When funding policy advocacy in the rich world, Open Philanthropy Project aims to only fund projects that at least meet the '100x bar', which means that the things they fund need to increase incomes for average Americans by $100 for every $1 spent to get as much benefit as giving $1 to GiveDirectly recipients in Africa. The reason for this is that (1) there is roughly a 100:1 ratio between the consumption of Americans to GiveDirectly cash transfer recipients, and (2) the returns of money to welfare are logarithmic. A logarithmic utility function implies that $1 for someone with 100x less consumption is worth 100x as much. Since GiveWell's top charities are 10x better than GiveDirectly, the standard set by GiveWell's top charities is a '1,000x bar'.
Since 2015, Open Phil has made roughly 300 grants totalling almost $200 million in their near-termist, human-centric focus areas of criminal justice reform, immigration policy, land use reform, macroeconomic stabilisation policy, and scientific research. In 'GiveWell’s Top Charities Are (Increasingly) Hard to Beat', Alex Berger argues that much of Open Phil's US policy work probably passes the 100x bar, but relatively little passes the 1,000x bar.
The reason that Open Phil's policy work is able to meet the 100x bar is that it is leveraged. Although trying to change planning law in California has a low chance of success, the economic payoffs are so large that the expected value of these grants is high. So, even though it is a lot harder to increase welfare in the US, because the policy work has so much leverage, the expected benefits are high enough to 100x the $ benefits.
This raises the question: if all of this true, wouldn't advocating for improved economic policy in poor countries be much better than GiveWell's top charities? If policy in the US has high expected benefits because it is leveraged, then policy in Kenya must also have high expected benefits because it is leveraged. We should expect many projects improving economic policy in Kenya to produce 100x the welfare benefits of GiveDirectly, and we should expect a handful to produce 1,000x the welfare benefits of GiveDirectly.
This is an argument for funding work to improve economic policy in the world's poorest countries. Lant Pritchett has been arguing for this position for at least 7 years without any published response from the EA community. Hauke Hillebrandt and I summarise his arguments here. My former colleagues from Founders Pledge, Stephen Clare and Aidan Goth, discuss the arguments in more depth here.
Updated addendum: At present, according to GiveWell, the best way to improve the economic outcomes of very poor people is to deworm them. This is on the basis of one very controversial RCT conducted in 2004. I don't think this is a tenable position.
I've been meaning to respond to the original post but never got around to it, so thank you for bringing it back up and encouraging more discussion. I'm not a 'randomista' per se, but I have published RCTs as well as non-RCTs, and I have worked in the US as well as many developing countries. FWIW, like Lant I have a PhD in econ from MIT (where I was one year ahead of Esther and TA'd for Abhijit), have taught at Harvard (and elsewhere), and used to work at the World Bank. We're also fairly evenly matched at tennis, judging from an interesting doubles game many years ago. I was one of the 'experts' for the Founders Pledge work on this topic, which as you know didn't suggest anything specific despite thinking hard about it for at least a little while.
TL/DR: I 100% agree that we should be doing more research on effective ways to leverage broad policy initiatives, including for growth (but also e.g. health). We know a lot about basically good macro policies (and imo very little beyond that; then again I'm a microeconomist) and it would be great to get countries to do more of those. This is hard, and no one seems to have particularly convincing concrete ideas about what to do differently (create another World Bank to compete with the first one??). The potential returns are high, but in expectation not necessarily any higher than for 'RCT-led' policies.
Detailed comments:
Hello, thanks for this and thanks for assisting with our report on that!
To clarify, it's not the case that the FP report didn't have any recommendations because we didn't find anything good. We stopped because we couldn't guarantee that we could move enough money to the area to make it worth our own time and that of the organisations we evaluated. We didn't discover anything that made me think we wouldn't find something better than deworming if we were to put a couple of person-years into it.
On your tldr - the point of my post is that I don't see how it could be true that the returns are not higher than direct RCT-tested projects. Either US policy doesn't actually get close to the GiveWell bar, or poor world policy beats it.
And thanks for your reply! I hope that you are now satisfied, since the issue is being discussed :) More seriously I really am glad you brought it to the fore again, because it deserves it, and I'm being [sincerely] critical only because I take it seriously and respect it.
