This post is a response to a challenge on Overcoming Bias to spend $10 trillion sensibly.
Here’s my proposed allocation (spending to be spread out over 10-20 years):
- $5 trillion on drug patent buyouts and prizes for new drugs put in the public domain, with the prizes mostly allocated in proportion to the quality adjusted life years attributable to the drug.
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$1 trillion on establishing a few dozen separate clusters of seasteads and on facilitating migration of people from poor/oppressive countries by rewarding jurisdictions in proportion to the number of immigrants they accept from poorer / less free regions. (I’m guessing that most of those rewards will go to seasteads, many of which will be created by other people partly in hopes of getting some of these rewards).
This would also have a side affect of significantly reducing the harm that humans might experience due to global warming or an ice age, since ocean climates have less extreme temperatures, seasteads will probably not depend on rainfall to grow food, and can move somewhat to locations with better temperatures. - $1 trillion on improving political systems, mostly through prizes that bear some resemblance to The Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership (but not limited to democratically elected leaders and not limited to Africa). If the top 100 or so politicians in about 100 countries are eligible, I could set the average reward at about $100 million per person. Of course, nowhere near all of them will qualify, so a fair amount will be left over for those not yet in office.
- $0.5 trillion on subsidizing trading on prediction markets that are designed to enable futarchy. This level of subsidy is far enough from anything that has been tried that there’s no way to guess whether this is a wasteful level.
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$1 trillion existential risks
Some unknown fraction of this would go to persuading people not to work on AGI without providing arguments that they will produce a safe goal system for any AI they create. Once I’m satisfied that the risks associated with AI are under control, much of the remaining money will go toward establishing societies in the asteroid belt and then outside the solar system. - $0.5 trillion on communications / computing hardware for everyone who can’t currently afford that.
- $1 trillion I’d save for ideas I think of later.
I’m not counting a bunch of other projects that would use up less than $100 billion since they’re small enough to fit in the rounding errors of the ones I’ve counted (the Methuselah Mouse prize, desalinization and other water purification technologies, developing nanotech, preparing for the risks of nanotech, uploading, cryonics, nature preserves, etc).
Half the money on drugs? You must think drugs are lots more effective than I do.
It’s quite possible that I disagree with you about how effective drugs have been, and/or about how QALY based prizes would improve the effectiveness of drugs.
Do you know of any clear evidence on the overall effectiveness of drugs?
There appear to be clear examples of drugs that have been valuable and would save more lives if improved incentives made them available in poor countries (e.g. HIV drugs), and it isn’t clear how other drugs could offset this by enough to change my conclusion.
Also, a big part of my reasoning is that drug research is one of the few areas where returns on investment don’t appear to drop by a large amount after the first trillion dollars. Possibly this would also be true of seasteading or prediction markets, but I have too little information about those to say.
Possibly “drugs” is a category that is narrower than I want. Maybe I should use a broader term such as “medical treatments” to be sure to include anything that might fall within SENS.