Econ PhD student at Oxford and research associate at the Global Priorities Institute. I’m slightly less ignorant about economic theory than about everything else.
trammell(Philip Trammell)
Karma: 951
ETGP 2022: materials, feedback, and lessons for 2023
Thanks for this!
My understanding is that some assets claimed to have a significant illiquidity premium don’t really, including (as you mention) private equity and real estate, but some do, e.g. timber farms: on account of the asymmetric information, no one wants to buy it without prospecting it to see how the trees are coming along. Do you disagree that low-DR investors should disproportionately buy timber farms (at least if they’re rich enough to afford the transaction costs)?
Also, just to clarify my point about 100-year leases from Appendix E: I wasn’t recommending that low-DR investors actually do this! It was just supposed to be an illustration of why patient investors should be expected to own a larger fraction of the world over time.
The numbers I cited on 100-year leases came from Giglio et al. (2015) (published version here https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/130/1/1/2337985 , accessible draft here http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Giglioetal2013.pdf).
Haha okay, thank you! I agree that it’ll be great if clear examples of impact like this inspire more people to do work along these lines. And I appreciate that aiming for clear impact is valuable for researchers in general for making sure our claims of impact aren’t just empty stories.
FWIW though, I also think it could be misleading to base our judgment of the impact of some research too much on particular projects with clear and immediate connections to the research—especially in philosophy, since it’s further “upstream”. As this 80k article argues, most philosophers have basically no impact, but some, like Locke, Marx, and Singer, seem to have had huge impact, most of it very indirect. In some cases (Marx especially I guess) the main impacts have even come from people reading their ideas long after they died.
Anyway, happy to celebrate clear impact (including my own!), just want to emphasize that I don’t think impact always has to be clear. :)
I expect that different people at GPI have somewhat different goals for their own research, and that this varies a fair bit between philosophy and economics. But for my part,
my primarily goal is to do research that philanthropists find useful, and
my secondary goal is to do research that persuades other academics to see certain important questions in a more “EA” way, and to adjust their own curricula and research accordingly.
On the first point—and apologies if this sounds self-congratulatory or something, but I’m just providing the examples of GPI’s impact that I happen to have had a hand in, in case they’re helpful!—I’m (naturally) excited that my work on the allocation of philanthropic spending over time motivated Founders Pledge to launch the Patient Philanthropy Fund. I’m also glad that a few larger philanthropists have told me that it has had at least some impact on how they think about the question of how they should distribute their giving over time.
On the second point, I don’t really expect to be influencing econ professors much yet since I’m still just a PhD student, but my literature review on economic growth under AI will be used in a Coursera course on the economics of AI. (To illustrate what I have in mind of what’s possible, though, the philosophers already seem to have had a fair bit of success influencing curricula: professors at Yale and UMich are now offering whole courses on longtermism, largely drawing on GPI papers.)
I am not focused on attempting to change policy.
Economic Theory & Global Prioritization (summer 2022): Apply now!
Hah, sorry to hear that! But thanks for sharing—good to have yet more evidence on this front...!
Right—the primary audience is people who already have a fair bit of background in economics.
There are now questions on Metaculus about whether this will pass:
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/8663/us-to-make-patient-philanthropy-harder-soon/https://www.metaculus.com/questions/8664/patient-philanthropy-harder-in-the-us-by-30/
I am, thanks
Cool! I was thinking that this course would be a sort of early-stage / first-pass attempt at a curriculum that could eventually generate a textbook (and/or other materials) if it goes well and is repeated a few times, just as so many other textbooks have begun as lecture notes. But if you’d be willing to make something online / easier-to-update sooner, that could be useful. The slides and so on won’t be done for quite a while, but I’ll send them to you when they are.
Yup, I’ll post the syllabus and slides and so on!
I’ll also probably record the lectures, but probably not make them available except to the attendees, so they feel more comfortable asking questions. But if a lecture goes well, I might later use it as a template for a more polished/accessible video that is publicly available. (Some of the topics already have good lectures for online as well, though; in those cases I’d probably just link to those.)
