“to the extent that the text above is breaking down centralization into sub-dimensions, and then impliedly taking something like the mean score of sub-domains to generate an overall centralization score.”
Thanks for pointing this out! I didn’t intend my post to be taking the mean score across sub-domains; I agree that of the dimensions I list, decision-making power is the most important sub-dimension. (Though the dimensions are interrelated: If you can’t tightly control group membership, or if there isn’t legal ownership, that limits decision-making power in some ways.)
To make sure I understand your view better, on my spectrum (From North Korea to the US startup scene) do you think I placed EA-as-it-currently-is too low on the centralisation spectrum? I said current EA is “similar to fairly decentralised religious groups, and many social movements”.
(Fine if your answer is “this spectrum doesn’t make any sense” → it’s pretty subjective!)
I think it is toward the more centralized side of the spectrum than that. I tentatively place it somewhere between the Scouts and sports organizations.
The Spectrum
I think the spectrum makes sense as long with two caveats. First, these organizations/movements differ on certain sub-dimensions. Reasonable people could come up with different rankings based on how they weight the various sub-dimensions.
Second, in some examples there are significant differences between the centralization of the organization per se and how much influence that organization has over a broader field of human activity. I think we’re mainly trying to figure out how centralized EA is as a field of endeavor, not as an organization (since it isn’t one). Thus, my model gives significant weight to the field-influence interpretation, especially by considering how feasible it is to seriously practice the field of activity (e.g., basketball) apart from the centralized structure. However, I’ve tried not to write off the organizational level entirely.
Comparison to Relatively Decentralized Religious Groups
I’ll take the Southern Baptist Convention (in the US) as an example of a “fairly decentralised religious group.” It is on the decentralized end of Protestantism (which was one of your examples), but that seems fair given if EA is to be placed between those groups and some social movements. In addition, there are a large number of Baptist and other churches in the US that aren’t part of anything larger than themselves, or are part of networks even weaker than the SBC.
Recently, the SBC kicked out some churches for having female pastors. Getting kicked out of the SBC is very rare, which is itself evidence of lower control, but main consequence for those churches is basically . . . they can’t advertise themselves as part of the SBC. There’s no trademark on “Baptist,” or centralized control who joins an SBC church (that is decided by leaders in the individual church). Movement in/out of the SBC, and between SBC churches is pretty easy. There are few formal barriers on forming your own church and applying for its membership in the SBC. There isn’t a huge centralized information flow given the emphasis on the Bible and the hostility to a priestly class. With the exception of startup churches in a transitional period, there is no centralized financial support.
But here’s the critical part to me—there are a lot of small Baptist churches. If you can get support from 100 people to form a congregation (that’s a tiny fraction of Baptists in the US), you can form your own church and do most of the things that Baptist churches do like administer baptisms and communion, preach, send missionaries, etc. Being in good standing with the SBC doesn’t give other churches a huge competitive advantage—SBC membership is actually unattractive to many Baptists (either because it is seen as too conservative or too accomodating).
Moreover, even control over local churches is decentralized to an extent—leaders are generally elected, and every pastor knows that people also vote their displeasure with their feet and their pocketbooks. There are many dozens of small Baptist churches in the smallish county where my parents still live. So I would rate fairly decentralised religious groups as pretty low on almost all sub-dimensions, including the most important one.
Where to Place Current EA?
Recognizing the limitations of the scale, I would tentatively place EA somewhere between the Scouts and certain sports organizations. Comparing mixed economies to EA would require too much space; I’ll leave that as undefined.
Generally More Centralized than Sports Organizations
The sports organizations are more structured than EA in terms of legal structure, membership, and so on. However, I think that is generally outweighed by their very incomplete control over their fields. Taking USA Basketball as an example, there is a lot of important basketball that happens outside their influence or at least control, including the most economically and socially significant basketball. The NBA answers to no one, high-school basketball is run by state-level associations of high schools, etc. Running your own independent basketball league is also very plausible, and in most cases I’m not aware of a massive advantage of affiliating it with USA Basketball.
Significantly and effectively practicing EA apart from Open Phil and the organizations it heavily funds is possible . . . but I would submit that it is noticeably harder than significantly and effectively practicing basketball without being in communion with USA Basketball.
