Cross posted from my blog https://hauke.substack.com/p/populism

An earlier version of this shallow cause area investigation was funded by legacies.now as a preliminary first step into this cause area and written in early 2020. Thanks to Stefan Schubert and Michael Aird for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. All opinions and errors are mine. This is an example of "EA consulting". If you're interested in consulting services from me, get in touch at: H@EA.do

Executive summary

This short review explores what a potential philanthropist could fund in the “Decreasing populism, improving democracy, evidence-based policy, and rationality” space.

This document sets out:

What populism is, what its impacts and causes are, and who is working on this cause already
What a philanthropist could do to tackle the problem

Our analysis informed our ranking of which broad causes are specifically effective to decrease populism, which is based on qualitative subjective impressions. We concluded that improving rationality, institutional decision making and evidence-based policy are particularly promising.

This should just be seen as a rough guide towards finding potentially highly effective interventions.

Throughout the report we highlight concrete ideas of things that a philanthropist could fund. We distinguish between “funding ideas”, which are promising broad areas that could be explored further, and “funding opportunities”, which are a bit more concrete because we have found a non-profit or academic researcher that is already working on a very promising idea or project that seem plausibly highly effective and that could be funded in the very near term. Our rough ranking of promising funding opportunities is as follows:

For instance, our top choice is the Initiative on Global Markets (IGM), a research center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Specifically, their “Economics Experts Panel”, regularly polls top economists on economic policy questions. A philanthropist could fund this project so that it can be expanded. Basing economic policy on expert consensus should be robustly positive.

What is the problem?

Definition

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘populism’ as a ‘political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups’.

Here, ou...

Democracy & EA