Brazilian legal philosopher, postdoc in intergenerational justice, financial supervisor, GWWC Pledger Bachelor of Laws, Master and Doctor of Philosophy from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), having published articles and translations in the areas of Political Philosophy, Applied Ethics and Philosophy of Economics – with a recent focus on climate risks, Environmental and Social Responsibility, and intergenerational justice. Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, integrating the Ethics and Political Philosophy Laboratory (EPLAB) and the project Present Democracy for Future Generations. Also a member of the Graduate Committee and Special Studies Analyst in the area of supervision of non-banking institutions at the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB). Member of the Inclusive and Sustainable Solutions association (SIS) and of the Effective Altruism community in Brazil (AE Brasil). https://philpeople.org/profiles/ramiro-avila-peres
Ramiro
Thanks for the post.
A confession: the first time I read about shrimp welfare in CE’s reports I rolled my eyes and thought “C’mon, seriously? Weren’t bugs enough?”, but I came to radically change my opinion (because of normative uncertainty, and because cutting shrimps’ eyes is evil, even if they are basically delicious bug monsters). I still use this example in a hideous “trap-joke” when talking to EAs—I start saying that I don’t always agree with some of the cause areas people come up with, like shrimp welfare, then we laugh, then I explain how we torture these poor animals for a fraction of the proteins we can get with beans, and that almost nobody was talking about it before CE.
I’d like to see a Portuguese translation of The Precipice, and would love to contribute w it. Is there any project along this line yet? If not, perhaps I could get some acquaintances in an academic publishing house interested (I have recently organised a translation of SEP entries on Philosophy and Economics) or apply for funding. I could try getting a bigger company interested, too—but that’s likely harder and would take longer.
Maybe I didn’t understand it properly, but I guess there’s something wrong when the total welfare score of chimps is 47 and, for humans in low middle-income countries it’s 32.
Depending on your population ethics, one may think “we should improve the prospects in poor countries”, but others can say “we should have more chimps.”
Or this scale has serious problems for comparisons between different species.Source: https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/weighted-factor-model.html
Thanks for the reply. I’ll have to answer it… it was supposed to be short, I really didn’t have the time, but then I started enjoying it. But I have a TL;DR.
TL;DR: I guess we’re not understanding each other very well, as you seem to be responding to other people (unfortunately, because I’m a big fan). I don’t see why you categorize me as a skeptic. I think we actually agree (i) RCT shouldn’t be the main path for dev-eco researchers, and (ii) there should be more research focused on developing countries. But: (iii) development economics is more complex than you make it look like, (iv) I keep the discussion on dev-eco research apart from the discussion on which cause areas to choose. Also, please, take a charitable look at my answer to your point (5)… but I don’t see how you can talk about Rwanda’s growth after 94 without talking about genocide and war.It is the second most upvoted post in EA Forum history, which suggests that lots of people in the community found the post persuasive
Congrats 😉 on the other hand, like many people who commented on the subject, I upvoted your post back then, but I don’t find your case against randomistas so persuasive; I don’t upvote only posts I agree with – but if this is sending the wrong signals, perhaps I should start down-voting more.
he has a PhD in economics from MIT, has been a professor of development at Harvard and Oxford, and worked at the World Bank for 15 years
Actually, I think your constant emphasis on Pritchett (as if the argument for dev-eco depended on him) is one of the weakest points of the post.
Some of the most prominent economists in the world (Rodrik, Acemoglu, Deaton, Cowen, Caplan) have endorsed similar conclusions.
Also, five economists who disagree a lot about how development can be achieved. For instance, Acemoglu emphasizes the role of culture and institutions (but I think Melissa Dell research makes an even better case for this), but then Hausmann, Pritchett and Rodrik (2004) say, in the same article, that “Political-regime changes” and “economic reform” are “significant predictors of growth acceleration,” even though “the vast majority of growth accelerations are unrelated to standard determinants such as political change and economic reform, and most instances of economic reform do not produce growth accelerations.”
Also, Rodrik (my favorite one among them) claimed globalization (with free capital flows), national sovereignty and democracy are incompatible, defended an industrial policy approach to growth for a while, but admitted, in an interview with Tyler Cowen in 2015 (I recommend it), that the window for policies based on East Asia growth is likely gone; also in the same interview, he predicted Brazil would return to growing faster than India again – which didn’t happen (I mean, it’s sad for me, a Brazilian, to here it today).
