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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: Two tentative concerns about OpenPhil's Macroeconomic Stabilization Policy work, published by remmelt on January 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Here’s something I’ve been pondering on-and-off for about two years now, but frankly know little about. I'm an amateur, and just found 3 hours to write up my speculations. Would love to get your vigorous input and corrections, particularly on economic considerations where you have some expertise as an academic or practician. OpenPhil argues: "monetary policymakers currently face political pressure to over-emphasize risks of inflation, relative to the suffering and lost output caused by unemployment." Holden Karnofsky elaborates more on it here:... "We've come to the view that there's an institutional bias in a particular direction. We believe that there is more inflation aversion than is consistent with a "most good for everyone" attitude. We think some of that bias reflects the politics and pressures around the Federal Reserve. We've been interested in macroeconomic stabilization for a while. There's this not very well-known institution, which is not very well understood and makes esoteric decisions. It's not a big political issue, but it may have a bigger impact on the world economy and on the working class than basically anything else the government is doing. Maybe even bigger than anything else that anyone is doing. I think it's kind of a twofer. We haven't tried to do the calculations on both axes, but certainly, it seems like it could provide broad-based growth and lower unemployment. There are a lot of reasons to think thoseat might lead to better societal outcomes. Outcomes such as better broad-based values, which are then reflected in the kinds of policies we enact and the kinds of people we elect. I also think that if the economy is growing, and especially if that growth is benefiting everyone across the economy: if labor markets are tighter, and if workers have better bargaining power, better lives, better prospects in the future, then global catastrophic risk might decrease in some way. I haven't totally decided, how does the magnitude of that compare to everything else? But I think if we had the opportunity to go bigger on that cause, we would be thinking harder about it." And Alexander Berger here: "We’ve also done a bunch of work on U.S. policy causes, including ... macroeconomic stabilization. We’re not currently planning to grow that work as much because we think we probably can find some better opportunities in the future. ... So we’re not totally sure about the future of that program. We’re not actively winding it down, but we haven’t been doing a lot more. We have been thinking about pivoting a little bit more to work in Europe, where if you just compare the E.U. policy response to the Great Recession to the American one, I think there’s a huge gap. And also frankly, the recoveries to the Great Recession — as much as I complained about the U.S. policy response, the degree of self-inflicted wounds by European monetary policymakers is I think genuinely somewhat astonishing. Obviously there are concerns. We’re an American funder. We don’t know as much about policy in Europe as we do about the U.S., and so there’s risks there, and we try to be cognizant of those. But I think we might continue to do a little bit more in that space and focus more on Europe. Or at some point we might say like. I don’t know if it would be literally declaring victory, but we might say like, we’re not sure there’s a ton more that we need to do here. The case doesn’t look as good as it did before. Why don’t we just step back? Rob Wiblin: I guess in the U.S. they’re slightly worried that possibly the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. People always respond to the last thing that went wrong, and now we’ve over...