Hi guys, I would appreciate your opinions here.
I’m working on an EA-aligned project and would like to brainstorm how to fine-tune my approach to it. I think there is a lot of exploration value hidden in this project. It falls into the category of prioritization research and improving institutional decision-making.
The project is called Czech Priorities, it will be run by the Copenhagen Consensus Center and the aim is to identify the smartest solutions to the most pressing social and economic challenges in the Czech Republic, with expected over-spill effects in the region and possibly across Europe, if it turns out easy to replicate in other countries.
Note: For the last 14 months I led the Czech EA Association. Lot of credit for it goes to my colleagues and volunteers, especially for organizing EAGx conference, first two public CFAR workshops in Europe, the Effective thesis project, or for receiving a donation that allows us to pay full-time staff in 2018. I now work for the Copenhagen Consensus Center and the project I will talk about here is run separately from our EA activities and we do not publicly associate it with the Czech EA.
Project background
About a year ago, Copenhagen Consensus Center was considering, among many other projects around the world, carrying out a national prioritization project in the Czech Republic. We knew a Czech philanthropist, who really likes economic prioritization and lives on the same street in Prague as Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. They have met and the donor committed to fund 1/5 of the project, identifying couple of other potential sources of funding. The CCC has done full-scale national prioritization projects in developing countries so far (e.g. Haiti, Bangladesh, India) and now has a methodology, infrastructure, will and the momentum to try it in a developed country as well.
Our goal is to raise the remaining 2 million USD in 2018, hire a team, spend two years doing world-class cost-benefit analyses on approx. 70 of the most promising local (state or non-governmental) interventions (contracting the best economists in all areas), and create public awareness by disseminating the results (list of top national priorities with “price tags”) through popular media (something like: „WOW, 1 extra Koruna invested into pre-school education can bring 17 Korunas of benefits!“). Previous projects show, that this is a very effective way to create a pressure on politicians, who eventually realize it’s both rational and politically smart to take at least some of those priorities, include them in their program and actually support them from the taxpayer´s money.
Pilot in a developed country
Global priorities research and improving institutional decision-making are very effective causes (they have indeed been listed on the 3rd and 4th spot in the 80k Hours´ list of priorities last year). But when I started working for this project, just to be completely compliant with EA thinking, I decided to look for funds only from sources that would not otherwise be used to fund AI Safety, promoting effective altruism or specific projects in third world countries, where the bang-for-the-buck ratio would likely be higher. Having worked on the project for four months, I came to realized that it´s worthy to discuss, if Czech Priorities could have enough positive international over-spill effects and exploration value for the EA community, that it might actually be one of the most effective projects to fund, across the spectrum.
Will McAskill spent a large part of his closing speech at the 2017 EA Global conference in London talking about the importance of global priorities research. I talked to him, Richard Parr or people from Global Priorities Institute about this during the conference. Global Priorities Institute is, for example, at the moment doubling-down on philosophy and economics in their research. The comparative advantage of Copenhagen Consensus Center is, that Bjorn Lomborg knows how to work with politicians and get things going. Personally, I am a big fan of Global Priorities Institute´s philosophical work, and I am aware of the issues with external validity, causal inference, extrapolation and other deficits of RCTs and cost-benefit analyses. On the other hand, my background from political studies leads me to believe, that there might be surprisingly lot of additional value in orchestrated efforts towards actual political implementation of and advocacy for good enough ideas and effective policies.
Exploration value
Making a good use of prioritization research often seems to imply changing incentive structures of entire political systems, so that the most effective programs start getting implemented. Of course it would be most effective to do it globally, but is that even possible with our current resources? In its Post-2015 Consensus project, the CCC carried out great cost-benefit studies on UN´s Sustainable Development Goals. It generated lot of attention, but the structure of funding of SDGs remained mostly intact on an international level. There are a lot of initiatives trying to prioritize globally, but isn´t the whole planet a little too big of a playground to start at?
Wouldn´t it be more effective to start with prioritizations locally and then systematically scale-up, replicate, and localize the findings to other regions in the world, and then slowly work up to an international and global level? Wouldn‘t it be more applicable and politically acceptable to create deep understanding of priorities for each specific country and region, and only then prioritize among those priorities at an international level?
