When I wrote the post, the framing I used was focused on the differences in direct impact of focusing on local causes. This meant not mentioning a number of other important considerations, both positive and negative. Since writing the post, I’ve had the opportunity to talk more to others, and to reflect some more on what these other considerations are. Below, I highlight some that I consider particularly important (see Sjir’s comment for some others).
Getting people involved with effective interventions for local problems can serve as a way to get more people involved with effective global interventions. This can happen because it will be easier for some people to get involved with a local problem first before getting involved with a global problem, and also because working on local-level interventions can increase the popularity of EA in the region. I’ve recently learned that GiveDirectly’s US cash transfer program appears to have led to a really large increase to their international donations to people in extreme poverty, due to these two channels. They claim that this was the case, and a quick look at their funding from previous years shows no signs of such a large increase in (international) donations in 2020. If this increase in international donations was indeed not caused by something else, then this example makes me a lot more optimistic about this indirect benefit of doing LPR. Relevantly, I should note that GiveDirectly (1) first consolidated their international transfers program before starting their US transfer program, and (2) tried to emphasize international transfers following the media attention they obtained for US transfers.
A second point in favor of LPR is that, in practice, it doesn’t need to be the case that resources directed to local causes come at the expense of resources for the global cause. If an EA group already has a well-developed core group, and can already do outreach to those interested in the global cause, then the group might be able to start dedicating resources to LPR at a relatively low cost. As long as this doesn’t compromise the group’s ability to do outreach for global issues properly, I think that LPR might become a valuable activity for EA groups to engage in.
It’s also worth highlighting some downsides:
Value drift: if research and outreach of local problems comes at the expense of global ones, then this could be a reason for the group to lose most of their impact. And, as the number of people working on local priorities increases, this could attract even more people with a local focus, in a gradual drifting process that might result in a group that’s much more focused on local problems than the ideal.
Research costs: high-quality research requires a lot of time, as well as specific research skills. There’s already a lot of research available on the most relevant global issues, but for the local problems the group’s countries would have to mostly do this themselves. The opportunity cost is doing direct work, doing context-specific GPR[1] that’s not LPR, or doing outreach for global problems, which is quite a high bar.
Low-quality research has a really large cost in expectation. If the recommended charities aren’t among the best local opportunities, then this further increases the gap in effectiveness of local vs global interventions.[2] Furthermore, it opens up space for large damage to the group’s reputation, such as negative media coverage.
These considerations highlight a timing aspect of the overlap between LPR and context-specific GPR. They suggest that LPR is generally better suited for more mature EA groups, which have already consolidated their outreach structure for people willing to work on global problems. Depending on how high the benefits of LPR turn out to be, this could mean that at some point we would want to do LPR even in the US. But there’s still a lot of uncertainty, and I think that more information on the benefits and costs of LPR can be quite valuable. I would feel excited about attempts to get a sense for the magnitude of some effects mentioned here, such as by evaluating the GiveDirectly US transfers case more carefully, and looking for other related cases. And I’m excited about EA doing some work on LPR for the information value, particularly in the countries where it’s most likely to be the best local opportunity, such as India.
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This is the same concept as what I refer on the post as contextualization research; see Vaidehi’s comment.
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Given a heavy-tailed distribution of impact at the local level, redirecting donations from the average charity to a better-than-median but not great charity is also likely to have negative impact in counterfactual terms. I won’t explain why here, but you can read about properties of heavy-tailed impact in this paper.
This is a great post, thanks for writing this up!
I agree with the main point, and 80,000 Hours’ webpage does make it clear that their top career recommendations (and the specific jobs in these areas that are highly concentrated in a few organizations) are pretty competitive, and most people on the EA movement are not going to be able to get into one of those. When planning my career, I factor in this possibility, but one problem I face is that I don’t feel I know enough about these other possibilities, and so there is a lot of uncertainty when I think about what should I do outside of the top career paths and top organizations.
I don’t think the solution to this problem is for 80,000 Hours to try to discuss other problem areas and mention other EA-aligned organizations in more detail, because that would take a lot of effort. One thing that could be helpful, though, is to emphasize more the process people should go through when planning their careers, with more guidance on how to tackle problem areas that haven’t been explored in much detail, how to explore areas that an EA think might be relevant but hasn’t been explored at all, how to find organizations to work for in the problem areas they are interested in, and what to do if you can’t get a job at an organization you really want to work for in the long term.
I believe it would also help to share the trajectories of people in the EA community who have done some innovative work, or people who managed to find jobs at EA-aligned organizations that the movement was previously unaware of, emphasizing how they approached the task. Facilitating networking between people in a certain problem area could also prove really helpful.
I’m not saying there isn’t any content in these topics, just that in my experience writing up and improving my own career plan over a few years I found it much easier to find EA material on why should I take a certain career path than on how to do it more concretely (besides working at top career paths and organizations), and that based on my experience I believe emphasizing more these aspects could go a long way into helping people structure better career plans.