EAs were also warning, for a long time, about the importance of health aid sent overseas. In contrast, non-EA leftists were more likely to call these institutions colonialist and call EAs racist for neglecting domestic political issues. But when Trump got elected, we were vindicated in the worst of ways: he destroyed much of USAID, and this was the single act in his presidency that led to the most deaths.
This feels like a strange argument to make, and one which seems to be trying way too hard to find evidence of vindication even in failures, which ironically is the opposite of what people with good epistemics should be doing. EAs were criticised [by critics whose arguments greatly varied in quality] for tending to treat international aid as primarily an optimization problem best addressed by small specialist charities and individuals maximising their donations, and largely ignoring the political dimension.
Then domestic political issues killed government programmes funding traditional Big Aid multinational aid agencies[1] with the stroke of a pen[2] and did far more damage than EA philanthropy is able to repair.
Directionally, thats the opposite of a validation of EA orthodoxy on aid.
I don’t think neglecting the politics of whether aid actually gets disbursed is a strong argument against EA either—not least because I don’t think EAs would have been able to dissuade people from voting Trump even if they’d made it their leading cause area, or convince Trump/Musk that foreigners lives mattered—but it’s definitely not one where the “don’t neglect politics” and “actually big programs that aren’t quite as good as AMF are still really good” critics can be said to have lost the argument.
For added irony, the person who gleefully signed those death warrants was at least superficially EA-adjacent enough to have enthusiastically endorsed MacAskill’s writing and funded a couple of longtermist organizations in the past.
This feels like a strange argument to make, and one which seems to be trying way too hard to find evidence of vindication even in failures, which ironically is the opposite of what people with good epistemics should be doing. EAs were criticised [by critics whose arguments greatly varied in quality] for tending to treat international aid as primarily an optimization problem best addressed by small specialist charities and individuals maximising their donations, and largely ignoring the political dimension.
Then domestic political issues killed government programmes funding traditional Big Aid multinational aid agencies[1] with the stroke of a pen[2] and did far more damage than EA philanthropy is able to repair.
Directionally, thats the opposite of a validation of EA orthodoxy on aid.
I don’t think neglecting the politics of whether aid actually gets disbursed is a strong argument against EA either—not least because I don’t think EAs would have been able to dissuade people from voting Trump even if they’d made it their leading cause area, or convince Trump/Musk that foreigners lives mattered—but it’s definitely not one where the “don’t neglect politics” and “actually big programs that aren’t quite as good as AMF are still really good” critics can be said to have lost the argument.
(programs not run by EAs, but admired by some of them for their results)
For added irony, the person who gleefully signed those death warrants was at least superficially EA-adjacent enough to have enthusiastically endorsed MacAskill’s writing and funded a couple of longtermist organizations in the past.