Hide table of contents

Overview

We are excited to announce the GPI Predoctoral Research Programme, a one-to-two-year position for early-career researchers interested in pursuing academic careers in economics to advance the field of global priorities research.

Predoctoral research fellows will spend one to two years in Oxford, depending on their preference, providing research assistance both to senior GPI researchers and to faculty in Oxford’s Department of Economics. Researchers will have access to open plan desk space in the Department of Economics, and will have the opportunity to attend seminars and to enrol in an Economics MPhil graduate option course, subject to approval. More information about the programme can be found on the GPI website.

Motivation for the programme

GPI aims to work toward a world in which large-scale political and philanthropic resource allocation decisions are routinely made on the basis of rigourous academic research into how to do as much good as possible.

We believe that currently mainstream approaches to policy analysis and programme evaluation give insufficient attention to a variety of key considerations, including

  • the comparison of interventions across very different cause areas;
  • the comparison of potential impacts on the size and number of future generations; and
  • the estimation and incorporation of flow-through effects, including those that may persist into the very distant future.

We therefore hope to build an academic field, termed 'global priorities research', populated by world-class researchers applying tools from economics, philosophy, and other disciplines to the many unanswered questions posed by the project of global prioritisation.

Thanks in large part to the effective altruism movement, there are currently many enthusiastic young people with an undergraduate training in economics and an interest in building the field of global priorities research. On the other hand, there do not yet appear to be many senior researchers in economics who engage directly with foundational questions of global prioritisation. The GPI Predoctoral Research Programme is designed in response to this pair of circumstances. Predoctoral research fellows will receive mentorship concerning the development of the global priorities research community, as well as the research training necessary for admittance to a world-class graduate programme in economics.

Should I apply?

The Predoctoral Research Programme requires an undergraduate or master’s degree in economics or a closely related discipline, completed by spring 2019, and evidence of strong research potential. An intention to pursue an academic career in global priorities research is also required. Candidates of all nationalities who meet these criteria are encouraged to apply.

The ideal candidate will have a strong background in mathematics, analytic philosophy and (especially) economics; prior research experience; and close familiarity with the thinking that has already been produced by the effective altruism community.

Those intending to pursue careers in less foundational areas of economic research, such as mainstream development economics or domestic policy analysis, are not encouraged to apply.

I'm an aspiring economics researcher, but this programme isn't right for me at the moment. How else can I get involved?

Current students and researchers at any level are of course more than welcome to work independently on topics listed on the GPI research agenda. You are also welcome to explore global priorities research questions formulated elsewhere, such as on the 'economics' page of the website effectivethesis.com. If you produce a piece of research you think may be relevant to the question of global prioritisation, please let us know!

Economics students interested in entering global priorities research are also encouraged to take coursework, and gain research experience, in the most relevant subfields of economics. In particular, while valuable insights can come from any source, we currently (tentatively) believe that the most promising subfields of economics are microeconomic theory, political economy, the economics of discounting and optimal timing and the economics of catastrophic risk. More generally, we believe that theoretical tools will typically prove more valuable than empirical tools at this stage. This is because the task of creating a framework within which to evaluate impacts on very long timescales allows relatively little directly relevant data.

For current job openings in global priorities research, check out the 80,000 Hours job board.

If you have any questions about the Predoctoral Research Programme, or about getting involved with GPI or global priorities research in any other capacity, please don’t hesitate to email gpi-office@philosophy.ox.ac.uk.

Comments2


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:
[anonymous]7
0
0

How many fellows do you plan to accept?

We expect to accept two fellows this year, though the number is somewhat flexible.

Curated and popular this week
trammell
 ·  · 25m read
 · 
Introduction When a system is made safer, its users may be willing to offset at least some of the safety improvement by using it more dangerously. A seminal example is that, according to Peltzman (1975), drivers largely compensated for improvements in car safety at the time by driving more dangerously. The phenomenon in general is therefore sometimes known as the “Peltzman Effect”, though it is more often known as “risk compensation”.[1] One domain in which risk compensation has been studied relatively carefully is NASCAR (Sobel and Nesbit, 2007; Pope and Tollison, 2010), where, apparently, the evidence for a large compensation effect is especially strong.[2] In principle, more dangerous usage can partially, fully, or more than fully offset the extent to which the system has been made safer holding usage fixed. Making a system safer thus has an ambiguous effect on the probability of an accident, after its users change their behavior. There’s no reason why risk compensation shouldn’t apply in the existential risk domain, and we arguably have examples in which it has. For example, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) makes AI more reliable, all else equal; so it may be making some AI labs comfortable releasing more capable, and so maybe more dangerous, models than they would release otherwise.[3] Yet risk compensation per se appears to have gotten relatively little formal, public attention in the existential risk community so far. There has been informal discussion of the issue: e.g. risk compensation in the AI risk domain is discussed by Guest et al. (2023), who call it “the dangerous valley problem”. There is also a cluster of papers and works in progress by Robert Trager, Allan Dafoe, Nick Emery-Xu, Mckay Jensen, and others, including these two and some not yet public but largely summarized here, exploring the issue formally in models with multiple competing firms. In a sense what they do goes well beyond this post, but as far as I’m aware none of t
 ·  · 1m read
 · 
 ·  · 19m read
 · 
I am no prophet, and here’s no great matter. — T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”   This post is a personal account of a California legislative campaign I worked on March-June 2024, in my capacity as the indoor air quality program lead at 1Day Sooner. It’s very long—I included as many details as possible to illustrate a playbook of everything we tried, what the surprises and challenges were, and how someone might spend their time during a policy advocacy project.   History of SB 1308 Advocacy Effort SB 1308 was introduced in the California Senate by Senator Lena Gonzalez, the Senate (Floor) Majority Leader, and was sponsored by Regional Asthma Management and Prevention (RAMP). The bill was based on a report written by researchers at UC Davis and commissioned by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). The bill sought to ban the sale of ozone-emitting air cleaners in California, which would have included far-UV, an extremely promising tool for fighting pathogen transmission and reducing pandemic risk. Because California is such a large market and so influential for policy, and the far-UV industry is struggling, we were seriously concerned that the bill would crush the industry. A partner organization first notified us on March 21 about SB 1308 entering its comment period before it would be heard in the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, but said that their organization would not be able to be publicly involved. Very shortly after that, a researcher from Ushio America, a leading far-UV manufacturer, sent out a mass email to professors whose support he anticipated, requesting comments from them. I checked with my boss, Josh Morrison,[1] as to whether it was acceptable for 1Day Sooner to get involved if the partner organization was reluctant, and Josh gave me the go-ahead to submit a public comment to the committee. Aware that the letters alone might not do much, Josh reached out to a friend of his to ask about lobbyists with expertise in Cal