I'm glad you're doing work on this - it's a potentially very valuable project. I think we could go about it in a different way though. There's a risk of analysis paralysis in trying to find the optimal location in advance so that we can commit to something as big as buying and converting property. Instead we could just find the people who are likely to move somewhere cheaper in the next few months (I'm one of those people) and see if we can do it together. We might also want to drop the framing of it as 'A new EA hub' at this stage because that makes the task seem big, important, and intimidating. Let's just experiment with some locations and see how it goes. We'll learn something about living abroad and we'll be able to observe existing coworking and coliving setups to see what works.

I'd be interested in hearing arguments for why a hub in a low-cost country would be better than a new hub in a developed country with more potential EAs (e.g. Australia, the East Coast).

Might make sense to get a bunch of people to precommit to coming if at least N people come, like the Free State Project.

In the first instance, you mightn't necessarily need a lot of people to come, but if you wanted to grow it to 20 or more, that would be an interesting way to grow interest.

Apparently this paper found that 36% of successful changes in behavior were associated with a move to a new place (nearly three times the rate associated with unsuccessful changes)? So it might be worthwhile for participants in this project to plan out some habits they wish to form in the new place in advance of the move? Relevant thread.

I've been thinking of writing an article on the EA Forum for a couple months now, something of a companion article to this one, about cities which have the potential to become EA hubs. This is a different angle of attack than the thinking which has been poured into EA hubs which have are explicitly researched for their low cost-of-living potential. There are a few cities around the world which have the potential to become EA hubs in the same way Oxford or SF are, even if they're not as advantageous as ones in countries with drastically lower living costs. Still, though, it can't be anything but useful to be at least be aware of these options. Other things being equal, as an ecosystem, if EA could or would benefit from a greater diversity of hubs to set roots in, it's good to be aware of that.

AFAICT, the extant, bona fide EA hubs are:

• Oxford (with offshoots in London and Cambridge)
• Basel, Switzerland
• the Bay Area (albeit a large area where their are nuclei around Stanford, Berkeley/Oakland, and San Francisco itself, each of which are at least 1-hour transport away from each other)
• Melbourne

Other potential EA hubs include:

• Boston, Massachusettes
• Vancouver, Canada (where I live)
• Berlin
• Seattle, Washington

I imagine there are a few more which would qualify. Let me explain what I mean by 'qualify'. Ideally, what I would do is determine what are the common factors between SF, Oxford, Basel, and Melbourne. These would be factors that would, if not directly precipitate the generation of an EA hub, be highly correlated with its rise. Then, I would figure out which other cities share those factors, and speculate/encourage those cities to develop other common factors, such that their potential to become an EA hub is more robust. Such factors include:

• at least one, and usually multiple, EA organizations
• the organization of at least one, often multiple, local meetups which themselves sport ~10 regular attendees, outside of the local EA orgs
• sharehousing between EAs, or otherwise factors which facilitate incidental social cohesion among otherwise professional relationships
• a local culture amenable to either startups and/or social entrepreneurship, such that the city itself as an attractor for the sorts of people drawn as EA, and the city can feed the growth of the EA hub.

The biggest problem here is that whatever it is in the culture of hip cities which draw socially conscientious millenials, that lends themselves to becoming EA hubs, also draws enough people that it makes them very expensive. London is the most expensive city in England, and I'm guessing for a university town, Oxford isn't too cheap either. SF is the most expensive city in the U.S. I hear Melbourne is one of the most expensive cities in Australia. Vancouver is the most expensive city in Canada. Maybe only second to New York, Boston is one of the costliest cities to live in on the American east coast. I know little of Basel, but based on the above, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's expensive to live in.

I think i know what's going on. EA hubs tend to be cities full of people open-minded to experimenting with cutting-edge innovation. Effective altruism is just the mindset of 'cutting-edge thinking' applied to philanthropy and do-gooding. To get a city with cutting-edge innovation and risk-neutral young people, though, comes with high costs of living. This isn't exactly a scientific theory of how EA hubs rise and fall, but I think the relationships here are pretty clear-cut.

The curse of founding a new EA hub is that the places, the local cultures, in which one would ideally want to seed an EA hub are also the most expensive ones. If an exodus of EAs moved to a new city in the developing world, bereft of the 'startup culture' mindset, we might have to build that culture from the ground up, all by ourselves. That seems like it would have high fixed costs, and be very hard to do.

Totally in favour of exploring this sapce. I've been paying attention to the experience of EAs who are from or who have lived in South American countries over the last couple years, and there seem some promising points of inquiry. I've written down what I think about opportunities in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile below.

