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Curated and popular this week
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This is a linkpost for a paper I wrote recently, “Endogenous Growth and Excess Variety”, along with a summary.
Two schools in growth theory
Roughly speaking:
In Romer’s (1990) growth model, output per person is interpreted as an economy’s level of “technology”, and the economic growth rate—the growth rate of “real GDP” per person—is proportional to the amount of R&D being done. As Jones (1995) pointed out, populations have grown greatly over the last century, and the proportion of people doing research (and the proportion of GDP spent on research) has grown even more quickly, yet the economic growth rate has not risen. Growth theorists have mainly taken two approaches to reconciling [research] population growth with constant economic growth.
“Semi-endogenous” growth models (introduced by Jones (1995)) posit that, as the technological frontier advances, further advances get more difficult. Growth in the number of researchers, and ultimately (if research is not automated) population growth, is therefore necessary to sustain economic growth.
“Second-wave endogenous” (I’ll write “SWE”) growth models posit instead that technology grows exponentially with a constant or with a growing population. The idea is that process efficiency—the quantity of a given good producible with given labor and/or capital inputs—grows exponentially with constant research effort, as in a first-wave endogenous model; but when population grows, we develop more goods, leaving research effort per good fixed. (We do this, in the model, because each innovator needs a monopoly on his or her invention in order to compensate for the costs of developing it.) Improvements in process efficiency are called “vertical innovations” and increases in good variety are called “horizontal innovations”. Variety is desirable, so the one-off increase in variety produced by an increase to the population size increases real GDP, but it does not increase the growth rate. Likewise exponential population growth raise
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As we mark one year since the launch of Mieux Donner, we wanted to share some reflections on our journey and our ongoing efforts to promote effective giving in France. Mieux Donner was founded through the Effective Incubation Programme by Ambitious Impact and Giving What We Can.
TLDR
* Prioritisation is important. And when the path forward is unclear, trying a lot of different potential priorities with high productivity leads to better results than analysis paralysis.
* Ask yourself what the purpose of your organisation is. If you are a mainly marketing/communication org, hire people from this sector (not engineers) and don’t be afraid to hire outside of EA.
* Effective altruism ideas are less controversial than we imagined and affiliation has created no (or very little) push back
* Hiring early has helped us move fast and is a good idea when you have a clear process and a lot of quality applicants
Summary of our progress and activities in year 1
In January 2025, we set a new strategy with time allocation for our different activities. We set one clear goal - 1M€ in donations in 2025. To achieve this goal we decided:
Our primary focus for 2025 is to grow our audience. We will experiment with a variety of projects to determine the most effective ways to grow our audience.
Our core activities in 2025 will focus on high-impact fundraising and outreach efforts. The strategies where we plan to spend the most time are :
* SEO content (most important)
* UX Optimization of the website
* Social Media ; Peer to Peer fundraising ; Leveraging our existing network
The graphic below shows how we plan to spend our marketing time:
We are also following partnership opportunities and advising a few high net worth individuals who reached out to us and who will donate by the end of the year.
Results: one year of Mieux Donner
On our initial funding proposal in June 2024, we wrote down where we wanted to be in one year. Let’s see how we fared:
Meta Goals
* Spendi
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Sometimes working on animal issues feels like an uphill battle, with alternative protein losing its trendy status with VCs, corporate campaigns hitting blocks in enforcement and veganism being stuck at the same percentage it's been for decades. However, despite these things I personally am more optimistic about the animal movement than I have ever been (despite following the movement for 10+ years). What gives?
At AIM we think a lot about the ingredients of a good charity (talent, funding and idea) and more and more recently I have been thinking about the ingredients of a good movement or ecosystem that I think has a couple of extra ingredients (culture and infrastructure). I think on approximately four-fifths of these prerequisites the animal movement is at all-time highs. And like betting on a charity before it launches, I am far more confident that a movement that has these ingredients will lead to long-term impact than I am relying on, e.g., plant-based proteins trending for climate reasons.
Culture The culture of the animal movement in the past has been up and down. It has always been full of highly dedicated people in a way that is rare across other movements, but it also had infighting, ideological purity and a high level of day-to-day drama. Overall this made me a bit cautious about recommending it as a place to spend time even when someone was sold on ending factory farming. But over the last few years professionalization has happened, differences have been put aside to focus on higher goals and the drama overall has gone down a lot. This was perhaps best embodied by my favorite opening talk at a conference ever (AVA 2025) where Wayne and Lewis, leaders with very different historical approaches to helping animals, were able to share lessons, have a friendly debate and drive home the message of how similar our goals really are. This would have been nearly unthinkable decades ago (and in fact resulted in shouting matches when it was attempted). But the cult
I feel pretty disappointed by some of the comments (e.g. this one) on Vasco Grilo's recent post arguing that some of GiveWell's grants are net harmful because of the meat eating problem. Reflecting on that disappointment, I want to articulate a moral principle I hold, which I'll call non-dogmatism. Non-dogmatism is essentially a weak form of scope sensitivity.[1]
Let's say that a moral decision process is dogmatic if it's completely insensitive to the numbers on either side of the trade-off. Non-dogmatism rejects dogmatic moral decision processes.
