Good point. If rulers worry about the consequences for social life, for instance, they could reduce taxes on some other good that is important to bar and restaurant operations, or even reduce taxes on low alcohol% beverage options while raising taxes on stiffer blends
artilugio
Karma: 16
One can also imagine monetary costs being inflicted on families whose drunk adults now have less money leftover from their binge for picking up takeout or groceries
I think this is a good thought. With loneliness and social capital underdevelopment such large and apparently consequential problems, it is important to think about alternate candidates that might perform alcohol’s social lubricant role
Thank you for this info. Am i understanding correctly that advocacy for taxes on sugary drinks is estimated to be 55x more effective than donation to givewell’s recommended charities?
I think it is also useful to consider some civic consequences of depletion of non-tradable professional workforces. In countries where premature deindustrialization from import competition and IT and industrial automation have reduced the number of clerks, engineers, and factory workers, teachers, policemen, and nurses not only perform their professional roles but may also be the school board, the church organizers and donor pool, the newspaper’s customer base, the treasurers of the local government, and maybe the base of a democratization movement. The nurse from Lagos at the medical post may be the only sympathetic, knowledgeable outsider to whom the village girls can look for advice or role modeling
To be fair, I can imagine remittances help thicken the civic fabric. Maybe by financing private school tuition for a nephew, or a family member’s internet cafe business / print shop
Have you set up this school in Uganda? How has it gone?
Are there any promising political or technical initiatives that exist or that you would like to see to increase the volume of exports and employment in low-income countries? What are some important barriers in the present? Tariffs? Inadequate infrastructure in very poor countries?
congrats. i hope content will include setbacks in the fight to keep GBG / bichera fly out of Central America and Mexico, Uruguay’s anti-bichera project and collaboration with Mexico, corn import tariffs’ potential for reducing chicken industry scale, Fiocruz dengue vaccine efforts, chikugunya vaccine prospects, use of Brazilian and Portuguese media products such as telenovelas and soccer competitions for improving Portuguese fluency in ex—Portuguese colonies in sub-Saharan Africa to aid in nation-state consolidation and development
I think there are already tons of really smart people working full time on making the futures where we survive more valuable. I think the likeliest existential and catastrophic risks are relatively neglected
are you seeking investors?
If increased homebuilding does not raise inflation economy-wide, might it still make credit a bit more expensive by raising competition for credit?
If more direct effects on interest rates of increased homebuilding are smaller than effects on policy rates via lower rent-->lower inflation, should we surmise that US yimbyism may be a useful intervention for augmenting global development and reducing global poverty?
We are currently having problems with inadequate electricity generation in Ecuador, where drought has weakened hydropower output. What do you think second-best solutions might be for countries in this boat? Waiting for foreign donors/investors/lenders to impose higher prices as a condition of major help? Waiting for solar and batteries to get better/cheaper and replace more of diesel’s role, and also to make generation cheaper for the energy firms so that their deficits are smaller and more bailout funds can be aimed at new investment?
Countries like Ecuador, Colombia, and Nigeria have recently demonstrated courage in reducing motor fuel subsidies (which, in Nigeria, may impact those firms and households who rely on diesel backup). Are electrical price subsidies politically even tougher due to electricity being so much more common than cars in low and middle-income countries?
What are the next steps for expanding this program? I read that the pharma firm Takeda and a Brazilian non-profit have each invented promising dengue vaccines, too
Dang I didn’t notice that
[Question] USD interest rates
Some functionary involved in malaria vaccine distribution to tell us how they could expand and accelerate.
Someone to explain to us how that Danish pharmaceutical firm’s governance structure works, and whether it’s better for continuous investment in innovation than the one where “founder mode” ends and lawyers take the reins of firms crucial to human progress.
I liked your interview with a professor who talked about defense methods against pandemics and potential gene drive efficacy against malaria, new world screw worm, lyme disease, and maybe one other nasty enemy. Works in Progress also had an article about gene drives’ promise against diseases like these in its most recent edition. I would also like to know about Jamaica and Uruguay’s attempts to open new fronts against the New World Screw Worm.
I liked an interview that I believe to have been on 80k hours about efforts to reduce air pollution in India. I would like to know what effect could be expected from allowing export of natural gas from countries like Turkmenistan, Iran, and Venezuela to India.
I am interested in learning about the importance of fertilizer prices and natural gas prices to global nutrition. I think there is a woman at the Breakthrough Institute who studies this topic. I suppose oil prices may be an important input, too.
I would like to know more about how USD interest rates and oil prices impact global poverty, so as to better evaluate the importance of factors like home rental inflation and economic sanctions in determining poverty rates.
someone recently posted the transcript from an 80k hours podcast interview with an MIT scientist who invented something called the CRISPR drive, which the MIT scientist thinks could be used to make lots of male screwworms infertile so that they stop making larvae that eat the flesh of many millions of animals every year. New World Screwworm would be difficult to eradicate in South America, where it does most of its damage, but it is still endemic in Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Trinidad and Tobago, which are island nations who would be protected by the sea from re-infestation if NWSW were to be eradicated on their territories. I imagine it may also be problem on non-sovereign islands like Colombia’s San Andres and Providencia in the Caribbean, and maybe Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, which definitely has a parasite that is endangering several bird species by invading the organisms of hatchlings. Uruguay is trying to eradicate NWSW on its territory now. maybe a megaproject could pay technicians from the Uruguay mission, if it turns out to be successful, to try to repeat the feat on a Caribbean island to try to bring the issue to the attention of more nation-states and donors.
FDA also approved a Chikungunya (sp?) vaccine recently. lots of tropical winning
Idk about magnitudes but in my country, Ecuador, alcoholism is a huge problem. We have some sin taxes on alcohol, but it seems difficult to raise them in part because binge-drinking is such a popular passtime and in part because there is lots of illegal production of moonshine-type alcohol that would likely gain market share with higher taxes on formal-sector alcohol products
Does anyone know if satellite and AI technology authorities could more easily identify acreage dedicated to sugar cane cultivation and tax this land more heavily than land devoted to other crops? Sugar cane is an important input for much of the bootleg moonshine in Ecuador, to my knowledge. Sugar cane also produces other harmful products, so I think taxing its production in this way could have other helpful effects and lead to more land and other agricultural resources being devoted to healthier crops