If you expect your donation to be ~10x more valuable if one political party is in power, then it probably makes more sense to just hold* your money until they are in power. I suppose the exception here would be if you don’t expect the opportunity to come up again (eg., if it’s about a specific politician being president, or one party having a supermajority), but I don’t see a Biden presidency as presenting such a unique opportunity.
We have two things going on here beyond just partisan switch (discussed in more detail in the report) that do make this a special moment unlikely to re-occur.
(1) Elevated importance: The importance of the 2020 election for climate policy was much elevated because of COVID-related stimulus spending, the difference between Trump-Biden is much starker than the difference Trump-Clinton was in 2016 because of the much enlarged policy opportunity.
(2) Carbon lock-in: the leverage that US climate policy has is declining sharply as its main benefits in terms of global emissions (effects on emissions globally through innovation and global leadership) is becoming less valuable every year as more and more of future emissions get locked-in by infrastructure and long-lived capital asset decisions in emerging economies.
Thank you jackva. Great points on this specific example.
In general, suppose we didn’t think this was a special moment. Then essentially this means we think ‘investing to give’ also presents a good opportunity. If ‘investing to give’ is also 10x CCF under Trump, then indeed you would want to just wait and either give under Biden or invest to give. But if ‘investing to give’ is only 5x CCF, then we’re in the scenario I discussed under ‘More general context’. So, fair point, I have added a sentence to the main post to explicitly rule out ‘investing to give’ being a consideration.
I’d be most interested to see people’s objections conditional on accepting a scenario where mission hedging seems like a valuable opportunity. Like the one I have tried to illustrate around last year’s election. Are there somehow more fundamental intuitions for why you would not pursue such a strategy?
If you expect your donation to be ~10x more valuable if one political party is in power, then it probably makes more sense to just hold* your money until they are in power. I suppose the exception here would be if you don’t expect the opportunity to come up again (eg., if it’s about a specific politician being president, or one party having a supermajority), but I don’t see a Biden presidency as presenting such a unique opportunity.
*presumably actually as an investment
We have two things going on here beyond just partisan switch (discussed in more detail in the report) that do make this a special moment unlikely to re-occur.
(1) Elevated importance: The importance of the 2020 election for climate policy was much elevated because of COVID-related stimulus spending, the difference between Trump-Biden is much starker than the difference Trump-Clinton was in 2016 because of the much enlarged policy opportunity.
(2) Carbon lock-in: the leverage that US climate policy has is declining sharply as its main benefits in terms of global emissions (effects on emissions globally through innovation and global leadership) is becoming less valuable every year as more and more of future emissions get locked-in by infrastructure and long-lived capital asset decisions in emerging economies.
Good points.
Thank you jackva. Great points on this specific example.
In general, suppose we didn’t think this was a special moment. Then essentially this means we think ‘investing to give’ also presents a good opportunity. If ‘investing to give’ is also 10x CCF under Trump, then indeed you would want to just wait and either give under Biden or invest to give. But if ‘investing to give’ is only 5x CCF, then we’re in the scenario I discussed under ‘More general context’. So, fair point, I have added a sentence to the main post to explicitly rule out ‘investing to give’ being a consideration.
I’d be most interested to see people’s objections conditional on accepting a scenario where mission hedging seems like a valuable opportunity. Like the one I have tried to illustrate around last year’s election. Are there somehow more fundamental intuitions for why you would not pursue such a strategy?