The idea of “broad market efficiency” has been introduced in a post by GiveWell’s Holden Karnofsky.

Some other pieces that discuss broad market efficiency in the non-profit world:

• “It’s harder to favor a specific cause in more efficient charitable markets” by Carl Shulman
• A section on market efficiency in Brian Tomasik’s “Why Charities Don’t Differ Astronomically in Cost-Effectiveness”

See also this comment by Luke Muehlhauser, which argues that more research is important, but which also makes the claim that the best causes for existential risk tend to get funded:

Getting high-quality evidence about which x-risk mitigation efforts are worthwhile requires lots of work, but one thing we’ve learned in the past decade is that causes with high-quality evidence for their effectiveness tend to get funded, and this trend is probably increasing. The sooner we do enough learning to have high-quality evidence for the goodness of particular x-risk mitigation efforts, the sooner large funders will fund those efforts. Or, as Christiano writes:

To me it currently looks like the value of getting information faster is significantly higher than the value of money, and on the current margin I think most of these learning activities are underfunded.

External links

• “How Efficient is the Charitable Market?” by Luke Muehlhauser