There's an "economic growth" topic on the EA Forum (under the parent topic of Global Health & Development). Is that distinct from what you mean by Global Development?
In a separate but related vein, are there any organizations / funds that are EA-aligned and working in this area?
Sharing my reflections on the piece here (not directly addressing this particular post but my own reflections I shared with a friend.)
While I agree with lots of points the author makes and think he raises valuable critiques of EA, I don’t find his arguments related to SBF to be especially compelling. My run-through of the perceived problems within EA that the author describes and my reactions:
One EA critique in the piece that resonated with me - and I'm not sure I'd seen put so succinctly elsewhere is:
“The philosophy-based contrarian culture means participants are incentivized to produce ‘fucking insane and bad’ ideas, which in turn become what many commentators latch to when trying to grasp what’s distinctive about EA."
While not about SBF, it's a point I don't see us talking about often enough with regard to EA perceptions / reputation and I appreciated the author making it.
TL;DR: I thought it was an interesting and thought-provoking piece with some good critiques of EA, but the author (or - perhaps more likely - editor who wrote the title / sub-headers) bit off more than they could chew in actually connecting EA to SBF's actions.
Thanks Adina! Agree it's an awesome tool; the link was in my draft but I really should have incorporated it!
Taking the tool "one step further" (e.g., trying to size the impact of each intervention in a more standardized manner) is probably one of the most clear-cut (and possibly high-return) next steps a funder could take if they were interested in further pursuing the topic.
I know the footnotes in this piece don't currently work :( I pasted my write-up from a Google doc based on this guidance but it seems something broke in my attempt. If anyone here can help me figure out how to get those sorted, that'd be much appreciated!
Relatedly, two upfront notes I'd have liked to add toward the start but couldn't get to work as footnotes in the editor:
I haven't read any of Blattman's writings but in case I'm not too late and these aren't being covered, I'd be curious to hear his thoughts on
For what it's worth, I took a course on Causes of War in college ~ten years back with Professor Gary Bass, and I still have the syllabus alongside a summary of a few of the assigned readings. It's raw, but if you're still looking for inspiration I'm happy to share them for you to skim.
- On the other hand, taxes are not entirely "money lost" - a good part of government spending goes into causes that you may not be entirely averse to - although it's hard to tell what a marginal dollar will do, e.g. whether it will be used to cut the taxes of millionaires, or to provide social benefits to the poor.
To your point on marginal impact - governments certainly don't spend money they take in dollar for dollar, and in fact it seems the correlation between intake and expenditure is quite far from 1:1. US government debt is on the order of trillions of dollars, so while its maybe slightly better than flushing your money down the toilet, I'm not sure I'd value it much higher
Personally, I would donate to the Long Term Future Fund over the global health fund, and would expect it to be perhaps 10-100x more cost-effective (and donating to global health is already very good). This is mainly because I think issues like AI safety and global catastrophic biorisks are bigger in scale and more neglected than global health. Coming up with an actual number is difficult – I certainly don’t think they’re overwhelmingly better.
Not to pick nits but what would you consider “overwhelmingly better?” 1000x? I'd have said 10x so curious to understand how differently we're calibrated / the scales we think on.
Not sure what this is but flagging the link doesn’t seem to lead anywhere when I try it