A Case for Improving Global Equity as Radical Longtermism

~50% of Open Phil spending is on global health, animal welfare, criminal justice reform, and other "shortermist" and egalitarian causes.

This is their recent writeup on one piece of how they think about disbursing funds now vs later https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/2021-allocation-givewell-top-charities-why-we-re-giving-more-going-forward

(When I say 'we' I mean 'me, if I had control over the EA community'. This is just my view, and the actual reasons behind funding decisions are probably somewhat different)

Well, I'm not sure about the numbers but I'd say a pretty substantial percentage of EA funding and donations is going to GiveWell-style global health initiatives. So it's not like we are ignoring the plight of people right now.

The reason why there is more money that we can spend is that we don't know a lof of effective interventions to reduce say, pandemic risk, which scale well with more money.

We could just spend all that money on interventions that might help, like trying to develop broad spectrum antivirals, but it's legitimately a hard problem and it's likely that we would end up with no more money to spend without having solved anything.

Going back to improving equity, the three people you mentioned (rohingya, yemeni, afghan) are victims of war and persecution. The root causes of their suffering are political. We could spend hundreds of billions trying to improve their political system so that this does not happen again, but Afghanistan itself is an example of just how hard that is.

In short, even though helping people now is very valuable, we also don't know a lot of interventions that scale well with money. Malaria nets and deworming are the exception, not the rule. Remember that the entire world has been trying to eliminate poverty for centuries. It's just a hard problem.

Maybe paying for vaccines in lower income countries is an effective and scalable intervention. The right way to evaluate this is with a cost-benefit analysis, not by how much money the WHO says it needs.

I welcome the counter-arguments on this, but I think the writer makes a fair point around protecting current institutions and systems which are weakening due to political changes / pressure / defunding. It isn't ideal when countries withdraw funding from the WHO; and arguably if institution X was less reliant on funding from nation states, it would also be likely less beholden to them politically.  More beholden to philanthropists, so here comes the private actors Vs. states as funders debate again, which I'm not going to put forward a solution to now as much as say "it's an debate alright".

These institutions aren't perfect by any means - the masks debacle by the WHO being a case in point - but a question is if it didn't exist as a mechanism for near - and long-term health protection, would we suggest it should be founded? Answer is likely yes; so if they are underresourced, why not consider funding.

More controversial perspective: the message going round now is "we have lots of money, we just want to keep the bar high for what we do with it; ergo be ambitious". So I think it's fair enough to say "maybe making sure health protection / poverty alleviation systems to keep the world going in the right direction are fit for increased funding in the absence of these more ambitious and fitting ideas being put forward"...  

I guess I'm saying what's the appropriate default? Very high bar for innovative long-term ideas seems reasonable because this is an emerging field with high uncertainty. But lower bar for ways in which the world is on fire now, and where important institutions could get worse / lead to worse outcomes if defunding / underfunding continues?