This case is harder, but I’ll note that in general I don’t read EV explanations of spending less than $100mn. If there wasn’t all the controversy, I doubt I’d care and probably I don’t want EV feeling the need to explain every $20mn expenditure. Though this case may be different, hard to think about.
You can read what you want of course, but I don’t think ginormous cost is the sole factor that justifies scrutiny.
For example, if an EA org spent it’s donor money on a very expensive watch for their CEO, I’d would expect some very good justification. The thousands of dollars might not be large in the grand scale, but that’s still money that could have gone to an effective cause, and it could be evidence of bad decision making, wastefulness, or even corruption.
While I would say $100mn is probably too high a bar, buying Whytham Abbey wasn’t really $20mn expenditure as they’ll sell it and get most of this back. So the actual expenditure (cost related to the transaction, running costs, overhead, gain/loss, not including any reputational cost) of the purchase is probably between $1mn and $4mn (depending on what they manage to sell it for).
Has EVF ever had a $100MM expenditure? If I recall the 990s and Charity Commission reports, annual expenses were in the tens of millions of USD and GBP, and some of that was EA Funds grantmaking + GWWC passthrough.
This seems like the wrong order of magnitude to apply this logic at, $20mn is close to 1% of the money that OpenPhil has disbursed over its lifetime ($2.8b)
This case is harder, but I’ll note that in general I don’t read EV explanations of spending less than $100mn. If there wasn’t all the controversy, I doubt I’d care and probably I don’t want EV feeling the need to explain every $20mn expenditure. Though this case may be different, hard to think about.
You can read what you want of course, but I don’t think ginormous cost is the sole factor that justifies scrutiny.
For example, if an EA org spent it’s donor money on a very expensive watch for their CEO, I’d would expect some very good justification. The thousands of dollars might not be large in the grand scale, but that’s still money that could have gone to an effective cause, and it could be evidence of bad decision making, wastefulness, or even corruption.
While I would say $100mn is probably too high a bar, buying Whytham Abbey wasn’t really $20mn expenditure as they’ll sell it and get most of this back. So the actual expenditure (cost related to the transaction, running costs, overhead, gain/loss, not including any reputational cost) of the purchase is probably between $1mn and $4mn (depending on what they manage to sell it for).
Has EVF ever had a $100MM expenditure? If I recall the 990s and Charity Commission reports, annual expenses were in the tens of millions of USD and GBP, and some of that was EA Funds grantmaking + GWWC passthrough.
This seems like the wrong order of magnitude to apply this logic at, $20mn is close to 1% of the money that OpenPhil has disbursed over its lifetime ($2.8b)
Yeah $20,000,000 here, $20,000,000 there, pretty soon we’re talking about real money.
Maybe, but nonetheless it is true. I don’t read ’em. Do you?