health and development researchers and policymakers, who work on important development questions that EAs have not historically engaged much with. Here are my suggestions:
Doug Gollin is the foremost expert on agriculture in developing countries. Agriculture is the largest sector, so improving agricultural productivity could dramatically increase people’s incomes. At the same time, the agricultural sector is a constraint on growth, limiting people’s movement into higher value sectors that can power economic growth. How do we improve agriculture? Doug Gollin can tell us.
David McKenzie is the foremost expert on businesses in developing countries. If we want people to be able to earn more money, the most important constraint is that businesses have to expand to create more jobs that can hire people. How do we make businesses more productive? David McKenzie can tell us.
Pinelopi Goldberg is the foremost expert on globalization and development. The biggest tectonic shift in development in the past 50 years is the rapid globalization that followed the end of the Cold War; India and China arguably gathered a lot of steam in their growth paths from globalization that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. But today we are in a de-globalizing world where the EU puts up “carbon tariffs” that mostly affect developing countries, and the US wants to “friend-shore” its supply chains. What can developing countries do to advance growth and alleviate poverty in a de-globalizing world? Pinelopi Goldberg can tell us.
In addition, I see some really promising agendas from younger scholars, who might also be more willing to talk at EAG:
Lauren Bergquist is at the vanguard of research on market-level interventions in developing countries. Traditionally, EAs and development economists focused on interventions that directly deliver some health commodity or income-generating support to households. But you can get an unparalleled amount of leverage by intervening at the market level, addressing market-level inefficiencies that reduce people’s incomes. What are these inefficiencies and can we find cost-effective ways to address them at scale? Lauren Bergquist can tell us.
Jacob Moscona is at the vanguard of research on technology in developing countries. The rich world has invented technologies that improve life beyond the wildest imaginations of people who lived a hundred years ago, but most of these technologies are absent from developing countries. Why don’t technologies flow from rich countries to poor countries? Jacob Moscona can tell us.
Ben Faber is at the vanguard of research on economic integration within developing countries. Countries cannot prosper as a collection of isolated villages. The flow of goods and people between rural and urban areas is essential for both of them to become richer. How do we facilitate this flow? Ben Faber can tell us. (Disclosure: Ben is one of my advisors.)
I’ve named development economists since those are the people whose work I am aware of. But I am sure that global health also has more exciting areas than EA is aware of, and I encourage people with expertise in global health to recommend global health experts in the same vein.
One idea for a cause area that I have is investing in public transportation in developing countries that have inadequate infrastructure for it—many of which are in Africa. Public transit can promote sustainable, equitable economic growth. Many African governments are mostly building roads even though the majority of their citizens don’t own cars, so their transportation investments are not really benefiting the public.[1] And as I’ve written on this forum, car-centric cities are prone to congestion so they can’t support large populations and high economic growth like transit-oriented cities can.
Personally, I think EA’s global health and development wing has become stale. There are very few new ideas these days, very little dynamism or experimentation with things beyond the typical GW/OP grant.
What do you think the cause for this stagnation is? I can envision some stagnation causes for which inviting speakers who work on EA-neglected questions could have an attractive theory of impact, and other stagnation causes for which the potential pathways to impact would be murkier.
People defer to OP/GW/CE to shine the light forward for us.
New ideas come from new people, and EA GHD has much fewer new people entering each year than it used to because community building focuses on AI.
The appeal of EA GHD is certain impact which makes people much more reluctant to deviate from obviously good opportunities that we have found already.
The point above, but for funding.
I started using the EA Forum just shortly before OP ran their Cause Exploration Prize contest, and it really felt like the Forum was the most exciting place for new ideas on how to do good in global development. I used to regularly send Forum posts to my non EA development friends. I’ve had zero cause to do so recently.
Another explanation is just that we’ve basically found the best global health interventions, and so there isn’t much to do in the space—or at least not with current budget.
If this were true, GW/OP wouldn’t be funding new areas like lead poisoning or air pollution. You could argue those areas are speculative and may not beat GW top charities, but then there’s still tremendous value of information from funding them to see if they do beat GW top charities. Either way, there’s no argument for resting on our laurels.
It seems consistent for it to be true and for us not to know that it’s true. All GW can ultimately do is keep trying and assessing new stuff, and if it fails to to beat AMF & co, gradually increase their credence that they’ve found the best areas.
I’m somewhat unsure what you mean when you describe these things as having ‘tremendous value of information’ while also thinking they represent ‘very little dynamism or experimentation’ btw (not claiming you’re inconsistent, just that I find them a confusing pair of statements as contextualised so far and would be interested for you to clarify).
It seems consistent for it to be true and for us not to know that it’s true.
That’s what I mean by value of information. My point is that there is high value of information in testing new interventions, and that OP/GW/CE are definitely doing this exploration, but that the community is adding very little to this exploration process. What little innovation there has been in EA GHD has been mostly top down and led by these organizations rather than based on collective research.
