FWIW, I’m not sure if you found it already, but I think this is the best piece I’ve seen written so far on the overlaps and differences between EA and SJ worldviews: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
IanDavidMoss
Karma: 2,654
Improving Institutional Decision-Making: a new working group
A Landscape Analysis of Institutional Improvement Opportunities
Prioritizing COVID-19 interventions & individual donations
Improving Institutional Decision-Making: Which Institutions? (A Framework)
Vitalik Buterin just donated $54M (in ETH) to GiveWell
One context note that doesn’t seem to be reflected here is that in 2014, there was a lot of optimism for a bipartisan political compromise on criminal justice reform in the US. The Koch network of charities and advocacy groups had, to some people’s surprise, begun advocating for it in their conservative-libertarian circles, which in turn motivated Republican participation in negotiations on the hill. My recollection is that Open Phil’s bet on criminal justice reform funding was not just a “bet on Chloe,” but also a bet on tractability: i.e., that a relatively cheap investment could yield a big win on policy because the political conditions were such that only a small nudge might be needed. This seems to have been an important miscalculation in retrospect, as (unless I missed something) a limited-scope compromise bill took until the end of 2018 to get passed.
I’m not aware of any significant other criminal justice legislation that has passed in that time period.[Edit: while this is true at the national level, arguably there has been a lot of progress on CJR at state and local levels since 2014, much of which could probably be traced back to advocacy by groups like those Open Phil funded.]This information strongly supports the “Leverage Hypothesis,” which was cited by Open Phil staff themselves, so I think it ought to be weighted pretty strongly in your updates.
When does it make sense to support/oppose political candidates on EA grounds?
The top-voted suggestion in FTX’s call for megaproject ideas was to evaluate the impacts of FTX’s own (and other EA) grantmaking. It’s hard to conduct such an evaluation without, at some point, doing the kind of analysis Jack is calling for. I don’t have a strong opinion about whether it’s better for FTX to hire in-house staff to do this analysis or have it be conducted externally (I think either is defensible), but either way, there’s a strong demonstrated demand for it and it’s hard to see how it happens without EA dollars being deployed to make it possible. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all for Jack to make this suggestion, even if it could have been worded a bit more politely.
I agree. While I appreciate the push to lower the barriers to posting for those who feel intimidated, the flipside of this is that it’s pretty demotivating when a post that reflects five months and hundreds of hours of work is on the front page for less than a day. I feel like there’s something wrong with the system when I can spend five minutes putting together a linkpost instead and earn a greater level of engagement.
AMA: Ian David Moss, strategy consultant to foundations and other institutions
I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but have followed the effective philanthropy “scene” since 2007 or so. My sense is that most EA community members aren’t very knowledgeable about this whole side of institutional philanthropy, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the history recounted pretty accurately here! With that said, one quibble is that the book you cited entitled Effective Philanthropy by Mary Ellen Capek and Molly Mead is not one I’d ever heard of before reading this post; I think this is just a case of a low-profile resource happening to get good Google search results years later.
Here is a bit of additional background on the key players and some of their intersections, as I understand it:
The effective philanthropy movement was very much a child of the original dot-com boom in the late 1990s. While CEP is based in Boston, the scene was mostly driven by an earlier generation of West Coast tech magnates who were interested in bringing business concepts like results-based management to philanthropy. Education funding was viewed as a major priority and there were close ties to the charter school movement, which saw a number of influential organizations like KIPP incubated by funders looking to put these ideas into practice. With that said, CEP’s Phil Buchanan has consistently pushed back against the idea that nonprofits are analogous to businesses, despite his own MBA from Harvard Business School.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has an Effective Philanthropy Program and has been a major financial supporter of CEP for a long time. Hewlett’s former president Paul Brest (2000-2012) pioneered the notion of “strategic philanthropy” which is closely related both in spirit and sociologically to this movement. Fun trivia note: Hewlett’s Effective Philanthropy program was an early funder of GiveWell at the time when that organization was precariously situated (i.e., pre-Dustin & Cari).
