Audience: EA audiences that work in global health and development to some capacity. Possibly most importantly, EA audiences that work in global health and development alongside other cause areas.
Draft amnesty week! I didn't edit this as much as I would have otherwise and might make some edits/cuts for a future version on my blog. As always, this is a personal post that doesn't necessarily reflect the views of current or past employers.
tl;dr: The EA community understands that increased opportunities for jobs, networking, education, and training can be highly impactful in the medium- and long-term. So EA organizations working in global health and development or related fields should more seriously consider funding jobs/networks/education-related work focused on people and organizations in low- and middle-income countries, even if it doesn't fit into current cost-effectiveness frameworks
The bifurcation of EA impact measurement
The effective altruism (EA) impact framing around human capital seems sometimes frustratingly split into a binary: there are people living in poverty in low- and middle-income countries who can benefit from not dying, and there are educated and talented people, mostly from high-income countries, who can benefit from networking and having access to high-impact jobs.
For the first, there are highly cost-effective global health interventions measured by randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and impact is measured by QALYs and DALYs. For the second, there are the EA Global events where medium-term impact is measured by connections made and jobs offered and longer-term impact is, well, broader impact.
The first takes a pretty straightforward and shorter-term view of cost-effectiveness: does the marginal dollar lead to more people being able to live/live longer/live better lives for cheaper? If an organization compares well to others along these metrics, it’s worth funding; if not, then it’s not.
The second takes a more nebulous and longer-term view of cost-effectiveness: does the marginal dollar lead to the potential for higher impact down the road via opportunities for connections, networking, finding talent, building companies etc.? It is a more risk-tolerant approach that doesn’t expect high impact from every interaction, but outsized impact down-the-road for some of these interactions. Note: This post doesn’t even really go into AI, but it falls into the risk-tolerant category and the points below may still be relevant.
I think both are valuable, and my argument here is not to get rid of either but to expand the second (or versions of the second) risk-tolerant approach beyond high-income countries and people who likely have a lot of connections already. This is what traditional global development often tries to do with e.g. job trainings or mentorship or tertiary education funding. As with EA Globals, the benefits are less tangible than that of vaccine delivery, but can be sizable.
The failure modes of elites
Being involved with EA has been tremendously helpful for my career. When I lost my job earlier this year, I was almost immediately able to connect with many people hiring for impactful jobs . I have also learned helpful ways of thinking about impact that benefit me now at my non-uppercase-EA job.
Pretty much everyone can benefit from networking and building skills, and they will benefit the organizations that they become part of. Talent and skill can come from anywhere, if given the time and resources to grow.
And I absolutely think EA would be better and have a broader source of potentially highly cost-effective funding ideas if it included more people outside of the US and Europe.
I worry often that ideas and jobs in the EA global health and wellbeing sector are too dominated by economists or generalists like myself who are from high-income countries and have learned from elite universities to think a certain way. This is not a nebulous point, but a recognition that there a lot of factual things that you do not know unless you have experienced or studied them.
This essay I recently discovered on “Why I Am Not a Technocrat” outlines some of the historical failures of policy driven by technocratic elites who are disconnected from the people and problems they’re working with; it also puts into focus some of the reasons I made a recent transition to state government. While I don’t agree with all of the author’s conclusions –this is good! I get suspicious when I agree with someone 100% – and I wish the essay (especially on this topic!) was a bit less opaquely written, I would hope that more people within EA would at least consider some of the failure modes of technocracy.
I’ve written before about how when I lived in India I learned about the overwhelming number of things I didn’t even know I didn’t know. I do not know the most common issues that coffee farmers in Ethiopia face – and therefore do not have any knowledge of what might make their lives better – because I haven’t been a coffee farmer in Ethiopia or even read research or talked to them. Or a community health worker in Vietnam, or a customer service representative in Colombia, etc.
And that’s totally fine; it takes more time than any of us have to become an expert on many subjects. That’s one reason it’s helpful to be in community and work with people who are.
Undoubtedly EA would be improved by having more Ethiopians who are aware of the problems and opportunities in their country. Undoubtedly these Ethiopians would benefit from being part of EA with its impact frameworks and networks.
