I think the find-the-biggest-demos argument is probably the strongest argument for government spending instead of philanthropy. I really disagree with the nationalism inherent in the premise of the last two defenses for reasons of equity. I also don’t think that the nation is an obvious level to spend philanthropy at when most very rich people made their money through a globalized market
I think there’s a mistake here. Yes it’s partly about “democracy” in the nation-state sense but it’s also a lot more specific than that, and it’s about appropriate decision-making in and by communities that are effected by those decisions.
This is quite obvious in the education policy sphere, which is where this debate often comes up. The question is whether students, parents, teachers, and local communities should be front and center in setting the direction of an education system, or whether it’s a good idea for individual rich people to set that policy agenda.
A similar dynamic happens a huge amount in the developing world, and it’s criticised not only on the basis that it’s anti-democratic and dis-empowering, but also because it rarely works out to decide from the outside what is best for a group of people without their input or buy-in.
I think some areas are more suited to philanthropy than others (Bill Gates for example does a pretty excellent job focussing on things that private philanthropy is unique well suited for). Philanthropy, national-level government, local government—all of these things are better suited to different things. The ultimate point is about accountability to your constituency/beneficiaries which I don’t think is easily discussed in the abstract. What kinds of causes/actions are ripe for private philanthropic investment and which are in need of grassroots democratic intervention is something I’d personally love to see more discussion of.
No need to apologize! I’m happy people are still interested in discussing this. :-)
(And I in turn apologize for taking a while to reply!)
it’s about appropriate decision-making in and by communities that are effected by those decisions. . . . The ultimate point is about accountability to your constituency/beneficiaries which I don’t think is easily discussed in the abstract. What kinds of causes/actions are ripe for private philanthropic investment and which are in need of grassroots democratic intervention is something I’d personally love to see more discussion of.
A couple of responses to this general point.
First, I (and I think most EAs) would wholeheartedly agree that feedback mechanisms are important in charity governance generally: it seems to be an important measure to identify and solve problems, as well as accurately assess impacts of a charity. Indeed, GiveWell seems to include this in their qualitative assessment of top charities:
There are aspects of the quality of the implementation of a program that our cost-effectiveness model doesn’t capture.
Examples:
The quality of interactions between program participants and program staff may have long-term consequences for the costs and uptake of delivering the same or similar interventions in the future.
The quality of communications about the program with participants can affect, for example, whether participants receive maximal benefit from the intervention (e.g. whether they consistently use an insecticide-treated net to prevent malaria).
The equity of the charity’s distribution of the intervention could, in some cases, affect whether the individuals who can most benefit are reached and can affect whether the program causes jealousy/conflict/distrust in the local community.
Charities’ decisions may affect local markets for talent or goods to varying degrees.
GiveDirectly does a very good job of this generally. One of their FAQs is “How do local governments feel about GiveDirectly’s presence?” GiveDirectly’s response:
Typically, very positively. We take our relationships with local government seriously, obtaining the necessary approvals at each level from national governments down to village leaders. We also find that GiveDirectly tends to make voters happy.
So there’s nothing inherent about philanthropy generally, or as EA practices it, that precludes broad opportunities for feedback. To the extent that someone criticizes philanthropy on these grounds, then, it should really only apply to charities that somehow don’t afford these opportunities, or do so inadequately. That’s a much narrower case that the authors were making.
I do think that EAs may undervalue certain types of feedback mechanisms, though, which is why I give somewhat higher weight in my own charity selection to charities that either enhance recipients’ autonomy (by giving them resources they can decide what to do with, as GD does) or otherwise enable communities to choose the goods they feel they need most. I’m excited about charities that develop or use mechanisms like this, such as the quadratic funding mechanism promoted by RadicalxChange.
But I do think that procedural input of this kind is only one important input to an overall effectiveness assessment. A charity that has less-good feedback mechanisms but looks much more cost-effective “on paper” may be worth preferring despite the procedural shortcoming. Ultimately, community feedback has to be a proxy for effectiveness to matter, morally. If so, it can be weighed against other indicia/sources of effectiveness.
