Interview
A year's worth of education for under $1 and other "best buys" in development | Rachel Glennerster
- The Future Perfect podcast is expanding its content scope in its first season to include diverse global improvement topics such as humane fish slaughter, open borders, geoengineering, voluntary organ donation, and lithium in tap water, while simultaneously launching a new section dedicated to effective altruism.
- Future programming trends indicate a convergence between the Future of Life and Future Perfect podcasts, with both increasingly featuring long-form interviews on technical AI safety, moral philosophy, accidental nuclear war, and climate change.
- The aid sector is anticipated to undergo a significant shift toward evidence-based decision-making driven by self-questioning from agencies like DFID and the World Bank, including a specific strategic pivot by DFID toward economic transformation to achieve major poverty reductions.
- Experts predict a continued "sea change" in integrating development lessons from developing nations, such as behavioral economics, into policy frameworks in rich countries, alongside growing academic focus on the developing world.
- Future research strategies may prioritize using Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) to test broad policy questions rather than just specific programs, with a potential transition away from rigid pre-registration in favor of expert theory and priors to handle unforeseen study variables.
- Ethiopia is identified as having tremendous potential for beneficial policy changes, though significant research gaps remain regarding economic development promotion in nations not undergoing fundamental reforms.
- Underrated opportunities for poverty reduction include leveraging high productivity gains from early childhood nutrition, improving management in developing world social entrepreneurship, and aggressively targeting tax havens and illicit financial flows which drain significant capital from developing countries.
- A future landscape of organizations is expected to require more specialized entities focused on scaling single evidence-based interventions, such as deworming, to avoid dilution from unrelated activities.
- Forecasting efforts may benefit from platforms that aggregate ex-ante forecasts and independent prior solicitation, though this approach carries the risk of becoming an excessive burden on expert forecasters without proper coordination.
- There is an expectation that the perception that the poor are getting poorer will persist among general populations unless actively countered by narratives detailing actual improvements, prompting calls for more full cost-benefit analyses regarding US and UK policies on illicit financial flows.