Thank you—I bookmarked this link a while back, and I do have strong reservations about Hickel’s approach (at least his epistemics). That said, I credit the book with making me think more broadly about cause prio / career options.
NoteworthyTrain
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Thank you for this—very insightful. I posted here not really sure about Hickel’s epistemics, so I really appreciate some pushback of his views. (Also: sorry for the late reply. I haven’t checked my account here for ages!) Is there any reading you’d suggest?
Sounds great! Thank you very much :)
Thank you for this idea. I should definitely think more about leading a research team.
I really don’t mean to say that I’m unenthusiastic about Charity Entrepreneurship; I’m just currently unsure whether it’s the very best thing to do. There are a lot of things that would very much appeal to me about CE, so I want to be sure not to jump into it too fast. (I think a lot depends on one’s moral position about the importance and tractability of shaping the long-term future, and this is something that I’m planning to spend time reading and thinking about during my time out.)
Thank you very much for these suggestions.
I’m not convinced charity entrepreneurship is for me, partly because I’m unsure whether it’s the most impactful thing I could do, but I think it would be great to get a better understanding of what they are doing.
The idea of volunteering with a newly launched CE charity is a very good one and not something I had thought of. Thank you!
Hello and welcome! What do you think this community would look like? I’m curious :)
It’s been great to see and read through this thread. Any thoughts on my own situation would be especially appreciated.
I’m in my final year of PPE at Oxford with a focus on the more technical/quantitative parts of economics. I consider myself quite entrepreneurial and have for some time wanted to do something in that vein—broadly considered, to include e.g. charity entrepreneurship.After reading a book over the summer that challenged my perspectives, I am considering a broader range of issues and careers than before (brain dump from then here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RnmsaX5TEDoaH6XcB/systemic-change-global-poverty-eradication-and-a-career-plan ). That post was just about development, but I’m also thinking more about longtermism and the other causes it suggests. It seems that to maximise my impact I should affect EA-meta or policy in some way.
Affecting policy seems challenging because I’m not confident of my personal fit in academia or government bureaucracies. One of my new interests is in combining policy/‘systemic’ change with an entrepreneurial approach, so any suggestions here would be welcome. I’m motivated and willing to work hard; enjoy learning new things; and would like to do work that combines high impact, intensity, some level of intellectual challenge, and fairly fast feedback loops. I’m still unsure about my cause prioritisation. I like quantitative subjects and am mathematically competent but don’t think my comparative advantage lies in (purely) quantitative work.
Since I have more questions than I can answer now, while focused on my end-of-degree exams, I plan to take some time (9-12 months) after graduation to explore certain key questions and areas via independent study and internships/volunteering. I’ve got a full-time job offer at quite a prestigious strategy consulting firm, which it is very likely that I can defer until after that.
I want to use these 9-12 months as best I can and would like to hear anyone’s thoughts on how to do this. These could include:Any lessons learned from your own experience of taking some time out to figure out plans
Advice you would give yourself if you were about to enter my shoes
Specific areas or questions you would recommend investigating / opportunities for internships (I am happy to send my CV by direct message)
Things I’m already going to do:
Planning beforehand roughly what I want to do and achieve (already started)
Time-boxing with hard limits & using accountability systems with friends
Making documents / presentations of my thought process to crystallise thoughts and make sure I land on at least some conclusions in time
Please also let me know if you’d be willing to chat about all this around June-time, when I’m figuring out plans for the time out more concretely :)
Thank you very much!
Thank you! I’ve been thinking along similar lines, actually, although I’d like to do some more research on the first bullet point. It seems plausible, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually true, and it seems very important to have a good idea of whether it’s true.
Fascinating. Thanks for this alternative perspective. I certainly need to read more.
I think his point was related to development via protection, etc., that was then loosened somewhat. But not sure.
I agree. I’m concerned about the same, and want to look at both
some of the evidence for myself; and
some of what others think, both through my new stack of books on development (from Abhijit & Banerjee to Acemoglu & Robinson to Jeffrey Sachs to Ha-Joon Chang—I’m excited!) and through conversations.
I just haven’t been able to do it yet, since I’m in the middle of an internship. That’s why I wrote this post with some first thoughts.
This is fair, although I take Richard’s point below as well. (I’m not sure about its truth, because I don’t know enough about China or Africa.)
