Heh, reminds me of some past work. In particular, see here.
When you say:
So if capital allocated to EA is growing at a faster rate than labour (β>γ), our discount rate should be negative with respect to time: if labour is growing faster, it should be positive… Intuitively, this occurs because capital and labour are varying at some rates exogenously and we wish our level of capital per worker to be as close to constant over time as possible due to diminishing marginal returns to all inputs.
I’m not sure whether this is the case. In particular, what does this assume about the return to capital and the return to labor? See equation 3 here: How low does r have to be for that conclusion to hold? It’s very possible that I am missing something.
Labour growth is considerably more stable than capital growth, but still volatile, so will be assumed to be a constant rate of 10% with a standard deviation of 5%, with the lower bound taken as the mean due to difficulties in higher growth rates (30% would imply that 4% of the world would be engaged in EA-relevant work by 2060, which seems highly implausible)
Arguably, labor growth is endogenous, not exogenous, and a function of both labor and capital?
α will be assumed to be the same level as the economy as a whole, at 0.4.
Why? It’s possible that it might be very different, and that this depends on the type of existential risk. E.g,. some types of AI safety seem like they can be done while capital constrained, some types of biorisk might be particulary capital heavy (e.g,. funding better protective equipment)
These results counterintuitively imply that the current marginal individual would be substantially higher marginal impact working to expand effective altruism than working on maximising the reduction in existential risk today, with 99.7% confidence
One interesting thing to look at might be what under what modelling assumptions this holds.
Overall I like the approach. I think that most of the uncertainty is going to come from model error, though.
Some comments about the approach:
Heh, reminds me of some past work. In particular, see here.
When you say:
I’m not sure whether this is the case. In particular, what does this assume about the return to capital and the return to labor? See equation 3 here: How low does r have to be for that conclusion to hold? It’s very possible that I am missing something.
Arguably, labor growth is endogenous, not exogenous, and a function of both labor and capital?
Why? It’s possible that it might be very different, and that this depends on the type of existential risk. E.g,. some types of AI safety seem like they can be done while capital constrained, some types of biorisk might be particulary capital heavy (e.g,. funding better protective equipment)
One interesting thing to look at might be what under what modelling assumptions this holds.
Overall I like the approach. I think that most of the uncertainty is going to come from model error, though.