Generally Somewhat Less Centralized than the Scouts
I’m going to place EA as less centralized than the Scouts (here operationalized as Scouts BSA, f/k/a The Boy Scouts of America, since that’s the org with which I am most familiar). However, it’s important to note the extent to which the centralized organization’s power is significantly checked by a variety of independent actors. First off, the local councils are legally independent with their own independent funding networks and relationships, and the national organization needs them almost as much as they need the national org. Thus, it would be fair to characterize them as more like US states than divisions of a single entity. Breaking up with a local council would probably mean the end of Scouting BSA in that council’s jurisdiction. I don’t think Open Phil’s relationship with its median grantee has the same federalist nature.[1]
Second, there are a number of external constraints on decisionmaking. Scouts BSA is significantly dependent on corporate sponsors and private philanthropy (especially after its bankruptcy...), and the need to maintain financial support is a check on centralized power. It is also significantly dependent on religious and other organizations that serve as sponsoring organizations for individual troops. Finally, it needs to keep its volunteers and parents—who derive no financial advantage from affiliation with Scouting—happy.
So while there is a good deal of formal concentration of decision-making power, there are also some very real constraints on that power. Those constraints come from entities and people who are not financially intertwined with Scouts BSA. And they are not pro forma—if I recall correctly, the LDS (Mormon) church was by far the largest sponsoring organization and walked away with its members to run its own program because it didn’t like the way things were going with Scouts BSA. Likewise, I believe a decent number of Scouts in the conservative Southern US moved away.
Also of note: there is an opportunity to do Scouting-like things outside of Scouts BSA in the US, but there are rather significant disadvantages that make alternative practice a less than full substitute. For instance, status as an Eagle Scout carries significant prestige in many places, and isn’t available outside Scouts BSA.
Although I’m not going to suggest that major EA power centers experience no outside checks on their exercise of power, it seems to me that those checks are much weaker than in Scouts BSA, and are often not held by people who are financially and otherwise independent from the power centers.
It is true that the individual councils are themselves centralized. However, I believe they are even more constrained by some of the factors in the next paragraph than the national org.
“to the extent that the text above is breaking down centralization into sub-dimensions, and then impliedly taking something like the mean score of sub-domains to generate an overall centralization score.”
Thanks for pointing this out! I didn’t intend my post to be taking the mean score across sub-domains; I agree that of the dimensions I list, decision-making power is the most important sub-dimension. (Though the dimensions are interrelated: If you can’t tightly control group membership, or if there isn’t legal ownership, that limits decision-making power in some ways.)
To make sure I understand your view better, on my spectrum (From North Korea to the US startup scene) do you think I placed EA-as-it-currently-is too low on the centralisation spectrum? I said current EA is “similar to fairly decentralised religious groups, and many social movements”.
(Fine if your answer is “this spectrum doesn’t make any sense” → it’s pretty subjective!)
I think it is toward the more centralized side of the spectrum than that. I tentatively place it somewhere between the Scouts and sports organizations.
The Spectrum
I think the spectrum makes sense as long with two caveats. First, these organizations/movements differ on certain sub-dimensions. Reasonable people could come up with different rankings based on how they weight the various sub-dimensions.
Second, in some examples there are significant differences between the centralization of the organization per se and how much influence that organization has over a broader field of human activity. I think we’re mainly trying to figure out how centralized EA is as a field of endeavor, not as an organization (since it isn’t one). Thus, my model gives significant weight to the field-influence interpretation, especially by considering how feasible it is to seriously practice the field of activity (e.g., basketball) apart from the centralized structure. However, I’ve tried not to write off the organizational level entirely.
Comparison to Relatively Decentralized Religious Groups
I’ll take the Southern Baptist Convention (in the US) as an example of a “fairly decentralised religious group.” It is on the decentralized end of Protestantism (which was one of your examples), but that seems fair given if EA is to be placed between those groups and some social movements. In addition, there are a large number of Baptist and other churches in the US that aren’t part of anything larger than themselves, or are part of networks even weaker than the SBC.
