Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…hen saying that he turned it back on. In fact, you talk to people on the ground there, and he didn’t. So, I’m worried about risk exploding, which is why I wouldn’t have wanted to see it done this way. I think that people who are in my position — and I think people care about effective government — really need to look with some anger and shame about the way in which the people who believe in government basically gave up on government reform and left that to this kind of process. If we think steady-state — when I look at the private sector, it seems to me large foundations, charitable foundations — they’re not better run than smaller ones, on average. If someone says, “Five years from now, we could have a USAID that maybe even gives away more money, is more effective, and total personnel is 300 or 400 people plus AGI,” that seems entirely plausible to me and actually a good goal. Could you imagine supporting a future vision for USAID with 350 employees plus AGI? Way, way less with the US-based contractors, get rid of that part of the law — that’s just domestic wealth, corporate cronyism welfare — and give away more money and have way fewer people. Why isn’t that a good vision? I could imagine that. I think USAID is a weird one to imagine would work like that because I think what you would then get . . . Somebody is actually providing somewhere what USAID provides. If it’s not the contractor that’s out there working in Africa and working in Latin America and working in other places, if you imagine . . . Let me try to flush this vision out. USAID is functionally gutted now, so you’re going to be down at that low level of staffing. Then in 2028, we have something we’re willing to call AGI. You’re basically getting AGI to do the work that GiveWell was doing at a more AGI-like level and evaluate, what is the highest benefit per dollar that we can spend through USAID, and it’s doing a better job of that. Then, of course, that is going to have to be spent out in the real world. Vaccines have to go into people’s arms. HIV, AIDS, retrovirus drugs have to be handed to people. The AGI is not going to do that. Then you have this question of, in this world, are you expanding staffing somewhere? I’m fine with that world. My disagreement with what is happening right now is that I really think it is important to be clear that the disagreement is about whether or not we should be doing aid, not over what aid is effective. They could have gone in and restructured USAID and what it spends money on. They have not articulated any desire to save lives of people in other countries at all. This is where I think this conversation can get a little hiding the ball. I think efficiency is always towards what. What are you trying to make more efficient? There are always values in that, and the language of efficiency is often a way of trying to hide the values. But yes, the question, hypothetically, could you imagine a world where aggressive reform of USAID led to a USAID that was much more laser-focused on public health provision, and maybe some forms of functionally cash-transfer programs, and probably support for certain kinds of government functions in other countries, and administering that required much less administrative staff in Washington and in the US? Absolutely. But that’s a goal you can define and work towards right now. AGI is not even really doing anything in that hypothetical. What is doing something in the hypothetical is having a coherent vision of foreign aid and then a willingness to upend the bureaucracy to achieve it, which on the one hand, I don’t think you’ve seen necessarily from a lot of the nonprofit industrial complexes, as it gets called. But on the other hand, on the values level, you certainly have not seen from this crew.…

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