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currently, our main focus is in the United States
What is the justification for this focus on the United States? (Which is, obviously, among the wealthiest countries in the world already).
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I'm not sure if I'm allowed to ask this[1], but I'm curious if people at OP think that this is cost-effective with other areas they are working on. Or more broadly, I'm curious if there's any public argument of effectiveness on this.
The public communications seems to emphasize reasons why this field is promising, not reasons why it's a good trade-off vs. other top fields. This seems similar to the sort of logic that all philanthropic donors use - it's possible to find reasons why basically all philanthropic areas are promising.
I don't believe there's been cost-effectiveness estimation posted publicly, for instance.
Overall this seems very much going in the direction of more traditional center-leftist/tech[1] philanthropy. I think that this sort of philanthropy is often net-good, but obviously there's a gap between it and the things we generally regard as effective altruism.
[1] Here I mean something like "center-left in the US"
This full comment got far more attention than I was expecting, I didn't spend much time crafting it. I agree that "allowed to ask" is probably the wrong way to describe my reluctance, and I've explained my views much more in subsequent comments.
Thanks Ozzie, you’re definitely allowed to ask questions like this! We won’t always be able to answer but we welcome questions and critiques of our work.
Our innovation policy work is generally based on the assumption that long-run health and income gains are ultimately attributable to R&D. For example, Matt Clancy estimated in this report that general funding for scientific research ranged from 50-330x in our framework, depending on the model and assumptions about downside risks from scientific research. In practice we currently internally use a value of average scientific research funding of 70x when evaluating our innovation policy work. Of course, 70x is well below our bar (currently ~2,100x), and so the premise of the program is not to directly fund additional scientific research, but instead to make grants that we think are sufficiently likely to increase the effective size of R&D effort by raising its efficiency or productivity or level enough to clear the bar. Moreover, while most of our giving in this program flows to grantees in high-income countries operating on the research frontier, the ultimate case is based on global impact: we assume research like this eventually benefits everyone, though with multi-decade lags (which in practice lead us to discount the benefits substantially, as discussed in Matt’s paper above and this report by Tom Davidson).
Our innovation policy work so far has cleared our internal bar for impact, and one reason we are excited to expand into this space is because we’ve found more opportunities that we think are above the bar than Good Ventures’ previous budget covered.
We also think our housing policy work clears our internal bar for impact. Our current internal valuation on a marginal housing unit in a highly constrained metro area in the US is just over $400k (so a grant would be above the bar if we think it causes a new unit in expectation for $200). A relatively small part of the case here is again based on innovation - there is some research indicating that increasing the density of people in innovative cities increases the rate of innovation. But our internal valuation for new housing units also incorporates a few other paths to impact. For example, increasing the density of productive cities also raises the incomes of movers and other residents, and reduces the overall carbon footprint of the housing stock. Collectively, we think these benefits are large enough to make a lot of grants related to housing policy clear our bar, given the leverage that advocacy can sometimes bring.
We’ll be evaluating new sub-areas as we go to make sure that they are also generally above our impact bar, but we suspect that the same logic of large potential importance will mean that policy changes that make even modest improvements to areas like clinical trial regulation, energy permitting, etc. could be highly impactful.
In terms of scale, while this is a significant expansion of Open Phil’s overall work in the space, it’s a modest expansion of Good Ventures’ (from ~$15M to ~$20M/year). The remaining funding is coming from other donors. As we wrote in our annual review last week:
First great job getting other funders on board here I love that. I've got a coupke of queries here for things that I didn't write understand
"We also think our housing policy work clears our internal bar for impact. Our current internal valuation on a marginal housing unit in a highly constrained metro area in the US is just over $400k (so a grant would be above the bar if we think it causes a new unit in expectation for $200)"
I don't understand what this means, is there a report or something you could link to which explains it?
Also I read the report you linked on R and D where it didn't clear the funding bar. That said 45x, you were pushing that up to 76x
"In a highly stylized calculation, the social returns to marginal R&D are high, but typically not as high as the returns in some other areas we’re interested in (e.g. cash transfers to those in absolute poverty). Measured in our units of impact (where “1X” is giving cash to someone earning $50k/year) I estimate the cost effectiveness of funding R&D is 45X. This is 45% the ROI from giving cash to someone earning $500/year, and 4.5% the GHW bar for funding. More."
I understand that you think you can raise efficiency of certain types of R@D, but getting from 70x to 2100x means you would have to 30x the efficiency. I struggle to understand how that would be likely again any pointers here?
