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
[Speaking in a personal capacity]
It doesn't answer all your questions, but you might find this interesting: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/trusted-evaluators
On that page, you can find the current "trusted evaluators" according to GWWC, and at the bottom "a tentative list of additional charitable giving experts we are considering investigating in 2023".
As for your questions, to the best of my understanding
1) Here's a list from @Sjir Hoeijmakers https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OSv9vkW0UkTyOuwOnYZeFfiZT8hrF8DSvUIwKKfh95A/edit#gid=0 (You can look at the ones that are marked as "Funding opportunity supplier"). I don't know which ones you would consider "EA-aligned", I don't think there's a strong consensus on what's "EA-aligned"
2) This is a very deep topic that I'm not an expert in, but you might find this post useful: Measuring Good Better. Here's the video version:
As far as I personally see it, there are two kinds of differences between evaluators:
3) I don't know much about them, but until recently I think they were focusing less on impact (the results of the charities) and more on things like the organization's transparency, overheads, and culture. By a quick skim on their website, it seems that they don't recommend the most impactful donation opportunities, but rate charities across a range of metrics.