Again, I don’t think that’s relevant. I can easily ruin systems with a poorly spent $10m regardless of how hard it is to fix them.
I am not sure I understand why international funding should displace local expertise...
You’re saying that these failure modes are avoidable, but I’m not sure they are in fact being avoided.
The building of those health institutions takes a long time, the results come slowly with a time lag of 10+ years.
Yes, and slow feedback is a great recipe for not noticing how badly you’re messing things up. And yes, classic GiveWell type analysis doesn’t work well to consider complex policy systems, which is exactly why they are currently aggressively hiring people with different types of relevant expertise to consider those types of issues.
I can easily ruin systems with a poorly spent $10m regardless of how hard it is to fix them.
I understand, Give Well recommendations are not going down a path of destruction. So I am not worried. I would be really worried when they try to influence policies.
Also in the big picture I think AID helps if directed well, but it is a small part of the budgets of poor countries and can only be expected (in the big scheme of things) to have small effects. Most of the improvement has come from people/national governments improving their countries.
Again, I don’t think that’s relevant. I can easily ruin systems with a poorly spent $10m regardless of how hard it is to fix them.
You’re saying that these failure modes are avoidable, but I’m not sure they are in fact being avoided.
Yes, and slow feedback is a great recipe for not noticing how badly you’re messing things up. And yes, classic GiveWell type analysis doesn’t work well to consider complex policy systems, which is exactly why they are currently aggressively hiring people with different types of relevant expertise to consider those types of issues.
And speaking of this, here’s an interesting paper Rob Wiblin just shared on complexity and difficulty of decisionmaking in these domains; https://philiptrammell.com/static/simplifying_cluelessness.pdf
I understand, Give Well recommendations are not going down a path of destruction. So I am not worried. I would be really worried when they try to influence policies.
Also in the big picture I think AID helps if directed well, but it is a small part of the budgets of poor countries and can only be expected (in the big scheme of things) to have small effects. Most of the improvement has come from people/national governments improving their countries.