Recently, the SBC kicked out some churches for having female pastors. Getting kicked out of the SBC is very rare, which is itself evidence of lower control, but main consequence for those churches is basically . . . they can’t advertise themselves as part of the SBC. There’s no trademark on “Baptist,” or centralized control who joins an SBC church (that is decided by leaders in the individual church). Movement in/out of the SBC, and between SBC churches is pretty easy. There are few formal barriers on forming your own church and applying for its membership in the SBC. There isn’t a huge centralized information flow given the emphasis on the Bible and the hostility to a priestly class. With the exception of startup churches in a transitional period, there is no centralized financial support.
But here’s the critical part to me—there are a lot of small Baptist churches. If you can get support from 100 people to form a congregation (that’s a tiny fraction of Baptists in the US), you can form your own church and do most of the things that Baptist churches do like administer baptisms and communion, preach, send missionaries, etc. Being in good standing with the SBC doesn’t give other churches a huge competitive advantage—SBC membership is actually unattractive to many Baptists (either because it is seen as too conservative or too accomodating).
Moreover, even control over local churches is decentralized to an extent—leaders are generally elected, and every pastor knows that people also vote their displeasure with their feet and their pocketbooks. There are many dozens of small Baptist churches in the smallish county where my parents still live. So I would rate fairly decentralised religious groups as pretty low on almost all sub-dimensions, including the most important one.
Where to Place Current EA?
Recognizing the limitations of the scale, I would tentatively place EA somewhere between the Scouts and certain sports organizations. Comparing mixed economies to EA would require too much space; I’ll leave that as undefined.
Generally More Centralized than Sports Organizations
The sports organizations are more structured than EA in terms of legal structure, membership, and so on. However, I think that is generally outweighed by their very incomplete control over their fields. Taking USA Basketball as an example, there is a lot of important basketball that happens outside their influence or at least control, including the most economically and socially significant basketball. The NBA answers to no one, high-school basketball is run by state-level associations of high schools, etc. Running your own independent basketball league is also very plausible, and in most cases I’m not aware of a massive advantage of affiliating it with USA Basketball.
Significantly and effectively practicing EA apart from Open Phil and the organizations it heavily funds is possible . . . but I would submit that it is noticeably harder than significantly and effectively practicing basketball without being in communion with USA Basketball.
Generally Somewhat Less Centralized than the Scouts
I’m going to place EA as less centralized than the Scouts (here operationalized as Scouts BSA, f/k/a The Boy Scouts of America, since that’s the org with which I am most familiar). However, it’s important to note the extent to which the centralized organization’s power is significantly checked by a variety of independent actors. First off, the local councils are legally independent with their own independent funding networks and relationships, and the national organization needs them almost as much as they need the national org. Thus, it would be fair to characterize them as more like US states than divisions of a single entity. Breaking up with a local council would probably mean the end of Scouting BSA in that council’s jurisdiction. I don’t think Open Phil’s relationship with its median grantee has the same federalist nature.[1]
Second, there are a number of external constraints on decisionmaking. Scouts BSA is significantly dependent on corporate sponsors and private philanthropy (especially after its bankruptcy...), and the need to maintain financial support is a check on centralized power. It is also significantly dependent on religious and other organizations that serve as sponsoring organizations for individual troops. Finally, it needs to keep its volunteers and parents—who derive no financial advantage from affiliation with Scouting—happy.
So while there is a good deal of formal concentration of decision-making power, there are also some very real constraints on that power. Those constraints come from entities and people who are not financially intertwined with Scouts BSA. And they are not pro forma—if I recall correctly, the LDS (Mormon) church was by far the largest sponsoring organization and walked away with its members to run its own program because it didn’t like the way things were going with Scouts BSA. Likewise, I believe a decent number of Scouts in the conservative Southern US moved away.
Also of note: there is an opportunity to do Scouting-like things outside of Scouts BSA in the US, but there are rather significant disadvantages that make alternative practice a less than full substitute. For instance, status as an Eagle Scout carries significant prestige in many places, and isn’t available outside Scouts BSA.
Although I’m not going to suggest that major EA power centers experience no outside checks on their exercise of power, it seems to me that those checks are much weaker than in Scouts BSA, and are often not held by people who are financially and otherwise independent from the power centers.
It is true that the individual councils are themselves centralized. However, I believe they are even more constrained by some of the factors in the next paragraph than the national org.
[footnote deleted]