I think the point is that there are two points
Poverty in China has decreased recently
Poverty in Africa has (arguably) increased recently
(Hickel claims that China’s very non-neoliberal policy enriched its people, while African countries’ mandated structural adjustments impoverished its people. I don’t know enough to say if this is true, but it’s another reason Hickel excludes China.)
So much here! Once I’ve read and thought more, I’ll try to give these all a shot. Right now, I don’t have answers to most of them.
Thank you!
Yes, I think this is correct. It’s worth thinking about what the best path would be—and, although I’m leaning more and more towards a graduate degree in economics, I’m still uncertain and I agree that it wouldn’t be necessary for every type of policy work.
As for social entrepreneurship vs structural change, this is difficult because
(a) for-profit social enterprises may be more sustainable because of a lack of reliance on grants that may not materialise;
(b) policy change is much harder to achieve (perhaps) than even a successful social enterprise.
Very interesting! I will let you know. I definitely want to spend some time just looking at the data for myself, and will let you know when I come to some (tentative) conclusions.
Thank you! Lots of food for thought—need to get back to my internship, but I look forward to thinking and reading more about the things you mention.
Thank you so much for this! It’s a very interesting perspective, and you sound like exactly the sort of person I would love to talk to about my next steps!
‘Reading through your summary of Hickel’s points, my immediate reaction was that he is pushing his agenda pretty hard. As others have outlined, both relative and absolute poverty have decreased as a % of the population. Of course the growth of population has outpaced the decrease in poverty, but that’s a little dishonest to show only this side of the picture.’
Yes, I thought this and I got the impression that Hickel’s argument was not very balanced. I guess it wasn’t intended to be.
vaidehi_agarwalla’s comment suggests Hickel may still have a point. Hickel points to the idea that the morally relevant number with respect to poverty is the proportion of poverty that we could alleviate but don’t. There would be a debate about how to measure poverty and counterfactuals here, but the basic idea seems correct.
‘Whether we like it or not, capitalism is the name of the game. I find it more efficient to learn the rules of the game than to try to change it.’
I agree, to an extent. But there are different versions of capitalism. No country has a pure capitalist economy, and the choice of hybrid system seems both malleable and significant.
Capitalism as it is currently practised is also ecologically unsustainable, so it will have to change in some way, whether by force of argument or nature.
‘When you say “For example, farmers in sub-Saharan Africa starve because their produce is undercut by below-cost competition from Europe and the US, where farm subsidies exist in contravention to WTO rules”, I think this shows that whoever’s idea this is does not understand the game. Sub Saharan African farmers are not connected to global markets in any kind of way. Believing that corn or wheat subsidies in the US are causing corn prices to increase in Botswana is delusional. The cost of bringing that corn to landlocked countries is totally prohibitive, and as a result no ear of corn produced in the US reaches these poor countries.’
This is interesting, but I’m not sure it’s correct, since exports from SSA could still be impacted by global prices and so subsidies—unless, as you say, ‘Sub Saharan African farmers are not connected to global markets in any kind of way’. That said, I’m not an expert.
Looking at papers like this one (from the EU itself!) there seems to be a consensus that market price effects did exist and affect ‘developing countries’; ‘decoupling’ may help but the paper admits that there might still be distortionary effects. (The quotation below doesn’t mention poor countries, but they’re mentioned elsewhere in the paper.)
‘With the change from price support to direct payments, the CAP’s distorting effects have been reduced. Direct payments, initially introduced in the CAP’s 1992 reform, have mostly been decoupled from production since the 2003 reform. While it is widely recognised that commodity-coupled support created market distortions, decoupled support is not in principle supposed to have an impact on production. … However, while significant progress has been made to reduce the distorting effects of CAP payments, direct payments might still impact agricultural performance and markets outside the EU. First, … this is because of decoupled payments’ indirect effects, which may enhance the competitiveness of EU farmers on global markets. Second, this could also result from some coupled support still existing under the Voluntary Coupled Support (VCS) scheme.’ (p.18)
The Rwanda and Burundi case is very interesting—thanks for bringing it up. I’d have to read more about it and figure out if it’s exceptional, since I don’t have enough knowledge on the topic yet. I’m sceptical of Hickel’s all-out attack on the WB, IMF, and WTO: I expect there are incremental systemic improvements that would have a huge effect but there are also things they have done well.
Thanks again, and I’d love to talk more! I’ve sent you a message.
I’m aware of these, but thanks for reminding me :)
Thank you—yes, it’s on my list of things to read soon.