Newsletter—Global Development & EA
Contractor for GiveWell
DavidNash
Karma: 4,832
The funding landscape also includes governments funding healthcare in their own countries. And the decisions they make will impact aid choices as well.
“A few years ago, I began to rethink that approach. More recently, with the input from our board, I now believe we can achieve the foundation’s goals on a shorter timeline, especially if we double down on key investments and provide more certainty to our partners.”
It seems it was more of a question of whether they could grant larger amounts effectively, which he was considering for multiple years (I don’t know how much of that may be possible due to aid cuts).
Is there any data to back up the environmental movement growing and stalling around those times? It may have got a lot of media attention but it seems like the real gains on climate change were made by people who have been working in clean tech for decades and politicians that were already lobbying for various policies in the 2000s/2010s.
I imagine if you work in that field people will show interest in the topic, I’d be interested in if you know there is outsized interest in cultivated meat over other alt proteins.
I’m not sure I see any data in that LinkedIn post, do we know how sales have changed over time and price points for these products? I find this type of data more convincing. I’d be more interested in seeing global info, and looking at sales of various products, in the retail and business sectors to get a good sense of what is actually happening in plant based margarine vs margarine vs butter vs plant based butter market.
The Jacob Peacock article is about them being the same price, not significantly cheaper, which I think is the wrong way to think about it. Most examples historically of animal products being replaced have been because of big cost differences rather than cost parity (horses/cars, whales/oil, fur/other fabrics). That doesn’t mean that people don’t still ride horses, hunt whales or use fur, just that it is a much smaller percentage.
You mention that ‘EA’ should temper it’s enthusiasm for cultivated meat. I’m not sure I have noticed this on the forum or in conversations, or at least not beyond enthusiasm for the idea of alternative proteins in general. Do you have a sense why you think cultivated meat enthusiasm is too high in EA?
I would also be sceptical of having your mind changed via survey data for dietary preferences when people already consume a lot of food that is manufactured in ways they say they are against. I think it would be more important to see whether alternative proteins (including cultivated meat) can become as tasty, convenient and significantly cheaper than animal products.
I think EA and Nazism are quite different (in many ways). EA doesn’t have a membership policy, and EA has a very wide range of philosophies, including opposing views, that people can believe in whilst still doing EA related work (positive vs negative utilitarianism, virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, some people care about animals some don’t, a very large range of time discounts, etc).
As in the original article about EA as a question, it makes less sense philosophically and practically to have EA as an identity.
Maybe what you’re noticing is people who haven’t been asked about their ‘EA’ status before, giving the answer they would have always given.
Part of it may be that before FTX there was already a strong norm for people to not identify as EA (EA as a question). And that has only got stronger since. At least in the UK a lot of people working in EA areas wouldn’t call themselves EA including myself, pre 2020.
There has been quite a bit written about democracy, I’m not sure if it fits your description but some of those posts might be related.
Effektiv Spenden also has a ‘Defending Democracy’ fund.
There’s a write up here (if you mean the same thing), but it was about 30 people.
Quite a few development and EA adjacent organisations think AI will be quite important, if not the most important factor for future development. It is already being used by many companies, charities and governments around the world.
IDInsight—Ask-a-Metric: Your AI data analyst on WhatsApp
The Agency Fund—AI for Global Development Accelerator: Introducing our cohort
How AI is driving India’s next agricultural revolution
How Neil King and David Baker are using AI to create more effective vaccines
Kenyan farmers deploying AI to increase productivity
How the farmers without smartphones are using AI
Another thing to look at would be how donations in general changed in 2020-2024. From what I’ve read, there have been decreases in US giving (of around 2%).
Similar to the reasoning behind Open Phil funding YIMBY groups.
Thanks for this, do you know what process AMF uses to verify the number of people in a house? And if there are any incentives to under/over report.
I have heard anecdotally that there is the opposite problem in Uganda and Burkina Faso.
In Burkina Faso the issue was that GDP per capita numbers were calculated from industrial output divided by population estimates so in order to look good, local government had an incentive to underestimate population so they seemed richer.
I’m not sure having a “bigger EA tent” leads to more funding/interest, if anything, people may be less likely to fund/support/be interested in a group that supports many different areas rather than the cause they mainly care about. At least it seems like cause specific orgs get much more funding than multi-cause/EA orgs.
