Denkenberger
Bio
Participation2
Dr. David Denkenberger co-founded and directs the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED.info) and donates half his income to it. He received his B.S. from Penn State in Engineering Science, his masters from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Building Systems Program. His dissertation was on his patented expanded microchannel heat exchanger. He is an assistant professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks in joint in mechanical engineering and Alaska Center for Energy and Power. He received the National Merit Scholarship, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, is a Penn State distinguished alumnus, and is a registered professional engineer. He has authored or co-authored 124 publications (>3000 citations, >50,000 downloads, h-index = 28, third most prolific author in the existential/global catastrophic risk field (https://www.x-risk.net/)), including the book Feeding Everyone no Matter What: Managing Food Security after Global Catastrophe. His food work has been featured in over 25 countries, over 200 articles, including Science, Vox, Business Insider, Wikipedia, Deutchlandfunk (German Public Radio online), Discovery Channel Online News, Gizmodo, Phys.org, and Science Daily. He has given interviews on 80,000 Hours podcast twice (https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-denkenberger-allfed-and-feeding-everyone-no-matter-what/ and https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-denkenberger-sahil-shah-using-paper-mills-and-seaweed-in-catastrophes/ ) and Estonian Public Radio, WGBH Radio, Boston, and WCAI Radio on Cape Cod, USA. He has given over 80 external presentations, including ones on food at Harvard University, MIT, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Cornell University, University of California Los Angeles, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos National Lab, Imperial College, and University College London.
How others can help me
Referring potential volunteers, workers, board members and donors to ALLFED.
How I can help others
Being effective in academia, balancing direct work and earning to give, time management.
Posts 21
Comments605
Thanks for the link. This shows that 3% of global wealth is in billionaires. Though richer people generally give a larger percent of their income, it's not clear they give a larger percent of their wealth. This is because many people with near zero wealth still have significant income, and still donate to charity. So I would guess ~3% of donations from individuals/foundations would be from billionaires. Corporations you point out are 6% of the US total. It's not clear to me how to classify this, but generously you could go with market capitalization. I would guess a minority of corporate donations would come from companies worth more than $1 billion. So that would mean something like 5% of donations coming from billion-dollar individuals/companies. Whereas EA might be 75%? But it would be great to get actual breakdowns on donations by income/wealth outside EA. Will makes the claim "it’s more or less inevitable that much or most funding in EA will come from a small handful of donors." To me this implies under 10. But if EA became a mass movement like environmentalism, then I think this would not be true, at least for "most of funding coming from <10 donors." If there were more than 10 donors giving the majority, I think people would be significantly less worried about centralization of funding in EA.
Wealth is heavily fat-tailed, so it’s very likely that one or a small number of funders end up accounting for most funding.
Most philanthropy is not from billionaires, so the fact that most EA philanthropy is from billionaires means that EA has been unusually successful at recruiting billionaires. This could continue, or it could mean revert. So I do think there is hope for more funding diversification.
I'm curious how you would count endowments. For instance, Princeton has an endowment equal to about 10 years of expenditure, and about 17 years of expenditure net of non-philanthropic income. My understanding is that most of this would be restricted, e.g. to scholarships or athletics. So if 20% were unrestricted, would that mean you would calculate 2 or 3.4 years of unrestricted runway?
Wouldn't interstellar travel close to the speed of light require a huge amount of energy, and a level of technological transformation that again seems much higher than most people expect?
Not really - about six hours of the energy produced by the sun. If molecular manufacturing could double every day (many bacteria double much faster), we would get there very fast.
Oh - sorry - I meant to reply to AnonymousAccount instead - it was their text that I was quoting. I've now put it there - should I delete this one?
Wouldn't interstellar travel close to the speed of light require a huge amount of energy, and a level of technological transformation that again seems much higher than most people expect?
Not really - about six hours of the energy produced by the sun.
I agree it’s important to recruit more experience into EA. How do you relate to High Impact Professionals?
Do you mean z > 1?