EA - Fundamentals of Global Priorities Research in Economics Syllabus by poliboni

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Fundamentals of Global Priorities Research in Economics Syllabus, published by poliboni on August 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a 6-9 session syllabus on the fundamentals of global priorities research in economics.The purpose is to help economics students and researchers interested in GPR get a big picture view of the field and come up with research ideas.Because of this focus on fundamentals, the readings are rather light on economics and heavy on philosophy and empirics of different cause areas.Previous versions of this list were used internally at GPI and during GPI's Oxford Global Priorities Fellowship in 2023, where the prompts guided individual reflection and group discussion.Many thanks to the following for their help creating and improving this syllabus: Gustav Alexandrie, Loren Fryxell, Arden Koehler, Luis Mota, and Charlotte Siegmann. The readings below don't necessarily represent their views, GPI's, or mine.1. Philosophical FoundationsTopic: Global priorities research is a normative enquiry. It is primarily interested in understanding what we should do in the face of global problems, and only derivatively interested in how those problems work/facts about the world that surround them.In this session, we will focus on understanding what ethical theory is, what some of the most important moral theories are, how these theories relate to normative thinking in economics, and what these theories imply about what the most important causes are.Literature:MacAskill, William. 2019. "The Definition of Effective Altruism" (Section 4 is optional)Prompt 1: How aligned with your aims as a researcher is the definition of Effective Altruism proposed in this article (p. 14)?Trammell, Philip. 2022. Philosophical foundations (Slides 1-2, 5-9, 12-16, 20-24)Prompt 2: What is your best guess theory of welfare? How much do you think it matters to get this right?Prompt 3: What is your best guess view in axiology? What are your key uncertainties about it? Do you think axiology is all that matters in determining what one ought to do (excluding empirical uncertainty)?Trammell, Philip. 2022. Three sins of economics (Slides 1-24, 27)Prompt 4: What are your "normative defaults"? What are views here that you would like to explore more?Prompt 5: Do you agree that economics has the normative defaults identified in the reading? Can you give examples of economics work that avoids these?Prompt 6: Insofar as economists tend to commit the 3 'sins', what do you think of the strategy of finding problems which are underprovided by those views?Extra reading:Wilkinson, Hayden. 2022. "Key Lessons From Global Priorities Research" (watch video here - slides are not quite self-contained)Which key results are most interesting or surprising to you and why? Do you think any of them are wrong?Greaves, Hilary. 2017. "Population axiology"Broome, John. 1996. "The Welfare Economics of Population"2. Effective altruism: differences in impact and cost-effectiveness estimatesTopic: In this session we tackle two key issues in cause prioritization. First, how is impact distributed across interventions (or importance across problems). Second, how to compare the cost-effectiveness of interventions which are differentially well-grounded.Literature:Kokotajlo, Daniel and Oprea, Alexandra. 2020. "Counterproductive Altruism: The Other Heavy Tail" (Skip Sections I and II)Prompt 1: Do you think there is a heavy right tail of opportunities to do good? What about a heavy left tail?Prompt 2: How do the distributions of impact of interventions aimed at the near-term and long-term compare (specifically, in terms of the heaviness of their tails)?Karnofsky, Holden. 2016. "Why we can't take expected value estimates literally (even when they're unbiased)"Prompt 3: What, in your view, is ...