Other people have already replied well to the central point of this post, so I’ll say something different: I think you misunderstand the relationship between Good Ventures and Open Phil. You frame it as:
EA finances stopped growing because Good Ventures stopped growing
Good Ventures stopped growing because the wills and whims of billionaires are inscrutable?
This isn’t how it works. Disclaimer: I have worked for both GiveWell and Open Philanthropy in the past, but it’s been more than two years since I was involved at all and also I was mostly, like, an intern-level person the whole time. But to be safe with confidentiality stuff I’ll just draw on public information. From Wikipedia:
Good Ventures plans to spend out the majority of its money before the death of Moskovitz and Tuna, rather than be a foundation in perpetuity. Most of the money for the foundation comes from the stock Moskovitz obtained as a Facebook co-founder. They are working closely with charity evaluator GiveWell to determine how to spend their money wisely. At GiveWell’s recommendation, Good Ventures is not currently spending a significant share of the couple’s wealth, but they plan to up their spending to 5% of the foundation’s wealth every year once GiveWell has built sufficient capacity to help allocate that level of money.
The key points here being:
Good Ventures is spending at way less than full capacity because GiveWell/Open Phil* told them to. They could clearly be spending more.
GiveWell/Open Phil told them not to spend more because they didn’t know how to usefully spend that money.
Good Ventures is a foundation. This means** it has an endowment funded by Moskovitz’s personal fortune, analogous to the Gates Foundation or the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. So it doesn’t really make sense to talk about a foundation ‘growing’. I guess the endowment can grow if it’s accumulating interest faster than it’s being spent down, but that’s different from what I think you meant.
Bottom line being, funding from Good Ventures has never been the bottleneck when it comes to money moved. The bottleneck is knowing how to usefully allocate that money. It’s not as simple as “you can always give more money to bednets”, because Open Phil / GiveWell / Good Ventures doesn’t like to provide more than 50% of the funding for any organization. (The reason being that there are a bunch of bad things that happen if an organization becomes primarily dependent on any one funder; I didn’t find a specific GW/OP blog post on this but I can elaborate if someone asks.)
ETA: Two relevant blog posts by Holden here and here.
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*Yes I know GiveWell and Open Phil are separate now but I don’t think that’s relevant to my point
**I’m not an expert on what exactly a foundation is so this is just my sense; people can correct me if I’m wrong
It’s not as simple as “you can always give more money to bednets”, because Open Phil / GiveWell / Good Ventures doesn’t like to provide more than 50% of the funding for any organization.
They also think they can find more valuable things to spend the money on than bednets and GiveDirectly. (Or at least, they think this is likely enough to justify not spending it all now.)
Other people have already replied well to the central point of this post, so I’ll say something different: I think you misunderstand the relationship between Good Ventures and Open Phil. You frame it as:
This isn’t how it works. Disclaimer: I have worked for both GiveWell and Open Philanthropy in the past, but it’s been more than two years since I was involved at all and also I was mostly, like, an intern-level person the whole time. But to be safe with confidentiality stuff I’ll just draw on public information. From Wikipedia:
The key points here being:
Good Ventures is spending at way less than full capacity because GiveWell/Open Phil* told them to. They could clearly be spending more.
GiveWell/Open Phil told them not to spend more because they didn’t know how to usefully spend that money.
Good Ventures is a foundation. This means** it has an endowment funded by Moskovitz’s personal fortune, analogous to the Gates Foundation or the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. So it doesn’t really make sense to talk about a foundation ‘growing’. I guess the endowment can grow if it’s accumulating interest faster than it’s being spent down, but that’s different from what I think you meant.
Bottom line being, funding from Good Ventures has never been the bottleneck when it comes to money moved. The bottleneck is knowing how to usefully allocate that money. It’s not as simple as “you can always give more money to bednets”, because Open Phil / GiveWell / Good Ventures doesn’t like to provide more than 50% of the funding for any organization. (The reason being that there are a bunch of bad things that happen if an organization becomes primarily dependent on any one funder; I didn’t find a specific GW/OP blog post on this but I can elaborate if someone asks.)
ETA: Two relevant blog posts by Holden here and here.
--
*Yes I know GiveWell and Open Phil are separate now but I don’t think that’s relevant to my point
**I’m not an expert on what exactly a foundation is so this is just my sense; people can correct me if I’m wrong
They also think they can find more valuable things to spend the money on than bednets and GiveDirectly. (Or at least, they think this is likely enough to justify not spending it all now.)
Oh yeah that too. Rob with the assist!