Max Ghenis

Karma: 159

I’m the co-founder and CEO of PolicyEngine, a tech nonprofit that computes the impacts of public policy (policyengine.org). I’m also the founder and president of the UBI Center, a think tank researching universal basic income policies (ubicenter.org).

I first got into EA in 2012: I worked at Google at the time, and Google.org made a grant to GiveDirectly. I’ve since taken the GWWC pledge and focused my giving on GiveDirectly and GiveWell. I was active in Google’s EA group and also MIT’s when I went there for grad school in 2020.

I’m also the founder of Ventura County YIMBY, and a volunteer California state coordinator for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a grassroots organization advocating for a national carbon fee-and-dividend policy.

Max Ghenis 21 Jan 2023 3:01 UTC
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in reply to: Rasool’s comment on: UK Personal Finance Tips & Info
Yeah both my cofounder Nikhil and I are longtime EAs :) We have a couple projects in the works on tying PolicyEngine to EA , which we’ll probably launch in the next couple months.

Nikhil is actually in the UK as well (I’m in DC), so could you please connect him to the EAGx Cambridge folks? He’s nikhil@policyengine.org.

Max Ghenis 20 Jan 2023 15:44 UTC
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on: UK Personal Finance Tips & Info
You can also use PolicyEngine UK (my nonprofit’s free, open source web app) to estimate your taxes and benefits given your income and household characteristics. It captures nuances like the Child Benefit High Income Tax Charge and phase-outs of Universal Credit and the Personal Allowance, and shows your total marginal tax rate considering these factors.

You can also design custom policy reforms, and PolicyEngine estimates the impact, both on the UK and your own household.

Max Ghenis 20 Dec 2022 6:31 UTC
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on: Cause Suggestion: Econ Literacy
I’m all for this, though I’ve got a dog in the fight: I’m ED of PolicyEngine, a nonprofit that largely intends to improve epistemics around economic policymaking by making epistemic tech available to everyone. Our free, open source software estimates households’ taxes and benefit eligibility, and lets users design customizable policy reforms and estimate impacts on society and households.

Since you mentioned a carbon tax, our new app beta.policyengine.org, which we’ll launch in January, lets you design a custom carbon tax in the UK. Here’s a 2-minute video on how to do that and pair the carbon tax with a dividend, or the link directly to the policy. For example, we estimate that a budget neutral £100/ton carbon dividend would benefit ²⁄₃ of UK residents and lower the poverty rate by 7%. We also model much of the US tax-benefit system, though we currently only model carbon taxes in the UK (here’s how).

We’d be excited about building PolicyEngine into an educational initiative, especially with EAs. We’ve also started working on an EA Forum post for a shallow dive cost-effectiveness of computational policy simulation—I think this plays well into our community’s embrace of forecasting as well. Happy to chat more with folks on this.

Max Ghenis 5 Dec 2022 6:48 UTC
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on: Hackathon on Mon, 12/5 to follow EAGxBerkeley
How many consumption-doublings does a policy reform generate?
GiveDirectly’s unconditional cash transfers have long served as GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness baseline. GiveWell’s 2022 cost-effectiveness analysis estimates that GiveDirectly doubles the consumption of a person for a year for about $200. ^[1]
Tax and benefit reforms also affect households’ consumption. My nonprofit, PolicyEngine, builds free open-source software that computes the impact of custom tax and benefit reforms on outcomes like poverty and the budget. This slide from my EAGxBerkeley lightning talk shows how we will display poverty impacts of a custom tax reform in our upcoming redesign.
My proposal is to add a chart to our app showing the impact of a policy reform on sum(ln(net income)), which could translate to total consumption-doublings for comparison with GiveDirectly. This could enable more data-driven EA-style advocacy for poverty-reducing policies. Currently we have models in the US and the UK, but we intend to expand to low- and middle-income countries in the future, and this visualization would translate to those new country models where reforms might be more cost-effective.
Here’s our GitHub. Our stack is Python/Flask/React.
1. ^
  Cell B87 shows that each philanthropic dollar spent generates 0.0034 units of value, which in this case is one-unit increases of ln(consumption). That is, it costs 1/0.0034=$294 to increase a person’s ln(consumption) by one unit for a year. Doubling consumption for a year therefore costs $294 * ln(2) = $204.

