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This is: Can we drive development at scale? An interim update on economic growth work, published by smclare, AidanGoth on the AI Alignment Forum.
Disclaimer: This is an interim report and the views expressed here do not represent "house views" of our employer Founders Pledge
Introduction
Global health and development is still arguably the most popular EA cause. For example, payouts from the Global Health and Development EA Fund comprise 45 percent of the total amount of money granted from EA Funds. Almost all of this spending supports so-called “randomista”-type development: direct interventions that have strong experimental evidence of effectiveness. This allocation is justified by the claim that these interventions are the most cost-effective way to improve the lives of people in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Earlier this year, John Halstead and Hauke Hillebrandt published an EA Forum post that argued this is likely mistaken. In “Growth and the case against randomista development” they write that past poverty alleviation has overwhelmingly been achieved by economic growth, not direct interventions. They argue that the magnitude of the gains of growth are so large that interventions which can increase growth rates are likely more cost-effective even if there is less evidence of their effectiveness or they have a low chance of success.
The post generated a lot of discussion and commenters raised several important potential objections. These included:
Growth work is not neglected and there are no good marginal funding opportunities
Economic growth does not make people much happier
Economic growth does not help the poorest of the poor
We are clueless about the causes of growth
Implementing better economic policies faces political economy challenges that EA funding cannot overcome
Over the past few months, we have spent between 100 and 150 hours looking deeper into these challenges to try to determine the likelihood of finding concrete, cost-effective funding opportunities to promote economic growth. We conducted a brief literature review, but given the breadth of the subject matter and the uncertainty of the research question we relied heavily on conversations with experts. After about 30 such interviews, we’ve decided to stop looking for concrete funding opportunities for now. So far we haven’t found any growth-focused policies or programs which experts agree would be highly-valuable to support. We think good opportunities probably exist, but identifying them will require thorough evaluations of potential funding opportunities. Since evaluating policy-focused interventions requires considerable investment from both us and representatives from the organisation under investigation, we’re deprioritizing this project for now. We’re posting this wrap-up to share what we’ve learned, get feedback on our current conclusions, and stimulate further discussion on this important topic.
Is growth work neglected?
A key question we looked into was whether or not research and advocacy into economic growth is relatively neglected compared to direct, randomista-style interventions. A complication here is that almost all development programs, including randomista programs, affect growth at some level. This makes it difficult to separate out funding for the policy-focused work we’re interested in. For example, at first glance the International Growth Centre seems like it would be a relevant funding opportunity with a large budget. After further investigation, though, our impression is that the IGC’s work is more in the randomista school.[1]
If one were to simply add up all the money multilateral organisations like the World Bank, Official Development Assistance (ODA) agencies, and large NGOs spend on work they classify as “economic growth”, it would be a large amount—much more than $1...
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