In November 2022, the United Stated Agency for International Development appointed Professor Dean Karlan as their Chief Economist. Dean Karlan is a development economist who founded Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in 2002 and has been its president since. He's also on the Executive Committee of MIT's Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).
IPA and J-PAL have been responsible for a lot of the research that underpins GiveWell's charity recommendations (GiveWell has a 2011 overview of IPA's contributions here). Their work includes:
- Evidence for the effectiveness of free vs. priced bednets
- Ongoing work on unconditional cash transfers
- Evidence for positive effects from deworming (a 2019 Cochrane review suggests otherwise)
- Work suggesting that microfinance isn't that great
- Evidence for the effectiveness of chlorine dispensers
- Work on incentives for immunisation
This is among hundreds of other policy/intervention evaluations the two groups have done.
Dean Karlan seems to have played a big role in advancing evidence-based global development.
USAID has an allocation of $29.4 billion for 2023. Wikipedia says this is the world's largest aid budget. If Prof. Karlan improves the effectiveness of the USAID program by even a small amount it could have a huge positive impact.
I think I would describe him as generally supportive of global health and wellbeing focused EA / effective giving. As others note above, he's been aware of the community since roughly around the time it started and in many ways has been 'practicing' EA since long before then (e.g. founded IPA in 2002, wrote 'more than good intentions'). He's also engaged directly with the community in various ways - e.g. has been on the board of TLYCS for a long time (and advised them on charity selection for a while). He set up ImpactMatters, which evaluated and recommended a much broader range of charities than GiveWell. Overall, I think this is an extremely exciting appointment and I think he'll do a huge amount of good in the role!