In spite of this, no-one in the EA community has ever published a response to these arguments
I’m not sure what’s the problem here and what sort of response you’re expecting. But as mentioned before, you also received a lot of comments, many of them discussing some of your main points; and you cite Founder’s Pledge analysis of the area, which concludes (very persuasively, in my opinion) that “We’re not continuing this project because we think identifying funding opportunities would be too costly for us and for the organisations under consideration.”
Perhaps you’re victims of your own success, since searching for “randomista” in the EA Forum mostly leads to references to your post – but it shows people are actually taking it into account; I think it might provide some sort of middle ground between short-term and longterm causes). But, yeah, the only thing that seems as deep as your original post is K. Sarek’s long summary of Ogden’s “RCTs in Development Economics.”
However, I must add that I think EA is more often identified with randomista economics by outsiders – precisely because RCTs in economics provide a useful rhetorical advice to distinguish EA from other approaches to philanthropy.
Turning to the object-level, I take it that you are making two arguments here - (1) scepticism about growth economics, (2) neglectedness. I have several responses.
I’m sorry, but calling my position scepticism is getting too close to a strawman – an unfortunately common move among us philosophers, as if it’s impossible to engage with someone without putting a tag on them. For instance, you don’t call someone who says “people disagree about cancer” a skeptic. I explicitly said economic development is very important, and I don’t deny we know a lot about it, nor that people should research it (quite the opposite); I’m just claiming that arriving to specific recommendations on growth, at the required scale, is way harder than you make it look like (particularly if we restrict the discussion to a small sample of economists, in a limited period of time). If I’m skeptical about anything, it is that we will figure out something like a feasible way to, e.g., make Haiti grow like Botswana did, or even to ensure the latter keeps its current trajectory for decades.
Also, I suspect there’s a widespread Dunning-Kruger effect in discussions about economics, where experts usually express themselves with way less confidence than the average amateur. So, I’m not saying we’re in the dark here – actually, we are more likely being obfuscated by too much noisy light. Thus, sorry, but I think your “replies to skepticism” are answering the wrong man (unfortunately, I’d like it to be me, as I’m a big fan of your work), and I’m afraid we’re not quite understanding each other.
On the other hand, I feel compelled to answer in full, as you do provide me with some examples I can target:
It is not possible to sustain the position that we know how to make policy-led improvements to economic welfare in the US, but not in Kenya
Actually, I don’t see why this is impossible.
We may know how to improve A’s health (because she’s kinda healthy, or has a well-known condition), but not B’s – because he has a very peculiar condition, or because you never studied a non-WASP person like B, or because he has diabetes + allergies + cancer + covid-19 etc. and anything we do has a significant risk of causing harm (because of, e.g., noise). Nothing here implies that we only know “one of two things about how to boost” health – actually, precisely because we know a lot about health we can recognize we’re uncertain.
Actually, development economists often consider it quite obvious that the advice you would give to poor countries (such as “improve capital formation”) is quite different from what you would focus on with rich countries (“get back to investing on innovation, lest others will leave you behind”).
Again, if most of our research is about developed countries and mostly focus on their trajectories (“see what developed /OECD countries have done more”), we’re very likely neglecting risks of selection bias and path dependencies. I can’t stress this enough: instead of thinking about Kenya in terms of what I know from US, I’d start studying why Cape Verde and Mauritius (hmmm… bad example: small insular nations), or Botswana and Gabon are better (in terms of HDI) than Kenya.
However, I must remark: I think we actually agree economic researchers should focus more on developing countries, right?
2) For example, Indian farmers are forced to sell their products to state middlemen at a guaranteed minimum price. According to Wikipedia, foreign supermarkets are banned in many Indian states. The time taken to start a business ranges from 1 day in New Zealand to 230 in Venezuela.
I agree these examples show problems that could be fixed with simple recommendations from economics. Do you think there’s any initiative which is likely to lead to these intended outcomes? What do you think its cost-effectiveness could be? I’d gladly know more about it.
But notice they’re very different issues, and they’re more like symptoms than causes of the underlying conditions affecting these nations. I don’t think the problem here is anything like a lack of economic literacy, or advocacy for the right economic policies – it’s more things like inadequate equilibria.
3) The experience of the world since 1950 makes it extremely unlikely that we don’t know anything about growth. Economists and states were prominently trying to increase development from 1950, and development did in fact increase. Indeed, there was more progress on all subjective and objective measures of wellbeing than all prior human history combined. It might be true that this was an enormous coincidence, but at the very least someone actually needs to sit down and explain why it was.
