I think that there are pretty strong arguments that entrepreneurship is effective partly because of the actual value that the business creates. For instance, the paper Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy estimates that entrepreneurs capture on average 1% of the value they create. If it costs about 100x as much to save a life in the US as abroad, that would suggest that half the benefit of EA entrepreneurship is realized through creating value in the US.
(Obviously there’s a huge amount of variance here, depending on things like whether you’re trying to capture value or trying to create value, and whether we believe Nordhaus’s statistics. This is very back-of-the-envelope.)
I think that there are pretty strong arguments that entrepreneurship is effective partly because of the actual value that the business creates. For instance, the paper Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy estimates that entrepreneurs capture on average 1% of the value they create. If it costs about 100x as much to save a life in the US as abroad, that would suggest that half the benefit of EA entrepreneurship is realized through creating value in the US.
(Obviously there’s a huge amount of variance here, depending on things like whether you’re trying to capture value or trying to create value, and whether we believe Nordhaus’s statistics. This is very back-of-the-envelope.)
Not that it matters for your argument, but I think the figure is closer to 2%.
(This must be the most nitpicky comment in the history of this site.)