Max Ghenis

Karma: 232

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 Mar 21, 2022, 4:21 AM
6 points
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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 Mar 8, 2022, 3:47 PM
1 point
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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 Mar 8, 2022, 3:43 PM
3 points
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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 Mar 7, 2022, 7:00 PM
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 (Mar 8, 2022, 3:43 PM; 3 points)
- Max Ghenis's comment on The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition by Nick_Beckstead (Mar 8, 2022, 3:47 PM; 1 point)

Max Ghenis Mar 6, 2022, 4:44 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Framing it as EA hubs that also happen to serve vegan food could come off as less cultish. The restaurant could also donate 10% of revenue to GiveWell. Edit: Or let the customer select a GiveWell charity to receive 10% of their bill.

Max Ghenis Jan 22, 2022, 5:55 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Dan Stein’s comment on: Climate Recommendations in EA: Giving Green and Founders Pledge
That report doesn’t include CCL.

Democrats do support a carbon tax:
- Democrats almost passed carbon pricing in 2009
- 12 US states price carbon (almost all run by Democrats)
- All Democratic senators, with the possible exception of Manchin, support a carbon tax in BBB, and Romney also supports a carbon tax (so it could be one of multiple reconciliation bills)
- The House Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act has 93 Democratic cosponsors
- The Senate Save our Future Act has 9 Democratic cosponsors
Every other developed country has priced carbon. Only Australia has revoked it. Taking an outside view, this suggests pricing carbon in the US is tractable; the absence of it will also create clearer trade tensions as the EU starts enforcing its border adjustment.

What studies find that regulations without carbon pricing can reach our climate goals? The only one I’ve seen is Rhodium (2021), which requires an unrealistic coordination of many unprecedented climate policies at the congressional, executive, state, and corporate levels (pp. 16-18). This policy suite far exceeds BBB and regulations from Obama and Biden, which are already on shaky ground given the Supreme Court’s questioning the EPA’s authority to regulate GHGs. That report also includes a more optimistic baseline than others, and still only gets to 45-51%. Many other reports, including from Rhodium, show that carbon pricing makes these goals straightforward to meet.

Max Ghenis Jan 22, 2022, 5:23 AM
6 points
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in reply to: Kim Huynh’s comment on: Climate Recommendations in EA: Giving Green and Founders Pledge
Decentralization is a choice that donors should consider. Sunrise funds empower local chapters that advocate counterproductive climate policies. Their choice also not to actively support critical policies like carbon pricing is also relevant, especially given studies showing that emphasizing less-effective climate policies reduces interest in more effective ones.

If they were the only grassroots climate org and they generated interest in broad climate action, it might be worth the trade-off. But interest in climate is strong and other organizations like Citizens’ Climate Lobby advocate proven solutions (and are much more funding-constrained than Sunrise, even when Sunrise was smaller).

Max Ghenis Jan 21, 2022, 5:08 PM
9 points
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on: A case for nonviolent protest
This just came up in my Nonlinear feed and I haven’t yet listened to it in full, but one concern I have with organizations like XR is that they tend not to advocate specific climate policies, and when they do it’s often not the most effective ones. In particular, they don’t advocate carbon pricing, nuclear power, infill housing development, and carbon capture, and in some cases they oppose these policies.

I’m active in Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which is a grassroots group advocating a carbon fee-and-dividend model, mostly in the US. Carbon pricing is probably the most important single policy for reducing emissions (relevant analysis regarding Build Back Better), and it polls well (around +35 net favorability), but it hasn’t had the groundswell of support that XR could bring.

People have finite attention spans when it comes to the environment; for example, this RCT found that nudging people toward clean electricity reduced their support for a carbon tax. XR may well be effective at moving public opinion around climate change, but I don’t think that’s the bottleneck for reducing emissions anymore as much as directing energy toward effective policies.

Max Ghenis Jan 21, 2022, 4:52 PM
4 points
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on: Climate Recommendations in EA: Giving Green and Founders Pledge
Have you researched Citizens’ Climate Lobby? They’re a grassroots organization advocating carbon fee-and-dividend policy, mostly in the US. All credible studies I’ve seen indicate that we cannot reach our climate goals without carbon pricing; for example, this study finds that a carbon tax starting at $15 per ton would more than double the emissions reductions of the Build Back Better Act.

Polls suggest that returning carbon tax revenue as a dividend increases its popularity, though carbon pricing polls strongly net-positive either way: about +36 net favorability since 2020.

Research from myself and others also finds that a carbon dividend would substantially reduce poverty; this wouldn’t be a major shift from an EA perspective in the US, but if the policy spills over to developing countries, it could meaningfully relieve suffering a la GiveDirectly.

