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This is: Why Nations Fail and the long-termist view of global poverty, published by Ben_Kuhn on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Within the effective altruism community, people often talk about “long-termist” vs “short-termist” worldviews. The official distinction between the two is that short-termists prioritize problems by how they affect people alive today, while long-termists prioritize problems by how they could affect humanity’s entire future trajectory. In practice, people usually treat this as synonymous with prioritizing either existential risk reduction (if long-termist), or scaling up proven global health interventions (if short-termist).
It’s a bit surprising that each worldview should have exactly one favorite cause area, though. Couldn’t you have short-termist work on existential risk, or long-termist work on global poverty? In reality, these supposedly discrete worldviews seem more like correlated clusters of various different beliefs:
"Short-termist"
High time discount rate
Prefers highly robust “outside view” type arguments
Extrapolates existing effects or trends
Skeptical of prima facie bizarre claims
Focuses on fixing known, concrete problems
Fast feedback loops are critical to making progress
"Long-termist"
Low or no discount rate
More open to “inside view” that this case might be different
Reasons about the future from first principles
Takes weird-sounding ideas more seriously
Focuses on preventing hypothetical, nebulous risks
Fast feedback is helpful, but not the most important thing
It’s understandable why some of these are correlated, but there must be a lot of people who fall through the cracks between the clusters. What if you share short-termists’ skepticism of weird claims and hypothetical risks, but you’re willing to focus on first-principles reasoning and work on a long time scale?
You’d still want to focus on something that’s a problem today, so you’d probably want to work on global poverty. But you’d dismiss GiveWell’s top charities as treating a symptom and not a cause. Why do these countries need charity in the first place? South Korea used to be just as poor as anywhere in Africa, but today it’s incredibly prosperous, while sub-Saharan Africa has made way less progress. If we could move the lowest-growth countries from their current trajectory onto South Korea’s, we’d have done much more than any single malaria-eradication campaign could.
If that were your worldview, you’d really enjoy Why Nations Fail, one of the best attempts I’ve seen at getting a first-principles understanding of what affects countries’ long-term economic growth.
First of all, what is economic growth? It’s when people produce more (or more valuable) stuff with the same effort[1]. The first and least controversial point in Why Nations Fail is that for a nation to keep on doing more with less, its individual citizens need to be incentivized to become more productive. In particular, the state should not set up systems where, whenever someone gets more productive, other people come and take away the extra stuff they produced. Those systems are what the authors call extractive economic institutions, and they include things like slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, roving bandits, guilds, collectivized agriculture, nationalization of private assets, officials requiring bribes, kangaroo courts, banana republics, and other [animal or vegetable] [civic institution].
You might think you could grow your economy under extractive institutions by forcing people to become more productive even if they won’t get to keep the surplus. This does often work in the short term (and the short term can last a surprisingly long time)–for instance, Soviet Russia grew at about 5% annually from 1930-1970,[2] despite having extremely extractive institutions. But ...
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