A bit on “community”: I think that we/others/EAs should be willing to help people in some circumstances where their “community” does not approve of it. Communities are composed of individuals, and individuals have different and sometimes inconsistent preferences. Minorities within communities—or even just individuals who disagree with the communities values and judgments—are still people worthy of our moral consideration, and aid if we can give it safely and effectively. We should do this super humbly, and acknowledge that there may be good reasons why a particular situation exists in a particular area, even if nobody can articulate it. Individual recipients should almost always have the opportunity to deny aid, but I am less confident that always (or even largely) deferring to community judgments about what types of aid to give, if any, are systematically better than an approach that considers community judgments as one of many inputs. To do otherwise risks further marginalizing people whose own communities have neglected or excluded them.
This brings me to another point: part of the challenge here is that no country has perfect preference aggregation mechanisms, and unfortunately the quality of democratic input is negatively correlated with wealth. So if we want to help the poorest people, we will often be operating in communities with non-democratic governance structures, as well as corruption and human rights problems. Yet another reason to not rely solely on community feedback, as some philanthropy critics would do.
It’s also worth contextualizing my blog post against the alternative to philanthropy that people like Giridharadas would seem to prefer, which is one in which resources are shifted away from charities and to the donors’ democratic governments. It is this preference that strikes me as morally suspect, since it would deny people in aid-recipient countries much agency and resources. The fact that our current democratic governance systems systematically neglect them is rarely discussed, if at all.
I realize there’s some very weak sense in which the US government represents me. But it’s really weak. Really, really weak. When I turn on the news and see the latest from the US government, I rarely find myself thinking “Ah, yes, I see they’re representing me very well today.”
Paradoxically, most people feel the same way. Congress has an approval rating of 19% right now. According to PolitiFact, most voters have more positive feelings towards hemorrhoids, herpes, and traffic jams than towards Congress. How does a body made entirely of people chosen by the public end up loathed by the public? I agree this is puzzling, but for now let’s just admit it’s happening.
Bill Gates has an approval rating of 76%, literally higher than God. Even Mark Zuckerberg has an approval rating of 24%, below God but still well above Congress. In a Georgetown university survey, the US public stated they had more confidence in philanthropy than in Congress, the court system, state governments, or local governments; Democrats (though not Republicans) also preferred philanthropy to the executive branch.
When I see philanthropists try to save lives and cure diseases, I feel like there’s someone powerful out there who shares my values and is doing right by them. I’ve never gotten that feeling when I watch Congress. When I watch Congress, I feel a scary unbridgeable gulf between me and anybody who matters. And the polls suggest a lot of people agree with me.
In what sense does it reflect the will of the people to transfer power and money from people and causes the public like and trust, to people and causes who the public hate and distrust? Why is it democratic to take money from someone more popular than God, and give it to a group of people more hated than hemorrhoids?
And if the people want more money to be spent by private philanthropists instead of Congress – and they use the democratic process to produce a legal regime and tax system that favors private philanthropy – their will is being represented.
Which brings me to my final point, which in part just restates the point of this post: even if community input is valuable, the meta point still holds: the balance of public and private initiatives has itself been set by communities. Almost every community allows for both private initiative and private charity, and so operating within that private space has been, in a sense, ratified by the community at the meta level. Some (like the people I quote) may dislike it, but their will is apparently not the community’s.
I think there’s a mistake here. Yes it’s partly about “democracy” in the nation-state sense but it’s also a lot more specific than that, and it’s about appropriate decision-making in and by communities that are effected by those decisions.
This is quite obvious in the education policy sphere, which is where this debate often comes up. The question is whether students, parents, teachers, and local communities should be front and center in setting the direction of an education system, or whether it’s a good idea for individual rich people to set that policy agenda.
A similar dynamic happens a huge amount in the developing world, and it’s criticised not only on the basis that it’s anti-democratic and dis-empowering, but also because it rarely works out to decide from the outside what is best for a group of people without their input or buy-in.