I think this is outside the scope of the book, the example of Operation Desert Storm wasn’t that the general was trying to do the most good, but was given an objective by people higher up (who maybe made mistakes with their own strategic thinking).
I’m not even sure the book would suggest you ignore these externalities if that was the goal you were aiming for, it’s about providing a framework and some tools to help come up with better strategies.
There is a post here that looks into this question. (Although almost 10 years ago).
”There are some good reasons for why large donors would want to not give too much money to a charity at once:1 - Avoiding excessive reserves: Because of the opportunity costs (other charities could use money productively sooner), it is undesirable to have a charity having excessive reserves. Ideally, they would be promised a steady stream of funding if they meet specific targets over many years in order for them to be able to plan ahead.
2 - Risk diversification: Funds should be distributed to several high impact organisations in order to diversify the risk of one of them not performing well.
3 - Incentivizing others to join the cause area:
a—Countries: By restricting funding to a particular country, one incentivizes the country to invest in very effective health interventions themselves and use their (often very limited) domestic resources to close the funding gap between donations and the full cost of delivering effective health interventions. Poorer, low-income countries (such as Ethiopia) are less able to do this than low-to-middle income countries (such as India).
b—Charities: By restricting funding to charities, they’re being kept on their toes, so that they do not rely on a particular foundation or big grant giver exclusively and apply for other grants. For instance, in the past, the Gates foundation has heavily funded the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. However, Gates later discontinued SCI’s funding not because of too little effectiveness, but because, since their effectiveness had been established, other funders would more readily fund them.
c—Other donors: By restricting funding to particular charities, other donors are incentivized to also invest in the effective charities. For instance, the Against Malaria foundation has a broader appeal to small private donors than more high-expected-value interventions. Thus, even though theoretically, the Gates foundation, which is the largest private foundation in the world with an endowment of US$42.9 billion[4], could buy every person in Africa a bednet every two years (population of Africa (1 Billion) * Cost of Bednet (5 Dollars) = 5 Billion dollars) that would rapidly deplete their limited resources and then they could not spend their money on other very effective causes. They might reason that (small) more risk-averse donors (who want to be certain that their money will have an impact) will close the funding gap of very effective and established interventions and that they can instead spend more money on riskier, high expected value areas.
4 - Technological Innovation: New technological innovations—such as a very effective malaria vaccine—might be discovered, and these might be more cost-effective.
5 - High risk, high reward project:
For these reasons, one needs to come up with short-term room for more funding estimates.Crucially, many room-for-more-funding numbers do not include scale-up and seem to be an estimate of how much money the charities can use to fund projects in the short-term (i.e. in the next couple of years). In other words, these estimates do not take into account potential mid-term scale-up of their interventions into other countries or into more projects (see for instance[5],[6]). For instance, Givewell reports that AMF’s room for more funding in the next year is $25 Million, which translates to roughly 5 million bednets. Because AMF has reported to be constricted in terms of funding in the short-term, they had not been actively reaching out to other countries to discuss new net programs in the beginning of 2015[7]. AMF also has more leverage with regards to national malaria control programs agreeing to implement their strict and rigid monitoring and evaluation process, when they agree to give governments millions as opposed to thousands of bednets[8].
Because these room for more funding estimates do not include scale up, the Gates foundation cannot simply close the funding gap for bednets.”
Also if there was a way of automating this work, I’d be interested in chatting about that.
You may find other sources from the links I include in these newsletters.
We should shut down EA UK, change our mind
EA UK is hiring a new director, and if we don’t find someone who can suggest a compelling strategy, shutting down is a likely outcome despite having ~9 months of funding runway.
Over the last decade EA in the UK has been pretty successful, Loxbridge in particular has the highest number of people involved in EA, there are multiple EA related organisations, and many people in government, tech, business, academia, media, etc who are positively inclined towards EA.
Because of this success (not that we’re claiming counterfactual credit), there is less low hanging fruit for a national/city group to do.
For example:
Conferences—EAG London and student summits are run by CEA
Co-working—There are at least 3 different places to co-work (LEAH, LISA, AIM) for 100+ people, as well as many other orgs that have space for guests
Student groups—A combination of Arcadia Impact and CEA
Incubation of new organisations—AIM/CE
Media outreach—Mainly done by the most relevant organisations/CEA
I’m not saying mission accomplished, but for EA specific community building in the UK, I think there will have to be a good understanding of the existing landscape and ideas for what is missing and is unlikely to be done by someone else.