I think this remark is surprising, because it totally ignores my point on the Nurkse v. Hirschman debate, which is my very example of how these discussions are still unsettled. And even now, we still don’t really know, e.g, what kickstarted the Industrial Revolution in England, but we do know economists back then were wrong about many things – even though economies have increased exponentially since then.
4) I don’t think there’s any point in answering (4), as it seems premised on the accusation of broad skepticism. I agree that finding out, e.g., how to make everyone grow like Botswana would be huge. Except that perhaps you’re framing the problem in a way that underestimates the costs of obtaining new information here. Again, development economics has been a hot topic for a long time.
5) Suppose you were a philanthropist with the opportunity to influence policy in Rwanda in 1994. Would you focus on encouraging them to do some RCTs of social programmes, or would you try as hard as possible to get them to do whatever it is that they did that led to sustained economic growth in Rwanda of 9% since 1995?
I’d first try to avoid another Rwandan genocide and the following Congo Wars, which are among the worst things that have happened in the world in the last 30 years. Seriously.
My point is not the rhetorical effect of “how could you forget that?”, but that any explanation of Rwanda’s growth after 1994 that fails to take it into account is likely flawed. WorldBank’s overview of the country refers it explicitly, for instance.
6) I will answer this separately. It’ll take longer, and, unfortunately, I’m not paid to do this – quite the opposite, perhaps.
7) If our knowledge of growth is incomplete, I don’t think it helps that a substantial chunk of the economics profession (>30%?) have started to work on RCT-evaluable things, which do not attempt to make a non-trivial dent on GDP per capita.
Well, this is the debate I actually want to have – and I guess you do, too. Dufflo and Banerjee response to this would be (in my interpretation from Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems) that we know more about how to make progress in this area (RCT), and that researchers can learn useful stuff with that (which might provide positive feedback loops); besides, we already had, and will keep having, public policies that will need to be oriented by research.
They have a point, but I agree with you (as I said before) this is likely not the best approach to development – as it is more about redistributing resources than creating them (i.e., growth), and it still leaves a huge blank in our theory of dev-eco. But this is about the roads economic researchers are trailing, not about EA recommendations.
8) This scared me a bit, too. But you have to read into the whole context. They’re emphasizing the need to change consumption patterns (particularly in developed countries), because energy-efficiency programmes failed to deliver results, and so recognizing there’s a trade-off here (and pending towards lowering emissions). They are not against growth. But I got scared: what if Cowen’s “Crusonia plants” are getting harder to find?
Neglectedness
I’d like to see someone investigate it more thoroughly. I agree US policy is not neglected. But I guess neglectedness is more about opportunity costs: how much do you expect the counterfactual effect of more input on this area to be? What will it add? Will it crowd-in or crowd-out additional investment?
(You know, this is analogous to a very controversial point on the role of the State in dev-eco since at least Nurkse: will a state intervention here crowd-out or crowd-in private investments?)
Finally, summarising my point: some of the best minds in economics are already taking dev-eco seriously, funded by governments and wealthy organizations, and things are still quite uncertain when it comes to feasible particular recommendations – as my future answer concerning my own country (I’ll see what I can say, despite a small but positive risk of suffering future persecution—sorry, but paranoia is starting to spread around) might exemplify. But I agree with you that sending 30% of economic researchers to do RCTs on things like transfers is likely a wrong move.
You should first find out how to make people (justifiably) trust those policies.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re in some sort of stalemate here. A can say: “economics show that, unless you adopt pro-business policies – e.g., lower your taxes, slash labor and consumer regulations – investors will avoid this country.” And B replies: “social science shows that, unless you adopt redistributive policies – e.g., tax the rich, protect workers and consumers – people won’t support the government.” Of course, that’s even worse when A and B identify themselves as belonging to specific classes—then it’s more a political bargain than a debate on economics. I’d like to know more about how developed countries actually faced this conundrum – as far as I know, very badly: 30 years later, the 80’s neoliberal policies are still the core of debates. But the difference between developed and developing countries regarding social trust (and trust in the government) is truly remarkable; I wonder what’s the direction of causality here.
Thanks for this post. It fits my experience and reasoning. I suspect that people don’t see it as a major problem, yet, because we are still used to think of EA as a “small movement”. I suspect this is one of the usual issues in the long-term growth of a movement, either becoming an obstacle for scaling, or threatening the “fidelity” to core principles.
...I don’t have time to write the full post right now
I’m eager to read the full post, or any expansion on what makes you think that groups should actively discourage newbies from take the Pledge.
