We usually act as though the future matters less than today. Many institutions apply "discount rates" to the future as a way to formalize that view. But strange things happen if we assume even a 1% annual discount rate for social benefits. This would mean that saving a life this year is as valuable as saving roughly two lives in the year 2100 — and is also as valuable as saving more than one million lives in the year 3400.
This paper examines the arguments for applying social discount rates, argues that none of them work, and calls for treating the future as though it matters as much as the present. (35 mins.)
Political institutions generally operate on 2-to-4-year timescales, which aren’t long enough to address global issues (as the issue of climate change has shown). This talk analyzes sources of political short-termism and describes institutional reforms to align government incentives with the interests of all generations. (Video - 30 mins.)
A researcher from the Global Priorities Institute explains how investing resources, instead of spending them immediately, can allow us to do much more good. (Podcast - 2.5 hours)
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts:
* Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they do
* NEST is an opinionated ideas-fi...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...