Re the FP report: so did it find anything promising or not? My reading (could be wrong, obviously, so let me know) was that they/you didn't in fact find anything to point to; that they/you believe such a thing does exist; but that it would take a lot of time and effort to find it. This is not especially encouraging, given that between them and the experts and you and Lant, at least one person-year has been spent on this already. If all you want is more discussion / research, as I said upfront I agree 100%. If you want to convince me that it is likely to succeed, you need to point to something more than intuition (in part because even the numbers you have thrown around are somewhat suspect).
There still seems to be an apples-to-oranges comparison here. You can criticize specific RCTs, sometimes validly and sometimes not (I'm happy to share the 10+ page report I wrote for GiveWell which on the whole validated the deworming results, and David Roodman's extensive research came to a similar conclusion). But it's not helpful to compare a single intervention (note that GiveWell has multiple charities with similarly high estimated ROIs) to "whatever it is that caused [those countries] to grow" which neither you nor the best macroeconomists seem to uncontroversially agree on even in retrospect. My claim is that if deworming had been added to their policy mix (and other aspects had adjusted however they adjusted), that would have been a good thing.
Sure you can run an RCT on allowing foreign investment: subsidize it in some regions and not others. Same for immigration: encourage it in some places (or times) and not others. Same for road pricing. These won't pick up anything that is truly nationally systemic (and for that reason I agree full-scale tax reform is more difficult, although many taxes can be varied locally), but it doesn't have to be perfect for us to learn a lot. It also doesn't have to directly involve a "policy that you might enforce in the real world" - it just has to have useful implications for such policies. Some of these might be hard and take time and involve theory; so is figuring out what causes growth and how to make it happen.
The ICRIER case that you and Lant and FP point to is simply wrong. You suggested in the comments below that >30% of the economics profession is working in the RCT space; this is wrong for development econ (where it is less than 10%) and even further from the truth in other sub-fields. You say in your response to me that "EAs do not support a randomista approach to the rich world" - obviously I can't speak for EAs in general, but I have worked on RCTs in the US (here and here and forthcoming here), RCTs in Europe (here and here), and for what it's worth non-RCTs in the US (here and here and here) as well. Eva Vivalt, another EA-affiliated economist, is also working on randomized cash transfers in the US. David Reinstein is working on RCTs of charitable giving.
Purely anecdotally, I have found 'randomistas' to be highly practical, perhaps in part because they work more often in the field. I think most of them are happy to apply the technique anywhere it can help. I also think most of them admit that it isn't always the best approach, whereas I rarely see Lant or Angus Deaton saying the same about RCTs (perhaps because they incorrectly believe the method can only be applied to second- or third-order domains? then again they are very smart people so I have some trouble accepting that explanation).
And finally back to the main question of this particular post. I'm personally not convinced that US policy work will necessarily get close to the GiveWell bar. Whether it does or not, I do think it's nontrivially possible that developing-world policy wouldn't beat it by an order of magnitude or more. As has been noted by others here I think, policy work often requires local contextual knowledge and connections, which for many poor countries would first have to be built up by the EA community. Most such work will be country specific, and most such countries (with some important exceptions, like Nigeria and India) have an order of magnitude lower population than the US. Most such countries have less stable governments, so any policy changes won't last as long in expectation. Lots of factors come into play; it's not so simple as saying 100x and that you personally don't see how it couldn't be true. Don't get me wrong: it might be true! In fact I do suspect that policy work, like other interventions, will in general have a higher return in the global south. But it's not a priori obvious.
Hello,
I'm going to try to step back first and speculate where we actually disagree, in hopes of getting at what you actually think should be happening differently, if anything. You seem to be arguing to some extent against things that do not exist, and in particular that neither I nor others are saying. I think we agree that (i) 1-5% of work in economics should be RCTs; (ii) RCTs are not the right approach for many, indeed most, questions in social science; (iii) there exists lots of policy-relevant and actionable information from non-RCT sources; (iv) intuitions can be a useful input, as long as one is transparent that that's what they are; (v) the EA community should be spending resources studying policy interventions, including around growth but also imo health (e.g. lead paint, tobacco); and (vi) economists do more good than harm in the world.
