Founder of the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH), a Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated organization doing cause prioritization research.
Once a civil servant, and then a consultant specializing in political, economic and policy research. Recovering PPEist who overdosed on meta-ethics.
Joel Tan (CEARCH)
The elite overproduction hypothesis is always interesting (not sure of robustness even in the context of the US and other advanced economies where the case for it would be strongest), but probably not a worry in the context of low income countries where it’s just primary/secondary education we’re looking at.
If you think that EA is (a) a community committed to the two ideas of (b) us needing to do far more to help others even at great cost, and (c) doing this as effectively as possible, then we would date EA to 2009 with both the first GWWC pledgers as well as the less organized stuff on Felicifia, since this qualifies on all three counts of (a), (b), and (c). The 2006 and before stuff aren’t organized enough to really be considered a community i.e. disqualified on criterion (a) but that’s subjective.
Also, I miss the days of Common Sense Atheism! Always interesting to see the proportion of people transitioning from the rationalist anti-theist movement to EA (especially longtermism, but you can definitely see the intellectual overlap)
The causality could well runs both ways, since plausibly education improves productivity and income, even as countries/people spend more on education as they get richer. To get around this problem of reverse causality, the Dieppe et al analysis we rely on basically regresses 1960-2018 growth rates on 1960 education levels and other candidate explanations like innovation or institutions (since obviously future growth rates cannot affect the past).
However, as I note in the report, this doesn’t eliminate the problem completely, since possibly 1960-2018 growth rates are autocorrelated with pre-1960 growth rates, which then influence 1960 education levels etc.
That said, my conclusion is that this is sufficiently unlikely given the theoretical and empirical case against consistently positive autocorrelation between past and future productivity growth:In theory, copying technological/educational/managerial innovations etc and catch-up growth is just easier than inventing further new ideas.
Empirically, advanced economies underperform the global average of productivity growth while developing economies over-perform.
And if we don’t expect future growth rates to be positively correlated with past growth rates, then it wouldn’t be growth boosting education (through higher growth allowing more spending on education). And hence, we can be fairly confident that reverse causality is probably not driving the results. I discuss this all in greater detail in the report.
The Gruber paper (linked below in my comment) suggests that reducing smoking actually makes the population of smokers and potential smokers happier.
In any case, it doesn’t appear to me true that most smokers don’t want to quit—see data on the US and even in China where most people don’t want to quit, a strong majority (70%) supports the government doing more to control smoking.
Great and comprehensive piece. I’m personally very enthusiastic about this intervention, based onCharity Entrepreneurship’s report on tobacco taxation, which found that it’s extremely cost-effective (i.e. maybe USD 27-37 per DALY, which is >GiveWell top charities in expectation), and also on CEARCH’s own research that global health policy interventions tend to be enormously cost-effective.
Important points to add.
(1) I would push back on modelling such mere speeding up as involving simply a set number of years (year of introduction san intervention—year of introduction with intervention) in which the intervention counterfactually applies. It’s important to realize that future tax increases apply on top of the intervention—in this sense, it’s better to think of the tax as a permanent level increase, which of course brings long-term benefits.
(2) These benefits are subject to various discount rates, but generally (a) tobacco taxes are sticky (i.e. aren’t reversed), though inflation can be an issue, and (b) as you say, DALY burdens are growing due to population growth outweighing the secular decline in per capita tobacco consumption.
(3) Economic benefits are around 10% of the health benefits for tobacco, last I did an analysis on this, so agreed that the lack of incorporate in the BOTEC doesn’t alter conclusions overmuch.
(4) The main issue not talked about in this report but which you’ll find is most politically salient is the issue of regressivity—policymakers are afraid the poor are disproportionately hurt, which is a legitimate concern. That said (a) low SES populations (and youths) tend to be disproportionately price sensitive, so their consumption falls more than average (and hence they’re hurt less than they otherwise would be), and (b) you can design income-targeting lump sump compensations.
(5) Caleb Parikh and Joel Burke can speak to this better than me, but my understanding is that the Ministries of Finances tend to be the obstacle in lobbying attempts—not the Ministries of Health, which tend to be supportive. To address the former’s concern (which will be revenue-related), it’s important to point out that actually tax revenues rise with tobacco excise rates, at least over the short and medium term, due to the elasticities involved.
(6) From a consumer welfare perspective (i.e. the pleasure from smoking argument), Gruber had an interesting paper showing that, far from reducing consumer welfare, excise taxes makes the smoking population – whether actual smokers, former smokers or even potential smokers – happier, by helping them overcome their time-inconsistent preferences (i.e. helping them quit something that gives them pleasure in the short-term but which reduces their overall life satisfaction in the
long-term). And this makes sense—that’s literally what addiction is.
