I am a Tasmanian resident, and I am wondering what the practicalities would be of hiring an EA-like analysis team to rank-order Tasmanian priorities - sort of like what the Copenhagen Consensus does with countries like Malawi and Bangladesh.
I can already hear you saying that Tasmania is part of Australia, and therefore, there is no reason to invest in such a project. I believe this is incorrect for three reasons:
- If less money is wasted by Tasmania, and that improves the quality of life there, then it increases the chance that this will be done in other states as well. This decreases the amount of money being wasted by rich countries, increasing the amount of money they are capable of donating as foreign aid.
- It provides a much deeper advertisement of the EA community to the broader population by demonstrating how this rank-ordering of results methodology can affect people's actual lived experience. If dealing with prison reform in Tasmania does 10X the amount of good than the pre-existing uses of spending, for example, then the quality of Tasmania will improve, causing the policy to gain attention. This overrides the stereotype that everyone who cares about EA is a pseudo-intellectual armchair philosopher who thinks about charity too narrowly.
- Because policy analysis at the state level sucks. This is evidenced by the fact that 10 billion dollars is being spent on education over the next 4 years; however, this will inevitably go towards nice-sounding bureaucracies that are experts in wasting money, instead of going to policies that actually improve education. Therefore, there is a niche for EA economics to guide policy, providing a cranny that you can nudge EA philosophy into guiding other areas of government practically as well.
However, when I reached out to the EA team, I was informed that EA has a very small number of employees, and therefore, they cannot support a project like this. I cannot help but think, however, that it has got to be possible to fund something like this. It must be possible to team up with one of the GPI professors and provide a PhD project, or something like that. Or hire another organisation that is associated with EA.
Is this doable? If so, what should I look into?
What is "the EA team" that you refer to?
What is GPI?
Hello
Yes, apologies for any inconvenience.
GPI is the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University, often associated with the EA movement.
EA - Effective Altruism. I just reached out to a bunch of 'contact us' emails, and they referred me to a guy named Elliot Teperman (I live in Australia, so it may be different for you). He is the one who told me the teams for Effective Altruism are quite small and therefore have to prioritise projects, which is something I completely understand.
However, it surely has to be possible to organise something like this. Right?