Argentina

Just pointing out that after I heard about how easy it is to acquire visas to work in Argentina, I'm far from the only one that thought this would be a natural candidate for a low-cost EA hub. I notice in the spreadsheet you mentioned a major disadvantage might be economic/political instability in Argentina. I know things tanked there in the late '90s, and I don't know how things are know. Definitely worth researching more to develop a model of how problematic it may or may not be over the course of several years. I'm guessing with Argentina EA could send a contingent of, say, a dozen EAs willing to try living there as expats for a couple years, letting us know how it goes and getting better 'inside view' data on how likely catastrophic disruption to their lifestyles seems, and then reporting back to us. I'm aware the whole point of an EA hub is to prior determine a great location for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of EAs to lay roots there for at least several years on end. However, the potential advantages of Argentina, presuming there isn't a political/economic crisis there, seem to me to great to write off. So, I think it'd be worth trialing with an experiment amongst ourselves. Alternatively, EA could develop an action plan such that if things get hairy in Argentina we can move back to other countries quickly, such that we haven't laid down roots or sunk costs in Argentina that make it hard to leave.

Brazil

Diego Caleiro, Joao Fabiano, and Leo Arruda are three guys I know who are or were highly involved in IEFHR (Instituto por Eticas, Futuro de Humanidae y Racionalidae; English: Institute for Ethics, Future of Humanity and Rationality) in Brazil. The fact there is an EA org in Brazil might be a good way to get a foot in the door. Diego Caleiro is himself an open-minded guy who is in favour of independent researchers in effective altruism receiving funding So, I think he'd be open to EAs being hired by IEFHR as employees, and then getting paid to do whatever work they would normally do. This might be a way for several dozen EAs to work out of Brazil. Of course, the money would need to be doanted to IEFHR for this to happen, which might be a minor technicality. I don't know if donations to IEFHR from outside Brazil would be tax-deductible in the country of origin, so one could do a CBA of the transaction costs of donating to a Brazilian org instead of, say, an American or British EA org, plus the costs of moving and getting settled in Brazil for a given individual, minus the reduction in living costs. If the sign came out highly positive, it might be worth people moving to Brazil to work at IEFHR.

I don't actually know how open IEFHR would be to this sort of arrangement. At most, I would think they would want concessions from other EA orgs or the EA community-at-large to plug their preferred causes, e.g., far-future ethics and FHI-style cause prioritization. Generally, I imagine they're pretty open to free cooperation with the rest of EA.

The bottleneck here might just be the bureaucracy of Brazil. I know the folks who run the Charity Science Foundation of Canada (CSFC), the legal parent organization of EA orgs Charity Science (CS), Charity Entrepreneurship (separate project/org run by the founding team of CS)and .impact. It's legally incorporated as a foundation, as opposed to a run-of-the-mill registered charity. The upshot is that having the legal status of 'charitable *foundation' as opposed to just any 'charity' is that certain advantages are granted. Some of these might be ease of hiring foreigners for your organization. For example, I'm aware that, combined, the three organizations headed under CSFC have helped acquire Canadian visas for, and hired, 6 foreigners (3 Brits, 3 Americans).

I know the status of 'charitable foundation' exists in the United States and the U.K. as well. I don't know if Brazil has a similar set-up. If IEFHR doesn't have an equivalent/comparable status of 'charitable foundation' in Brazil, it might be exceedingly difficult for them to get foreigner-EAs approved as employees, no matter how much money is moved through IEFHR. I honestly don't know enough about civil services in Brazil to comment. I'll ask Leo about this.

Anyway, if you, Eric, yourself, want to get more info on the potential of using IEFHR as a lever to make an EA hub in Brazil, I recommend talking to Joao. IIRC, he's currently a fellow at FHI working with Anders Samberg. You should be able to meet in-person, or Skype, with him pretty easily.

Chile

Brienne Yudkowsky spent a winter in Chile. The rationale was more or less that anywhere she wanted to live in the U.S. was sufficiently temperate and cloudy there was too-high a chance she'd be hit by seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and she wouldn't tolerate that another year, so she spent a few months in the tropics. I recall Eliezer once mused on FB, other things being equal, and the Bay Area not having comparative advantages for EA work, for everyone to migrate to a country like Chile to form a new EA/rationalist hub. I generally gather Brienne had a positive experience in Chile. I don't know more, but you can ask her yourself.

This is interesting. What do you think about including in the consideration set the ability for this community's location to have a positive impact on the world? For example, moving to a poor area in need of external income or an area where westerns have a negative bias? There could be some secondary and tertiary benefits to this community.