Will Charter Cities / Affinity Cities / Network States get $10m+ from EA funders before 2030?
8
73
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2030
31%
chance

To resolve this question, in 2030 I will look at publicly-available grantmaking documentation (like this Openphil website, for example), adding up all the grants between October 2023 and January 2030 that support Charter City / Affinity City / Network State projects, and resolve YES if the grand total exceeds ten million US dollars.

I included the phrase "affinity cities" to indicate that it isn't strictly necessary for the city to have special legal rights as envisioned with charter cities, as long as it is clear that the city is intended to be an outlier on some important cultural or local-governance dimension. For example, if an EA funder provided $10m to influence the development of the "California Forever" new-city project near the bay area, or the "Telosa" georgist new-city project in the Sun Belt, I would resolve YES. Pretty much any project that gets mentioned in an ACX "model city monday" blog post would probably count.

"EA funders" means places like OpenPhil, LTFF, SFF, Longview Philanthropy, Founders Fund, GiveWell, ACX Grants, etc. Some example "EA-adjacent" funding sources that wouldn't count, even if their money goes directly to this cause area: Patrick Collison, Yuri Milner, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin, Peter Thiel. This is obviously a fuzzy distinction (what if one of the aforementioned billionares becomes noticeably more EA-influenced by 2030? etc), but I'll try my best to resolve the question in the spirit of reflecting how the EA community has grown over time.

Note that if an EA funder /invests/ in a new-city project as opposed to granting the funds, I will have to figure out how to discount the dollar amount by some factor, since investments are not the same as grants (they're hoping to eventually get the money back!).

For markets about other cause-area-candidates (like approval voting and climate geoengineering!), check out the "New EA Cause Area?" tag!

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