Gotcha. My guess is that’s funding- and culture-driven—my sense is EA community orgs have been put under substantial pressure to prioritise longtermist/AI stuff to a substantially greater degree than they used to.
Maybe, although this conclusion would likely be dependent on applying GiveWell-like moral weights that heavily favor saving lives. I’m not saying those weights are wrong, just that they are not beyond questioning.
Yeah the last 6 months especially had been lean pickings on the GHD front on the forum. I came on much later than you (20 months ago) and have seen a noticeable decline even in that time. Love your suggestions for speakers.
Perhaps also as lot of EAish GHD people are getting stuck into their work rather than looking for he’s opportunities too.
I would also like to see more GHD stuff on the forum from Open Phil and RP but I doubt I’ll get much joy there
This is a good opportunity to say, your posts on clean water, nurse emigration and helping individuals cost-effectively have been the best GHD contributions I’ve read on this Forum in years!
Thanks—those are similar to the causes I had in mind, although I would probably ground them even more explicitly in funding issues. For instance, it seems plausible that perceived “deference” to OP/GW/AIM (CE) is actually more like—people don’t go investigating theories of impact that don’t seem to fit within established funding streams, and there are a lot of potential ideas that don’t fit those funding streams very well.
It seems that AIM looks for interventions that can launch for ~$100-$250K and then produce enough results to attract continuing funding. There’s a lot that will work with that model, but the ideas your answer hinted at may not be among them.
As for GW, its business processes seem to favor interventions that are more iteratively testable. By that I mean roughly those interventions for which you can get pretty decent evidence of a specific charity’s effectiveness at a fairly low cost, and then fund an eight-figure RCT to promote the charity to top charity status.
Also—and I say this lovingly as a committed GW donor! -- there’s some truth to the idea that GW’s top charities put band-aids on deep problems. One can think that band-aids are the best approach to these problems right now while recognizing that one will need just as many band-aids for next year’s newborns. When you combine that with GW top charities having a lot of room for more funding with only a modest decrease in marginal effectiveness, you don’t have much churn of established programs to make more room for the new ones.
That’s not to criticize either organization! I am skeptical that any single organization could do something as broad as “global health and development” at a consistently high level, and there’s a lot to be said for the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well.
(Adding another possible structural issue: if someone is all-in on GHD and open/flexible to a lot of options of how to maximize their GHD impact, they are going to compare the EV of exploring/trialing new ideas against earning to give. Even post-FTX, that calculus is much more conducive to new-idea development in GCR than in GHD or animal welfare.)
Personally, I think EA’s global health and development wing has become stale. There are very few new ideas these days, very little dynamism or experimentation with things beyond the typical GW/OP grant. In that spirit, I think we should invite health and development researchers and policymakers, who work on important development questions that EAs have not historically engaged much with. Here are my suggestions:
Doug Gollin is the foremost expert on agriculture in developing countries. Agriculture is the largest sector, so improving agricultural productivity could dramatically increase people’s incomes. At the same time, the agricultural sector is a constraint on growth, limiting people’s movement into higher value sectors that can power economic growth. How do we improve agriculture? Doug Gollin can tell us.
David McKenzie is the foremost expert on businesses in developing countries. If we want people to be able to earn more money, the most important constraint is that businesses have to expand to create more jobs that can hire people. How do we make businesses more productive? David McKenzie can tell us.
Pinelopi Goldberg is the foremost expert on globalization and development. The biggest tectonic shift in development in the past 50 years is the rapid globalization that followed the end of the Cold War; India and China arguably gathered a lot of steam in their growth paths from globalization that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. But today we are in a de-globalizing world where the EU puts up “carbon tariffs” that mostly affect developing countries, and the US wants to “friend-shore” its supply chains. What can developing countries do to advance growth and alleviate poverty in a de-globalizing world? Pinelopi Goldberg can tell us.
In addition, I see some really promising agendas from younger scholars, who might also be more willing to talk at EAG:
Lauren Bergquist is at the vanguard of research on market-level interventions in developing countries. Traditionally, EAs and development economists focused on interventions that directly deliver some health commodity or income-generating support to households. But you can get an unparalleled amount of leverage by intervening at the market level, addressing market-level inefficiencies that reduce people’s incomes. What are these inefficiencies and can we find cost-effective ways to address them at scale? Lauren Bergquist can tell us.
Jacob Moscona is at the vanguard of research on technology in developing countries. The rich world has invented technologies that improve life beyond the wildest imaginations of people who lived a hundred years ago, but most of these technologies are absent from developing countries. Why don’t technologies flow from rich countries to poor countries? Jacob Moscona can tell us.
Ben Faber is at the vanguard of research on economic integration within developing countries. Countries cannot prosper as a collection of isolated villages. The flow of goods and people between rural and urban areas is essential for both of them to become richer. How do we facilitate this flow? Ben Faber can tell us. (Disclosure: Ben is one of my advisors.)
I’ve named development economists since those are the people whose work I am aware of. But I am sure that global health also has more exciting areas than EA is aware of, and I encourage people with expertise in global health to recommend global health experts in the same vein.