Glad to hear you might be interested!
Thanks for pointing this out. It’s tough, because (a) as GrueEmerald notes below, at least some European schools end later, and (b) it will be easier to provide accommodation in Oxford once the Oxford spring term is over (e.g. I was thinking of just renting space in one of the colleges). Once the application form is up*, I might include a When2Meet-type thing so people can put exactly what weeks they expect to be free through the summer.
*If this goes ahead; but there have been a lot of expressions of interest so far, so it probably will!
Sure. Those particular papers rely on a mathematical trick that only lets you work out how much a society should be willing to pay to avoid proportional losses in consumption. It turns out to be different from what to do in the x-risk case in lots of important ways, and the trick is not generalizable in those ways. But because the papers seem so close to being x-risk-relevant, I know of like half a dozen EA econ students (including me) who have tried extending them at some point before giving up…
I’m aware of at least a few other “common EA econ theorist dead ends” of this sort, and I’ll try making a list, along something written about each of them. When this and the rest of the course material is done, I’ll post it.
Good to know, thanks!
Video recordings are among the “more polished and scalable educational materials” I was thinking might come out of this; i.e. to some extent the course lectures would serve as a trial run for any such videos. That wouldn’t be for a year or so, I’m afraid. But if it happens, I’ll make sure to get a good attached mike, and if I can’t get my hands on one elsewhere I’ll keep you in mind. : )
2-week summer course in “economic theory and global prioritization”: LMK if interested!
Thanks! A lot of good points here.
Re 1: if I’m understanding you right, this would just lower the interest rate from r to r—capital ‘depreciation rate’. So it wouldn’t change any of the qualitative conclusions, except that it would make it more plausible that the EA movement (or any particular movement) is, for modeling purposes, “impatient”. But cool, that’s an important point. And particularly relevant these days; my understanding is that a lot of Will’s(/etc) excitement around finding megaprojects ASAP is driven by the sense that if we don’t, some of the money will wander off.
Re 2: another good point. In this case I just think it would make the big qualitative conclusion hold even more strongly—no need to earn to give because money is even easier to come by, relative to labor, than the model suggests. But maybe it would be worth working through it after adding an explicit “wealth recruitment” function, to make sure there are no surprises.
Re 3: I agree, but I suspect—perhaps pessimistically—that the asymptotics of this model (if it’s roughly accurate at all) bite a long time before EA wealth is a large enough fraction of global capital to push down the interest rate! Indeed, I don’t think it’s crazy to think they’re already biting. Presumably the thing to do if you actually got to that point would be to start allocating more resources to R&D, to raise labor productivity and thus the return to capital. There are many ways I’d want to make the model more realistic before worrying about the constraints you run into when you start owning continents (a scenario for which there would presumably be plenty of time to prepare...!); but as noted, one of the extensions I’m hoping gets done before too long is to make (at least certain kinds of) R&D endogenous. So hopefully that would be at least somewhat relevant.
Thanks! I agree that this might be another pretty important consideration, though I’d want to think a bit about how to model it in a way that feels relatively realistic and non-arbitrary.
E.g. maybe we should say people start out with a prior on the effectiveness of a movement at getting good things done, and instead of just being deterministically “recruited”, they decide whether to contribute their labor and/or capital to a movement partly on the basis of their evaluation of its effectiveness, after updating on the basis of its track record.
Good point, thanks!
Good question! Yes, an ideas constraint absolutely could make sense.
My current favorite way to capture that possibility would be to model funding opportunities like consumer products as I do here. Pouring more capital and labor into existing funding opportunities might just bring you to an upper bound of impact, whereas thinking of new funding opportunities would raise the upper bound.
This is also one of the extensions I’m hoping to add to this model before too long. If you or anyone else reading this would be interested in working on that, especially if you have an econ background, let me know!
Thanks! And thanks for presenting!!