Hi Karthik,
Thanks for writing this! Very useful summary to the economics literature on development for someone unfamiliar with it.
I note in your caveat that “a large body of work emphasizes the importance of good institutions for development; I don’t believe that topic will yield any promising interventions”. You seem to have given alot of thought on this so I’m wondering if there are any clear signs you see which suggest that such institutional development work are indeed not promising.
There seem to be a number of organisations working on this front (e.g. Artha Global as suggested in this post, anti-corruption institutions etc.), though the outcomes may be hard to quantify. The EA community also often faces criticisms that it neglects interventions which aim at systemic change. Without having looked at the evidence, such interventions seem possibly promising to me.
Thanks for this post! The best advice I got was to: look through job descriptions for the specific jobs in biosecurity that YOU want, and identify the experience/skills needed.
The skills and experiences needed to develop technical DNA synthesis screening standards at IBBIS can be very different from those needed to work on advocacy for BWC verification mechanisms.