Comments
I don't think these things are "lumped in" with each other as often as it might seem. Within EA, people typically use "global health and development" as an umbrella term when they want to cover work in both areas; it's understandable that this would look like conflating the two.
But "global health" and "global development" are often discussed separately as well.
(Confusingly, much of the development discussion happens within the progress studies community, which overlaps heavily with EA in terms of ideas + the people involved, but has its own publications and Twitter threads and so on, which means the conversations often involve people in EA but happen outside EA spaces.)
I still wish there were more discussion of growth in EA and EA-adjacent spaces, relative to conversations about health topics, but I think the gap is less wide than it appears.
The view seems to be fairly common among EA circles that global development is intractable, or very low in tractability. The best that can be done is global health work (although the idea that this actually leads to faster growth somewhere down the line is IMO very very poorly evidenced) or mass immigration to the West.
Personally, I think this view is mostly wrong although bits of it are clearly true. Obviously there's nothing that EA can realistically do for development in South Africa or Argentina, countries with very different histories but completely screwed-up utterly hopeless politics. That said, most developing countries have institutions that are quite a bit more functional than this and there's a lot more to work with (even in somewhere like Nigeria, vide https://kenopalo.substack.com/p/on-why-i-remain-bullish-on-nigeria). That sort of work ultimately takes long-term cadre building in developing countries themselves since trying to import governance wholesale rarely works outside of (occasionally) authoritarian regimes, but the potential payoffs are of course absolutely enormous.