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.
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.