This seems like a good representation of a large portion of my reasons.
I basically expect people without perceived slack to be destroying value whenever they’re engaged in sufficiently high-level intellectual work.If you believe that people in the developed world do in fact wield disproportionate power in the form of money (which is the usual justification for wealth transfers to the developing world poor), then improving the decisionmaking slack of those people seems like an extremely high-leverage intervention. This works for the same reason that real tenure was a good idea, and for the same reason Tocqueville was worried about the destruction of hereditary aristocracy and unaccountable institutions more generally.
This seems like a good representation of a large portion of my reasons.
I basically expect people without perceived slack to be destroying value whenever they’re engaged in sufficiently high-level intellectual work.If you believe that people in the developed world do in fact wield disproportionate power in the form of money (which is the usual justification for wealth transfers to the developing world poor), then improving the decisionmaking slack of those people seems like an extremely high-leverage intervention. This works for the same reason that real tenure was a good idea, and for the same reason Tocqueville was worried about the destruction of hereditary aristocracy and unaccountable institutions more generally.
For more on the incentive effect, see Robin Hanson’s argument for prizes over grants, which is related to the argument for impact certificates (and my argument for something simpler).