A factor in favour of a more coherent EA that this post misses is the importance of policy advocacy.
I think in almost all of the spheres we care about governments hold most of the levers. For instance, it would be within the power of many countries to unilaterally solve the global insecticide-treated bed net problem if they were sufficiently motivated. I could make this a very long list.
As a public servant and ministerial adviser, I’ve been on the receiving end of well-coordinated campaigns by global not-for-profits. They’re extraordinal good at getting their way. The example I usually think of is Save the Children. It’s hard to know for sure, but StC seems to have fewer people involved than EA and less money. But they have significant access to the leaders of dozens of countries; the ability to drive multilateral agreements through international decision-making bodies (see the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child); and genuine geostrategic influence.
The EA movement has all the ingredients (global reach; motivated talent; money) necessary to have influence of that kind, or more. But we chose not to (for many of the reasons outlined above), and I think our impact suffers hugely because of that choice. I think we’ve made a bad deal. I would much rather we paid the price of coordination, managed the risks that result, and used it to be serious players in global policy.
I think popular support is a rather critical ingredient here—even if organizations like StC have relatively few people directly involved with the organization, most of them can plausibly claim to be speaking for the general population and can successfully generate political consequences through appeals to the public if their desires aren’t taken into consideration.
Although I would love the idea of trying to fund a similar movement to (e.g.) increase and improve global aid policy, this theory of change is limited by the need for the proposed action to be something the public can easily be convinced to support.
First, there’s a lot of niche special interest groups that get their way with government. There’s lots of ways to pressuring government for a policy outcome that aren’t a simple popular appeal.
Second, I don’t think it’s impossible to build public support for many things we believe in. I think a message like “it’s unacceptable that in current year there are people who need something as simple as a net, but don’t have access to it—government could fix this today” could easily have popular appeal. Or at least sufficient popular that an alliance of governments would put a few per cent of their aid budgets on the problem and fix it. I agree that not everything we care about could work this way, but many things could.
While I am sympathetic to more policy work, I am not sure how this ties into centralization within EA more generally. Funding is very centralized, so that’s not an impediment to the big funder dropping nine figures a year on it lobbying if desired.
I think EA is generally a mediocre brand for lobbying efforts—it has too elitist a vibe (billionaires trying to influence how my tax money is spent) and will remain vulnerable to FTX attacks for at least several years. So beyond providing the funding, I think too much visible coordination with the rest of EA is likely to be net negative.
I think the ‘good vibes’ that help policy advocacy come (in part) from benefiting from other people’s positive externalities. That’s to say, I’d like us to be in a position where we can say “we’re the movement that achieved X, Y and Z. So when we ask your nation to (put 5% of its aid budget to bed nets) you should take us seriously”.
To the extent that we’re more centralised and coordinated, it’s easier to say “we’re the movement that achieved X, Y and Z”. When we intentionally fracture and distance ourselves, we also fracture and distance ourselves from those positive externalities.
Again, I recognise that there is a give and take here—risks and opportunities. I just think that we need to put this potential path to policy impact as an ‘opportunity’ that we largely pass-up when we choose to distance our work and organisations from other another.
A factor in favour of a more coherent EA that this post misses is the importance of policy advocacy.
I think in almost all of the spheres we care about governments hold most of the levers. For instance, it would be within the power of many countries to unilaterally solve the global insecticide-treated bed net problem if they were sufficiently motivated. I could make this a very long list.
As a public servant and ministerial adviser, I’ve been on the receiving end of well-coordinated campaigns by global not-for-profits. They’re extraordinal good at getting their way. The example I usually think of is Save the Children. It’s hard to know for sure, but StC seems to have fewer people involved than EA and less money. But they have significant access to the leaders of dozens of countries; the ability to drive multilateral agreements through international decision-making bodies (see the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child); and genuine geostrategic influence.
The EA movement has all the ingredients (global reach; motivated talent; money) necessary to have influence of that kind, or more. But we chose not to (for many of the reasons outlined above), and I think our impact suffers hugely because of that choice. I think we’ve made a bad deal. I would much rather we paid the price of coordination, managed the risks that result, and used it to be serious players in global policy.
I think popular support is a rather critical ingredient here—even if organizations like StC have relatively few people directly involved with the organization, most of them can plausibly claim to be speaking for the general population and can successfully generate political consequences through appeals to the public if their desires aren’t taken into consideration.
Although I would love the idea of trying to fund a similar movement to (e.g.) increase and improve global aid policy, this theory of change is limited by the need for the proposed action to be something the public can easily be convinced to support.
I’m not sure that’s true for two reasons:
First, there’s a lot of niche special interest groups that get their way with government. There’s lots of ways to pressuring government for a policy outcome that aren’t a simple popular appeal.
Second, I don’t think it’s impossible to build public support for many things we believe in. I think a message like “it’s unacceptable that in current year there are people who need something as simple as a net, but don’t have access to it—government could fix this today” could easily have popular appeal. Or at least sufficient popular that an alliance of governments would put a few per cent of their aid budgets on the problem and fix it. I agree that not everything we care about could work this way, but many things could.
While I am sympathetic to more policy work, I am not sure how this ties into centralization within EA more generally. Funding is very centralized, so that’s not an impediment to the big funder dropping nine figures a year on it lobbying if desired.
I think EA is generally a mediocre brand for lobbying efforts—it has too elitist a vibe (billionaires trying to influence how my tax money is spent) and will remain vulnerable to FTX attacks for at least several years. So beyond providing the funding, I think too much visible coordination with the rest of EA is likely to be net negative.
I think the ‘good vibes’ that help policy advocacy come (in part) from benefiting from other people’s positive externalities. That’s to say, I’d like us to be in a position where we can say “we’re the movement that achieved X, Y and Z. So when we ask your nation to (put 5% of its aid budget to bed nets) you should take us seriously”.
To the extent that we’re more centralised and coordinated, it’s easier to say “we’re the movement that achieved X, Y and Z”. When we intentionally fracture and distance ourselves, we also fracture and distance ourselves from those positive externalities.
Again, I recognise that there is a give and take here—risks and opportunities. I just think that we need to put this potential path to policy impact as an ‘opportunity’ that we largely pass-up when we choose to distance our work and organisations from other another.