If you believe that all humans have the potential to have impact, you should believe networking/training/other jobs- and education-related work can be important to fund. Even if you, unlike me, believe that only elites have the potential to have impact – EA is missing out on influencing a lot of global elites, and more global networking is still important.
This would allow EA to catalyze both international and intra-country relationships between people who are working on evidence-based policy, which is one of the ways EA has been most important for me. As someone based in the US for the last five years, I have benefitted from things like the 80,000 hours jobs board. But the jobs board right now is scarce for people based in Ethiopia, or Rwanda, or Uganda. “Africa” is categorized as a whole continent in the checklist. Note: I realize that 80,000 hours is now mostly focused on AI, so maybe another jobs board should take its place, but even roughly half of the global health and development jobs listed are based in the Global North. A note here that the Probably Good jobs board (disclaimer, I used to consult with them), which is less AI-focused, appears to be much more global although still US/Global North-heavy, so if you are looking for jobs elsewhere that might be a good place to start!
A more expanded global EA and EA-adjacent network would have a jobs board that was more reflective of the world, so that next time I meet someone based in Uganda asking for job advice I don’t have to scramble to try to think about organizations I may have heard about, but instead be able to connect them to someone else in Uganda or point them to an evidence-focused jobs board that has 30 job openings in Uganda from organizations doing good work.
What EA is already doing well, and recommendations for the future
It is great to see parts of EA or EA-adjacent organizations doing this. I have been involved for years with Magnify Mentoring, which has made a concerted effort to recruit more from underrepresented populations within EA. GiveWell-funded Malengo, which provides scholarships for University students from Uganda to study in Germany, is another good example. The expanded EAGx in Nigeria, India, São Paulo, and the 5-7 Dec virtual event, are another.
Many organizations with an evidence focus that EAs may be aware of, including my former employer, IDinsight, have done much to recruit locally and more representatively of the people they work with, realizing that this has the mutual benefit of making the organization's work more effective and providing skills development and global networks for young professionals from around the world.
But I haven’t often seen these longer-term benefits both for organizations and people factored into cost-effectiveness analysis.
For example: as anyone who has spent enough time in and around governments knows, the hardest part is often not doing the calculations to try to find the cost-effective thing, but convincing the powers that be that this thing is worthwhile.
There's probably a high social return on investment from getting policymakers from around the world involved in the most principles of impact measurement and cost-effectiveness. It might be even more impactful to do this and work with people to implement somewhat more cost-effective programs that also align with their other goals, than it is to try to figure out the most cost-effective way to do something if it has a low chance of being implemented. This is partially why I've made some of my personal career choices.
But I don't know for sure – I'm not an expert in expected value calculations. I do have some ideas about what I'd like to see EA organizations explore the cost-effectiveness/impact of in this realm, though, taking into account the longer-term and not just acute value, taking into account that talent can come from anywhere:
- Training and working with policymakers on impact and cost-effectiveness
- Various tertiary education interventions, from sponsorships like the Malengo model, scholarships, or investments into high-quality local tertiary education
- Education interventions in general, including pre-K and K-12. They lose out to global health in the current analyses, but I'm not sure how it would pan out if long-term effects were taken into account
- Mentorship, particularly involving people not already from elite universities or the Global North
- Networking and community-building opportunities, particularly involving people who are not already from elite universities. EA is really good at networking and community building as I mentioned above, so I’m sure there are many better ideas than mine about how to do this
- Expanding the scope of job boards towards high-impact opportunities not based in the US/UK/Global North
Some ways that these things could have outsize impact down the road:
- Placing talented people at high-impact organizations or government roles in their own countries (Over 80% of people live in low- and middle-income countries), improving service delivery, governance, health etc in ways that we can’t quantify today
- Getting more people from LMICs the capital to found their own high-impact organizations
- Giving talented people without great education opportunities the opportunity for higher-quality education and more expansive networks
- Sourcing better ideas around the world for EA or EA-aligned funders to fund
I think there’s so much good work that’s already been done here even since I first heard about EA in ~2017, and I’m looking forward to more – I hope some of these suggestions might at least start a conversation!