(7) For the issue of freedom of choice - under plausible moral weights, the health benefits dominate the autonomy considerations up until the point where you transition from taxes to de jure bans; not a particularly significant issue
(8) Smuggling/black market considerations are unlikely to be an issue. While there are theoretical concerns about higher taxes causing increased black market activity, such worries are not justified by the empirical evidence. As Schwartz and Zhang (2016) find, the international experience has been that raising tobacco prices either (a) fails to raise contraband tobacco activity at all, or (b) does so only temporarily, or (c) causes a sufficiently small increase in black activity such that cigarette consumption still falls.
(9) Critically, this shallow report may be too bearish on the chances of tobacco tax advocacy. CE’s case study of 159 case studies suggests about a 27% chance of success, and while I would discount this to some extent due to selection bias (i.e. taxes being pushed in countries where it’s more likely to succeed), this would still suggest a >10% chance of success.
All in all, great work, and I am keen to seen more direct work in this area.
Shallow Report on Productivity
Sounds great! Hope the side effects aren’t too bad, and (for what it’s worth), I think it’s really commendable to volunteer for challenge trials.
Hi Bob & team,
Really great work. Regardless of my specific disagreements, I do think calculating moral weights for animals is literally some of the highest value work the EA community can do, because without such weights we cant compare animal welfare causes to human-related global health/longtermism causes—and hence cannot identify and direct resources towards the most important problems. And I say this as someone who has always donated to human causes over animal ones, and who is not, in fact, vegan.
With respect to the post and the related discussion:
(1) Fundamentally, the quantitative proxy model seems conceptually sound to me.
(2) I do disagree with the idea that your results are robust to different theories of welfare. For example, I myself reject hedonism and accept a broader view of welfare (given that we care about a broad range of things beyond happiness, e.g. life/freedom/achievement/love/whatever). If (a) such broad welfarist views are correct, (b) you place a sufficiently high weight on the other elements of welfare (e.g. life per se, even if neutral valenced), and (c) you don’t believe animals can enjoy said elements of welfare (e.g. if most animals aren’t cognitively sophisticated enough to have preferences over continued existence), then an additional healthy year of human life would plausibly be worth a lot more than an equivalent animal year even after accounting for similar degrees of suffering and the relevant moral weights as calculated.
(3) I would like to say, for the record, that a lot of the criticism you’re getting (and I don’t exempt myself here) is probably subject to a lot of motivated reasoning. I am personally uncertain as to the degree to which I should discount my own conclusions over this reason.
(4) My main concern, as someone who does human-related cause prioritization research, is the meat eater argument and whether helping to save human lives is net negative from overall POV, given the adverse consequences for animal suffering. I am moderately optimistic that this is not so, and that saving human lives is net positive (as we want/need it to be) . Having very roughly run the numbers myself using RP’s unadjusted moral weights (i.e. not taking into account point 2 above) and inputting other relevant data (e.g. on per capita consumption rate of meat), my approximate sense is that in saving lives we’re basically buying 1 full week of healthy human life for around 6 days of chicken suffering or above 2 days of equivalent human suffering—which is worth it.
Shallow Report on Shigella
The probability of advocacy success is a fairly critical variable, and I agree that the estimate provided could well be too optimistic. It really depends on (a) what reference class you take, and (b) how you weigh it against subjective inside view estimates. For example, my estimate of (b) as informed by working in the public sector/politics is fairly low, but if you look do a case study of when sugar taxes were actually advocated (and implemented or not), it’s really impressive (~90%), and the real challenge becomes adjusting for selection bias—both with respect to it being tried (in countries where political conditions were more favourable in the first place), and successful attempts being noted in the news (while failed ones die inside the government, unreported).
On the one hand, sugary drinks taxes really aren’t that uncommon, so it’s not that surprising that it wouldn’t be too difficult to advocate for (relative to something like sodium tax advocacy, which is probably a quarter as tractable). I would also caution against using US lobbying costs, since that isn’t necessarily representative (i.e. the modal campaign wouldn’t be hiring K-street lobbyists in the US, so much as an NGO talking to low and middle-income countries governments, which tend to defer to NGOs than western governments do).
In general, I hope to get a better sense of this by talking to experts (even while noting that the public health experts may well also be overoptimistic due to halo effects/wishful thinking!)
Cheers, Mathias.