Max Ghenis 30 Nov 2022 20:25 UTC
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on: Economics and Population Growth Reading List
My colleague Ahmed Ahmed and I summarized research on fertility in the context of the US Child Tax Credit expansion in this UBI Center report last year. We cited the Lyman Stone article from here:

Stone’s research suggests that making it permanent could close between 15% and 65% of the gap to a replacement fertility rate.

My nonprofit PolicyEngine has also been scoping how to predict fertility impacts in our app that computes the impact of custom tax and benefit reforms. Our shallow dive hasn’t turned up standard elasticities with respect to current-year policy changes though, so while we could create ones like % change to births with respect to % change to net income of parents of newborns, I don’t know how well this would connect well to the literature.

In general, though, Stone finds that baby bonuses are most cost-effective at spurring births. Other evidence suggests that reducing infant poverty improves developmental outcomes more cost-effectively than interventions later in life, and baby bonuses could be easily administered at any level of government (just run payments through the hospitals). In my view, that all makes baby bonuses an underexplored plausibly cost-effective intervention, both from a lobbying/policy perspective and through philanthropic means (a la GiveDirectly).

Max Ghenis 29 Nov 2022 0:47 UTC
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on: Cost-effectiveness of operations management in high-impact organisations
Really interesting post. Not to hijack it, but I didn’t know about the EA Forecasting & Epistemics Slack. Can you point me to info on it or how to join?

Max Ghenis 25 Nov 2022 15:10 UTC
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on: Hackathon on Mon, 12/5 to follow EAGxBerkeley
Web app implementing giving pledges based on net income (after taxes and benefits)
The Giving What We Can Pledge is 10% of pre-tax income, if giving is tax-deductible, or 10% of post-tax income otherwise. We’ve scoped a different pledge, in which one gives the amount such that their net income after taxes and benefits falls 10%. You can also think of this as transferring 10% of your consumption to effective charity.
We propose building a web app where people enter their household information and it suggests the amount to give. The app would call the free, open source PolicyEngine API to compute taxes and benefits (I am the Executive Director of PolicyEngine, a nonprofit). I think in a day we can build a simple US prototype that collects a handful of data points (earnings, family size, state) and displays the computation.
I’ve discussed this idea with Luke Freeman, Executive Director of Giving What We Can, who supported experimenting with it.

Max Ghenis 12 Nov 2022 23:10 UTC
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on: How could we have avoided this?
We could cultivate for-profit entrepreneurship in fields with clearer social benefit. I’ve seen arguments that people can make a bigger impact by focusing on social impact or profitability rather than trying to do both, and I think that’s true on the margin for most people, but embracing crypto may have overcorrected.

Max Ghenis 2 Oct 2022 2:19 UTC
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on: Some thoughts on vegetarianism and veganism

Thirdly, the question of whether going veg*n strengthens your altruistic motivations is an empirical one which I feel pretty uncertain about. There may well be a moral licensing effect where veg*ns feel (disproportionately) like they’ve done their fair share of altruistic action; or maybe parts of you will become resentful about these constraints. This probably varies a lot for different people.

Related to this is this study finding:

Across six experiments, including one conducted with individuals involved in policymaking, we show that introducing a green energy default nudge diminishes support for a carbon tax.

Max Ghenis 30 Jul 2022 18:29 UTC
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on: Re-Announcing High Impact Engineers (FKA EA Engineers)
Makes sense and glad to see more EA centralization around Slack.

I might just suggest clarifying in this post that HIE is a community of physical engineers, as the website states.

Max Ghenis 22 Jul 2022 15:40 UTC
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on: Why EA needs Operations Research: the science of decision making
My Operations Research degree definitely primed me for EA. Agree with this post.

I’d also add that economic forecasting involves OR techniques, and I think there are opportunities to integrate economic forecasts more into prediction platforms. This is my area of research, and for example my colleagues and I have recently used optimization to identify universal basic income policies that minimize disruption against the status quo, in the UK and in the US.

Max Ghenis 14 Jul 2022 4:19 UTC
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on: Passing Up Pay
Some may also want to consider how passing up pay will affect benefit eligibility. If you can lower your income to 200% of the poverty line, under current Covid-related policy, you can get the maximum SNAP benefit for your household size in many states, including Massachusetts. That in turn entitles you to other benefits like broadband and school meal subsidies.