Where I think we disagree is that your intuition is that with another three person-years of effort, the EA community will find growth policy funding opportunities (not based on RCTs...) that are far more effective than the current top GW charities, and my intuition is that we won't (but that I still think we should look, as I've said many times, because the uncertainty is high and we might find them!). Neither of us knows for sure, as this hasn't been done yet. Is it more than that?
Yes, that seems like the main thing we disagree about. It also seems like we disagree about the likely impact of deworming.
Another point of agreement: the economics profession currently focuses too much on empirical work. Meanwhile my own personal view is that people like Esther and Chris B are slightly 'too far' in the pro-RCT camp, and that people like Lant (and you) are 'too far' in the anti-RCT camp. But I don't see anyone in this discussion as being extreme (except possibly Lant...); healthy disagreement is to be expected and encouraged. Note that Esther and Abhijit's most recent book tackles macro issues like migration, trade, climate change, and yes growth - using RCTs when possible / relevant but also plenty of other results (including lots of theory! Abhijit started life as a theorist, like I did). Meanwhile Chris has a forthcoming book on war and peace (macro level! no easy RCTs) for which he uses other approaches like machine learning. You can find all sorts of quotes, but the proof is in the pudding. Final point on this is that one can easily combine RCTs with admin data, ML, etc, and researchers (including me) are doing more and more of that, which imo is great - it's not always one or the other.
As you say, the efficacy of deworming seems to be a point of disagreement between us. Again pulling back somewhat, you link to Eva's paper as supporting your claim that RCTs have minimal external validity, but her paper is about all forms of impact evaluation (and she notes in the conclusion that the subset of RCTs aren't special). So this would be extremely damning for economics if true, but her results don't support your claim. For instance she notes that bednets and conditional cash transfers seem to do very well on this front. More relevantly, her point (as I read it) is to see how much of the nominal variation in effect sizes can be explained by other contextual variables, and she finds that typically a nontrivial amount of it can be. This is good news for external validity, since it means we can often explain / predict the differences even when they do arise.
I think I haven't been very clear about 'apples to oranges' - I agree that these can & should absolutely be compared. I just felt like the way you were doing it glossed over an important difference. I can write a check to AMF and feel very confident that something will change in the world; we can then debate the expected magnitude of the impact of that change. But I can't write a check to "growth reform in the developing world", so even before we debate the relative benefits of changing immigration policy vs distributing bednets we have to calculate the probability that the desired policy will get implemented. I realize you're fully aware of this, but that's the part I keep coming back to because that's the part where I'm pessimistic (partly having worked for the US government, although for a counterargument I liked this recent forum post) and suspect that our intuitions disagree, and mostly you keep talking about the benefits of more migration and of GDP growth (which are great!) and not so much about how we sit down and estimate the likelihoods of bringing those about. I'll admit that the "pessimistic" estimate of 1% on ICRIER in the original post with Hauke really made me distrust everything afterward, since the pessimistic estimate in that case is a negative number and a plausible median estimate seems to be about 1 in a million.
On China I suppose my main point is still that I think it's simply very very hard to quantitatively estimate most of this. Just because you (or I, or anyone) thinks that something is extremely conservative (when you admit you haven't put in as much time on all this as you'd like, and indeed it's not your job to do so) doesn't make it so. In this specific case, if you forced me to take a stand, my best guess is to agree with you that economists have helped push policy in a better direction and that that made a big difference to global welfare. Even if I felt more confident about that, what is the counterfactual you are comparing to? Did some NGO or the WB cause that to happen on the margin, or would economists have tried to learn about the world and influence policy anyway? Are there similar opportunities going forward? The Taliban says they want economics expertise, so perhaps. But I don't think we know the answers to these questions (yet), even within orders of magnitude, and whether or not this type of approach will beat RCT-type approaches depends entirely on those particular probabilities.
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.
Hi there
On your first question - what am I proposing?