Thanks Nick.
On the housing piece: we have a long internal report on the valuation question that we didn't think was particularly relevant to external folks so we haven't published it, but will see about doing so later this year. Fn 7 and the text around it of this grant writeup explain the basic math of a previous version of that valuation calc, though our recent version is a lot more complex.
If you're asking about the bar math, the general logic is explained here and the move to a 2,100x bar is mentioned here.
On R&D, the 70x number comes from Matt Clancy's report (and I think we may have made some modest internal revisions but I don't think they change the bottom line much). You're right that that implies we need ~30x leverage to clear our bar. We sometimes think that is possible directly through strategic project selection - e.g., we fund direct R&D on neglected and important global health problems, and sometimes (in the case of this portfolio) through policy/advocacy. I agree 30x leverage presents a high bar and I think it's totally reasonable to be skeptical about whether we can clear it, but we think we sometimes can.
Thanks @Alexander_Berger that all makes complete sense, appreciate the clear and comprehensive reply - all the best with this work. Predictably basic me especially likes the direct RandD on neglected Global Health :).
[Edit: Note that @Alexander_Berger from OP provided a lengthy response, after I wrote this.]
My quick guess is that people at OP won't want to (publicly) argue that this area is cost-effective with other top areas.
It's their money, I won't complain.
But at the same time, I want to avoid the trap of people on this forum assuming that their work is justified as being cost-effective with other top areas.
I think it's easy for both:
1. OP doesn't argue that its work represents Effective Altruism
2. Many people around Effective Altruism defer greatly to OP, and assume its actions are cost-effective in EA ways[1]
So to be clear, I think that typically, only one of those two points will be true. I assume it's (1). And correspondingly, I imagine that many Effective Altruists should understand not to make many assumptions using public OP announcements like this about which topics are cost-effective.
There's obviously one semi-interesting question, which is, "Okay, but then why should this announcement from OP be shown on the EA Forum, but not similar announcements from the Gates Foundation or similar?" This seems like a tricky question to answer. I think it's good that this was posted here, but hope that readers don't assume the wrong things about what it means. I assume that this was posted here roughly because OP is an org important for EA, not because OP is trying to argue that this is necessarily an EA cause.
By this, I mean, "Cost-effective in the sense that other EAs might themselves donate or contribute to the area." Not in a sense like, "From OP's specific perspective, this action accomplishes specific goals that makes it cost-effective for OP money specifically"
Thanks this is super helpful. I was trying to get my head around this announcement and that really helps.
Also to state the maybe obvious, you are allowed to ask whatever you want, and they are allowed to answer it or not! I for one appreciated the question in and of itself regardless of whether it gets answered
Clarifying this a bit more (from seeing the comments):
I assume that people close to this decision have reasons why they think this makes sense for OP, as a way to maximize OP's contributions at some level.
This might well be for reasons like:
1. This could be a good experiment in OP collaborating with other philanthropists.
2. This could be a good way for OP to gain recognition by other important parties.
3. Maybe Dustin Moskovitz really wants this, and this is a way for other OP leaders to come to some agreement where they get more clearly-efficient funding for something else.
4. Maybe OP could learn other useful things by doing this that will lead to wins in other areas.
5. Maybe this is a cause area that does well if one uses some weighted average of different philanthropic views.
I don't have a problem with OP doing this, and don't mean to claim they're not trying to maximize impact in some way.
At the same time,
1. I think that we (i.e. effective altruist enthusiasts reading public information) just don't know how they justify this internally. I wouldn't be surprised if we never find out. As others have flagged, it's likely that revealing the true reasons might make their work less effective.
2. Again, there's an important question of what EAs should take away from this. And I imagine we shouldn't assume that "This is generally an effective cause area for other regular EA funding and talent, outside of OP." It seems likely that a lot of the benefit here is fairly specific to the strategy and interests of people at OP.
3. There's one related topic of "Is there any delineation in what projects EAs might consider EA/effective/interesting?" The more causes are justified on grounds that aren't clear and transparent, the messier this gets. Lots of other philanthropists and leaders also do major things that aren't directly effective, but that they think will ultimately be best for the world.
4. While I'm sure it's the case they have some reasons they think this makes sense, I think it's reasonable for onlookers to be skeptical that it's actually worth it. To me, this venture rhymes a lot with the common mistake that many organizations make of over-extending themselves. I personally am probably more worried about the managerial attention they may spend on this than the $60m.