Stanford Social Innovation Review was closely associated with this scene as well. With startup funding from Hewlett, I believe it was intended to be a Harvard Business Review for the social sector when it was founded in 2003. (HBR had published the original article on “venture philanthropy” in 1997.)
Some other funders that have been influential include Mario Marino’s Venture Philanthropy Partners and his Leap of Reason community, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, and REDF (which developed the social return on investment methodology, a form of cost-benefit analysis).
Over the past decade, the consensus among US-based staffed foundations has shifted hard against some of the technocratic premises that drove the effective philanthropy movement, in particular its emphasis on measurable outcomes and tendency to invest lots of funder resources in strategy development. The Whitman Institute’s work probably contributed in a minor way to that dynamic, but in my read a much stronger influence has been the growing emphasis on racial justice in the nonprofit sector since the dawn of the Black Lives Matter movement that, via a variety of pathways including the widespread socialization of Tema Okun’s work, caused so-called “top-down” approaches like effective/strategic philanthropy to feel out of touch with the moment. One of the earliest points of tension was a series put out beginning in 2009 by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy called “Philanthropy at its Best” critiquing current foundation practices, which Brest wrote a four-part essay responding to in 2011. A parallel thread of critique comes from complexity science, via the argument that the wicked problems philanthropy is trying to solve are knotty enough that trying to predict the outcomes of philanthropic investments with any meaningful level of detail is a fool’s errand, and funders should therefore defer to the expertise of grantees wherever possible. On that front, this essay from one of the co-founders of FSG (a philanthropy consultancy closely associated with Harvard Business School and the early days of venture philanthropy) was particularly influential.
I don’t believe there was one single event that caused the momentum around effective philanthropy to fall apart, but by 2016 or so it was clear that its peak was in the rear-view mirror; a particularly dramatic turn was when Hal Harvey, Paul Brest’s co-author on their 2008 book Money Well Spent which was written while Brest was still president of Hewlett, wrote an op-ed apologizing for his role advancing strategic philanthropy. There’s a much longer conversation to have about to what extent and which of the critiques of effective philanthropy are worth attending to, and how they relate to effective altruism, but I’m happy to see it pointed out that many of the topics EA is most concerned with have been discussed at length in other venues.
I’ve been thinking about this too. I was really struck by the contrast between the high level of explicit support for “one of our own” running for office vs. the usual resistance to political activism or campaigning otherwise. Personally, I’m strongly in favor of good-faith political campaigning on EA grounds, but from my perspective explicit ties to the EA community shouldn’t matter so much in that calculus—rather, what matters is our expectations of what the candidates would do to advance or block EA-aligned priorities, whether the candidates are branded as EA or not.
In 2020 I suggested that it might be a good idea to set up an entity to vet and endorse candidates for office on EA grounds. While I’m sure such an entity would have still supported Carrick in retrospect, I think one benefit of having a resource like this is that it would allow us to identify, support, and develop relationships with other politicians around the US and in the rest of the world who would be really helpful to have in office while not facing some of the disadvantages of being a newcomer/outsider that Carrick faced.
Recommendations for prioritizing political engagement in the 2020 US elections
Yes, I strongly agree with this. Almost all money in politics goes to establishing and maintaining narratives about the candidates, but money becomes a problem rather than a help in politics when the supporter and candidate allow the money itself to become the narrative. This is especially true in a Democratic primary.
Introducing the Effective Institutions Project Innovation Fund, a new regranting option for donors
Reflections on EA Global from a first-time attendee
David, I hate to remind you that EA interventions are supposed to be tractable...
Just noting that in the comments of the original post by Nathan Young that the authors linked to, the top-upvoted suggestion was to offset the gap in nuclear security funding created by the MacArthur Foundation’s exit from the field. I recently had an opportunity to speak to someone who was there at the time of MacArthur’s decision and can share more about that privately, but suffice to say that our community should not treat the foundation’s shift in priorities as a strong signal about the importance or viability of work in this space going forward.
Wow, I didn’t see it at the time but this was really well written and documented. I’m sorry it got downvoted so much and think that reflects quite poorly on Forum voting norms and epistemics.