When you’re working in highly socially valuable sectors like research or some entrepreneurship, it seems to me that the two are roughly comparable, with big error bars.
I have the same intuition, but I would be interested in hearing about whether you have object level reasons for thinking so.
One point to note with Carl’s 30x figure—that’s only when comparing the short-run welfare impact of a GDP boost with a transfer to GiveDirectly. If you also care about the long-run effects, then it becomes much less clear.
Quoting from an email that I wrote
A standard reply to “developing world stuff beats developed world stuff” is “but there are greater flow-through benefits from helping people in the developed world.” This is clearly true to some extent: increasing the productivity of an American who makes $50k/year by 1% increases world GDP by 100x as much as increasing the productivity of an African who makes $500/year by 1%, and assuming that this increase is uniformly distributed percentagewise, using the 30x figure from Carl’s blog post, you get a (100/30) greater increase in log of income worldwide.
But there’s a general a priori case for the flow-through effects being priced in: people are willing to pay for productivity boosts, industries are willing to pay for productivity boosts, etc.
I would be interested in seeing more analysis of flow-through effects of interventions in the developed world: when it comes to general efforts to increase economic growth / tech speedup, I don’t see an object level case for there being disproportionate flow-through effects coming from working in the developed world (though I still give the possibility substantial weight on priors).
Thanks for all of these thoughts
I have the same intuition, but I would be interested in hearing about whether you have object level reasons for thinking so.
Quoting from an email that I wrote
I would be interested in seeing more analysis of flow-through effects of interventions in the developed world: when it comes to general efforts to increase economic growth / tech speedup, I don’t see an object level case for there being disproportionate flow-through effects coming from working in the developed world (though I still give the possibility substantial weight on priors).