5. If one goes all the way on the idea that "private reasons make it likely that this is a good move, so we shouldn't try to evaluate it from the outside," one might assume that "All kinds of public critique of all organizations are invalid, because all organizations might have secretive information that makes their decisions unusually justified." I think that public critique and evaluation is still important to attempt. I also think that OP is one of the most important groups to understand and critique, just because of it's outsized impact around EA.
Other miscellaneous points:
1. Obviously, I find it interesting that this fairly-short press release has led to so much theorizing on our end. (perhaps me in-particular, as I've written a lot of the comments)
2. I think it's kind of telling that OP hasn't paid many people to directly engage with the EA Forum or other EA discussion. For example, I wouldn't expect that it's anyone's job to respond to comments in these threads. This is almost ironic given that they pay for the CEA team, including the EA Forum team. But I think that they consider open communication about these topics, from OP team members, to be highly costly, and I correspondingly don't expect them to provide much more insight on this or similar topics to our community. If I were to put myself in their shoes, I think they have a lot of worries about what other potential large donors, political actors, and other specific groups think about them. And they're less concerned about the EA community. One thing this means is that PR statements like this won't generally provide much information that the EA community in particular would care about.
I guess this comment is now obsolete/wrong given Alexanders reply? I still appreciate it! Maybe worth flagging that with an edit or something?
Sure, added with an edit.
Speculation only:
It seems plausible to me that the value of funding "Abundance and Growth" in the USA is not measured in QALYs, but in supporting a political alternative to Trump and MAGA. The "center-left" vibes might not be a bug, but a feature.
If you think USAID cuts are important, and AI is important, and that Trump is net-negative on both of these, maybe the most impactful thing you can do is support alternative narratives to Trumpism and help ensure he doesn't get re-elected and that you swing the house as far as possible. Of course, it needs sound bi-partisan and not in-your-face, but "Abundance and Growth" is pretty clearly at contrast to the current administrations policies.
This both explains why OP won't publicly their reasoning for this, and why it might be as cost-effective in EV as other options.
I'd flag that Dustin Moskovitz is a top Democratic donor. He certainly doesn't seem to have a problem directly donating to support Democrats. So I don't see a need to donate to Abundance as a way to counter Trump while being bi-partisan.
That said, I know that Abundance-proponents do consider it as an area that has wide-ranging positive effects. So while "reducing political extremism" might not be the only purpose, I wouldn't be surprised if it was part of the pie.
https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Dustin+Moskovitz
I think the theory of change here is that the Abundance Agenda taking off in the US would provide an ideological frame for the Democratic Party to both a) get competitive in the races in needs to win power in the Executive & Legislature and b) have a framing that allows it to pursue good policies when in power, which then unlocks a lot of positive value elsewhere
It also answers the 'why just the US?' question, though that seemed kind of obvious to me
And as for no cost-effectiveness calculation, it seems that this is the kind of systemic change many people in EA want to see![1] And it's very hard to get accurate cost-effectiveness-analyses from those. But again, I don't know if that's also being too harsh to OP, as many longtermist organisations don't seem to publicly publish their CEAs apart from general reasoning like about "the future could be very large and very good"
Maybe it's not the exact flavour/ideology they want to see, but it does seem 'systemic' to me
What makes it leftist? If anything my immediate reaction is that abundance is in some sense right-coded in that it's about unleashing markets. Maybe more British right and pre-Trump American right than current right.
(Mostly a nitpick, as I don't want Open Phil doing centrist or libertarian or centre-right coded things rather than what's most effective either, and I think strongly upvoted your comment.)
I contend. OP (no pun intended) cites both the Abundance Institute and Progress Studies as inspiration, a cursory look at the think tank sponsors and affiliations of the people involved in those show that they are mostly a libertarian-ish right-of-center bunch.
Sorry, that was confusing on my end.
When I said "left" I was thinking "center-left in the US, of the type close to Bay Area tech." Agreed that the right of other countries are much more open to this sort of thing.
I think the current US MAGA focus seems pretty clearly not what this is targeted to, at least. They seem pretty distant from many of our epistemics.
Maybe you don't mean this literally, but I find this really sad
kind of horrifying. Who do you think wouldn't allow you to ask this question, and why?Sorry, I was unsure how to express that.
