The Grown-Ups Aren’t Coming

Note: post written for my Substack, reposting here verbatim. I think the main takeaway for the EA Forum audience is that you shouldn't assume things are being built and that everything is being covered and that we need you to make awesome infrastructure projects.

It looks like the effective philanthropy ecosystem is set to receive an unprecedented amount of funding and those dollars cannot currently be absorbed effectively. Even if the third wave looks more like a puddle, as Morgan Fairless, Research Director of Ambitious Impact, proposes it might, it will still mean a vast increase in funds. We, as an ecosystem, will need to do a lot of thinking and building to make sure that these philanthropic dollars find the most impactful homes. We will need to build and scale many NGOs to take in the funds – that is intuitive – but what is less on people’s radar is building out the meta infrastructure we need to succeed here.

Nan Ransohoff, Head of Public Goods at Stripe, recently created a buzz with her post about what she calls the third wave of philanthropy. I encourage you to read the piece if you haven’t already. In it, Nan argues convincingly that the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs will mean a huge amount of wealth – likely many billions per year and potentially tens of billions per year – will enter the effective philanthropy ecosystem and that the ecosystem needs to be designed better in many ways to be able to have the money be absorbed impactfully. Similarly Nick Allardice, President & CEO at GiveDirectly, argues in his piece about the absorption problem that scaling organizations to absorb the funding is hard and poorly understood, since organizations break in various ways as they scale up, or are not even scalable in the first place. This isn’t hypothetical: Tony Senanayake, CEO of Fortify Health, argues that the binding constraint on Coefficient Giving's $1 billion grant to GiveWell is the operational capacity to deploy it well and that money at that scale defaults to whoever already has the infrastructure to absorb it, not to wherever it would do the most good.

All of this leaves us with the gargantuan task of figuring out how to get these dollars to find homes where they can best be converted into impact. How can we make that happen? And further, how can we make that happen soon, as in yesterday?

Ransohoff takes a good first stab at this in her piece, recommending some things like making the problems we need to solve more legible and attracting great philanthropic startup talent, in addition to starting thousands of philanthropic startups. And she is right about all these things and it is good that she has made motions in these directions. 

But I have been in the ecosystem long enough to know what happens to public goods that no single organization is incentivized to provide: even when someone argues for them compellingly, people nod in agreement but then go on with their day jobs, leaving them missing, or at best massively undersupplied. This is where meta infrastructure comes in!

Let’s take Ransohoff’s true claim that we need to attract great philanthropic startup talent to the ecosystem. Who, if anyone, is tasked with solving that problem? Existing NGOs are always trying to hire great people for their organization, but in very targeted and limited ways and not those that will produce outsized gains for the whole ecosystem. There are a few organizations geared toward getting talented professionals into the ecosystem, like Consultants for Impact or High Impact Professionals (which I co-founded), but we need more. The ecosystem needs many meta infrastructure organizations working on finding and absorbing talent alone, each with different theories of change, catering to different target markets and generally scouring the earth to get every awesome, conscientious, impact-oriented person engaged in fighting the good fight.  

How do these organizations get started? You, dear reader, have to start them. There has historically been much too much diffusion of responsibility in the effective altruism space of people thinking “Org X already has this covered” or “Ransohoff’s post was compelling and I am sure the Grown-Ups are acting accordingly and following her policy prescriptions to create those thousands of startups”. 

But it isn’t true! It just isn’t true. Organizations – and I don’t care which you point me to – DON’T have it covered and we need more meta firepower out there making sure that we are ready to rock when the money hits. 

Another barrier is that it can be a long journey for people to decide to work on meta. When most people first come into the ecosystem, they don’t intuitively think “building out infrastructure is the most impactful thing I can do”. They come in with some direct cause area in mind and plan to contribute to a problem they care about directly. Which makes sense, but this also limits the pool of talent that work on these infrastructure projects. 

(HINT: part of the reason I am writing these posts is to make meta more legible and enticing and to pull you in to work on it).

It is worth stating that we won’t be ready when the money hits, because organizations and infrastructure take time to build and don’t happen overnight. But the best time to start an org was yesterday and the second best time is now.

Meta organizations also need money to get started. Traditionally there have been a couple of funders in the space but in aggregate the amounts given have been relatively small, especially for non-longtermist meta work. Even the broader effective giving ecosystem is quite tiny. Sjir Hoeijmakers, CEO of Giving What We Can, recently put the total effective giving ecosystem at $2 billion per year, a low percentage of the $600 billion of annual US giving, as well as a fraction of the expected annual inflow of third wave funding. 

If you want to have a large impact at this exceptional time in history, I urge you to consider funding or working for meta projects that solve public goods problems of the ecosystem and provide the backbone that allows direct charities to maximize their impact.

In the next post I’ll discuss meta organizations I believe are very much needed and that I’d love to see founded, so please subscribe if you want to see that. Or if you are interested in starting a meta project, add a comment or DM me - I’d love to hear from you.