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This is: An introduction to global priorities research for economists, published by DavidBernard on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
It’s difficult for aspiring economists to understand how they can contribute to global priorities research. This post shares a syllabus and extended literature for an introduction to global priorities for economists, provides background on the development of the syllabus, its use for a reading group, and advice to others who want to use it. The syllabus was designed with graduate students in mind, but advanced undergraduates will likely be able to get the relevant points from almost all papers. We hope this will be useful for aspiring economists who want to contribute to global priorities research but don’t know where to start.
Link to syllabus
Link to core readings folder
Link to other EA/GPR syllabi
For those who are just interested in economics literature relevant to global priorities research just follow the link to the syllabus above and ignore the rest of the post. If you want more information about what purpose the syllabus serves, how it came to be, and advice for using it for your own reading groups, read on. It probably makes most sense to read the syllabus alongside the 'Using the syllabus' section. I also recommend the generic Reading group guide for EA groups. Please contact me in the comments section or privately if you have any questions about running your own reading group based on this syllabus.
Thanks to Aaron Gertler, Rossa O'Keeffe-O'Donovan, Philip Trammell, and Duncan Webb for feedback. Opinions and errors remain my own.
Motivation
Global priorities research (GPR) is concerned with the question ‘If our aim is to do the most good possible, from a totally impartial perspective, with limited resources, what should we do?’. Two fundamental fields in this endeavour are economics and philosophy. Since its inception, the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) has made progress in GPR research itself and the instrumental goal of developing GPR as an academic field.
However, this progress is currently lopsided, with much more progress being made in philosophy. Most staff at GPI are philosophers (but they have recently hired their first two postdoctoral economists). All of the papers currently in the GPI Working Paper Series are philosophy papers (but they aim to add ~5 economics papers soon). A comment in a relevant EA Forum post: “One economics student told me that when reading the GPI research agenda, the economics parts read like it was written by philosophers”, also suggests that the economics side of GPR is less clear than the philosophy side (but the research agenda is currently being refreshed). Numerous academic EA/GPR courses have been run in philosophy departments, but as far as I can tell, none have been run in economics.
The result of this state of affairs is that the budding philosopher is easily able to understand what the core texts, seminal papers and cutting edge articles are for philosophical global priorities research, while the budding economist is left with not much to go on. The philosopher has plenty of senior role models and potential supervisors to look to while the economist is unsure who they can speak to about their wacky cause prioritisation ideas. The subfields which GPR philosophy mostly relies on are ethics, decision theory and epistemology, while GPR-relevant economics is spread across a wide variety of subfields, relying on theory and empirics, and normative and positive approaches.
The aim of this syllabus is to help partially solve these issues, by providing a framework and literature to introduce people to global priorities research through published articles in and around the economics literature. It is not a reading list for GPI’s current research priorities. It has a broader scope than GPI’s r...
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