Disclaimer: I’ve volunteered with Citizens’ Climate Lobby since 2018 and am currently a volunteer chapter leader for them.

Max Ghenis Jan 21, 2022, 4:39 PM
5 points
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on: Climate Recommendations in EA: Giving Green and Founders Pledge
I find your estimate of Sunrise’s cost-effectiveness of $0.22 per mtCO2e extremely implausible. Sunrise and its chapters have opposed essentially all of the most important policies for reducing emissions:
- Carbon pricing
- Nuclear power
- Dense infill housing
- Carbon capture
Your Sunrise deep dive does not discuss any of these issues.

Max Ghenis Jan 12, 2022, 7:55 PM
3 points
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in reply to: GMcGowan’s comment on: Cause Area: UK Housing Policy
This blog post establishes some links between housing scarcity and immigration:

Only the wealthiest, best-educated immigrants move [to California], and most refugee resettlement agencies no longer place families in San Francisco because of the city’s high housing costs. The city accepts 95% fewer refugees than just a few years ago. Who actually welcome immigrants and refugees? Cities like Houston, Phoenix, and Atlanta that have lower costs of living.

Cavaille and Ferwerda (2017) provide a well-identified channel:

Empirically, we leverage an EU legal directive that resulted in an exogenous increase in the intensity of competition between immigrants and natives over public housing in Austria. Our findings indicate that support for anti-immigrant parties is highly responsive to perceived scarcity resulting from immigrant receipt of in-kind benefits.

Max Ghenis Jan 12, 2022, 5:20 AM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: The Bioethicists are (Mostly) Alright

Indeed when I spoke to people from my department about challenge trials, none had both heard of and thought extensively about the issue. One respondent wished to emphasize that they hadn’t thought about this issue much yet at all when deciding. Bioethicists are no worse than the average person on the streets, but that doesn’t mean they are much better either, and maybe they should be.

This surprises and concerns me. Challenge trials seem like a textbook bioethics topic, and even if they weren’t, I’d expect that people trained to think carefully about the ethics of related problems would arrive at substantially more good-maximizing opinions. Economists are more skeptical of price controls than the public, physicians are more supportive of vaccines, and so on. Bioethicists have power in their institutions, and I think we should hold them to an accordingly higher standard.

I appreciate you sharing data on your experience, but I have to say it didn’t change my view that society would be better off with a weaker bioethics field.

Max Ghenis Jan 12, 2022, 4:47 AM
9 points
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on: Cause Area: UK Housing Policy
In addition to GDP effects, liberalizing zoning ties to other EA cause areas. For example, density allows for more immigrants and averts climate change. This study finds that

...doubling the population density would entail a reduction in the total [per capita] CO2 emissions in buildings and on-road sectors typically by at least 42%.

I’d love to see all these factors tied together in a cohesive EA analysis, from a dollar donated to the number of homes legalized and downstream benefits of those homes. I’ve contributed quite a bit of volunteer time to YIMBY groups, but haven’t given much money; I suspect it’s cost-effective, but I’m highly uncertain about it.

Max Ghenis Dec 31, 2021, 3:55 AM
7 points
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on: Convergence thesis between longtermism and neartermism

I would like to see near-term EAs like GiveWell looking more at the long-term implications of the interventions they recommend and more speculative but potentially higher return interventions such as policy change

I wholeheartedly agree. Last month, GiveDirectly criticized GiveWell for ignoring externalities of cash transfers, and while I think this is sort of unfair given they also ignore externalities of malaria prevention, I genuinely don’t know what kind of multiplier to put on various effective short-term interventions.

In my post, Mortality, existential risk, and universal basic income, I summarized some research connecting poverty to patience, trust, and attitudes toward global cooperation. This evidence is sparse and mostly (though not entirely) correlational, and the connection to longtermism is speculative at this point. The EA community could fill some of this knowledge gap by commissioning surveys on longtermist attitudes, and utilizing either natural experiments or RCTs to examine the effect of short-term interventions in shaping these attitudes.

Max Ghenis Dec 18, 2021, 4:38 PM
2 points
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on: Can the most effective charities be political?
EA cause areas now include quite a bit of policy advocacy:
- Open Phil supports Farm Animal Welfare, Macroeconomic Stabilization Policy, Immigration Policy, and Land Use Reform (edit: and until recently, Criminal Justice Reform) in the US.
- The Founders Pledge Climate Fund supports policy advocacy; they estimate that their top charity, the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, averts a ton of CO2 for $0.12 through policy.
- Notable EAs like SBF have given to political campaigns like Biden’s, and Kyle Bogosian has applied EA-style rigor to rank candidates in terms of their impact on various policy areas at happinesspolitics.org.
In each case, I think EA emphasizes estimating the impact in terms of human outcomes like lives saved. Successful Supreme Court cases could be a useful intermediate outcome, but ultimately I’d want to know something like the impact of the average case on well-being, as well as the likelihood of cases going the other way in the absence of funding the Institute for Justice. Similarly, an EA perspective on the Committee on the Present Danger: China could try to estimate the impact of each dollar donated on the likelihood that the US boycotts the Olympics, and then the impact of that boycott on China’s human rights policies, and then the impact of those policies on human well-being; there could also be an existential risk angle if it affects the likelihood of war. This quantification is inherently uncertain, but starting points with Bayesian reasoning and help from forums like these can typically uncover the order of magnitude, which we can use to compare it against other interventions.

