We welcome unsolicited proposals for support from the Abundance and Growth Fund. When assessing a proposal, we look at two things:
- Is the grant a good fit for our current priorities?
- Is this a cost-effective way to achieve the overall goals of the Abundance and Growth Fund?
Grant proposals will need to make a case that they can help raise broad-based economic growth and lower the cost of living in the United States and other high-income countries. We generally support work aimed at policy change, rather than the invention of new technologies or direct provision of goods and services, though there are exceptions. We make grants in the following areas:
- Housing policy: expanding the supply of housing, especially in supply-constrained superstar cities.
- Energy policy: improving state and federal permitting and approval processes so that new energy infrastructure can be built more quickly and cheaply.
- Clinical trials: streamlining the clinical trials approval process so that new drugs can be brought to market faster and more affordably, without compromising safety or efficacy.
- High-skilled immigration: expanding pathways for talented scientists and inventors to move to places where they have the resources to push forward technological progress.
- Innovation policy: improving the overall scientific and innovation ecosystem by solving various coordination and market failure problems.
- State capacity: supporting cross-cutting, scalable work to help governments achieve their policy goals.
- Abundance and progress studies field building: supporting the growth of the abundance and progress studies communities, which in turn support most of our other priorities.
While not core areas today, we are also open to considering proposals in the following areas:
- Transportation: supporting policy changes to speed up and reduce the cost of building new transportation infrastructure.
- Economic dynamism: building a flexible economy to quickly adapt to shocks and new technological opportunities.
- Health care: expanding health care supply and lowering its cost, outside the clinical trials path, via policy change.
There are many other plausible ways to increase the rate of economic growth or accelerate science and technological progress, but we are unlikely to fund proposals in areas not connected to the above strategies at this time.
For proposals within one of our areas, we also investigate whether a grant is likely to be cost-effective. We are ultimately interested in raising incomes and the health of people around the world, and we have a set of heuristics we use that link intermediate outputs like housing, energy, and economic growth to those outcomes. Where feasible, we try to estimate a grant’s impact on these objectives as well as its cost effectiveness. We aim for our grants to achieve a minimum cost-effectiveness threshold.
While there are no hard caps on grant size, our grant page gives a sense of average amounts.
If you have a grant idea that is aligned with the above, you are welcome to send us an email at abundanceandgrowth@coefficientgiving.org with a short inquiry. Emails should have a 1-2 paragraph explanation of the grant proposal, including:
- The activities that support would enable.
- How these activities connect to our goals.
- A rough sense of grant size and the duration requested.
We won’t hold you to these ideas, but they are helpful for deciding how we want to proceed.
If we think the idea is a potential fit for our program, one of our staff will respond and set up a time to learn more. From that point on, the grant investigation process described here is a good description of what to expect.