I’m fairly centrist, but if I put my leftist hat on, the thing that feels worst about global development EA is the lack of context.
EA often celebrates individuals who give a lot of money, without recognising where that money comes from. We don’t openly acknowledge how much money Britain and America have gained from the Global South, both in the past and right now. Sure, trade deficits are complicated, but on the surface we’re getting a lot more than we give, and we get a significant amount of interest from developing world debt.
Sure, it’s great when rich people donate to help poor people, but why are the rich rich, and why are the poor poor? EA is always very quiet about that. Maybe we can’t change global economic systems, but it would nice if we could acknowledge that they’re the backdrop to everything we do.
EA often celebrates individuals who give a lot of money, without recognising where that money comes from. We don’t openly acknowledge how much money Britain and America have gained from the Global South, both in the past and right now
Have you asked EAs what they think about economic history? Why don’t you do that before making presumptions about others’ attitudes towards it?
Of course some (not nearly all) of America and Britain’s wealth comes from interactions with the global South, and furthermore of course some comes from unfair interactions (though the magnitude of this is less clear). There, I openly acknowledge it, because it is banal. Presumably other EAs generally know about it too, so why would you demand it to be preemptively “acknowledged”?
Such demands are unproductive and silly. Otherwise we may as well demand that everyone “acknowledge” animal farming, and governance, and urbanization, and technological advances, and human cognition, and slavery, and everything else that has contributed to economic growth. But there are books for those things: if someone wants to know why the economy has turned out this way, they can go read those books. Or they can ask us, and we can tell them what we think or what sources to read. There’s no reason to preempt this healthy intellectual process with a political game of collective atonement.
why are the rich rich, and why are the poor poor? EA is always very quiet about that
Because (a) that question has already been largely addressed, there is extensive economic and historical literature examining the issue, and (b) it’s not really important for answering most of the questions that we have to answer.
Exploiting others makes you less virtuous, and singing the praises of rich philanthropists without acknowledging that paints an incomplete picture. If we don’t acknowledge it, it’s reasonable for leftists to assume that we don’t know or don’t care.
It might not hurt to repeat some of that economic and historical literature in an EA venue. The mere existence of books on a topic doesn’t give any indication of EAs’ opinions on those books.
But (a) it’s not clear that virtue matters, as virtue ethics is controversial (as are all moral theories) and most of us adhere to consequentialism, and (b) merely making money from interacting with someone is not sufficient for exploitation to take place, it must also be one of the unfair interactions, and (c) Khorton did not talk about where we get our own wealth: he talked about where American and British wealth has generally come from, which is something with a long history and many factors regardless of our personal behavior. These are the kinds of nuances that demands for “acknowledgement” routinely obfuscate.
singing the praises of rich philanthropists without acknowledging that paints an incomplete picture
Every picture that isn’t published in a book or journal is incomplete; saying that a philanthropist got their money from exploitation is an incomplete picture. And the incomplete picture of “this philanthropist just does a lot of good” is closer to the truth than the incomplete picture of “this philanthropist made a lot money from exploitation and oppression, and is just giving some of it back”. Because once you take all the nuances into account, the proportion of our money that we could say has some kind of moral taint or special obligation (other than that which is ordinarily implied by utilitarian/benevolent motives) is just going to be somewhere between 0 and 25%.
In any case, generally painting a complete picture about this seems unimportant in the first place: per the goals of EA, we should paint a complete picture of how to do good now and in the future, and to the extent that belaboring economic history can inform these efforts, it should be belabored specifically in the contexts where it is actually relevant (i.e. writings about how to improve economic systems, and so on), not obnoxiously inserted into all regular discourse about philanthropy per se.
I expect EA hasn’t publicly acknowledged this is as much as we maybe should have in the past because:
1. Even if we were to assume the worst, and that all the gains of the Western world EA is giving away were originally ill-gotten, it wouldn’t change how we think it is best redistributed to improve the world, including to do justice by the very people the wealth would allegedly have been expropriated from;
2. Acknowledging this can give opportunistic critics of EA the chance to back EA into a corner and pillory us as too ignorant of issues of justice to accomplish any good;
3. Even if we did acknowledged this, it’s unclear we would reach a conclusion about what EA should do better than what we have now, since this is a question of the origins of wealth, a fundamental question of politics as hotly disputed in the world today as any, and not one I expect EA would be able to resolve to anyone’s satisfaction.
