Thanks Ozzie, you’re definitely allowed to ask questions like this! We won’t always be able to answer but we welcome questions and critiques of our work.

Our innovation policy work is generally based on the assumption that long-run health and income gains are ultimately attributable to R&D. For example, Matt Clancy estimated in this report that general funding for scientific research ranged from 50-330x in our framework, depending on the model and assumptions about downside risks from scientific research. In practice we currently internally use a value of average scientific research funding of 70x when evaluating our innovation policy work. Of course, 70x is well below our bar (currently ~2,100x), and so the premise of the program is not to directly fund additional scientific research, but instead to make grants that we think are sufficiently likely to increase the effective size of R&D effort by raising its efficiency or productivity or level enough to clear the bar. Moreover, while most of our giving in this program flows to grantees in high-income countries operating on the research frontier, the ultimate case is based on global impact: we assume research like this eventually benefits everyone, though with multi-decade lags (which in practice lead us to discount the benefits substantially, as discussed in Matt’s paper above and this report by Tom Davidson).

Our innovation policy work so far has cleared our internal bar for impact, and one reason we are excited to expand into this space is because we’ve found more opportunities that we think are above the bar than Good Ventures’ previous budget covered.

We also think our housing policy work clears our internal bar for impact. Our current internal valuation on a marginal housing unit in a highly constrained metro area in the US is just over $400k (so a grant would be above the bar if we think it causes a new unit in expectation for $200). A relatively small part of the case here is again based on innovation - there is some research indicating that increasing the density of people in innovative cities increases the rate of innovation. But our internal valuation for new housing units also incorporates a few other paths to impact. For example, increasing the density of productive cities also raises the incomes of movers and other residents, and reduces the overall carbon footprint of the housing stock. Collectively, we think these benefits are large enough to make a lot of grants related to housing policy clear our bar, given the leverage that advocacy can sometimes bring.

We’ll be evaluating new sub-areas as we go to make sure that they are also generally above our impact bar, but we suspect that the same logic of large potential importance will mean that policy changes that make even modest improvements to areas like clinical trial regulation, energy permitting, etc. could be highly impactful.

In terms of scale, while this is a significant expansion of Open Phil’s overall work in the space, it’s a modest expansion of Good Ventures’ (from ~$15M to ~$20M/year). The remaining funding is coming from other donors. As we wrote in our annual review last week:

One implication of our growing work with other donors is that it’s increasingly incorrect to think about Open Philanthropy as a single unified funder making top-down decisions. Increasingly, our resources come from different partners who are devoted to different causes and have different preferences and limitations for their giving. Their philanthropic dollars are not fungible, and we would be doing them a disservice if we treated them as if they were... it’s clearly less true than in the past (not that it was ever perfectly true) that the distribution of grants we advise across causes reflects our leadership’s unconstrained recommendations.

FWIW I certainly agree with "non-trivial"; "huge" is a judgment call IMO. We'll see!

I think this is a complicated question - it's always been the case that individual OP staff had to submit grants to an overall review process and were not totally unilateral decision makers. As I said in my post above, they (and I) will now face somewhat more constraints. I think staff would differ in terms of how costly they would assess the new constraints as being. But it's true this was a GV rather than OP decision; it wasn't a place where GV was deferring to OP to weigh the costs and benefits.

Just flagging that I think "OP [is] open to funding XYZ areas if a new funder appears who wants to partner with them to do so" accurately describes the status quo. In the post above we (twice!) invited outreach from other funders interested in the some of these spaces, and we're planning to do a lot more work to try to find other funders for some of this work in the coming months.

No, the farm animal welfare budget is not changing, and some of the substreams GV are exiting (or not entering) are on the AI side. So any funding from substratgies that GV is no longer funding within FAW would be reallocated to other strategies within FAW (and as Dustin notes below, hopefully the strategies that GV will no longer fund can be taken forward by others).

FWIW I think I'm an example of Type 1 (literally, in Lorenzo's data) and I also agree that abstractly more of Type 2 would be helpful (but I think there are various tradeoffs and difficulties that make it not straightforwardly clear what to do about it). 

Verstergaard has a reply on their website FWIW, can't vouch for it/just passing along: https://vestergaard.com/blogs/vestergaard-position-bloomberg-article-malaria-bed-nets-papua-new-guinea/ 

Exciting news! I worked closely with Zach at Open Phil before he left to be interim CEO of EV US, and was sad to lose him, but I was happy for EV at the time, and I'm excited now for what Zach will be able to do at the helm of CEA.

Great to hear about finding such a good fit, thanks for sharing!

Hi Dustin :)

FWIW I also don't particularly understand the normative appeal of democratizing funding within the EA community. It seems to me like the common normative basis for democracy would tend to argue for democratizing control of resources in a much broader way, rather than within the self-selected EA community. I think epistemic/efficiency arguments for empowering more decision-makers within EA are generally more persuasive, but wouldn't necessarily look like "democracy" per se and might look more like more regranting, forecasting tournaments, etc.