Why the Czech Republic
Here is a summary of why I think the Czech Republic would be the perfect guinea-pig among developed countries in which to test the effectiveness of a national prioritization project (this is my understanding, not a statement of the Copenhagen Consensus Center):
Characteristics of the Czech Republic:
· High potential for policy improvement – Growing economy (fiscal surplus, world´s best monetary policy) but the tide seems to be about to turn (see here or below). Basic needs of people are mostly covered, but social inequality is increasing and the country is notably underperforming neighboring Germany and Austria in indexes of well-being and opportunity.
· Attractive place for R&D - bridge between Western and Eastern Europe, increasingly attractive for living, unused global advantage in IT and R&D (low-cost, well educated researchers and developers).
· Size – with 10 million people, it’s relatively easy to have an impact on institutions (especially with this government), very little institutional and private money invested in strategy and prioritization so far, good track-record of "public lobby" initiatives.
Problems to solve:
· Still urgent post-communist social problems - 1 in 10 people living under poverty line, most middle class considered poor by EU standards, 10% of citizens under property distraint
· Felt need for changes – country is not run effectively (too much bureaucracy, corruption, e-government initiatives becoming obsolete, etc.), economy is based on industries with low long-term potential (car industry, mechanical engineering, transit etc).
· Fear of Czexit – strong political propaganda against EU, pro-EU part of the political spectrum is broken, populist parties are seriously talking about referendum for Czexit, the president is openly pro-Russian and pro-Chinese (this is a very emotional issue for Czech people, who feel that we need to improve something as soon as possible. If Czexit happens, the country will likely fall back to the level of Bulgaria and the concept of the EU will be seriously undermined in the region).
Why national prioritization should work here:
· Environment is ready – we are in contact with the largest Czech economic institutions and politicians across the spectrum, have informal pre-commitment from the Ministry of Finance, much non-financial support from the NGO sector and a notable media attention by now.
· Ability to implement the outcomes – Current Prime Minister, even though controversial, is pragmatic and claims to like data-based politics. Chances are high, that there will be political power to implement some of the outcomes.
· Ability to assess impact - Economic performance historically related to Germany (traceable indiators of progress), member of Visegrad group of countries (similar cultural background – good for counterfactual testing, effects of policy changes are regionally comparable and measurable).
Expected outcomes:
Scenario 1 (positive): A new or existing political party agrees to implement our outcomes and consults the program with EA and Copenhagen Consensus Center. A first political party in Europe with an EA-aligned evidence-based program could be created. It could be an interesting case study. Strong effects of the supported interventions and/or good performance of the party would build strong arguments for prioritization projects to be implemented in other developed countries.
Scenario 2 (positive): Economy and politics keep improving on their own. Media disseminates the outcomes and politicians eventually implement at least some of the recommendations. Robust impact assessment methods are applied. As above, lives of citizens are effectively improved, compared to counterfactual. The cost-benefit ratios can be used for new experimental projects such as prediction markets for the well-being of citizens or a ground for voting in a DAO democracy (Some Czech entrepreneurs would likely want to take up the challenge of being the first country to experiment with decentralized voting/democracy, similarly as Estonia did with e-government and finance).
Scenario 3 (neutral): Most results don´t get implemented or become suddenly outdated (due to political shifts, economic crisis, etc.). In this case, at least a part of the outcomes can be used by the NGO sector or in other countries to better fight system ineffectiveness. Cost-befit prioritization methodology will be better localized, fine-tuned to approach problems in developed world.
Scenario 4 (negative): Outcomes cannot be implemented at all (methodology fails to reasonably assess long-term and overspill effects, project is seriously discredited etc.) In this case, we learn that national prioritization projects in developed countries need to be done more carefully/are not effective/are difficult or impossible.
A bit of Murphyjitsu
I am also trying to build a mental model of this: Would it have made sense to invest into such projects during the 20th century, when we could have prevented developed countries from falling to spheres of influence of expansive authoritarian regimes? A bit of nudging towards rationality seemed to work well in Greece or Italy after WW2. Should we have done that more in Eastern Europe? How about North Korea or Vietnam? Iran? Cuba or Venezuela? Geopolitics is extremely complex, of course, but some general historical shifts repeat throughout history. Speaking of Italy, it also decided to take the irrational, populist political path, literally yesterday.