In the context of public health taxation policies, the main hard-to-quantify downside would be freedom of choice. As you know, I’m sympathetic to the concern, and we worked together before on quantifying freedom lost from tobacco taxation while in the CE incubation programme (and I think it’s linked to somewhere in CEARCH’s evaluative framework, as an example of how one might do it).
Having explicitly run the numbers in the context of tobacco/alcohol taxation + tightening road traffic standards in Singapore , my sense is that (a) for the range of realistic moral weights, very high taxes are still justified (i.e. the health benefits > the freedom of choice considerations), but outweigh bans are not (i.e. once you move from very high taxes to outright bans, the marginal health benefits decline below the value of freedom of choice).
Will definitely look to do this (i.e. incorporate freedom of choice considerations) at intermediate stages, and if we reach the deep stage I can definitely see the value of funding actual moral weights research on the matter (i.e. surveys to see how much people value being able to drink sweet drinks etc).
It’s loose talk, I agree—what’s we’re talking about really are health-adjusted life years (HALE), the loss of which are accounted for via DALYs. Probably should fix that going forward, but in general I find that people intuitively get the idea of disability-adjusted life years as a positive thing (for whatever reason)
Shallow Report on Diabetes Mellitus Type 2
I’ll look through this in greater detail eventually, but the main things that jump out at on this post is the lack of engagement with two of the biggest issues at stake:
(1) Ukraine’s inability to join NATO so long as it has outstanding territorial disputes, and hence its susceptibility to future invasions and war crimes.
(2) Russia’s continued possession of Sevastopol and Crimea allowing it to threaten Black Sea shipping, blockade grain exports, and cause/threaten to cause global famine as political leverage as happened early last year.
These would likely be the determinative factors, along with the likelihood of the Crimeans being subject to abusive autocracy (improbable) or that nuclear war will result (highly improbable). Reasonable people can definitely disagree on how it all adds up on net, but I do think a comprehensive attempt to engage with the topic requires addressing (1) Ukraine’s top concern of future security, and (2) the absolutely critical issue of global famine.
There’s Ruby Dickson in Colorado, though my sense now is that you don’t want to be explicitly identified in public as an EA given FTX. There are also EA-adjacent roles in Democratic politics, but I also understand that this is increasingly under pressure/no longer the case. Feel free to DM me if you want to chat more on this.
There’s a well-established bias in general in media towards negative reporting—it’s just what people are more interested in/animated by (see: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1908369116) It’s the same reason why negative stuff tends to get shared more on FB and social media in general, iirc.
Basically, it’s not an EA-specific issue. When was the last time you read a story about (virtually all) planes not crashing when they take off, or unemployment not being a problem for the vast majority of the population?
Great work, Akhil!
Wanted to hear your thoughts on two things in particular:
(1) The extent to which domestic violence DALYs are expected to decline in time (or not). For example, one might be optimistic in thinking along the lines of: economic development → greater female labour force participation → greater financial independence for women → less need for women to tolerate abusive partners given financial precarity → long term attitudinal changes in men towards internalizing the unacceptability of VAWG. On the other hand, one might be pessimistic that cultural attitudes always lag socioeconomic development, sometimes considerably. Does the research reveal anything useful in this regard?
(2) Generally, how do state/legal/policy-related interventions compare in cost-effectiveness, especially in a context where state institutions are weak and police/judges may have fairly misogynist attitudes themselves (e.g. hostility to rape victims etc)?
Am definitely enthusiastic about researching this at CEARCH down the line.
Sounds great!
One question I have is about the extent to which this is counterfactually better than just advising foundations to dump money into GiveWell charities; or, if one thinks GiveWell is too risk adverse or too short-termist, there are other cause/intervention/charity evaluation organizations out there like CE or Open Phil or 80k etc.
I would be fairly sceptical that smaller grantmaking organizations will be as accurate at identifying cost-effective or promising opportunities relative to the established organizations like GiveWell (who have big teams and a process that has been refined and improved over the years), or even compared to smaller organizations like CE/HLI/CEARCH doing cause prioritization (whose research teams are presumably by people whose interests/abilities meant they self-selected into cause prioritization work, rather than people who by good/bad luck are put into a position where they have to disburse e.g. one’s inheritance, or the family office funds).
Having spoken to some EA-sympathetic family offices, this is basically what they’ve said (i.e. they largely prefer to outsource the decision-making, subject to non-philanthropic/political considerations like giving locally etc).
In any case, keep up the great work, as always.
Would volunteer CEARCH to be added the list, with us doing public funding opportunity research, though of course we aren’t as big or as established as many of the others.