We are excited to announce the launch of the Abundance and Growth Fund, which will spend at least $120 million over the next three years to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific and technological progress while lowering the cost of living.
We’re grateful for support from Good Ventures, which has committed $60M, and from the other private individuals who matched them. We’re also grateful for a contribution from Patrick Collison, who helped launch the Progress Studies movement.
We launched the fund because:
- Economic growth has transformed global living standards, and further growth could deliver vast improvements to health and well-being.
- Innovation is a key input to growth; economists and our own researchers estimate that R&D and scientific research have very high social returns.
- We have strong evidence that it’s possible to boost growth and innovation by removing existing constraints; there are many positive examples to point to where alternative systems have enabled faster progress.
- We thought the timing was right. (See below.)
We’ve long been one of the most active philanthropic funders in the pro-abundance and pro-growth movements, particularly in land use reform and innovation policy. We chose this moment to double down because:
- We feel encouraged by the recent rise of the Abundance and Progress Studies movements, which advocate for economic growth and material progress.
- We’ve seen cross-partisan interest in areas like zoning reform, energy permitting, and science policy.
- We learned a lot from launching the Lead Exposure Action Fund, which helped us quickly establish a similar pooled fund for abundance and growth.
See our blog post for more detail on all of these points.
With the launch of the Fund, we’re also launching a search for a program leader to manage it on a permanent basis. They will have significant autonomy in shaping the Fund’s direction and strategy. The application deadline is 3/31. We encourage you to check out the job description and apply yourself, or recommend someone who you think would be a strong candidate.
There is an actual field called institutional development economics which has won a great chunk of Nobel Prizes and which already has a fairly good grasp of what it takes to get poor countries to develop. The idea that you could learn more about that without engaging in the field in the slightest but by... trying to figure out how to get rich countries with the institutional framework and problems of rich countries richer and assume that this will be magically applied (by who?) to poor countries with the institutional framework and problems of poor countries and work the same is just... straight-up obvious complete nonsense.