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: 771
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!
A Model of Patient Spending and Movement Building
Thanks!
Nice to see this coming along! How many visitors has utilitarianism.net been getting?
Thanks!
Sorry, what’s REI work?
I think this is a valuable contribution—thanks for writing it! Among other things, it demonstrates that conclusions about when to give are highly sensitive to how we model value drift.
In my own work on the timing of giving, I’ve been thinking about value drift as a simple increase to the discount rate: each year philanthropists (or their heirs) face some x% chance of running off with the money and spending it on worthless things. So if the discount rate would have been d% without any value drift risk, it just rises to (d+x)% given the value drift risk. If the learning that will take place over the next year (and other reasons to wait, e.g. a positive interest rate) outweigh this (d+x)% (plus the other reasons why resources will be less valuable next year), it’s better to wait. But here we see that, if values definitely change a little each year, it might be best to spend much more quickly than if (as I’ve been assuming) they probably don’t change at all but might change a lot, since in the former case, holding onto resources allows for a kind of slippery slope in which each year you change your judgments about whether or not to defer to the next year. So I’m really glad this was written and I look forward to thinking about it more.
One comment on the thesis itself: I think it’s a bit confusing at the beginning, where it says that decision-makers face a tradeoff between “what is objectively known about the world and what they personally believe is true.” The tradeoff they face is between acquiring information and maintaining fidelity to their current preferences, not to their current beliefs. The rest of the thesis is consistent with framing the problem as a information-vs.-preference-fidelity tradeoff, so I think this wording is just a holdover from a previous version of the thesis which framed things differently. But (Max) let me know if I’m missing something.
Sorry, no, that’s clear! I should have noted that you say that too.
The point I wanted to make is that your reason for saving as an urgent longtermist isn’t necessarily something like “we’re already making use of all these urgent opportunities now, so might as well build up a buffer in case the money is gone later”. You could just think that now isn’t a particularly promising time to spend, period, but that there will be promising opportunities later this century, and still be classified as an urgent longtermist.
That is, an urgent longtermist could have stereotypically “patient longtermist” beliefs about the quality of direct-impact spending opportunities available in December 2020.
Right—the primary audience is people who already have a fair bit of background in economics.