All of sbehmer's Comments + Replies

My sense is that most historic social reforms also followed path A), e.g. women's suffrage, child labor, civil rights. In the UK, cross-party support was also critical to abolishing slavery, while in the US, where abolition was more politicized, it took a Civil War.

As a non-expert, this is surprising to me. And I'm not sure that this applies to the US context. I think it's useful to distinguish between party polarization (democrats vs republicans) and ideological polarization (liberals vs conservatives). Almost any reform passed in the 1950s-1970s probably... (read more)

Finally, I'm struggling to see how and where this is decision relevant for people or organizations - but that's an entirely different set of complaints about how to do analyses.

One way in which it's decision relevant for people considering how much to prioritize extinction risk mitigation. Arguments for extinction risk mitigation being overwhelmingly important often rely on the assumption that the expected value of the future is positive (and astronomically large). A seemingly sensible way to get evidence on whether the future is likely to be good is to lo... (read more)

On your point about activism on issues other than climate change: When you say "short to medium term", what kind of time scale are you thinking of? I would guess that you mean "the next ten years or so", but I want to make sure. Sometimes around here people use "medium term" to mean the next hundred years.

Hi Sanjay, thanks for the comments.

On fiduciary duty: good to hear your thoughts on this. It looks like I drew the wrong conclusion from the evidence. Would you agree with the following statement instead: 

Fiduciary duty seems to be an obstacle, and could be significantly raising the costs of shareholder activism. That said, it doesn't seem to make the costs prohibitively high. Significant shareholder activism still seems to be possible under current laws and norms, at least on climate change.

That seems right to me given the evidence. I should say that... (read more)

Good question, and I haven't been very clear on this partially because I don't know much about it.

That said, I do think it's common for nonprofits to have lots of money invested in the stock market. This is what philanthropic foundations do. Examples include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ($38B in assets) or the Ford Foundation ($16B). Universities are other examples of nonprofits with huge investments in the stock market (the Harvard Endowment is $53.2B).

Within EA, I think the two major foundations are Good Ventures (which funds Open Philanthropy's... (read more)

Thanks for the comment! I tried to address this capital funding concern with the following paragraph in the post:

For reference, a fund of $10B (which I would expect to be around the amount that Open Philanthropy or FTX already have invested) in the S&P 500 would give about a .025% stake in each of those companies. This would be enough to engage in proxy battles but not to use proxy access. However, if you chose to skew your investments toward smaller (and presumably especially influential) companies, then you could potentially acquire much larger perce

Thanks! Both the Atkinson article and the Sen interview are very interesting. I would like to see some actual data on the teaching of welfare economics/public economics. People seem to agree that it's declined, but I'm not sure I would agree that it has "disappeared" (anecdotally, I know many people who were exposed to models of optimal redistribution during undergrad. Some of these people were exposed through a required course, and others chose to take a public finance elective). My impression that welfare economics teaching is more common at European universities is also just based on anecdotal evidence. Some actual data would be helpful.

This seems like a very good initiative. It's great to see this cause area moving forward.

Now, like some of the other commenters, I'm having some trouble understanding what kind of work IIDM includes. I agree with the earlier comment which said that the framing of IIDM so far has emphasized improving decision-making a lot more than improving institutions. The original 80k article focused mainly on the possibility of correcting cognitive biases (the kind that people would learn about in cognitive science or psychology classes). There was no mention of the la... (read more)

What is the LTFF's position on whether we're currently at an extremely influential time for direct work? I saw that there was a recent grant on research into patient philanthropy, but most of the grants seem to be made from the perspective of someone who thinks that we are at "the hinge of history". Is that true?

This looks great and thanks for posting! One question: how come those other organizations working in this space, who as you note have a track record of success in other countries, haven't expanded to countries like Malawi? In other words, why is lead exposure reduction in Malawi neglected by other actors?

Thanks, this is a very good comment. I mostly cited that article for the literature review, which includes a few papers that argue for a causal connection between learning economics and free-riding. However, I looked into it more today, and it seems like the entire body of work is inconclusive on this question. Here's a more recent literature review on that.

I'll edit that part of the post to be more accurate.

Thanks for the post. One question on the background: is there any data (from the EA survey or elsewhere) about the percentage of EAs who lean towards suffering-focused ethics?

Thanks for the talk and the report. I think this it's a very interesting topic and an important one to work on, given how many socially-minded people seem to care about impact investing.

I have a few more questions in addition to the one about perfectly elastic demand curves:

1. You note that if public markets are efficient then it will take nearly the entire population of investors to divest for the divestment movement to impact stock prices. This seems to make sense: it only takes a small group of socially-neutral investors to drastically increase the... (read more)

Thanks for the reply.

You're right that the paper I posted doesn't present direct evidence. I just thought it was important that in their literature review they claim that prior studies show that demand curves are not perfectly elastic (at least in theory. They aren't citing empirical papers).

On the empirical side, I'm surprised to hear you say that there seems to be agreement that long-run demand curves are perfectly elastic. On page 18 of the founder's pledge report, you seem to say that there is expert disagreement on this, and ... (read more)

It seems like you are fairly confident from your research that impact investing will tend to have little impact in publicly traded markets. I briefly looked into the theoretical literature on this, and I'm not seeing why we should be so confident in that idea. For example, this paper from 2019 claims:

"In general, systematic screening of assets based on investors’ preferences leads to a return premium on the screened assets, in equilibrium, and such return differences cannot be arbitraged away by 'neutral' investors".

They th... (read more)

Thanks for the comment. If differences in careful thinking are the main sources of differences in people's altruistic behavior and those differences can be easily eliminated through informing people about the benefits of thinking carefully, then I agree that the ideas in this post are not very important.

