TL;DR
- We have launched a preliminary (alpha) website for Probably Good.
- The long-term goal of this effort is to provide EA-aligned career advice in a way that’s engaging, relevant and useful to people with a diverse range of views, backgrounds and circumstances. For more details see our original announcement.
- As can be clearly seen in the site - this is an early version, which we are sharing here mainly to receive feedback, which you can give here in the comments or through the website's feedback page.
- Any feedback - including on content, style, prioritization or typos - would be greatly appreciated.
Details
Three months ago, we announced Probably Good - a new career guidance organization aimed at filling existing gaps in career advice in the EA community, and providing tools and advice relevant to a wide range of empirical, epistemic and moral views. It was heartening to see the support, offers to help, requests for advice, and significant amount of feedback we received - much of which we have already incorporated into our plans and content.
Today we’re excited to announce we have launched a first version of our website on ProbablyGood.org.
This first version is what could be called a minimal viable product (and, really, this version is not even viable yet) - it’s the most minimal version we could produce that we believe helps us test whether this direction can provide value. As should be pretty clear from the site itself - it is not yet comprehensive or even fully fleshed out. We are sharing it here mainly for feedback. We hope (and believe) this preliminary version can help clarify what we hope to offer, allow members of the community to provide us with more specific and meaningful feedback, and allow us to start testing out different strategies and directions.
However, the site already showcases some of the content we’ve been working on for the last few months. This includes the beginning of our general career guide, a profile on Nonprofit Entrepreneurship, and a profile on Development Economics.
We’re particularly interested in feedback about the content included and whether it’s useful, what additional content you’d most be interested in, and any other considerations you think are important for the goal of significantly and positively influencing people’s career trajectories. That being said, we’d appreciate feedback you have on any topic. Note that you can leave feedback here as a comment, or send it directly to us through the website.
We’re really excited to share this with you and truly appreciate your support and help in making this project a success!
Omer and Sella.
What does PG stand for? I did intend this feedback to be very positive. :)
I am claiming that causing economic improvements today could affect the future in 200+ years. The economic history literature provides many examples of events a few hundred years ago that cause surprisingly long-term, large, and diffuse effects today. That includes effects on governance, culture, and other aspects of "institutions"; improving these could plausibly reduce existential risk. I see this historical research as a proof of concept that very long-term effects might be possible, and I would love to see more economic historians and development economists trying to figure out whether modern changes have such long-term effects, and how.
Here's some reading suggestions; if you want to look into this yourself, good keywords are "economics" plus one of "persistence," "institutions," or "path dependence". Full disclosure, I have not looked into this stuff since 2013.
Papers in the vein of "long-ago economic events had a big effect on the present":
"The Colonial Origins of Economic Development", Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001), has been cited 14k . The authors argue that the way countries were colonized in the early 1800's had a large effect on per capita income today, because the colonists set up varying political institutions, such as property rights rules, which were highly persistent and affected economic development. Their book Why Nations Fail draws on this paper and others to argue that good economic conditions and good "institutions" tend to reinforce each other, and so do bad ones. (By "institutions", they mean "the rules of the game", such as democracy or property rights.)
A blog post with a good discussion: "Last weekend I attended a conference at Brown University on 'Deep-Rooted Factors in Economic Development'. [....] Nearly all of the papers gave evidence that economic shocks or initial differences in economic outcomes dissipate very, very slowly, if at all." The same blog has the series The Skeptic's Guide to Institutions, a readable overview of the institutions literature, although (in the author's words) "unfair, deliberately."
"The Long Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades", Nunn 2008. He says "I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance" and that relationship is causal. In a later paper, he explores trust as a mechanism, saying "most of the impact of the slave trade is through factors that are internal to the individual, such as cultural norms, beliefs, and values."
"The Persistent Effects of Peru's Mining Mita", Dell (2010) shows that a forced labor system in Peru from 1573 to 1812 lowered present-day household consumption by 25% and increased childhood stunting by 6%. She also attributes the persistence to institutions.
It sounds promising for people working on economic development that past events can have huge effects on the long-term future, but there are some caveats...
Economic history projects do not typically have the randomized controlled trials, high-quality data, or huge data sets used in other branches of economics, making the "persistence" literature less credible. "Colonial Origins" has been controversial on empirical grounds
Even if these papers are right that really bad things in the past had persistent effects, that doesn't imply that doing good things things today will have persistent effects. "Critical junctures" may be in the past, an idea that Acemoglu et. al. (2008) touch on.
We should not expect a lot of persistence if there is an an overall trend towards convergence, where poorer countries tend to grow faster.
At the country level, poverty just doesn't seem to be very persistent. See "Do Poverty Traps Exist?".
My personal view is that if we improve present-day global health and development, we probably won't change the far future much, but there's a decent chance we would. There is empirical proof-of-concept backing for "persistence" and theoretical justification in the form of models of multiple equilibria and self-reinforcing cycles. I'd love to see more development economists and economic historians studying the conditions needed for persistence.