The main thing I am proposing is quite weak - I am proposing that there be some public discussion of the arguments. Hauke and I published our piece summarising Pritchett's argument two years ago. It is the second most upvoted post in EA Forum history, which suggests that lots of people in the community found the post persuasive. On the face of it, Lant is worth taking seriously: 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. He has been defending economic growth and criticising the RCT-led approach to economics for at least 7 years. Some of the most prominent economists in the world (Rodrik, Acemoglu, Deaton, Cowen, Caplan) have endorsed similar conclusions. In spite of this, no-one in the EA community has ever published a response to these arguments.
The initial thing Hauke and I proposed was that "A ~4 person-year research effort will find donation opportunities working on economic growth in LMICs which are substantially better than GiveWell’s top charities from a current generation human welfare-focused point of view." I would have tried to put this to the test when I was at Founders Pledge if I knew we would move sufficient funds to that area to make it worthwhile. I got two members of the team to explore the question of whether growth increased life satisfaction (here), which was one main piece of pushback we got to our post in the comments.
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.
Neglectedness
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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:
Actually, I don’t see why this is impossible.
However, I must remark: I think we actually agree economic researchers should focus more on developing countries, right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for engaging with me so deeply on this. To avoid misunderstandings, the comments about my desire for a debate were not meant as a criticism of you. I suppose I am a bit disappointed that no-one from GiveWell or Open Philanthropy has responded to Lant's arguments. When I mentioned the upvotes mine and Hauke's post got, I wasn't trying to blow my own horn (much as I like doing that), I was just trying to say that there is at least a case to answer. But two years on, no-one has engaged with the post. A lot is at stake here - I think we're leaving an awful lot of value on the table.
It seems I misunderstood your stance from your first comment. I'm not sure I've got time to respond to the new comment in full but will try if I find time.
Hey, I really appreciate this discussion! I wanted to jump in on one point. You note that the Founders Pledge follow-up to the original growth post (which I co-wrote) concluded that it would be too costly to continue the research to identify funding opportunities. I just wanted to note that taht was the case that because of how FP's funding model works. FP staff don't directly control the pledged funds - the members make the final decision over where to donate, and can take or leave the recommendations.
Since policy orgs are difficult to evaluate, I was quite worried that we would take a lot of time to conduct these evaluations and then our members wouldn't end up donating to the recommendations. This would not be a concern for evaluators that have direct control over some funds. They can guarantee funding to organizations they're evaluating that reach some bar, making it worth it (in expectation) for the organizations to spend some time engaging.
Off topic, but I didn't realise you'd left Founders Pledge. May I ask what you're up to now?
I'm surprised (as it seems you are) that it has been two years since yours and Hauke's original post and there hasn't been any movement on this issue. Do you have any ideas on why this might be the case?
Seems like a potentially worrying pitfall of the EA Forum (or EA community?) if new-ish ideas are posted, solid cases are made that people agree with but nothing changes.
While I can't find any EA work on economic policy in poor countries, two Charity Entrepreneurship incubated charities are working on health policy:
I think the most obvious reason that this work isn't happening is just that the EA community is overwhelmingly concentrated in richer countries, and it's really hard to work on policy change without having local understanding and context. LEEP has had success but it's likely because they are focused on such a niche and unpolarized issue, with almost no significant stakeholders that would be against this policy. Economic policies like the ones you mention are probably going to be incredibly difficult for even experienced policy people from the countries they are working in, let alone for EAs with no experience in those countries. It would also be difficult for funders like Open Phil to evaluate which grants are more or less likely to succeed, since their staff doesn't have experience in these countries.
Of course, none of these barriers are an excuse for not focusing on this topic, if the expected impact is very high. The longer-term solution here is probably to encourage EAs studying and/or working in poorer countries to consider policy careers, and for EA funders like Open Phil to focus on developing capacity/expertise in these countries (looks like they're doing this with the new South Asian air quality program), or to partner with other organizations that have more knowledge in the area.
Final note: J-PAL and IPA have obviously been working on this for a while, though they might be pursuing smaller-scale economic policy changes than you're suggesting.
1.
"Open Phil has made roughly 300 grants totalling almost $200 million in their near-termist, human-centric focus areas of criminal justice reform, *immigration policy*"
I think immigration policy may be an exception for the 1,000x bar reasoning since you are pretty much helping people who now live in poor countries (although not necessarily the poorest and also probably with a middles-class selection bias - the ones who can actually afford to leave).