The reason that the second part is relevant is because as long as these differences in careful thinking persist, then it's as if people have differences in values (this is the same as what I said in the essay about how there are a lot of differenc... (read more)

Thanks, it's a very nice article on an important topic. If you're interested, there's a small literature in political economy called "political selection" (here's an older survey article) . As far as I know they don't focus specifically on the extreme lower tail of bad leaders, but they do discuss how different institutional features can lead to different types of people gaining power.

First, the only strong claim that I'm trying to make in the post is that the standard EA advice in this setting is to free-ride. Free-riding is not necessarily irrational or immoral. In the section "Working to not Destroy Cooperation" I argue that it's possible that this sort of free-riding will make the world worse, but that is more speculative.

As far as who the other players are in the climate change example, I was thinking of it as basically everyone else in the world who has some interest in preventing climate change, but the most i... (read more)

I'd be up for being convinced otherwise – and maybe the model with log returns you mention later could do that. If you think otherwise, could you explain the intuition behind it?

The more general model captured the idea that there are almost always gains from cooperation between those looking to do good. It doesn't show, however, that those gains are necessarily large relative to the costs of building cooperation (including opportunity costs). I'm not sure what the answer is to that.

Here's one line of reasoning which makes me thi... (read more)

I'd still agree that we should factor in cooperation, but my intuition is then that it's going to be a smaller consideration than neglect of future generations, so more about tilting things around the edges, and not being a jerk, rather than significantly changing the allocation.

For now, I don't think any major changes in decisions should be made based on this. We don't know enough about how difficult it would be to build cooperation and what the gains to cooperation would be. I guess the only concrete recommendation may be to more stro... (read more)

One more example to add here of a cause which may be like a "public good" within the EA community: promoting international cooperation. Many important causes are global public goods (that is, causes which benefit the whole world and thus any one nation has an incentive to free-ride on other nations' contributions), including global poverty, climate change, x-risk reduction, and animal welfare. I know that FHI already has some research on building international cooperation. I would guess that some EAs who primarily give to global poverty would be willing to shift funding towards building international cooperation if some EAs who normally give to AI safety do the same.

I agree with your intuition that with what a "cooperative" cause prioritization might look like. Although I do think a lot more work would need to be done to formalize this. I also think it may not make sense to use cooperative cause prioritization: if everyone else always acts non-cooperatively, you should too.

I'm actually pretty skeptical of the idea that EA tends to fund causes which are widely valued by people as a whole. It could be true, but it seems like it would be a very convenient coincidence. EA seems to be made up of people with ... (read more)

Thanks a lot for the comment. Here are a few points:

1. You're right that the simple climate change example it won't always be a prisoner's dilemma. However, I think that's more due to the fact that I assumed constant returns to scale for all three causes. At the bottom of this write-up I have an example with three causes that all have log returns. As long as both funders value the causes positively and don't have identical valuations, a pareto improvement is possible through cooperation (unless I'm making a mistake in the proo... (read more)

Thanks for the clarification. I apologize for making it sound as if 80k specifically endorsed not cooperating.

Thanks for the comment. First, I'd like to point out that I think there's a good chance that the collective action problem within EA isn't so bad because, as I mentioned in the post, there has been a fairly large emphasis on cooperating with others within EA. It's when interacting with people outside of EA that I think we're acting non-cooperatively.

However, it's still worth discussing whether there are major unsolved collective action problems within EA. I'll give some possible examples here, but note that I'm very ... (read more)

Thanks for that reference! I hadn't come across that before. I think the main difference is that for most of my post I'm considering public goods problems among people who are completely unselfish but have different moral values. But problems also exist when people have identical moral values and some level of selfishness. Paul Christiano's post does a nice job of explaining that case. Milton Friedman also wrote about that problem (specifically, he talked about how poverty alleviation is a public good).

Thanks for the post!

For people especially interested in this topic, it might be useful to know that there's a literature within academic economics that's very similar called "Directed Technical Change". See Acemoglu (2002) for a well-cited reference.

Although that literature has mostly focused on how different technological developments will impact wage inequality, the models used can be applied (I think) to a lot of the topics mentioned in your post.

Thanks for the comment. I agree that R&D costs are very important and can lead to increasing marginal returns. The HIV example is a good one, I think.

I agree that moving to explicit cost-effectiveness modeling is ideal in many situations. However, the arguments that I gave in the post also apply to the use of neglectedness for initial scoping. If neglectedness is a poor predictor of marginal impact, then it will not be useful for initial scoping.

Thanks for the response. I agree that social norms and politics are areas where increasing returns seem likely.

Thanks for this comment! The links were helpful. I have a few comments on your points:

" Empirically, we do see systematic diminishing returns to R&D inputs across fields of scientific and technological innovation "

After reading the introduction of that article you linked, I'm not sure that it has found evidence of diminishing returns to research, or at least that it has found the kind of diminishing returns that we would care about. They find that the number of researchers required to double GDP (or any other measure of output) has increased over time,

Yes, PITi + ui is supposed to be the real importance and tractability. If we knew PITi + ui, then we would know a cause area's marginal impact exactly. But instead we only know PITi.

Thanks for the comment. I agree that considering the marginal value of information is important. This may be another source of diminishing marginal total value (where total value = direct impact + value of information). It seems, though, that this is also subject to the same criticism I outline in the post. If other funders also know that neglected causes give more valuable information at the margin, then the link between neglectedness and marginal value will be weakened. The important step, then, is to determine whether other funders are considering the v