Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
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Epistemic status: Wrote this pretty fast, probably ~70% confident some version of the thesis claim is true, would welcome being proven demonstrably wrong.
Context: I’m a grantmaker focused on alt-protein and am fairly well-connected/moderately in the loop of what animal welfare grantmakers are doing.
This post was significantly inspired by “...
Models or goals that require continuous growth tend to be unsustainable. Looking at nature, most living organisms have a finite mature form.
Systems like GDP are great in a stage of economic growth, but once a mature economy has developed GDP no longer indicates economic improvement.
Similarly, population growth is useful for expansion, but in my opinion not necessarily a valuable goal in the world right now. Although some might be wary of the consequences of population stagnancy or decline, there are actions that can be taken if those in leadership foresee and accept these situations. Some of the most prominent modern population realities and consequences are described in detail by polling expert Dr. Darrel Bricker in The Inquiring Mind Podcast ep. 40.
Interesting. I'm not generally around people who believe population growth is important. I thought that was more a thing that unstable politicians cared about. I think it's more about voting in representative leadership than trying to cater to leaders that aren't interested in being rational.