Huh...It made me think if we should have some kind of GiveDirectly for Immigration (FlyDirectly?) where the poorest from the most remote villages would get selected to a visa or something.
2.
The view from Brazil:
We have a high influential academic establishment that cultivates marxists and outdated nationalist-industrialist approaches to economics. They pass down those "traditions" (religions?) to the younger students generation. The Washington Consensus liberalizing reforms are usually called by the derogatory neoliberal epithet and serious investigation of its impact or even actually what was originally proposed is never transmitted to students.
Maybe our academics and students should hear more about Effective Altruism. Or maybe they should also hear more about our friends at the Neoliberal Project. I'm an activist in both movements and trying my best to change some of that but good luck for me on that! =)
(In any case, here is our website for the Portuguese-speaking members out there: neoliberais.com, and if you are from Brazil and want to help with Neoliberal Project or EA drop me a line)
Economic policies is a highly political subject and since "politics is the mind-killer" this is probably why few EAs want to explicitly interfere with this. Maybe there should be some indirect support and this kind of “labor division”. For example, EAs could be stimulated to join their local Neoliberal Project chapters but keep it as two separate groups, with different meeting days, etc.
Alexander Berger discusses this at length in a recent 80,000 Hours podcast interview with Rob Wiblin.
I do think it is a key pillar of EA that there is open public discussion of arguments for and against different positions. I haven't seen much engagement with the case for focusing on economic growth.
+1
One excerpt worth quoting (emphasis added):
The most relevant comments in the transcript seem to be in the section "GiveWell’s top charities are (increasingly) hard to beat".
We put this question to Alexander Berger in our recent podcast. Best to engage with his response directly, but the very short version of his response was that they do expect to be able to find some opportunities that are even more leveraged than AMF within policy (AMF is 20x leveraged on cash transfers, but maybe 100x or more is possible), and that's why they're currently hiring for someone to work on each of SE Asian air quality advocacy and advocacy for more effective international aid, and also people to look for other areas like this. Though, my impression is that Alexander doesn't expect to be able to find $1bn per year of opportunities like this, so they also need to fund more scalable things like AMF.
Hello, yes this was in part a response to the arguments there where he suggested that policy is in the same ballpark as GiveWell top charities, which I don't think can be true given other things he says.
"Yeah, I think that’s totally right. And I think, again, if you had more of a dominance argument, where it’s like, look, the returns to the policy are just always going to outweigh the returns to evidence-based aid, then I think you would end up with more back and forth and debate between them. But when you see the arguments for cost effectiveness actually ending up in the same ballpark, the same universe, it’s just like, cool, we can all get along. People are going to sort into buckets that appeal to them, or styles that work for them, or interventions that they’re more personally excited about. I think that’s totally healthy. And then when some of them think, actually, the expected value-type argument seems to lead you to think one of these is going to just totally destroy the other, that’s where I think you get a little bit more friction and tension and debate sometimes."
Because there is little public discussion about what happens in the near-termist area, it is difficult to know why certain decisions are taken. I think it would be better for decisions that affect millions of dollars to be made with more public discussion and scrutiny.
I think I get the idea of what you’re saying, but I could be missing something in which case feel free to clarify in response to these two thoughts/comments:
It seems that some economic policy reforms rely a lot on percentage improvement gains, e.g., a 5% improvement in purchasing power/income, rather than solely absolute/fixed increases (e.g., +$100 per person)—although I imagine most are varying mixtures of fixed, percentage/linear, log, and/or exponential benefits relative to starting income. However, if a given policy results primarily in a constant percentage increase in income across two countries—one with high income and one with low income—does it matter which one gets the economic improvement under the logarithmic utility function? Doesn’t a 5% increase in income for a country with $100 of average income produce the same amount of utility as a 5% increase in income for a country with $1,000 average income (for a strictly log income => utility function)?
It’d be interesting to get a sense of how difficult it is to support/cause economic policy reform in rich countries vs. developing countries: that tractability consideration could shift things.
Overall though I think it’s good to be thinking about this alternative! I don’t know enough about the debate to really take a side, and like I said, I may missed some of your reasoning that dealt with this.
Hello! I will attempt to clarify, let me know whether this helps