You say things like “Once we include inequality, economic growth looks a lot less beneficial than interventions that target the extreme poor.” Insofar as I understand this sentence, you cannot conclude this unless you know about the cost of the intervention to increase economic growth. Your argument implies that the benefits of growth are lower than some models suggest, but since we don’t know anything about costs, you cannot conclude anything about cost-effectiveness. So, it’s not possible for you to conclude anything about the relative cost-effectiveness of different approaches
It’s fair to say that I’m not rigorously comparing these two approaches. What I am doing is showing that one has a 90% lower value than estimated, and the other is not affected. In general, this would lead you to update in favor of targeted interventions—hence saying that it looks better. The strength of that update may not be enough to overcome your prior. But I’m not litigating the entire growth vs RD debate here. The argument is just “inequality is a big problem for growth”.
For what it’s worth the Open Phil framework (with R&D discount factors removed) is looking at the effect of global growth, not growth in rich countries. That should attenuate the gap between their results and the results of modelling this just in LMICs. And I don’t know how big a big difference is, but to take it from my final estimate of 12X to 1000X would require growth promotion in LMICs to be over 80 times more cost effective than global growth promotion, which seems like a lot.
You say things like “Once we include inequality, economic growth looks a lot less beneficial than interventions that target the extreme poor.” Insofar as I understand this sentence, you cannot conclude this unless you know about the cost of the intervention to increase economic growth. Your argument implies that the benefits of growth are lower than some models suggest, but since we don’t know anything about costs, you cannot conclude anything about cost-effectiveness. So, it’s not possible for you to conclude anything about the relative cost-effectiveness of different approaches
It’s fair to say that I’m not rigorously comparing these two approaches. What I am doing is showing that one has a 90% lower value than estimated, and the other is not affected. In general, this would lead you to update in favor of targeted interventions—hence saying that it looks better. The strength of that update may not be enough to overcome your prior. But I’m not litigating the entire growth vs RD debate here. The argument is just “inequality is a big problem for growth”.
Agreed. I would like to see this done for LMICs and not rich countries as it seems that could make a big difference.
For what it’s worth the Open Phil framework (with R&D discount factors removed) is looking at the effect of global growth, not growth in rich countries. That should attenuate the gap between their results and the results of modelling this just in LMICs. And I don’t know how big a big difference is, but to take it from my final estimate of 12X to 1000X would require growth promotion in LMICs to be over 80 times more cost effective than global growth promotion, which seems like a lot.
Yes and to be clear, I think the analysis is well done and think this adds to the debate, so I appreciate you doing this