Hide table of contents

I'm going to be writing a few papers on a particular low-income country for a global economic development class I'm going to be taking. Here are the topics


I'd like it to be relevant for people in EA, so if anyone is interested in answers to the above about a particular country or policy, but doesn't have the time to do the research for themselves, let me know.

11

0
0

Reactions

0
0
New Answer
New Comment


2 Answers sorted by

You could try doing something relevant to one of the charities founded under Charity Entrepreneurship. They often advocate or implement practical and widely-recommended policy solutions within specific low-income countries. There’s one charity working on reducing lead exposure for children, and another trying to improve vaccination rates against preventable diseases. You could reach out to the founders, learn which countries they’re considering working in next, write a general profile of poverty with specific focus on their target problem, advocate their policy or analyze their options within that country, and provide them a stakeholder roadmap for getting the policy effectively implemented. Charity Entrepreneurship also has a big list of ideas they’re waiting for more people to tackle, so you could talk with CE about fleshing out some of those proposals.

https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/our-charities

Thanks! I'll ask them!

I'm from the lead exposure charity mentioned (LEEP: https://leadelimination.org/) - if banning lead paint counts as urban development then feel free to email me clare@leadelimination.org - we can definitely suggest some countries we're beginning work in.  

3
D0TheMath
I will find out if it does!

I have a Gdoc here ('Appendices to "The case against randomista development"') where I rank countries as a function of population, poverty (GDP per capita) to get at the importance and neglectedness of improving their economic policy proxied by their ranking on the World Banks Doing Business ranking.  The ranking is below.

But this didn't include tractability. Also from a longtermist perspective some people say that India is probably going to be the most important country, due to its population size, democracy, scalability, and so on.

 GDP per capita (PPP)PopulationPoverty multiplier (1/GDP) / max(1/GDP) to scaleImportance: Population * Poverty weightWB Doing business rankNeglectedness: WBDB/GDPI*N
Congo Democratic Republic of

$868

79M

147

115,637

183

0.21

24,380

Ethiopia

$1,734

102M

74

75,285

159

0.09

6,903

Mozambique

$1,216

29M

105

30,224

138

0.11

3,430

Bangladesh

$3,580

163M

36

58,025

168

0.05

2,723

India

$6,574

1B

19

256,777

63

0.01

2,461

Uganda

$1,819

41M

70

29,076

116

0.06

1,854

Pakistan

$5,238

193M

24

47,021

108

0.02

970

Nigeria

$5,861

186M

22

40,454

131

0.02

904

China

$15,531

1B

8

113,162

31

0.00

226

Curated and popular this week
Paul Present
 ·  · 28m read
 · 
Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way. Summary While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise: 1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015. 2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010. 3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.  I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.  Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.  Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.  Introduction In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000: Giving What We Can said that > The reduction in malaria has be
LintzA
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
Cross-posted to Lesswrong Introduction Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include: 1. Updates toward short timelines 2. The Trump presidency 3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm 4. Deepseek 5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending 6. Increased internal deployment 7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on. In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!  Implications of recent developments Updates toward short timelines There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is that 99% of fully-remote jobs will be automatable in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months). We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achi
Rory Fenton
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
Cross-posted from my blog. Contrary to my carefully crafted brand as a weak nerd, I go to a local CrossFit gym a few times a week. Every year, the gym raises funds for a scholarship for teens from lower-income families to attend their summer camp program. I don’t know how many Crossfit-interested low-income teens there are in my small town, but I’ll guess there are perhaps 2 of them who would benefit from the scholarship. After all, CrossFit is pretty niche, and the town is small. Helping youngsters get swole in the Pacific Northwest is not exactly as cost-effective as preventing malaria in Malawi. But I notice I feel drawn to supporting the scholarship anyway. Every time it pops in my head I think, “My money could fully solve this problem”. The camp only costs a few hundred dollars per kid and if there are just 2 kids who need support, I could give $500 and there would no longer be teenagers in my town who want to go to a CrossFit summer camp but can’t. Thanks to me, the hero, this problem would be entirely solved. 100%. That is not how most nonprofit work feels to me. You are only ever making small dents in important problems I want to work on big problems. Global poverty. Malaria. Everyone not suddenly dying. But if I’m honest, what I really want is to solve those problems. Me, personally, solve them. This is a continued source of frustration and sadness because I absolutely cannot solve those problems. Consider what else my $500 CrossFit scholarship might do: * I want to save lives, and USAID suddenly stops giving $7 billion a year to PEPFAR. So I give $500 to the Rapid Response Fund. My donation solves 0.000001% of the problem and I feel like I have failed. * I want to solve climate change, and getting to net zero will require stopping or removing emissions of 1,500 billion tons of carbon dioxide. I give $500 to a policy nonprofit that reduces emissions, in expectation, by 50 tons. My donation solves 0.000000003% of the problem and I feel like I have f