In the abstract I agree that you could think that. But I’d make some of the same claims for the urgent longtermist as the patient longtermist: that some of the best investment opportunities are probably non-financial, and we should be trying to make use of those before going on to financial investments. (There’s a question about whether at current margins we’re already using them up.)
I think there are some principled reasons to be unsurprised if the best available non-financial investment opportunities are better than the best available financial investment opportunities. Financial investment is a competitive market; there are lots of people who have money and want more money, and so for a given risk tolerance (and without lots of work) you can’t expect to massively outperform what others are making.
There are also markets (broadly understood) competing for buy-in to worldviews. At first glance these might look less attractive to enter into, since they seem to be (roughly) zero-sum. But unlike the financial case, capital is not fungible across worldviews, so we shouldn’t assume that market forces mean that the returns from the best opportunities can’t get too good (or they’d be taken by others). And I’m not concerned about the zero-sum point, because I don’t think that the longtermist worldview is just an arbitrary set of beliefs; I think that it has ~truth on its side, and providing people with arguments plus encouraging them to reflect will on average be quite good for its market share (and to the extent that it isn’t, maybe that’s a sign that it’s getting something wrong). This is a pretty major advantage and makes it plausible that there are some really excellent opportunities available. Then I think growth over the last few years is evidence that at least some of the activities people engage in have really good returns; the crucial question is how much there are really good ones being left on the table.
In the abstract I agree that you could think that. But I’d make some of the same claims for the urgent longtermist as the patient longtermist: that some of the best investment opportunities are probably non-financial, and we should be trying to make use of those before going on to financial investments. (There’s a question about whether at current margins we’re already using them up.)
I think there are some principled reasons to be unsurprised if the best available non-financial investment opportunities are better than the best available financial investment opportunities. Financial investment is a competitive market; there are lots of people who have money and want more money, and so for a given risk tolerance (and without lots of work) you can’t expect to massively outperform what others are making.
There are also markets (broadly understood) competing for buy-in to worldviews. At first glance these might look less attractive to enter into, since they seem to be (roughly) zero-sum. But unlike the financial case, capital is not fungible across worldviews, so we shouldn’t assume that market forces mean that the returns from the best opportunities can’t get too good (or they’d be taken by others). And I’m not concerned about the zero-sum point, because I don’t think that the longtermist worldview is just an arbitrary set of beliefs; I think that it has ~truth on its side, and providing people with arguments plus encouraging them to reflect will on average be quite good for its market share (and to the extent that it isn’t, maybe that’s a sign that it’s getting something wrong). This is a pretty major advantage and makes it plausible that there are some really excellent opportunities available. Then I think growth over the last few years is evidence that at least some of the activities people engage in have really good returns; the crucial question is how much there are really good ones being left on the table.