Thanks for this post. I am trying to think about charities, like CEA’s Groups team recommendations, in this light. Besides, I think someone should deeply think about how EAs should react to the possibility of social changes – when we are more likely to reach a tipping point leading to a very impactful event (or, in a more pessimistic tone, where it can escalate into catastrophe). For instance, in situations like this, neglectedness is probably a bad heuristics—as remarked by A. Broi.
On the other hand, this sounds inaccurate, if not unfair, to me:
Is EA really all about taking every question and twisting it back to malaria nets and AI risk?
I don’t actually want to argue about “what should EAs do”. Just like you, all I want is to share a thought – in my case, my deep realization that attention is a scarce resource. I had this “epiphany” on Monday, when I read that a new Ebola outbreak had been detected in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the same week, same country, the High Commissioner for Human Rights denounced the massacre about 1,300 civilians. Which reminded me this region has faced ethnic and political violence since the 1990s, when the First and the Second Congo Wars happened, leading to death more than 5 million people.
But most people have never even heard of it – I hadn’t, until three years ago, when I had my first contact with EA. Likewise, if the refugee crisis in Europe is a hot topic in world politics, the fact that Uganda is home to more than 1.4 million refugees (mainly from DRC and Sudan) is largely ignored—but not by GD.
So, I didn’t really see your point with this:
Do we also need an “EA So White” too
I’ve been following this debate for a while now… Though I tend to agree that deworming is certainly not the most impactful, and probably not the optimal option for EA investments, I’m still puzzled here: What are you proposing, especifically? I mean, what determinate project, with measurable goals, would you propose that someone invest on—which is not already being well funded by international organizations, banks, governments or think tanks?
My point is that I don’t think anyone in the EA community disagrees about the importance of economic development—particularly so-called randomistas such as Duflo and Banerjee. I certainly don’t—but I have been baffled with how little the field has gained in certainty, despite having way more data, since Nurkse v. Hirschman debates on the “balanced growth theory.” I think the problem is that people are not convinced about where is the low-hanging fruit here—or that there’s a clear path to take that will actually yield more overall marginal utility.Notice that the “smell test” does not answer those questions; and though I’m quite hopeful there might be an optimal answer for development economics, I’m also skeptical Pritchett’s test actually makes the right question—which, for me, sounds a bit like criticizing a training program for sedentary persons, based on an athlete’s routine. And when I think about it, the one “X thing” that developed countries clearly seem to have more is that they are geographically similar and close to each other—except for small nations with outlier trajectories in very peculiarly strategical positions, such as Taiwan, Brunei or Singapore.
Personally, I think this is gold.
On the other hand, I’m not so sure that sadism is particularly worse for the long-term future than the dark triad traits. Yes, sadistic leaders may pose a special S-risk, but I am not sure they increase other x-risks so much – e.g., Hitler was kind of cautious concerning the risk of nuclear weapons igniting the atmosphere, and Stalin was partially useful in WW II and avoided WW III.
Contrast:
Some dark traits, such as Machiavellianism, can be beneficial under certain circumstances. It might be better if one could single out a dark trait, such as sadism, and only select against it while leaving other dark traits unchanged.
with these parts of the Appendix A:
Dark Triad traits predict increased intention to engage in political violence (Gøtzsche-Astrup, 2019)…
Historical evidence suggests that even many of their political adversaries—at least for some time—did not realize that Hitler, Mao, and Stalin were malevolent
Actually, open sadism often raises opposition; and I think the big 3 above weren’t salient because they were sadistic – would they have killed less people if they were just functional psychopaths?
It might be hard to spot dark tetrad individuals, but it’s not so hard to realize an individual is narcissistic or manipulative. I don’t think people contend that Stalin and Mao were so – they may argue that they were beneficial, or that they were excused because they were “great man”.
So why do such guys acquire power? Why do people support it? We often dislike acquaintances that exhibit one of the dark traits; then why do people tolerate it when it comes from the alpha male boss?
My point is that the problem might be precisely that we often claim things like “Some dark traits, such as Machiavellianism, can be beneficial under certain circumstances. It might be better if one could single out a dark trait, such as sadism, and only select against it while leaving other dark traits unchanged.” If we could just acknowledge that dark triad traits individuals are very dangerous, even if they’re sometimes useful (like a necessary evil), then perhaps we could avoid (or at least be particularly cautious with) malevolent leaders.
I googled it and it returned “Did you mean Prospera?”
Plus, “Julia the Wise” would evoke Saruman. Too risky.