Max Ghenis Dec 6, 2021, 2:43 AM
14 points
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on: EA megaprojects continued

An affluent EA could buy a trusted newspaper and direct it in a more evidence-based direction, for instance, by incorporating forecasts into reporting or by highlighting certain positive developments that get neglected.

Have any EA organizations tried to partner with FiveThirtyEight?

Max Ghenis Dec 1, 2021, 6:48 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Ramiro’s comment on: Mortality, existential risk, and universal basic income
I think poverty reduction can decrease the risk of unaligned AGI through two channels:
1. Poverty reduces (or is at least associated with lower) patience, trust, and attitudes around global cooperation. Evidence is of varying quality on these points, as I discuss in the relevant sections above, but if it holds, societies with less poverty will be more cautious around existential risks like AGI.
2. More egalitarian economies expand access to markets, and since lots of AI is trained on transactions data, they will better represent the diversity of humanity. This could in turn make them more robust.
I admit these are somewhat speculative, and I’d like to explore higher quality causal chains, and other chains like whether we’re missing out on talent to address these risks like you suggest (though that talent could go into AI in general without necessarily working on alignment).

I think there are then three pieces from EA to UBI:
1. Establishing poverty as a broad longtermist cause area. Per the above, direct evidence here is somewhat sparse, so more perspectives could improve the relationship’s precision.
2. Establishing UBI as an effective antipoverty policy. I think the case is pretty strong here, and allows us to define UBI as a policy direction; i.e., steps toward cash benefits over in-kind benefits, and toward universality away from targeting and conditionality, will generally be positive in terms of poverty reduction and cost (other than public health, per GiveWell).
3. Establishing tax and benefit policy research and advocacy as an EA cause area. Scale is clearly high, neglectedness depends on the scope (tax policy in general is not at all neglected, but I think technology for jointly analyzing tax and benefit policy is pretty neglected), and tractability is probably medium-low (people don’t like taxes, and tax reform is realistically required to substantially improve benefits).

Max Ghenis Dec 1, 2021, 6:30 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Ramiro’s comment on: Mortality, existential risk, and universal basic income
I think it still suggests 37 million in extreme poverty in the US.

I’d also suggest using the Supplemental Poverty Measure for US poverty. Unlike the Official Poverty Measure, it incorporates taxes, non-cash benefits, and variation in local housing costs. The current SPM poverty rate is 9.1%.

Max Ghenis Nov 11, 2021, 4:40 AM
20 points
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on: Open Thread: November 2021
Hi everyone! I’m a longtime EA but I haven’t spent much time on the EA Forum, so taking this opportunity to introduce myself.
Professionally, I’m an economist in California focused on tax and benefit policy. I’m the co-founder and CEO of PolicyEngine, a tech nonprofit whose product lets anyone reform the tax and benefit system and see the quantified impact on society and one’s own household (we’re live in the UK and working on a US model). I’m also the founder and president of the UBI Center, a think tank researching universal basic income policies. Outside of work, I’m a founding lead of Ventura County YIMBY, which advocates housing density, and I lead the Ventura chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which advocates carbon dividends.
I previously spent most of my career as a data scientist at Google, where I first encountered EA when Google.org gave a grant to GiveDirectly in 2012. I then became active in Google’s internal EA group, left Google in 2018, took the GWWC pledge in 2019 (which I wrote about here), and got a Master’s in Development Economics from MIT in 2020, where I became involved in the MIT EA community. I give primarily to GiveDirectly and GiveWell, though as an avid listener of the 80k Hours podcast (and soon-to-be-avid reader of the EA Forum!) I’m always interested in new cause areas.
I’m also working on a post on tax and benefit policy as an EA cause area, so I’m open to ideas here on that topic.

Max Ghenis Jun 10, 2020, 7:12 PM
1 point
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in reply to: alex lawsen’s comment on: What are some good charities to donate to regarding systemic racial injustice?
I like Campaign Zero’s data-driven prioritization of solutions, but it’s not clear to me how they’d use marginal funds. I suspect this gap explains its absence from CEAs and Open Phil recommendation lists.