On donation timelines, and why 2050 will be harder than 2016
A continuation of an ongoing argument with Howie Lempel, then a researcher at the Open Philanthropy Project (OPP) — the grantmaking organization that advises billionaire Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna on where to direct their giving. Within effective altruism circles in 2016, there was a live debate over whether OPP should spend down its capital on the best opportunities currently visible (“giving now”) or invest and wait for better future opportunities (“giving later”). Alyssa makes the case that the “give later” scenario implicitly assumes a successful, world-famous, sclerotic OPP of 2050 — and that big organizations in that position have a much harder time taking new ideas seriously than small ones do today.
I realized there’s a part of my model which I haven’t really articulated yet.
To start off, if we’re talking about donating 30 or 40 or 50 years out, there’s a bunch of scenarios we’re implicitly excluding: first, all scenarios where everything is so good that donations become of little importance; second, all scenarios which are so disastrous that donations are meaningless (human extinction, nuclear war, global pandemic, etc.); third, all scenarios where we personally are incapacitated; eg. China conquers the world and only Chinese citizens have serious influence anymore, or we’re all hit by trucks, or we all get too old and haven’t passed on important knowledge, etc.
These scenarios all have small probabilities in 2016, but if you add up small numbers over decades, I think they get pretty substantial. But since no one really has good estimates here, let’s just exclude those worlds a priori.
As I’ve argued on Facebook, I think it’s pretty unlikely that OPP (or anyone else) could identify areas with AMF-like or better marginal returns, put billions of dollars into them over decades, not have anything go wrong (ie., the expected benefits really happen), and then just run out of money. Even if the funding gap is really that large (which IMO isn’t super likely, but let’s just assume), success of that magnitude would make attracting other donors really easy.
Buuuut, in this scenario, there will probably be other opportunities circa 2050, ones that are either infeasible now or that nobody’s noticed yet. Eg. if we think historically about the best investments for a rich person in 1925, then by 1970, most of them (smallpox, antibiotics, nuclear fission, making decolonization not a disaster, etc.) would be obsolete. However, it seems like 1970 has a new suite of opportunities that (collectively) aren’t dramatically worse than the 1925 opportunities. These new options reduce the impetus to spend lots of money speeding up progress in 1925.
But on the third hand, as people and organizations get older, and as organizations get larger, more famous, and become responsible for more money, there’s a strong tendency for them to sclerotify and become resistant to changing course. Eg., at EAG, I had the idea that online dating sites were a good opportunity for maximizing happiness per dollar, as (like Sendwave or e-cigarettes) they have big positive externalities. That’s an off-the-cuff speculation, but let’s just assume it’s correct. Right now, if I wanted OPP to look into that, I’d basically just have to email Holden, ask for a meeting, and convince him and a few other OPP staff that I’m right. However, if we’re talking about identifying new opportunities in 2050, it probably gets much, much harder. Given the assumed scenario parameters, the world then looks roughly like: Holden and Elie are both around 70 years old, and Dustin Moskovitz is in his mid-sixties. Assuming they haven’t retired, they’re probably thinking about it, and there are likely several people under them wanting to fill their shoes when they do.
Holden, Dustin, and GiveWell/OPP are world-famous, since they’re the people who eradicated malaria, or cracked the protein folding problem or passed major immigration reform or <whatever the big successes are>. They might not be A-list celebrities, but they’ll probably at least be in the same range as Norman Borlaug or Francis Crick.
OPP probably has hundreds of full-time employees, at least. Many of them will likely have been in the same job, researching the same thing or evaluating the same organizations, for a decade or more. Holden, or whoever’s in charge if he’s retired, probably has a full-time personal assistant and a professional PR spokesman.
Right now, the OPP staff are in a pretty unusual position, where they have influence over billions of dollars in spending but aren’t deluged with meeting requests. In this scenario, that doesn’t last very long. Big success will attract an endless stream of politicians, big company CEOs, event organizers, celebrities, journalists, critics, honest charities wanting grants, dishonest charities who cause trouble so you’ll pay them to go away, etc., all wanting a slice of people’s time. Especially the executive director, especially anyone with decision-making power, and especially anyone who’s previously demonstrated ability (eg. someone who started a very successful program ten years ago).
In that world, the priors are heavily in favor of it being hard to get things done, especially things which imply big updates or radical course changes. In some sense, these are Mercedes problems — they only appear when OPP has already achieved much of its agenda. Normally, it’s not worth worrying about those, since unless lots of other things go right, they’ll never even come up. But any world where you can’t take a good opportunity because there’s over $10 billion in better opportunities is inherently a Mercedes world. Here’s a relevant essay by Paul Graham: The Power of the Marginal .