Is there anywhere I can upvote something like “global poverty is likely appropriately prioritised within EA so far, but I guess longtermism & Animal Welfare have been receiving proportionally more attention and resources in the last couple of years than they used to, probably because that’s where some salient EAs think there are juicier arguments and low-hanging fruits to grab, and now we even read more about disputes between randomistas and systemistas than about how to compare AMF vs. GD impact these days”?
I think it certainly deserves an assessment. But I myself have been postponing reading Dasgupta’s review for months.
On the other hand, I wonder if it might overlap or conflict with wild animal welfare.
TL;DR: when it comes to technical expertise, our problem is more a lack of technical literacy than absence of experts. Think about it as analogy with other sciences.
I work with lots of economists (some of them trained in top graduate programs), for a government in a developing country, and I can’t help thinking this proposal is a bit naïve. I’m pretty sure our problem is not that we lack economists, or that the President does not receive expert advice, but that they are seldom listened to—unless they confirm what the relevant stakeholders want. And, like in natural sciences, journalists will often find someone they can refer to as an expert in the field, but people are not able to assess what they say, unless their conclusions are stated in very simple terms, usually in a confirmatory tone. So probably our problem is more a lack of overal economics literacy—and not more experts.On the other hand, I can say that things have actually been getting better in some sense in the last few years—I observe that basic literacy in economics have been improving in the media and among educated people from other fields. And yet, this has not led to better policy; part of it is that economic development is hard (as I have argued elsewhere), or that the causality here runs the other way around (i.e., people have been learning more about economics because we have dealt with recessions)… but then you also have the whole soldier vs. scout mindset all back again—even educated people will look for info to confirm their biases.
To be clear: I’m certainly not against training more economists from developing countries in US top graduate programs (quite the opposite: sometimes I think the best thing we can do around here is to send bright students away), but I don’t think that’s the bottleneck in economic development (in comparison to other hypothesis), nor that it’d more efficient than other policies concerning education in economics that are likely less expensive and have a broader scope—such as economic classes for youngsters, or funding more economists in these countries, or sending experts from top univerties to teach there, etc.
I wonder what you’d think about having a network connecting South American EAs. In Brazil, we have considered many of the matters you are now posing; I believe it would be, overall, mutually beneficial, possibly even fun.
Thanks for this post. Besides due recognition, I think that studying people who professed EA ideas before the movement began may provide insights on, e.g., what prevented these ideas from spreading before, what shortcomes they faced, what actually worked, etc.
Thanks for the post. I’m convinced about the case for extrapolating from UN SDGs to GCRs, and I think stating it explicitly is relevant because attention is a scarce resource: companies and governments often use SDGs as a focal point when they want to signal virtue—public companies might even be required to explicitly state what SDGs they are aiming at in their sustainability reports.
I wonder what other areas have failed to get into SDGs—e.g., there’s absolutely no concern for animal welfare, as the goals and targets are explicitly worded in conservationist terms. Most material I’ve read about this is limited to argue that animal welfare and SDGs are compatible—even this call for papers from MDPI (due on 30 jun), which might interest someone doing research on the area.
Thanks for the post. Following along with the other comments, I think this community sometimes overemphasizes the utilitarian case for longtermism (that, even if sound, may be unpersuasive for non-utilitarians), and often neglects the possibility of basing it on a theory of intergenerational cooperation / justice (something that, in my opinion, is underdeveloped among contractualist political philosophers). That’s why I think this discussion is quite relevant, and I commend you for bringing it up.
I agree with Justin’s comment that acausal trade might be a good way to frame the relationship between agents through different time slices… but you need something even weaker than that—instead of framing it as a cooperation between two agents, think about a chain of cooperation and add backward induction: if 27!Austin finds out he’ll not comply with 17!Austin commitments, he’ll have strong evidence that 37!Austin won’t comply with his commitments, too—which threatens plans lasting more than a decade. And this is not such a weird reasoning: individuals often ponder if they will follow their own plans (or if they will change their minds, or be driven away by temptation...), and some financial structures depend on analogous “continuing commitments” (think about long-term debt and pension funds).(actually, I suspect acausal trade might have stronger implications than what most people here would feel comfortable with… because it may take you to something very close to a universalization principle akin to a Kantian categorical imperative—but hey, Parfit has already convinced me we’re all “climbing the same mountain”)
Actually, there’s a lot of EAs researching philosophy and human psychology.
I think Collison’s conception of EA is something like “GiveWell charity recommendations”—this seems to be a common misunderstanding shared by most non-EA people. I didn’t check the whole interview, but it seems weird that he doesn’t account for the contrast between what he had just said about EA and his comments on x-risks and longtermism.