This isn’t to say EA shouldn’t do better on this issue. It’s just in my experience the conditions set up when people debate these questions in public, including with regard to EA, aren’t set up to give EA a chance to learn, respond, update, improve, or change. I.e., most instances when this subject is broached it is a political debate set up for rhetorical purposes by 2 sides EA is caught between, and who exploit EA’s reception to criticism to use it as a springboard to advance their own agenda.
While I didn’t upvote kbog’s comment for being rude, and I agree with you he didn’t need to be that rude, I didn’t downvote it either because I think he is reaching for a valid point. While I express it differently, I share kbog’s frustration with how sometimes effective altruists say we should extend so much charity to anti-capitalist critics of EA, while it may not be a majority of them, there are lots of kinds of anti-capitalism it seems EA should not actually want to reconcile with. I expressed that point without the rudeness of kbog’s comment in another comment reply I’ll excerpt here:
All variety of leftist ideologies from history are on the upswing today, as politics becomes more polarized, and more people are shifting leftward (and, of course, rightward as well) away from the centre. This has impelled some radical anti-capitalists to spread in the last few years as a propaganda the meme “liberals get the bullet too”.
If this was inspired by they ideology of, say, Leninism, then while even if EA shouldn’t moralize in asserting ourselves as “better”, this would be sufficient grounds for EA to deny a positive association with them, even if the line is meant only rhetorically or symbolically. This would be justified even if we would at the same time build bridges to other leftist movements that have shown themselves more conducive to cooperation with EA, such as those Marxists who would be willing to seek common ground with EA. Of course, as there are many ideologies on the Left, including whole families of ideologies totally incompatible with EA, I believe we must be clear about how we’re going to tow this line. Like you yourself said, this isn’t unique to leftists. With regards to the Right, EA could build bridges to conservatism, while nonetheless totally rejecting a notion we might ally ourselves with the family of rightist ideologies we could call “supremacism”.
[...]
If EA is to become part of humanity’s fabric of moral common sense, we must recognize there are ideologies that don’t operate under that fabric in the perpetuation of their goals, and go against the grain of both EA and the fabric of common sense. For EA to be worth anything, we must on principle be willing to engage against those ideologies. Of course, EA can and should be willing to ally itself with those leftists who’d seek to expand the circle of moral concern against those who would seek to shrink it to get ahead, no matter what their original ideals were.
This is with regards to political ideologies where either the disagreement over fundamental values, or at least basic facts that inform our moral judgements, are irreconcilable. Yet there will also be political movements with which EA can reconcile, as we would share the same fundamental values, but EA will nonetheless be responsible to criticize or challenge, on the grounds those movements are, in practice, using means or pursuing ends that put them in opposition to those of EA.
[...]
I believe our willingness to live up to that responsibility is one of the few things that distinguishes EA at all from any other community predicated on doing good.
I agree there are beliefs and belief systems that EA is incompatible with, although my post wasn’t coming from a place of anti-capitalism: even with my leftist hat on, all I would want is to regulate global market failures.
It’s a pretty big leap to hear “global markets make the rich richer and the poor poorer” and assume communism :)
Right, I wasn’t assuming communism on your part. I was just sharing thoughts of my own that I thought better represented the frustration kbog was trying to express. I did this because I thought he was making a valid point with his comment you downvoted about how the kind of question you’re asking would lead EA to prioritize a route for public dialogue that it doesn’t actually make sense to prioritize, since it is one you made from a leftist viewpoint as a thought exercise, even though you clarified you yourself are a centrist, and as a criticism of EA it is unsound.
My above comment was also addressing the premise you thought the historical origins of wealth as seen from an anti-capitalist perspective is a very relevant criticism of EA. I of course assumed by ‘leftist’ you meant ‘anti-capitalist’, which you did not. So, my last comment doesn’t apply. I was aware that you yourself were just wearing a leftist hat for the sake of argument, and I did not assume communism on your part.
Of course, regarding your point about questions of reform of contemporary global markets, I agree with you, and disagree with kbog, that that is a legitimate criticism of EA the community should think more about.