I am wittingly neglecting lot of variables here, but what if we wake up 15 years from now, and see that countries of the former Soviet bloc have naturally (and suddenly) gravitated back to some form of authoritarianism (mentality is hard to change in one generation) and the Western world spends billions of dollars on development aid to previously developed areas, which deeply rooted problems have been underestimated? Would we be shocked? And what if in times of optimism, a couple of smart projects could spread the critical mass of political rationality across the region? Will it look obvious 15 years from now, that we should have done exactly that? Being very difficult to measure and predict, the probability of sudden authoritarian surges in Eastern Europe might be higher than available data would indicate. At least my inner-sim tells me, that I wouldn´t be too shocked if something like that happens.
Summary
I suggest that national, cross-sector cost-benefit prioritization project in a small, regionally important developed country could be a great thing for EA donors to fund at the moment, especially for it´s exploration value. To improve institutional decision-making and international prioritization, it seems to be best to start locally, implement, measure, and then scale-up, replicate and localize the findings to other regions in the world and only then work up to global level. From a long-term view, by focusing national prioritization only on the poorest regions of the world, we are likely to miss out some important international over-spill effects coming from solving neglected structural problems in more developed countries.
At this point, Copenhagen Consensus Center has proven EA-aligned methodology, infrastructure for local prioritization projects, it works around the world, and the Czech Republic seems like a good place to start in Europe. We have spent 6 months preparing the environment and this opportunity for a case study shouldn´t be passed.
I´ll be happy to hear your views, ideas about who could be a good EA partner for us and how to make such national prioritization projects take off.
Also, please refer me to any studies that argue for or against this kind of reasoning.
This sounds like a really good project. You clearly have a decent understanding of the local political issues, a clear ideas of how this project can map to other countries and prove beneficial globally. And a good understanding of how this plays a role in the wider EA community (I think it is good that this project is not branded as 'EA').
Here are a number of hopefully constructive thoughts I have to help you fine tune this work. These maybe things you thought about that did not make the post. I hope they help.
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1.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN EA AND CCC VALUES
As far as I can tell the CCC seems to not care much about scenarios with a small chance of a very high impact. On the whole the EA community does care about these scenarios. My evidence for this comes from the EA communities concern for the extreme risks of climate change (https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/climate-change/) and x-risks whereas the CCC work on climate change that I have seen seems to have ignored these extreme risks. I am unsure why the discrepancy (Many EA researchers do not use a future discount rate for utility, does CCC?)
This could be problematic in terms of the cause prioritisation research being useful for EAs, for building a relationship with this project and EA advocacy work, EA funding, etc, etc.
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2.
ADVOCACY CHALLENGES
Sometimes the most important priorities will not be the ones that public will latch onto. It is unclear from the post:
2.1 how you intend to find a balance between delivering the messages that are most likely to create change verses saying the things you most believe to be true. And
2.2 how the advocacy part of this work might differ from work that CCC has done in the past. My understanding is that to date the CCC has mostly tried to deliver true messages to an international policy maker audience. Your post however points to the public sentiment as a key driving factor for change. The advocacy methods and expertise used in CCC's international work are not obviously the best methods for this work.
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3
SCOPE / META? IMPROVING INSTITUTIONS?
For a prioritization research piece like I could imagine the researcher might dive straight into looking at the existing issues on the political agenda and prioritising between those based on some form of social rate of return. However I think there are a lot of very high level questions that I could be asked first like: • Is it more important to prevent the government making really bad decisions in some areas or to improve the quality of the good decisions • Is it more important to improve policy or to prevent a shift to harmful authoritarianism • How important is it to set policy that future political trends will not undo • How important is the acceptability among policy makers . public of the policy being suggested Are these covered in the research?
Also to what event will the research be looking at improving institutional decision making? To be honest I would genuinely be surprised if the conclusion of this project was that the most high impact policies were those designed to improve the functioning / decision making / checks and balances of the government. If you can cut corruption and change how government works for the better then the government will get more policies correct across the board in future. Is this your intuition too?