A central example of a dogmatic belief is: "Making a single human happy is more morally valuable than making any number of chickens happy." The corresponding moral decision process would be, given a choice to spend money on making a human happy or making chickens happy, spending the money on the human no matter what the number of chickens made happy is. Non-dogmatism rejects this decision-making process on the basis that it is dogmatic.
(Caveat: this seems fine for entities that are totally outside one's moral circle of concern. For instance, I'm intuitively fine with a decision-making process that spends money on making a human happy instead of spending money on making sure that a pile of rocks doesn't get trampled on, no matter the size of the pile of rocks. So maybe non-dogmatism says that so long as two entities are in your moral circle of concern -- so long as you assign nonzero weight to them -- there ought to exist numbers, at least in theory, for which either side of a moral trade-off could be better.)
And so when I see comments saying things like "I would axiomatically reject any moral weight on animals that implied saving kids from dying was net negative", I'm like... really? There's no empirical facts that could possibly cause the trade-off to go the other way?
Rejecting dogmatic beliefs requires more work. Rather than deciding that one side of a trade-off is better than the other no matter the underlying facts, you actually have to examine the facts and do the math. But, like, the real world is messy and complicated, and sometimes you just have to do the math if you want to figure out the right answer.
Per the Wikipedia article on scope neglect, scope sensitivity would mean actually doing multiplication: making 100 people happy is 100 times better than making 1 person happy. I'm not fully sold on scope sensitivity; I feel much more strongly about non-dogmatism, which means that the numbers have to at least enter the picture, even if not multiplicatively.
EDIT: Rereading, I'm not really disagreeing with you. I definitely agree with the sentiment here:
(Edited) So, rather than just the possibility that all tradeoffs between humans and chickens should favour humans, I take issue with >99% confidence in that position or otherwise treating it like it's true.
Whatever someone thinks makes humans infinitely more important than chickens[1] could actually be present in chickens in some similarly important form with non-tiny or even modest probability (examples here), or not actually be what makes humans important at all (more general related discussion, although that piece defends a disputed position). In my view, this should in principle warrant some tradeoffs favouring chickens.
Or, if they don't think there's anything at all, say except the mere fact of species membership, then this is just pure speciesism and seems arbitrary.
Or makes humans matter at all, but chickens lack, so chickens don't matter at all.
I also disagree with those comments, but can you provide more argument for your principle? If I understand correctly, you are suggesting the principle that X can be lexicographically[1] preferable to Y if and only if Y has zero value. But, conditional on saying X is lexicographically preferable to Y, isn't it better for the interests of Y to say that Y nevertheless has positive value? I mean, I don't like it when people say things like no amount of animal suffering, however enormous, outweighs any amount of human suffering, however tiny. But I think it is even worse to say that animal suffering doesn't matter at all, and there is no reason to alleviate it even if it could be alleviated at no cost to human welfare.
Maybe your reasoning is more like this: in practice, everything trades off against everything else. So, in practice, there is just no difference between saying "X is lexicographically preferable to Y but Y has positive value", and "Y has no value"?
From SEP: "A lexicographic preference relation gives absolute priority to one good over another. In the case of two-goods bundles, A≻B if a1>b1, or a1=b1 and a2>b2. Good 1 then cannot be traded off by any amount of good 2."
I think in practice most people have ethical frameworks where they have lexicographic preferences, regardless of whether they are happy making other decisions using a cardinal utility framework.
I suspect most animal welfare enthusiasts presented with the possibility of organising a bullfight wouldn't respond with "well how big is the audience?". I don't think their reluctance to determine whether bullfighting is ethical or not based on the value of estimated utility tradeoffs reflects either a rejection of the possibility of human welfare or a specieist bias against humans.
I like your framing though. Taken to its logical conclusion, you're implying:
(1) Some people have strong lexographic preferences for X over improved Y
(2) Insisting that the only valid ethical decision making framework is a mathematical total utilitarian one in which everything of value must be assigned cardinal weights implies that to maintain this preference they must reject the possibility of Y having value
(3) Acting within this framework implies they should also be indifferent to Y in all other circumstances, including when there is no tradeoff
(4) Demanding people with lexographic preferences for X shut up and multiply is likely to lead to lower total utility for Y. And more generally a world in which everyone acts as if any possibility they assign any value to may be multiplied and traded off against their own value sounds like a world in which most people will opt to care about as few possibilities as possible.
This page could be a useful pointer?
Amish Shah is a Democratic politician who's running for congress in Arizona. He appears to be a strong supporter of animal rights (see here).
He just won his primary election, and Cook Political Report rates the seat he's running for (AZ-01) as a tossup. My subjective probability that he wins the seat is 50% (Edit: now 30%). I want him to win primarily because of his positions on animal rights, and secondarily because I want Democrats to control the House of Representatives.
You can donate to him here.
Applicable campaign finance limits: According to this page, individuals can donate up to $5,400 to legislative candidates per two-year election cycle.
The page you linked is about candidates for the Arizona State House. Amish Shah is running for the U.S. House of Representatives. There are still campaign finance limits, though ($3,300 per election per candidate, where the primary and the general election count separately; see here).