I’m Jordan, I recently joined as the Content Coordinator on the EA Global team at CEA, and I’d love to hear from the community about what content you’d like to see at future conferences. You can see upcoming conference dates here.
How do we usually select content?
Traditionally, our content selection focuses on:
- Informing attendees about important developments in relevant fields (eg. founders discussing new organisations or projects, researchers sharing their findings)
- Diving deeper into key ideas with experts
- Teaching new skills relevant to EA work
Some recent sessions that were well-received included:
- Panel – When to shut down: Lessons from implementers on winding down projects
- Talk – Neela Saldanha: Improving policy take-up and implementation in scaling programs
- Workshop – Zac Hatfield Dodds: AI Safety under uncertainty
However, we recognise that conference content can (and perhaps should) fulfil many other roles, so your suggestions shouldn’t be constrained by how things have been done in the past.
What kinds of suggestions are we looking for?
We welcome suggestions in various forms:
- Specific speakers: Nominate people who you think would make great speakers (this can be yourself!).
- Topic proposals: Suggest topics that you believe deserve more attention.
- Session format ideas: Propose unique formats that could make sessions more engaging (e.g., discussion roundtables, workshops, debates).
To get an idea of what types of content we’ve had in the past, check out recordings from previous EA Global conferences.
We have limited content slots at our conferences, which means we can't promise to follow up on every suggestion. However, every suggestion helps us better understand what our attendees want to see and can provide jumping-off points for new ideas.
How to Submit Your Suggestions:
- Comment on this post and discuss your ideas with other forum users.
- Fill out this form or email speakers@eaglobal.org if you’d prefer not to post publicly.
Your input can help shape future EAGs to be even more impactful. I look forward to hearing your suggestions!
Personally, I think EA's global health and development wing has become stale. There are very few new ideas these days, very little dynamism or experimentation with things beyond the typical GW/OP grant. In that spirit, I think we should invite health and development researchers and policymakers, who work on important development questions that EAs have not historically engaged much with. Here are my suggestions:
Doug Gollin is the foremost expert on agriculture in developing countries. Agriculture is the largest sector, so improving agricultural productivity could dramatically increase people's incomes. At the same time, the agricultural sector is a constraint on growth, limiting people's movement into higher value sectors that can power economic growth. How do we improve agriculture? Doug Gollin can tell us.
David McKenzie is the foremost expert on businesses in developing countries. If we want people to be able to earn more money, the most important constraint is that businesses have to expand to create more jobs that can hire people. How do we make businesses more productive? David McKenzie can tell us.
Pinelopi Goldberg is the foremost expert on globalization and development. The biggest tectonic shift in development in the past 50 years is the rapid globalization that followed the end of the Cold War; India and China arguably gathered a lot of steam in their growth paths from globalization that they otherwise wouldn't have had. But today we are in a de-globalizing world where the EU puts up "carbon tariffs" that mostly affect developing countries, and the US wants to "friend-shore" its supply chains. What can developing countries do to advance growth and alleviate poverty in a de-globalizing world? Pinelopi Goldberg can tell us.
In addition, I see some really promising agendas from younger scholars, who might also be more willing to talk at EAG:
Lauren Bergquist is at the vanguard of research on market-level interventions in developing countries. Traditionally, EAs and development economists focused on interventions that directly deliver some health commodity or income-generating support to households. But you can get an unparalleled amount of leverage by intervening at the market level, addressing market-level inefficiencies that reduce people's incomes. What are these inefficiencies and can we find cost-effective ways to address them at scale? Lauren Bergquist can tell us.
Jacob Moscona is at the vanguard of research on technology in developing countries. The rich world has invented technologies that improve life beyond the wildest imaginations of people who lived a hundred years ago, but most of these technologies are absent from developing countries. Why don't technologies flow from rich countries to poor countries? Jacob Moscona can tell us.
Ben Faber is at the vanguard of research on economic integration within developing countries. Countries cannot prosper as a collection of isolated villages. The flow of goods and people between rural and urban areas is essential for both of them to become richer. How do we facilitate this flow? Ben Faber can tell us. (Disclosure: Ben is one of my advisors.)
I've named development economists since those are the people whose work I am aware of. But I am sure that global health also has more exciting areas than EA is aware of, and I encourage people with expertise in global health to recommend global health experts in the same vein.
How about someone from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy?
One idea for a cause area that I have is investing in public transportation in developing countries that have inadequate infrastructure for it - many of which are in Africa. Public transit can promote sustainable, equitable economic growth. Many African governments are mostly building roads even though the majority of their citizens don't own cars, so their transportation investments are not really benefiting the public.[1] And as I've written on this forum, car-centric cit... (read more)