Research Fellow @ Open Phil. Mostly on Twitter.
Lauren Gilbert
Karma: 445
Open Philanthropy Shallow Investigation: Civil Conflict Reduction
Oh, that’s a valid point about scaling; noted.
Re. job training: I was referring to Blattman and Annan 2016, where the intervention contained both counseling and job training.
Very excited to see the ten year results when they’re out!
Policing reform is a topic near and dear to my heart, so I am happy to talk about this ad nauseam. One of the papers in my now-on-pause dissertation was on policing, and I also RAed on a study on community policing in the Global South. (It didn’t work.)
I agree that better policing is desperately needed in the developing world; functionally, there really aren’t police in much of the world. But I don’t know that the literature is yet mature enough for this kind of overview; policing in the developing world has really only taken off as a research area in the last few years. My wild speculation would be that police reform is really hard—changing incentives for police can be very difficult in under-resourced environments.
The field is really growing, though, so I’m excited to see what comes out of that field in the future. Travis Curtice and Rob Blair are two of my favorite scholars of policing.
On a related note, if people reading this are interested in political economy & GHW, feel free to email me to chat about the advantages/disadvantages of being in a political science department instead of an econ department.
Oh, hi, stranger. ;)
Yes, we’ve been thinking about this a bit. In this version of the model, I assumed recovery to trend within 10 years, but honestly, that’s incredibly unrealistic. We’re likely to revise our model to use a substantially longer time scale for recovery.
I would love to see the arxiv expand to other disciplines that love preprints. I think centralizing the scattered social science preprint sphere would be doing good for science! (I am an ex-physicist turned political scientist, and I miss the arxiv so much.)
also, I would love if the arxiv had a good export to .bib file rather than just a copy-paste .bib formatted text, so I didn’t have to click through to the ADS to generate a .bib file. It would save me quite a few seconds. ;)
Yes! Political science often uses SSRN, but SSRN is… worse than the arxiv and doesn’t really do a daily digest of relevant papers (the astro-ph mailing list is every astrophysicist’s way of staying up to date with literature). Preprints sometimes go on author’s websites, sometimes get linked on Twitter, it’s just not centralized.
Econ has the same problem—there is an econ-gn category on the arxiv, but not a category for, say, crime, or health, or gender. Some preprints are on NBER, some are on IZA, some are on SSRN, etc.
Oh my god, if you let people include code in their preprints, you will be every astrophysicist’s favorite FOREVER.
Update: I texted an astrophysicist friend about including code in arxiv postings and got back “EXTREMELY GOOD”
Open Philanthropy Shallow Investigation: Telecommunications in LMICs
It looks like my footnote on Starlink didn’t make it over the forum version; will fix that! In the interim, these are my thoughts: “in the near future, satellites in low orbit will make it possible to access broadband in almost all parts of the world in the near future. However, satellite internet is quite pricey. Starlink terminals are currently $500 loss-leaders for the company, plus a monthly cost of $99. While this makes coverage possible throughout the world, it does not mean that this is actually useful to the majority of the world (let alone the ~7% of the world that does not have access to mobile broadband yet).”
Most experts we talked to were skeptical on Starlink for the average person in a LMIC, just because of the cost.
When we spoke to experts in the field, this was not a major concern for them. Indeed, a couple mentioned that often convincing people to use a development intervention is an uphill battle—but people needed no convincing to use cell phones.
This seems to be borne out by usage statistics; even though devices are expensive (44% of monthly income is a lot), usage is growing a lot. GSMA has smartphone usage doubling in sub-Saharan Africa doubling from 2014-2019 (pg. 17). World Bank research suggests the major barrier entry to using a mobile device is not lack of interest, but affordability.
Oh, that’s really interesting. I’ve passed this along to the team.
Two very quick notes:
It’s Caltech, no space.
As someone who went to Caltech (and turned down a couple of Ivys), I think EA’s focus on top tier schools is very weird and missing a lot of talent.
Edited to add: my MS and MA are from a less elite school (UCSD). I’ve tried to convince more of my friends from UCSD to apply to jobs at Open Phil than I have Caltech friends.
As far as I am aware, it is not true. Given most health conditions are rare, and even common health conditions are experienced by a minority of the population, DALY and QALY valuations are mostly produced by people with no lived experience of the condition they are ranking.
I will confirm this and also say that if your PhD does not provide funding, you should not go. This also applies to PhDs that don’t provide enough funding to live (though this may eliminate a few good schools—I’m not sure either Isabel’s alma mater (UCLA) or mine (UCSD) provide stipends that make sense relative to housing costs.)
Re. military service AND a PhD: we had a handful of active-duty people go through my PhD. They had three years to write their PhD—which is very short, and meant they did not write an academic-quality dissertation. (They all stayed in the military and went on to their next post; I do not think they regret not being academics.). That might be fine for you! But it’s worth bearing in mind that if you are interested in an academic job, using military service for funding probably won’t get you one.
You may want to disambiguate Great Lakes region—I had a moment where I was confused if you meant Ohio or Uganda.
Re. the intimidation factor: I regularly write for an audience of ~1.3M people. I found posting on the EA forum much more intimidating.
I am much more likely to get criticism in response to an EA forum post than elsewhere. This is good in terms of robustness of ideas, but it also means I am never going to dash off a post quickly.
FWIW, I found much higher ROI from improving quality of electricity access (e.g. reducing the number of blackouts; based pretty heavily on this paper from Fried and Lagakos) than from improving the quantity of electricity supplied.
I wish there was more data on this! There is very little systematic data collection on refugees and IDPs in the Global South. I had trouble finding data on physical health—e.g. life expectancy for those displaced by civil war—and well-being data was even thinner on the ground. I even tweeted about how much I wanted this data to exist. ;)
I certainly expect that experiencing or being displaced by civil war has substantially negative effects on well-being—this paper shows the effects persist for at least three decades—but I didn’t feel I had enough data in order to really include it in my BOTEC.