Thanks for the update, Joey. I understand founder talent no longer being the limiting factor means you have potential founders above your quality bar which cannot start a charity due to lack of funding. Do you have a guess for how much money M Ambitious Impact (AIM) would have to receive to pick the marginal rejected founder over the marginal accepted founder? I think you have 2 incubation programs per year, so the marginal accepted founder had better earn to give if they could increase their donations by more than 2 M per year.

Relatedly, do you have guesses for the amount of annual donations to AIM which would make it worth it for you to hire the marginal rejections instead of the marginal acceptances for other roles at AIM (e.g. operations and research)?

Thanks for the post, Amy! Another analogy. Hiking at a steady pace is usually the most efficient. This suggests one could work more efficiently via minimising working a lot on any given day, working more during weekends, and having shorter holidays. I think all of these have helped me.

Thanks for the good point, Ben. I think it is unclear whether democracy and human rights cause economic prosperity. I guess it depends on the context. In addition, democracy may cause economic prosperity due to favours from rich democratic nations instead of the institutional qualities of democracy per se, as argued in Democratic Favor Channel. Here is the abstract (emphasis mine):

A large body of literature in economics and political science examines the impact of democracy and political freedoms on various outcomes using cross-country comparisons. This paper explores the possibility that any positive impact of democracy observed in these studies might be attributed to powerful democratic nations, their allies, and international organizations treating democracies more favorably than nondemocracies, a concept I refer to as democratic favor channel. Firstly, after I control for being targeted by sanctions from G7 or the United Nations and having military confrontations and cooperation with the West, most of the positive effects of democracy on growth in cross-country panel regressions become insignificant or negatively significant. Secondly, using the same empirical specification as this literature for demonstrating intermediating forces, I show that getting sanctioned, militarily attacked, and not having defense cooperation with the West are plausible channels through which democracy causes growth. Lastly, in the pre-Soviet-collapse period, which coincides with the time when democracy promotion was less often used as a justification for sanctions, the impact of democracy on GDP per capita is already weak or negative without any additional controls, and it becomes further negative once democratic favor is controlled. These findings support the democratic favor channel and challenge the idea that the institutional qualities of democracy per se lead to desirable outcomes. The critique provided in this paper applies to the broader comparative institutions literature in social sciences and political philosophy.

Hi Florian,

Another quick note. I suspect answering the question "Does democracy increase resilience to catastrophes?" with "In general, yes" is too much of an oversimplification. I expect the answer is more like "In general, yes under X conditions, no under Y, and we do not know under Z". Relatedly, it looks like democracy and human rights are only associated with higher welfare holding income constant in some countries, and controlling for income makes sense to me if the institutional qualities of democracy per se do not cause economic growth.

Welcome to the EA Forum, OGTutzauer! Thanks for the interesting thought.

I currently think one should focus on improving the welfare of farmed animals despite all the effects I discuss in the post. For example, I believe way more welfare would be gained by making all farmed animals live fully healthy lives than by eliminating the risk of ASRSs:

• I estimated an expected annual mortality rate from ASRSs of 1.95*10^-5 adjusting results from the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH), which corresponds to 161 k death/year (= 1.96*10^-5*8.2*10^9) for the current population. Assuming 29.2 DALY/death (= 1.98*10^9/(67.9*10^6)) based on the years of life lost and deaths in 2021, the expected annual burden from ASRSs is 4.70 MDALY (= 161*10^3*29.2).
• I got 180 k MDALY for farmed animals, i.e. 38.3 k (= 1.80*10^11/(4.70*10^6)) times as much as the above burden from ASRSs.

Interesting post, Florian! You may be interested in the paper Democratic Favor Channel, whose abstract is below (emphasis mine).

A large body of literature in economics and political science examines the impact of democracy and political freedoms on various outcomes using cross-country comparisons. This paper explores the possibility that any positive impact of democracy observed in these studies might be attributed to powerful democratic nations, their allies, and international organizations treating democracies more favorably than nondemocracies, a concept I refer to as democratic favor channel. Firstly, after I control for being targeted by sanctions from G7 or the United Nations and having military confrontations and cooperation with the West, most of the positive effects of democracy on growth in cross-country panel regressions become insignificant or negatively significant. Secondly, using the same empirical specification as this literature for demonstrating intermediating forces, I show that getting sanctioned, militarily attacked, and not having defense cooperation with the West are plausible channels through which democracy causes growth. Lastly, in the pre-Soviet-collapse period, which coincides with the time when democracy promotion was less often used as a justification for sanctions, the impact of democracy on GDP per capita is already weak or negative without any additional controls, and it becomes further negative once democratic favor is controlled. These findings support the democratic favor channel and challenge the idea that the institutional qualities of democracy per se lead to desirable outcomes. The critique provided in this paper applies to the broader comparative institutions literature in social sciences and political philosophy.

Reiter (2017) seemingly convincingly argues that democracy does cause peace even after controlling for economics conditions, but I am not confident the same holds for catastrophes.

Thanks for trying this, Abraham! I suspect having a big donor commit to it would be important to make this successful, because then small donors would have an incentive to join to influence more than the size of their individual donations.

Thanks for sharing that related post, Mikolaj.

Thanks, James! Strongly upvoted for the transparency and willingness to share views which differ from OP's official position.

Thanks for the analysis, Joel!

We estimate that GWWC's marginal 2025 giving multiplier is around 13x – for every additional $1 they spend on promoting pledging, around $13 will be raised for GiveWell top charities ^[1]. Uncertainty is high and caution in interpreting results is advised.

Open Philanthropy's (OP's) bar is around 2 times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities. You got a multiplier of 13 which is significantly higher than 2, and therefore suggests OP is underfunding GWWC. Does OP think the multiplier is much closer to 2, or are they limiting themselves to providing at most a given fraction of GWWC's funding? @JamesSnowden may have feedback here.