But the tag has changed

The tag has not changed, they have explicitly closed it (see their site) and I don't think those three links count as examples since it's not targeted at reform (nor general immigration), but even if they did, it's still much lower than it used to be. They never told us why they closed it (which is annoying in itself) but the writing was already on the wall a year earlier with them saying:

We have never had a clear theory of how to change the political economy to be supportive of substantially larger immigration flows, which is what would be necessary to achieve the global poverty improvements that motivate our interest in this issue. Accordingly, our recent spending has been lower than in macro or land use reform.

The open borders website wrote a post tracking the downturn, e.g. writing under the section "Evidence that Open Philanthropy is reducing its involvement in and commitments to migration policy":

The grants database includes only one grant in 2021 [...] and otherwise no other grants in 2020. Open Philanthropy has been using exit grants as well as reducing levels of commitment even for grantees that they are continuing to support.

Speaking of the site. They posted every month from 2013 through 2015, only some months between 2016 and 2021, twice in 2022, zero times in 2023, once in 2024, and zero times in 2025. A clear sign that its engagement is going down (despite the number of EAs increasing over the years).

Thanks for the comment, that seems like a strange null hypothesis to me but alright. My earlier aversion to commenting on the EA forum has borne out again, so I'm going to stop commenting now.

if you want to have true beliefs about how to improve the world, economics can provide a bunch more useful insights than other parts of the social sciences

Source?

EDIT: I'm getting downvoted for asking for a source on a controversial claim? Why? Why does the heterodox EA have to cite dozens of academic sources and still get more downvotes than someone just asserting an academically controversial (but orthodox within EA) claim without a citation or justification? Why does asking for one generate downvotes?

If it was literally 2 we couldn't do statistics, but say it was the same ratio but one we could do statistics on, e.g. 1000.000 vs 2000, I would say this research is valid. If it was just about citations it would be a problem, but what's being polled there is opinions on interdisciplinary research, so it's about attitude towards working with other disciplines in general.

If a higher percentage of (a quantitatively smaller number of) political scientists think working with other disciplines is better, whereas a lower percentage of (a quantitatively higher number of) economists think so,  then even though there is (in absolute numbers) a higher quantity of economists who think that interdisciplinary research is better, we can still (comparatively) say that economists are more in favor of being insular than political scientists.

I've already responded to Larks on this

The first (by Fourcade et al) is about percentage not absolute numbers, so this is direct evidence of economists preferring to stay insular. Same for the one about citations in flagship journals. We can see that both the number of papers and the number of citations in economics is indeed higher, however it's so minor (still within the same order of magnitude), while the differences are so large (more than an order of magnitude) that the trend still remains. Similar for the Angris et al one (also, I don't know where you got these numbers from... the bureau of labor statistics indeed says 6,200 political scientists, but only 17,500 economists, so that ratio is not enough to explain the gap).

I'm more worried about black and other minorities within EA, since, again looking at the EA demographics data, Asians do comparatively better (comparatively being a load-bearing term there), while black and brown people do not (maybe also inherited from economics?). When we look at the race scandals in EA (Bostrom scandal, Manifest scandal, FLI scandal...) it's always about black and brown people being called less-intelligent, not Asians. So I think that's where our focus should be.

I'm not knocking economics as a field otherwise I wouldn't study/write about economics, I'm knocking overrelying on simple economic models to the detriment of a complete picture. That's why I cite evidence of simple economic models failing (which are obviously published in economic journals) and talk about the value that other disciplines can bring. If you think my citing is bad, perhaps you'd like to present some better sources?

Hi David,

I don't like commenting on the EA Forum given the karma-system's distortionary effect, so your chances of getting a response are much higher if you use substack/reddit/DM/email/any-other-medium. However, since you addressed me directly I'm not going to be so impolite as to ignore you, so I'll give it a go.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I have one that meets all these requirements. I linked Jason Hickel's "The Divide", which is probably the closest, but it's been half a decade since I read it. Given that  1: I have trouble remembering what I even had for breakfast, and 2: I don't even remember if I finished it, I don't think I'm in a good position to recommend it.
I heard that Ha-Joon Chang's "Bad Samaritans" tried something like what you mentioned, but I haven't read it. Writing for an antipodal/hostile audience is quite an unrewarding job (trust me), so I don't know how many writers you'll find. I'll keep my eye out for one though.

I also tend to search literature by topic, and not by author-affiliation, so I most often don't know the political position of the people I'm reading, beyond the vague vibes the text itself is giving off.
I know the World Bank did some dodgy shit, which socialists have raked them over the coals over, but I'm not sure if capitalist scholars (today) defend those actions, so I'm not sure if it's a uniquely socialist critique.

I think, given your profile, you'll probably find the arguments centered on western (farming) subsidies the most convincing (some sources linked in the beginning, though sources more to your liking are likely available online), and you'll probably find the arguments centered on "unequal exchange" the least convincing. (or, well, Open Borders and Climate Injustices are the ones you'll likely find the most convincing, but given that many capitalist scholars also champion those, I think you already believe in those)

But also, I'm not an expert on global trade. The argument for reparations stems more from what happened in history than what's happening today. Some highly upvoted comments by EAs were defending colonialism (which I know a bit about, so I'll probably do a post on that at some point), but for global trade I've only read a small handful of books and articles on the topic, so I'd have to look into it more.

My complaint was the incentive structure:

Not necessarily because you want to, but just because that's how the system is set up.

I used a personal example, but the complaint was about people being incentivized to  downvote (past and future) stuff by the outgroup while upvoting the ingroup, whether or not it's "mass" voting:

it incentivizes detractors to go back and downvote your other stuff as well. [...]

So if you want the forum to remain dominated by your ingroup, better upvote your ingroup's posts/comments

which I then expanded on with examples like:

If someone is spreading opinions you disagree with, then the karma system makes strong-downvoting them an excellent way to hinder their ability to do so.
If your friend makes mediocre posts but he also upvotes all your mediocre posts, then upvoting them is a great way to ensure your posts get more exposure.

If you had done it

I had done it, see: my screenshotted comment.