I think some areas are more suited to philanthropy than others (Bill Gates for example does a pretty excellent job focussing on things that private philanthropy is unique well suited for). Philanthropy, national-level government, local government—all of these things are better suited to different things. The ultimate point is about accountability to your constituency/beneficiaries which I don’t think is easily discussed in the abstract. What kinds of causes/actions are ripe for private philanthropic investment and which are in need of grassroots democratic intervention is something I’d personally love to see more discussion of.
PS. Sorry for bringing up such an old thread!
No need to apologize! I’m happy people are still interested in discussing this. :-)
(And I in turn apologize for taking a while to reply!)
A couple of responses to this general point.
First, I (and I think most EAs) would wholeheartedly agree that feedback mechanisms are important in charity governance generally: it seems to be an important measure to identify and solve problems, as well as accurately assess impacts of a charity. Indeed, GiveWell seems to include this in their qualitative assessment of top charities:
GiveDirectly does a very good job of this generally. One of their FAQs is “How do local governments feel about GiveDirectly’s presence?” GiveDirectly’s response:
GD also operates local call centers to serve their constituents.
So there’s nothing inherent about philanthropy generally, or as EA practices it, that precludes broad opportunities for feedback. To the extent that someone criticizes philanthropy on these grounds, then, it should really only apply to charities that somehow don’t afford these opportunities, or do so inadequately. That’s a much narrower case that the authors were making.
I do think that EAs may undervalue certain types of feedback mechanisms, though, which is why I give somewhat higher weight in my own charity selection to charities that either enhance recipients’ autonomy (by giving them resources they can decide what to do with, as GD does) or otherwise enable communities to choose the goods they feel they need most. I’m excited about charities that develop or use mechanisms like this, such as the quadratic funding mechanism promoted by RadicalxChange.
But I do think that procedural input of this kind is only one important input to an overall effectiveness assessment. A charity that has less-good feedback mechanisms but looks much more cost-effective “on paper” may be worth preferring despite the procedural shortcoming. Ultimately, community feedback has to be a proxy for effectiveness to matter, morally. If so, it can be weighed against other indicia/sources of effectiveness.
A bit on “community”: I think that we/others/EAs should be willing to help people in some circumstances where their “community” does not approve of it. Communities are composed of individuals, and individuals have different and sometimes inconsistent preferences. Minorities within communities—or even just individuals who disagree with the communities values and judgments—are still people worthy of our moral consideration, and aid if we can give it safely and effectively. We should do this super humbly, and acknowledge that there may be good reasons why a particular situation exists in a particular area, even if nobody can articulate it. Individual recipients should almost always have the opportunity to deny aid, but I am less confident that always (or even largely) deferring to community judgments about what types of aid to give, if any, are systematically better than an approach that considers community judgments as one of many inputs. To do otherwise risks further marginalizing people whose own communities have neglected or excluded them.
This brings me to another point: part of the challenge here is that no country has perfect preference aggregation mechanisms, and unfortunately the quality of democratic input is negatively correlated with wealth. So if we want to help the poorest people, we will often be operating in communities with non-democratic governance structures, as well as corruption and human rights problems. Yet another reason to not rely solely on community feedback, as some philanthropy critics would do.
It’s also worth contextualizing my blog post against the alternative to philanthropy that people like Giridharadas would seem to prefer, which is one in which resources are shifted away from charities and to the donors’ democratic governments. It is this preference that strikes me as morally suspect, since it would deny people in aid-recipient countries much agency and resources. The fact that our current democratic governance systems systematically neglect them is rarely discussed, if at all.
As Scott Alexander put it:
Which brings me to my final point, which in part just restates the point of this post: even if community input is valuable, the meta point still holds: the balance of public and private initiatives has itself been set by communities. Almost every community allows for both private initiative and private charity, and so operating within that private space has been, in a sense, ratified by the community at the meta level. Some (like the people I quote) may dislike it, but their will is apparently not the community’s.