I do too, FWIW. I read this post and its comments because I'm considering donating to/through ACE, and I wanted to understand exactly what ACE did and what the context was. Reading through a sprawling, nearly 15k-word discussion mostly about social justice and discourse norms was not conducive to that goal.

My point is more "context matters," even if you're talking about a specific skill like programming, and that the contexts that generated the examples in this post may be meaningfully different from the contexts that EA organizations are working in.

I don't necessarily disagree with anything you and Max have written; it's just a difference of emphasis, especially when it comes to advising people who are making hiring decisions.

Let me try a different framing and see if that helps. Economic factors mediate how individual task performance translates into firm success. In industries with winner-takes-most effects, small differences in task performance cause huge differences in payoffs. "The Economics of Superstars" is a classic 1981 paper on this. But many industries aren't like that.

Knowing your industry tells you how important it is to hire the right people. If you're hiring someone to write an economics textbook (an example from the "Superstars" paper), you'd better hire the best textbook-writer you can find, because almost no one buys the tenth-best economics textbook. But if you're running a local landscaping company, you don't need the world's best landscaper. And if your industry has incumbent "superstar" firms protected by first-mover advantages, economies of scale, or network effects, it may not matter much who you hire.

So in what kind of "industry" are the EA organizations you want to help with hiring? Is there some factor that multiplies or negates small individual differences in task performance?

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.

I enjoyed the article on development economics. As a failed academic development economist and current private-sector economist, I wish I had read this before I started a PhD. The article has a lot of useful info, and nothing in it seems blatantly inaccurate. I have some additional thoughts, especially on being an academic development economist who does very “micro” work assessing interventions. I don’t have experience with other flavors of development economics.

Soft skills: This work requires local knowledge (as the article mentions), management skills, sometimes language skills, and willingness to spend a lot of time traveling (as the article mentions) and on the phone. A lot of the development economists I’ve met have been “people people” and good managers in addition to being good at technical work. They need to hire and supervise people to do rote tasks in foreign countries, such as taking surveys; hire both local and foreign research assistants; collaborate with charities, governments, and NGOs; and do all of the teaching, presenting, and reviewing that most academics do. Even if you are from a developing country, it’s a challenge to organize projects that are in a different country from where you are studying or working. Researchers tend to have multiple projects going on at once, often in different countries. If you want to do this kind of work, I strongly recommend working for an organization like J-PAL or IPA that will give you hands-on experience.

Comparison to other subfields in economics, and collaboration: The ProbablyGood article says that development economics may be a good path for someone who is interested in economics, but wants to work in a more collaborative way. I don’t quite agree with this framing. Most academic economics research is collaborative, and increasingly so; it’s not “writing papers alone in offices their whole career.” But in development, you work with more people and at greater geographic distances. That was a main reason that, while I’ve contributed to a few development economics projects, becoming a PI was not for me. I found the prospect of supervising field employees in a far-away country really stressful.

Longtermism: I don’t think we know whether improving global health and development now will have a big effect on the long-term future. Development economists are the perfect people to answer that question! If someone receives a gift of $1000, what are the long-term effects of that? Does it help them escape a poverty trap, send their kids to a better school, and lead to more innovation and political stability? Does it increase or decrease fertility? Or does the effect disappear within a year? What about macroeconomic interventions and large-scale policy changes, like austerity or increasing funding to schools? There’s been work on all of these questions, but I love to see a lot more.

So I really do not see what could justify another brand with presumably similar production costs selling almost identical products for 5 times the price.

The production costs are not similar and the products are not identical. Compare a Louis Vuitton bag to a cheap knockoff up close, and you'll see that the authentic bag has a much nicer-feeling fabric, clean and consistent stitching stitching, metal rather than plastic fasteners, more aesthetic placement of the "LV" logo, a lack of "slouch", an overall nice shape, and sturdy, symmetrical handles. You may not care about these features, and I don't, but luxury consumers do. The authentic bag will typically last longer, and to achieve this level of quality, it needs to be made in a many-step process in the US, France, or Spain, where labor costs are high. If you're not sinking that kind of money into craftsmanship, you're competing with Walmart's LV lookalikes, not LV itself.

And as far as risk is concerned, I will use Printful and Etsy for the MVP, and they only charge fees when products are purchased, so the financial risk is literally zero. The only thing I may lose is time.

This sounds like a good low-risk idea to me. My main reservation would be that e-commerce return rates are high -- supposedly around 30% overall, but probably much higher for apparel (since you can get the wrong size). This is a special difficulty for made-to-order and/or low-volume businesses that can't easily resell returned items.

I have worked in e-commerce pricing BTW; happy to answer any questions about the industry.

>"Overall I'm leaning towards the view that "don't follow your passion" and "do high-leverage intellectual work" are good pieces of advice in isolation which work badly in combination: I suspect that passion about a field is a very important component of doing world-class research in it."

This fits my personal experience doing an economics PhD extremely well. I never had a true passion for economics; I thought I might be a good fit for being an academic researcher because "I find lots of things interesting", "I did well in classes", and "I'm truly passionate about improving other people's lives." In retrospect, I didn't have nearly enough passion for economics itself, and that lowered the quality of my work. Doing good empirical research requires a lot: Patience; creativity; accepting your colleagues' indifference, since no one needs  your work; pestering people for data access; trying things that are not likely to work; reading a lot in the hope that inspiration will strike; and spending a lot of your spare time thinking about work. 

This is all psychologically difficult if you don't have a deep passion for the subject matter. (Or, like some successful researchers, passion for prestigious appointments and publications.) One of my college professors "joked" that his department didn't like hiring people with hobbies. When asked what he did for fun, an MIT physics professor said he said he thinks about physics that won't publish well. An economics professor advised first-year grad students to think about economics everywhere and most of the time in order to come up with ideas for projects. Some empirical economists read bone-dry trade publications hoping to find a new data source or policy change to study.

All of this should have warned me that without an exceptionally deep passion for any particular field, I was not cut out to be a great researcher. When you're unhappy, It's hard to be creative, and without a manager or real deadlines, it's hard to put in long hours or push yourself to do boring work. I may have been able to sustain a career as a mediocre researcher, but I don't think my work would have been likely to be impactful.