Yesterday UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that in order to fund increased defence spending, the international aid budget will be cut from 0.5% of gross national income to 0.3% in 2027. This follows a cut in November 2020 which reduced the level from 0.7% to 0.5%
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It's interesting to think of this as a humanitarian arms race in reverse, competition to contribute to international aid has just experienced a massive "disarmament" in the US, allowing the UK "disarm" too. It could also be that Starmer is hoping to placate or disrupt reactionary movements as they inevitably rise in the UK. Ian Bremmer points out that the Europe lags behind the US in terms of these movements.
But it's all very depressing.
Is it really the case that the UK and US were competing for the gains to reputation that foreign aid brings? I suppose I’d try to answer that question by looking at the history of where the 0.7% target, which I thought was fairly broadly shared among rich countries, originally came from. One history I found said:
> It results from the 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2626. The 0.7% figure was calculated as a means to boost growth for developing countries. Since 1970, however, only several Nordic countries have met or surpassed this target.
Which makes it look like a potential failed case of cooperation: that no country wants to have the whole cost of international aid fall just on itself, so they try to establish international agreements so that others contribute too. Is that the right model, though? Perhaps countries don’t really experience pressure to adjust their contribution upwards when other countries drop out, and are happy to just continue doing the amount they were doing. I can think of a possible dynamic where ‘preventing bad runaway spillover effects like the spread of war and pandemics’ costs X billion dollars of aid (and has a threshold effect, where providing half of X billion is much less than half as effective as X), which no individual country is willing to stump up, but which is important to every rich country’s interest. In that dynamic, rich countries benefit from such UN-induced cooperation, by spreading the burden and getting the benefits of less instability and disease in the world.
If that’s the dynamic, then your idea of a race to the bottom in aid (a dis-‘alm’-ament, you could say) would not necessarily be what you expect after some country drops out — they’d possibly want to raise their contributions to make up the difference and still be able to reach the threshold of X. Alternatively, the UK now might expect that without the US it will be too difficult to reach that hypothetical threshold, and so there’s no point trying any more.
But if the incentives / dynamic of foreign aid is more about getting prestige for your country, then you could see a broad disalmament when the total pool of funding takes a hit — or alternatively you could see the second or third place players boosting their contribution to try and take the lead. So I’m not sure what determines what one would expect to see given this potential reputation-based dynamic.
Curated and popular this week
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*Disclaimer* I am writing this post in a personal capacity; the opinions I express are my own and do not represent my employer.
I think that more people and orgs (especially nonprofits) should consider negotiating the cost of sizable expenses. In my experience, there is usually nothing to lose by respectfully asking to pay less, and doing so can sometimes save thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per hour. This is because negotiating doesn’t take very much time[1], savings can persist across multiple years, and counterparties can be surprisingly generous with discounts. Here are a few examples of expenses that may be negotiable:
For organizations
* Software or news subscriptions
* Of 35 corporate software and news providers I’ve negotiated with, 30 have been willing to provide discounts. These discounts range from 10% to 80%, with an average of around 40%.
* Leases
* A friend was able to negotiate a 22% reduction in the price per square foot on a corporate lease and secured a couple months of free rent. This led to >$480,000 in savings for their nonprofit. Other negotiable parameters include:
* Square footage counted towards rent costs
* Lease length
* A tenant improvement allowance
* Certain physical goods (e.g., smart TVs)
* Buying in bulk can be a great lever for negotiating smaller items like covid tests, and can reduce costs by 50% or more.
* Event/retreat venues (both venue price and smaller items like food and AV)
* Hotel blocks
* A quick email with the rates of comparable but more affordable hotel blocks can often save ~10%.
* Professional service contracts with large for-profit firms (e.g., IT contracts, office internet coverage)
* Insurance premiums (though I am less confident that this is negotiable)
For many products and services, a nonprofit can qualify for a discount simply by providing their IRS determination letter or getting verified on platforms like TechSoup.
In my experience, most vendors and companies
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[Edits on March 10th for clarity, two sub-sections added]
Watching what is happening in the world -- with lots of renegotiation of institutional norms within Western democracies and a parallel fracturing of the post-WW2 institutional order -- I do think we, as a community, should more seriously question our priors on the relative value of surgical/targeted and broad system-level interventions.