I think there are a lot of implicit social agreements at work here. I know that a lot of people in positions in power often don't want to spend much time being questioned or addressing points they find disagreeable.
My impression is that a lot of public statements from major organizations come with expectations like this. But these expectations aren't typically explicit, which I find makes them difficult to reason about.
Historically, I know that many people with power around OP don't seem to engage much with comments on the EA Forum. For example, when I look through Holden's posts, I don't see many comments/responses from him. (with a good exception being this recent post!)
Or see this comment by Dustin Moskovitz:
> I'm not detailing specific decisions for the same reason I want to invest in fewer focus areas: additional information is used as additional attack surface area. The attitude in EA communities is "give an inch, fight a mile". So I'll choose to be less legible instead.
(quote emphasized by me)
It seems like Dustin thinks that EA's fight too much with OP, more than is fair, and therefore Dustin actively chooses to be less legible.
So, what is "fighting"? Is my questioning of the cost-effectiveness me "fighting a mile"? I have no idea.
Perhaps a better way to say, "I'm not sure if I can question this" might be something like, "I'm not sure if me raising this point would significantly frustrate people like Dustin." I'm not expecting him or others at OP to consider potentially-critical information as the kind that should be, say, legally attacked, but I do expect them to dislike a lot of this sort of conversation, and I don't feel like I understand where the lines are.
I don't particularly blame OP / EA leaders for this challenge. More that i think it's the kind of thing that comes out of most extreme power imbalances, and it takes a good deal of work to get around it.
Thanks, that's a helpful clarification! "Allowed" still feels like a strong choice of words, but I can see that the line between that and "I'm not sure if this will be perceived as annoying" is blurry, and also, the latter feels frustrating enough.
I'm only speaking in personal capacity here, but my strong preference would always be for these questions to be raised!
There's certainly been discussion of the potential efficacy of growth-focused interventions from an EA perspective, as in this Forum Post, "Growth and the case against randomista development" (a winner of the EA Forum First Decade Review!)
To give you a taste, some arguments of theirs I found quite thought-provoking were:
All of this said... it's hard to imagine this logic would hold (as) true for interventions in the US where Open Philanthropy is saying they're focused within this fund at the moment. So on that front I'll admit I'm more confused!
Yep when I first saw it I assumed they meant
Innovation around technology that would help people in low income countries (medical innovation, fintech, drone deliveries etc.
Then I saw it was all US based.
Again I don't mind at all if open Phil has a non EA d based, US based philanthropy arm, that might be what the donors want to do and might even be a good strategic move for PR reasons. But might be good to be more explicit about that.
I think that one thing that makes this a bit more confusing, to me, is the focus on Abundance / scientific progress / Progress Studies. These areas often focus on things other than strict economic growth.
It's just an incredibly broad area that they are discussing, if they want to cover things in both "Economic Growth" and "Abundance / Progress Studies".
Especially if they also want to cover things outside the US as well as inside the US.(Sorry, I see it's mainly US now)I just wrote a longer comment clarifying my views on some of the potential awkwardness of the OP-EA partnership.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mopsmd3JELJRyTTty/ozzie-gooen-s-shortform?commentId=o9rEBRmKoTvjNMHF7
One perspective one could have is that this is a positive-sum approach to influence-/power-seeking: supporting neglected policies that would benefit large amounts of the US public buys goodwill, helps develop connections with other funders, and might put people in positions of power that are highly sympathetic to EA ideas. With the current state of the EA brand, this might not be such a bad idea.
There are other ways of seeking influence but they tend to have fewer positive effects (donating to politicians, trying to run one's own candidates for office) and solely relying on the strategy "become experts and try to convince those in power of the necessary policies" isn't really bearing fruit. And it seems increasingly untenable to ignore politics, with US & UK (and Netherlands) already drastically slashing international aid and the AGI trajectory depending heavily on those in power.
It is of course different from the default EA strategy of "do the actual thing you believe is directly most cost-effective and communicate very explicitly about your theory of change". But I don't think that explicitly communicating this would be well-received by third parties. Even explicitly thinking of it this way internally is risky PR-wise.
It does seem important to clearly delineate within EA when and whose communication is meant to be representative of one's thinking, and which communication isn't. Muddying this could be quite detrimental to EA in the long-term. I'm not sure how OpenPhil should've acted here. Perhaps better if they had not posted it to the EA Forum so that they don't signal "we believe this is good on EA grounds".
All in all, I'm positively inclined towards this fund though.