All together, a family of four in MA can gain about $12,000 per year by getting their income just below 200% of the poverty line ($55k). That’s based on my nonprofit’s free open-source app, PolicyEngine US; here’s a graph. The application process and purchase restrictions can be annoying, but many online grocers now take SNAP and it’s tax free.

Max Ghenis 24 Apr 2022 6:59 UTC
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on: How to set up a UK organisation (Limited Company version)
Thank you! How much of this would you amend for starting a CIO instead?

Max Ghenis 15 Apr 2022 15:07 UTC
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on: Launching SoGive Grants
Could you share a Google Docs version of the application form? The FTX Future Fund linked this at the top, and I found it helpful for planning out the application with others.

Max Ghenis 28 Mar 2022 5:59 UTC
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in reply to: Markus Amalthea Magnuson’s comment on: How To Become A Professional Software Developer
Came here to suggest this. Open source demonstrates to hiring managers that you know how to collaborate, which is at least as important as the technical skills in many cases.

There are even good EA open source projects like microcovid and the template for the EA forum (my nonprofit that builds tech for public policy analysis is also fully open source and welcomes contributors on GitHub, happy to chat with anyone interested).
What links here?
- How To Become A Professional Software Developer by Yonatan Cale (25 Mar 2022 13:28 UTC; 40 points)

Max Ghenis 21 Mar 2022 4:31 UTC
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on: FTX Future Fund and Longtermism
Awesome post. I’d just add that you’ve reported a lower bound. Per https://ftxfuturefund.org/announcing-the-future-fund:

We plan to distribute at least $100M this year, and potentially a lot more, depending on how many outstanding opportunities we find. In principle, we’d be able to deploy up to $1B this year.

Max Ghenis 21 Mar 2022 4:21 UTC
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on: E.A. Megaproject Ideas
Regarding the dating app, it could also spawn a new generation of mega-EA children. But seriously, at least increase the number of future EAs.

It could also increase total fertility, which the FTX Future Fund identifies as an important project due to its effect on economic growth.

Max Ghenis 8 Mar 2022 15:47 UTC
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in reply to: Zac Townsend’s comment on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Somewhat related, I submitted “Comprehensive, personalized, open source simulation engine for public policy reforms”. Governments could also use the simulation engine to explore policy reforms and to improve operations, e.g. to establish individual households’ eligibility for means-tested benefit programs.

Max Ghenis 8 Mar 2022 15:43 UTC
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in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Cool—you might also be interested in my submission, “Comprehensive, personalized, open source simulation engine for public policy reforms”. It’s not in the pitch but my intent is for it to be global as well.

Max Ghenis 7 Mar 2022 19:00 UTC
12 points
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on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Comprehensive, personalized, open source simulation engine for public policy reforms

Epistemic Institutions, Economic Growth, Values and Reflective Processes

Policy researchers apply quantitative modeling to estimate the impacts of immigration reform on GDP, child benefits on fertility, safety net reform on poverty, carbon pricing on emissions, and other policies. But these analyses are typically narrow, impersonal, inflexible, and closed-source, and the public can rarely access the models that produce them.

We’d like to see a general simulation engine—built with open source code and freely available to researchers and the public—to estimate the impact of a wide variety of public policy reforms on a wide variety of outcomes, using a wide variety of customizable parameters and assumptions. Such a simulation engine could power analyses like those above, while opening up policy analysis to more intricate reforms, presented as a technology product that estimates impacts on society and one’s own household.

A common technology layer for public policy analysis would promote empiricism across institutions from government to think tanks to the media. Exposing households to society-wide and personalized effects of policy reforms can align the policymaking and democratic processes, ultimately producing more effective public policy.

Disclaimer: My nonprofit, PolicyEngine, is building toward this vision, starting with the tax and benefit system in the UK and the US. We plan to apply for the Future Fund’s first round.

See also “Unified, quantified world model” and “Civic sector software”.
What links here?
- Max Ghenis's comment on The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition by Nick_Beckstead (8 Mar 2022 15:43 UTC; 3 points)
- Max Ghenis's comment on The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition by Nick_Beckstead (8 Mar 2022 15:47 UTC; 1 point)

Max Ghenis

How many consumption-doublings does a policy reform generate?