Speaking somewhat roughly, with EA as a movement coming of age in an era where democratic institutions and the rule-based international order were not fundamentally questioned, it seems easy to underestimate how much the world is currently changing and how much riskier a world of stronger institutional and democratic backsliding and weakened international norms might be.
Of course, working on these issues might be intractable and possibly there's nothing highly effective for EAs to do on the margin given much attention to these issues from society at large. So, I am not here to confidently state we should be working on these issues more.
But I do think in a situation of more downside risk with regards to broad system-level changes and significantly more fluidity, it seems at least worth rigorously asking whether we should shift more attention to work that is less surgical (working on specific risks) and more systemic (working on institutional quality, indirect risk factors, etc.).
While there have been many posts along those lines over the past months and there are of course some EA organizations working on these issues, it stil appears like a niche focus in the community and none of the major EA and EA-adjacent orgs (including the one I work for, though I am writing this in a personal capacity) seem to have taken it up as a serious focus and I worry it might be due to baked-in assumptions about the relative value of such work that are outdated in a time where the importance of systemic work has changed in the face of greater threat and fluidity.
When the world seems to
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Forethought[1] is a new AI macrostrategy research group cofounded by Max Dalton, Will MacAskill, Tom Davidson, and Amrit Sidhu-Brar.
We are trying to figure out how to navigate the (potentially rapid) transition to a world with superintelligent AI systems. We aim to tackle the most important questions we can find, unrestricted by the current Overton window.
More details on our website.
Why we exist
We think that AGI might come soon (say, modal timelines to mostly-automated AI R&D in the next 2-8 years), and might significantly accelerate technological progress, leading to many different challenges. We don’t yet have a good understanding of what this change might look like or how to navigate it. Society is not prepared.
Moreover, we want the world to not just avoid catastrophe: we want to reach a really great future. We think about what this might be like (incorporating moral uncertainty), and what we can do, now, to build towards a good future.
Like all projects, this started out with a plethora of Google docs. We ran a series of seminars to explore the ideas further, and that cascaded into an organization.
This area of work feels to us like the early days of EA: we’re exploring unusual, neglected ideas, and finding research progress surprisingly tractable. And while we start out with (literally) galaxy-brained schemes, they often ground out into fairly specific and concrete ideas about what should happen next. Of course, we’re bringing principles like scope sensitivity, impartiality, etc to our thinking, and we think that these issues urgently need more morally dedicated and thoughtful people working on them.
Research
Research agendas
We are currently pursuing the following perspectives:
* Preparing for the intelligence explosion: If AI drives explosive growth there will be an enormous number of challenges we have to face. In addition to misalignment risk and biorisk, this potentially includes: how to govern the development of new weapons of mass destr
Is it really the case that the UK and US were competing for the gains to reputation that foreign aid brings? I suppose I’d try to answer that question by looking at the history of where the 0.7% target, which I thought was fairly broadly shared among rich countries, originally came from. One history I found said:
> It results from the 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2626. The 0.7% figure was calculated as a means to boost growth for developing countries. Since 1970, however, only several Nordic countries have met or surpassed this target.
Which makes it look like a potential failed case of cooperation: that no country wants to have the whole cost of international aid fall just on itself, so they try to establish international agreements so that others contribute too. Is that the right model, though? Perhaps countries don’t really experience pressure to adjust their contribution upwards when other countries drop out, and are happy to just continue doing the amount they were doing. I can think of a possible dynamic where ‘preventing bad runaway spillover effects like the spread of war and pandemics’ costs X billion dollars of aid (and has a threshold effect, where providing half of X billion is much less than half as effective as X), which no individual country is willing to stump up, but which is important to every rich country’s interest. In that dynamic, rich countries benefit from such UN-induced cooperation, by spreading the burden and getting the benefits of less instability and disease in the world.
If that’s the dynamic, then your idea of a race to the bottom in aid (a dis-‘alm’-ament, you could say) would not necessarily be what you expect after some country drops out — they’d possibly want to raise their contributions to make up the difference and still be able to reach the threshold of X. Alternatively, the UK now might expect that without the US it will be too difficult to reach that hypothetical threshold, and so there’s no point trying any more.
But if the incentives / dynamic of foreign aid is more about getting prestige for your country, then you could see a broad disalmament when the total pool of funding takes a hit — or alternatively you could see the second or third place players boosting their contribution to try and take the lead. So I’m not sure what determines what one would expect to see given this potential reputation-based dynamic.