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Finally to say I would be interested to be kept up-to-date with this project as it progresses. Is there a good way to do this? Looking forward to hearing more.
Thanks for the feedback, this is very helpful!
EA vs. CCC values: I think about prioritization as a 3-step process of choosing a cause, an intervention, and then a specific organization. EA, 80k Hours or Global priorities are focused especially on choosing causes (the most „meta“ activity), GiveWell and charity evaluators are focusing on the third step – recommending organizations. Copenhagen Consensus´ approach can be seen as a compatible middle step in this process – prioritizing between possible interventions and solutions (hopefully more and more in the most high-impact areas, being increasingly compatible with EA).
Discount rates: Yes, Copenhagen Consensus uses discount rates (3% and 5% in previous projects) I would argue especially because of the uncertainty about the future, and our comparative advantage in solving current issues. We are always open to discuss this with EA, especially considering projects in more developed countries.
X-risks: Our projects are done in three steps, that we value more or less equally: 1) stakeholder research (gathering 1000+ policy ideas and choosing the top 60-80 interventions to analyse), 2) cost benefit analyses on those interventions, and 3) media dissemination and public advocacy for the top priorities. I would expect x-risks to be considered in the research in developed country rather that in Bagladesh, Haiti or India. Interventions reducing x-risks will definitely be among the 1000+ policy ideas, and even if they don´t make it into the 60-80 intervention analysed, thinking about low-chance, extreme-impact effects is certainly something that should be included in all relevant cost-benefit analyses.
Meta: There is a substantial difficulty to reasonably calculate very broad long-term benefits. Cost-benefit ratio of “Improving institutional decision-making” would be almost impossible to calculate, but we will assess our own impact, and since this is exactly our goal, some interesting data might come up. It would be also helpful to analyse partial interventions such as anti-corruption or transparency, that should lead to better institutional decision-making as a result. There are other interventions with long-term effects, that might make it to the final round and EA would probably agree on, such as programs in mental health, giving homes, consumption of animal products (e.g. removing subsidies for factory farms), antibiotic resistance etc.
Advocacy challenges: The project intends to, of course, say the most true things. If some of the top priorities will be difficult to implement, politicians will simply choose not pay attention to them, but at least public awareness will be created. I don’t think there will be any extremely controversial interventions (in AI Safety, for example), that would make us consider not publishing it to protect the whole project from being ridiculed and discredited.
Public sentiment and preventing authoritarianism: Yes, we expect public sentiment to be a key driving factor for change (along with roundtables and presentations to politicians, political parties and members of budget committee), more so than in third-world countries. We are in touch with local media, that are influential in shaping public opinion. Implementing the best interventions would have great effects, but even if not implemented, we hope to move public discussion (that is always in conflict between different world-views) to a little bit more rational level, and open up as many eyes and educate as many minds as possible to think in bigger picture. That seems to be a good way to fight irrational populism, which has all sorts of bad impacts on the society.
Importance of robust policies vs. acceptable policies: This possible trade-off should be made in each analysis, the researcher should think if the specific intervention would make the most impact by making the connected policies more robust, or if the most impact can be done by, for example, increasing the funding for this intervention slowly, so that it´s acceptable by all sides and works best in the long run. This should ideally be encompassed in each cost-benefit ratio.
Preventing bad policies vs. improving good ones: We will look for policies that can have any of these effects, but we are not specifically looking for the existing bad policies. Improving good ones is not the goal either, we want to find policies that have great effects per each Koruna, but occupy unfairly bad position in the current equilibria - might be unpopular, underfunded, not yet well understood or not known by the public.
Sure, you can follow our web www.ceskepriority.cz or hit me up via email at [email protected]
I assume this is 3% real (adjusted for inflation) discount rate. This is actually similar to global per capita income growth. Since a dollar is worth less to a rich person (logarithmic utility), EAs are generally ok with discounting at the economic growth rate. This means we are valuing the utility of future generations the same as present generations.
And I would be happy if our prioritization research discusses other heuristics such as the ones that Denis (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1lu/current_thinking_on_prioritization_2018/#interventions_1) or Michael (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/yp/evaluation_frameworks_or_when_importance/) propose.