Nothing that I’ve said here is about whether or not we should reform global markets, nor about whether or not we should adopt communism as Khorton inexplicably assumed. The issue here is not about policy, it’s about discourse, viz. the idea that we ought to emphatically and preemptively notify people and atone for the causes of our own and the general Western prosperity, with the implicit assumption that such causes make it morally disagreeable.
khorton said she is a centrist, who for the sake of argument, was putting on her ‘leftist’ hat.
By “leftist”, I thought she meant she was being the devil’s advocate for anti-capitalism, when she was actually being an advocate for progressive/left-liberal reform.
She assumed that you assumed, like me, she was playing the role of devil’s advocate for anti-capitalism, when you did not, i.e., not anti-capitalist.
While khorton’s original comment didn’t mention reform and regulation of global markets, she made clear in her next response to me that is what she intended as the subject of her comment even though she didn’t make it explicit.
I got mixed up, and as the subject changed, I forgot market reform was never even implied by khorton’s original comment.
While I disagreed with how rude your original response to her was, I did agree with your point. Now that you’ve edited it, and this comment is sorted, I’ve now upvoted your comment, as I agree with you.
I’m fairly centrist, but if I put my leftist hat on, the thing that feels worst about global development EA is the lack of context.
EA often celebrates individuals who give a lot of money, without recognising where that money comes from. We don’t openly acknowledge how much money Britain and America have gained from the Global South, both in the past and right now. Sure, trade deficits are complicated, but on the surface we’re getting a lot more than we give, and we get a significant amount of interest from developing world debt.
Sure, it’s great when rich people donate to help poor people, but why are the rich rich, and why are the poor poor? EA is always very quiet about that. Maybe we can’t change global economic systems, but it would nice if we could acknowledge that they’re the backdrop to everything we do.
Have you asked EAs what they think about economic history? Why don’t you do that before making presumptions about others’ attitudes towards it?
Of course some (not nearly all) of America and Britain’s wealth comes from interactions with the global South, and furthermore of course some comes from unfair interactions (though the magnitude of this is less clear). There, I openly acknowledge it, because it is banal. Presumably other EAs generally know about it too, so why would you demand it to be preemptively “acknowledged”?
Such demands are unproductive and silly. Otherwise we may as well demand that everyone “acknowledge” animal farming, and governance, and urbanization, and technological advances, and human cognition, and slavery, and everything else that has contributed to economic growth. But there are books for those things: if someone wants to know why the economy has turned out this way, they can go read those books. Or they can ask us, and we can tell them what we think or what sources to read. There’s no reason to preempt this healthy intellectual process with a political game of collective atonement.
Because (a) that question has already been largely addressed, there is extensive economic and historical literature examining the issue, and (b) it’s not really important for answering most of the questions that we have to answer.
Edit: less rude now.
Exploiting others makes you less virtuous, and singing the praises of rich philanthropists without acknowledging that paints an incomplete picture. If we don’t acknowledge it, it’s reasonable for leftists to assume that we don’t know or don’t care.
It might not hurt to repeat some of that economic and historical literature in an EA venue. The mere existence of books on a topic doesn’t give any indication of EAs’ opinions on those books.
But (a) it’s not clear that virtue matters, as virtue ethics is controversial (as are all moral theories) and most of us adhere to consequentialism, and (b) merely making money from interacting with someone is not sufficient for exploitation to take place, it must also be one of the unfair interactions, and (c) Khorton did not talk about where we get our own wealth: he talked about where American and British wealth has generally come from, which is something with a long history and many factors regardless of our personal behavior. These are the kinds of nuances that demands for “acknowledgement” routinely obfuscate.
Every picture that isn’t published in a book or journal is incomplete; saying that a philanthropist got their money from exploitation is an incomplete picture. And the incomplete picture of “this philanthropist just does a lot of good” is closer to the truth than the incomplete picture of “this philanthropist made a lot money from exploitation and oppression, and is just giving some of it back”. Because once you take all the nuances into account, the proportion of our money that we could say has some kind of moral taint or special obligation (other than that which is ordinarily implied by utilitarian/benevolent motives) is just going to be somewhere between 0 and 25%.
In any case, generally painting a complete picture about this seems unimportant in the first place: per the goals of EA, we should paint a complete picture of how to do good now and in the future, and to the extent that belaboring economic history can inform these efforts, it should be belabored specifically in the contexts where it is actually relevant (i.e. writings about how to improve economic systems, and so on), not obnoxiously inserted into all regular discourse about philanthropy per se.