How about someone from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy?
One idea for a cause area that I have is investing in public transportation in developing countries that have inadequate infrastructure for it—many of which are in Africa. Public transit can promote sustainable, equitable economic growth. Many African governments are mostly building roads even though the majority of their citizens don’t own cars, so their transportation investments are not really benefiting the public.[1] And as I’ve written on this forum, car-centric cities are prone to congestion so they can’t support large populations and high economic growth like transit-oriented cities can.
Africa—Institute for Transportation and Development Policy
What do you think the cause for this stagnation is? I can envision some stagnation causes for which inviting speakers who work on EA-neglected questions could have an attractive theory of impact, and other stagnation causes for which the potential pathways to impact would be murkier.
I don’t know frankly. Spitballing:
People defer to OP/GW/CE to shine the light forward for us.
New ideas come from new people, and EA GHD has much fewer new people entering each year than it used to because community building focuses on AI.
The appeal of EA GHD is certain impact which makes people much more reluctant to deviate from obviously good opportunities that we have found already.
The point above, but for funding.
I started using the EA Forum just shortly before OP ran their Cause Exploration Prize contest, and it really felt like the Forum was the most exciting place for new ideas on how to do good in global development. I used to regularly send Forum posts to my non EA development friends. I’ve had zero cause to do so recently.
Another explanation is just that we’ve basically found the best global health interventions, and so there isn’t much to do in the space—or at least not with current budget.
If this were true, GW/OP wouldn’t be funding new areas like lead poisoning or air pollution. You could argue those areas are speculative and may not beat GW top charities, but then there’s still tremendous value of information from funding them to see if they do beat GW top charities. Either way, there’s no argument for resting on our laurels.
It seems consistent for it to be true and for us not to know that it’s true. All GW can ultimately do is keep trying and assessing new stuff, and if it fails to to beat AMF & co, gradually increase their credence that they’ve found the best areas.
I’m somewhat unsure what you mean when you describe these things as having ‘tremendous value of information’ while also thinking they represent ‘very little dynamism or experimentation’ btw (not claiming you’re inconsistent, just that I find them a confusing pair of statements as contextualised so far and would be interested for you to clarify).
That’s what I mean by value of information. My point is that there is high value of information in testing new interventions, and that OP/GW/CE are definitely doing this exploration, but that the community is adding very little to this exploration process. What little innovation there has been in EA GHD has been mostly top down and led by these organizations rather than based on collective research.
Gotcha. My guess is that’s funding- and culture-driven—my sense is EA community orgs have been put under substantial pressure to prioritise longtermist/AI stuff to a substantially greater degree than they used to.
Maybe, although this conclusion would likely be dependent on applying GiveWell-like moral weights that heavily favor saving lives. I’m not saying those weights are wrong, just that they are not beyond questioning.
Yeah the last 6 months especially had been lean pickings on the GHD front on the forum. I came on much later than you (20 months ago) and have seen a noticeable decline even in that time. Love your suggestions for speakers.
Perhaps also as lot of EAish GHD people are getting stuck into their work rather than looking for he’s opportunities too.
I would also like to see more GHD stuff on the forum from Open Phil and RP but I doubt I’ll get much joy there
This is a good opportunity to say, your posts on clean water, nurse emigration and helping individuals cost-effectively have been the best GHD contributions I’ve read on this Forum in years!
Thanks—those are similar to the causes I had in mind, although I would probably ground them even more explicitly in funding issues. For instance, it seems plausible that perceived “deference” to OP/GW/AIM (CE) is actually more like—people don’t go investigating theories of impact that don’t seem to fit within established funding streams, and there are a lot of potential ideas that don’t fit those funding streams very well.
It seems that AIM looks for interventions that can launch for ~$100-$250K and then produce enough results to attract continuing funding. There’s a lot that will work with that model, but the ideas your answer hinted at may not be among them.
As for GW, its business processes seem to favor interventions that are more iteratively testable. By that I mean roughly those interventions for which you can get pretty decent evidence of a specific charity’s effectiveness at a fairly low cost, and then fund an eight-figure RCT to promote the charity to top charity status.
Also—and I say this lovingly as a committed GW donor! -- there’s some truth to the idea that GW’s top charities put band-aids on deep problems. One can think that band-aids are the best approach to these problems right now while recognizing that one will need just as many band-aids for next year’s newborns. When you combine that with GW top charities having a lot of room for more funding with only a modest decrease in marginal effectiveness, you don’t have much churn of established programs to make more room for the new ones.
That’s not to criticize either organization! I am skeptical that any single organization could do something as broad as “global health and development” at a consistently high level, and there’s a lot to be said for the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well.
(Adding another possible structural issue: if someone is all-in on GHD and open/flexible to a lot of options of how to maximize their GHD impact, they are going to compare the EV of exploring/trialing new ideas against earning to give. Even post-FTX, that calculus is much more conducive to new-idea development in GCR than in GHD or animal welfare.)