It is helpful to distinguish between each set of ideas in theory and in practice. I don’t think EA and socialism claim a lot of common territory; the former is a set of individualist ideas on how wealthy people should donate their money, while the latter operates much more in the political and economic spheres. While I wouldn’t encourage someone to try and come up with a totalising socialist theory of EA as you’ve tried, I also wouldn’t discourage EAs from being curious about socialist and anti-capitalist ideas.
EA is increasingly moving toward policy and advocacy, but I don’t regularly see conflicts here. In fact, a lot of global health policy feels very internationalist in a way that socialists would encourage; and animal welfare and GCRs are both essentially identifying the failures of market-based systems to account for large negative externalities, and using statist or social means to oppose that economic power.
The remaining fundamental difference, for now, is the wealthy donors on the EA side, which seems to have large downstream effects on the ways EAs tend to think about and approach problems (“the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” etc.). But I think it would be possible for most of EA to be funded by governments raising higher taxes, or by a larger number of smaller, distributed donations; where this happens in EA today, I see those organisations start to think more optimistically about state and social power.
(Also, the comments on your post are unusually good, and I’d encourage people to go read more there. There’s a good reply from @Bob Jacobs, who has some good critiques of EA-in-practice that I agree with)
the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house
Isn’t this just obviously, trivially, literally false? On a literal level you can, in fact, just use carpenter’s tools like saws and hammers to destroy houses. On a figurative level, religion, state violence, written language, legislation and ships were used to enforce chattel slavery, and the exact same tools were used by abolitionists to combat chattel slavery in Europe and the US.
This is the same pattern we see in pretty much every successful attempt to dismantle oppression throughout history. The most successful wins of feminism wins came from co-opting sources of patriarchal power, not from women going their own way or imaginative new paradigms. Gay rights came from rhetorical activism, public acceptance, court battles and patient legislation; they did not primarily flow from novel innovations in queer theory. Animal rights and welfare improvement will probably come from wins in legislation, public opinion, and technology, not the invention of truly novel cultural paradigms.
Indeed I struggle to think of examples where genuinely novel paradigms were used to dismantle oppression, perhaps Gandhi’s Satyagraha and Non-Violent Resistance is a decent example, but a) much of it is still embedded in the existing paradigms and b) one example does not a trend make.
In concrete, practical terms, how do you envision “most of EA” being funded by governments? At least in the US context, this is very hard for me to imagine, as it runs counter to a lot of my understanding of the political economy of taxation and government spending.
I’m gonna bite because I assume you have some retort in mind, I’m curious to hear what you mean. I just meant in my ideal world, governments would levy higher taxes on individuals and corporations, and disburse the money through state-owned programmes (for things like PEPFAR, which are well-understood and benefit from huge scale and steady funding), or state-owned grantmakers (much how like USAID operated).
(I should warn you—my ideal world assumes the political will to do this. I don’t think we live in my ideal world right now.)
It is helpful to distinguish between each set of ideas in theory and in practice. I don’t think EA and socialism claim a lot of common territory; the former is a set of individualist ideas on how wealthy people should donate their money, while the latter operates much more in the political and economic spheres. While I wouldn’t encourage someone to try and come up with a totalising socialist theory of EA as you’ve tried, I also wouldn’t discourage EAs from being curious about socialist and anti-capitalist ideas.
EA is increasingly moving toward policy and advocacy, but I don’t regularly see conflicts here. In fact, a lot of global health policy feels very internationalist in a way that socialists would encourage; and animal welfare and GCRs are both essentially identifying the failures of market-based systems to account for large negative externalities, and using statist or social means to oppose that economic power.
The remaining fundamental difference, for now, is the wealthy donors on the EA side, which seems to have large downstream effects on the ways EAs tend to think about and approach problems (“the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” etc.). But I think it would be possible for most of EA to be funded by governments raising higher taxes, or by a larger number of smaller, distributed donations; where this happens in EA today, I see those organisations start to think more optimistically about state and social power.
(Also, the comments on your post are unusually good, and I’d encourage people to go read more there. There’s a good reply from @Bob Jacobs, who has some good critiques of EA-in-practice that I agree with)
Isn’t this just obviously, trivially, literally false? On a literal level you can, in fact, just use carpenter’s tools like saws and hammers to destroy houses. On a figurative level, religion, state violence, written language, legislation and ships were used to enforce chattel slavery, and the exact same tools were used by abolitionists to combat chattel slavery in Europe and the US.
This is the same pattern we see in pretty much every successful attempt to dismantle oppression throughout history. The most successful wins of feminism wins came from co-opting sources of patriarchal power, not from women going their own way or imaginative new paradigms. Gay rights came from rhetorical activism, public acceptance, court battles and patient legislation; they did not primarily flow from novel innovations in queer theory. Animal rights and welfare improvement will probably come from wins in legislation, public opinion, and technology, not the invention of truly novel cultural paradigms.
Indeed I struggle to think of examples where genuinely novel paradigms were used to dismantle oppression, perhaps Gandhi’s Satyagraha and Non-Violent Resistance is a decent example, but a) much of it is still embedded in the existing paradigms and b) one example does not a trend make.
Communist revolution? American independence?
In concrete, practical terms, how do you envision “most of EA” being funded by governments? At least in the US context, this is very hard for me to imagine, as it runs counter to a lot of my understanding of the political economy of taxation and government spending.
I’m gonna bite because I assume you have some retort in mind, I’m curious to hear what you mean. I just meant in my ideal world, governments would levy higher taxes on individuals and corporations, and disburse the money through state-owned programmes (for things like PEPFAR, which are well-understood and benefit from huge scale and steady funding), or state-owned grantmakers (much how like USAID operated).
(I should warn you—my ideal world assumes the political will to do this. I don’t think we live in my ideal world right now.)