Point of correction: khorton is a ‘she’, not a ‘he’.
Downvoted because this is rude
Downvoted because you’re not engaging with my arguments.
I expect EA hasn’t publicly acknowledged this is as much as we maybe should have in the past because:
1. Even if we were to assume the worst, and that all the gains of the Western world EA is giving away were originally ill-gotten, it wouldn’t change how we think it is best redistributed to improve the world, including to do justice by the very people the wealth would allegedly have been expropriated from;
2. Acknowledging this can give opportunistic critics of EA the chance to back EA into a corner and pillory us as too ignorant of issues of justice to accomplish any good;
3. Even if we did acknowledged this, it’s unclear we would reach a conclusion about what EA should do better than what we have now, since this is a question of the origins of wealth, a fundamental question of politics as hotly disputed in the world today as any, and not one I expect EA would be able to resolve to anyone’s satisfaction.
This isn’t to say EA shouldn’t do better on this issue. It’s just in my experience the conditions set up when people debate these questions in public, including with regard to EA, aren’t set up to give EA a chance to learn, respond, update, improve, or change. I.e., most instances when this subject is broached it is a political debate set up for rhetorical purposes by 2 sides EA is caught between, and who exploit EA’s reception to criticism to use it as a springboard to advance their own agenda.
While I didn’t upvote kbog’s comment for being rude, and I agree with you he didn’t need to be that rude, I didn’t downvote it either because I think he is reaching for a valid point. While I express it differently, I share kbog’s frustration with how sometimes effective altruists say we should extend so much charity to anti-capitalist critics of EA, while it may not be a majority of them, there are lots of kinds of anti-capitalism it seems EA should not actually want to reconcile with. I expressed that point without the rudeness of kbog’s comment in another comment reply I’ll excerpt here:
I agree there are beliefs and belief systems that EA is incompatible with, although my post wasn’t coming from a place of anti-capitalism: even with my leftist hat on, all I would want is to regulate global market failures.
It’s a pretty big leap to hear “global markets make the rich richer and the poor poorer” and assume communism :)
Right, I wasn’t assuming communism on your part. I was just sharing thoughts of my own that I thought better represented the frustration kbog was trying to express. I did this because I thought he was making a valid point with his comment you downvoted about how the kind of question you’re asking would lead EA to prioritize a route for public dialogue that it doesn’t actually make sense to prioritize, since it is one you made from a leftist viewpoint as a thought exercise, even though you clarified you yourself are a centrist, and as a criticism of EA it is unsound.
My above comment was also addressing the premise you thought the historical origins of wealth as seen from an anti-capitalist perspective is a very relevant criticism of EA. I of course assumed by ‘leftist’ you meant ‘anti-capitalist’, which you did not. So, my last comment doesn’t apply. I was aware that you yourself were just wearing a leftist hat for the sake of argument, and I did not assume communism on your part.
Of course, regarding your point about questions of reform of contemporary global markets, I agree with you, and disagree with kbog, that that is a legitimate criticism of EA the community should think more about.
Nothing that I’ve said here is about whether or not we should reform global markets, nor about whether or not we should adopt communism as Khorton inexplicably assumed. The issue here is not about policy, it’s about discourse, viz. the idea that we ought to emphatically and preemptively notify people and atone for the causes of our own and the general Western prosperity, with the implicit assumption that such causes make it morally disagreeable.
Okay, so, what has has happened is:
khorton said she is a centrist, who for the sake of argument, was putting on her ‘leftist’ hat.
By “leftist”, I thought she meant she was being the devil’s advocate for anti-capitalism, when she was actually being an advocate for progressive/left-liberal reform.
She assumed that you assumed, like me, she was playing the role of devil’s advocate for anti-capitalism, when you did not, i.e., not anti-capitalist.
While khorton’s original comment didn’t mention reform and regulation of global markets, she made clear in her next response to me that is what she intended as the subject of her comment even though she didn’t make it explicit.
I got mixed up, and as the subject changed, I forgot market reform was never even implied by khorton’s original comment.
While I disagreed with how rude your original response to her was, I did agree with your point. Now that you’ve edited it, and this comment is sorted, I’ve now upvoted your comment, as I agree with you.