If advocating now is a pre-requisite to advocating later, advocating now is part of the cost. By opting not to pay it, you aren’t increasing the overall cost-effectiveness of the LGBT rights movement, you’re just juicing your own numbers.
I think that relies on a certain model of the effects of social advocacy. Modeling is error-prone, but I don’t think our activist in 1900 would be well-served spending significant money without giving some thought to their model. More often, I think the model for getting stuff done looks more like a more complicated version of: Inputs A and B are expected to produce C in the presence of a sufficient catalyst and the relative absence of inhibiting agents.
Putting more A into the system isn’t going to help produce C if the rate limit is being caused by the amount of B available, the lack of the catalyst, or the presence of inhibiting agents. Although money is a useful input that is often fungible at various rates to other necessary inputs, and sometimes can influence catalyst & inhibitor levels, sometimes it cannot (or can do so very inefficiently and/or at levels beyond the funder’s ability to meaningfully influence).
Sometimes for social change, having the older generation die off or otherwise lose power is useful. There’s not much our hypothetical activist could do to accelerate that. One might think, for instance, that a significant decline in religiosity and/or the influence of religious entities is a necessary reagent in this model. While one could in theory put money into attempting to reduce the influence of religion in 1900s public life, I think there would be good reasons not to pursue this approach. Rather, I think it could make more sense for the activist to let the broader cultural and demographic changes to do some of the hard work for them.
There’s also the reality that efforts often decay if there isn’t sufficient forward momentum—that was the intended point of the Pikachu welfare example. Ash doesn’t have the money right now to found a perpetual foundation for the cause that will be able to accomplish anything meaningful. If he front-loads the money—say on some field-building, some research grants, some grants to graduate students—and the money runs out, then the organizations will fold, the research will grow increasingly out of date, and the graduate students will find new areas to work in.
You can you only care about providing free hologram entertainment to disadvantaged children, but since holograms are very expensive today, you’ll wait until they’re much cheaper. But shouldn’t you be responsible for making them cheaper? Why are you free-riding and counting on others to do that for you, for free, to juice your philanthropic impact?
The more neutral-to-positive way to cast free-riding is employing leverage. I’m really not concerned about free-riding on for-profit companies, or even much governmental work (especially things like military R&D, which has led to various socially useful technologies).
That’s not an accounting trick in my book—there are clear redistributive effects here. If I spend my money on basic science to promote hologram technology, the significant majority of the future benefits of my work are likely going to flow to future for-profit hologram companies, future middle-class+ people in developed countries, and so on. Those aren’t the benefits I care about, and Big Hologram isn’t likely to pay it forward by mailing a bunch of holograms to disadvantaged children (in your terminology, they are going to free-ride off my past efforts).
As a society, we give corporations and similar entities certain privileges to incentivize behavior because a lot of value ends up leaking out to third parties. For example, the point of patents is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Art” with the understanding that said progress becomes part of the commons after a specified time has passed. Utilizing that progress after the patent period has expired isn’t some sort of shady exploitation of the researcher; it is the deal society made in exchange for taking affirmative actions to protect the researcher’s IP during the patent period.
Sometimes for social change, having the older generation die off or otherwise lose power is useful. There’s not much our hypothetical activist could do to accelerate that. One might think, for instance, that a significant decline in religiosity and/or the influence of religious entities is a necessary reagent in this model. While one could in theory put money into attempting to reduce the influence of religion in 1900s public life, I think there would be good reasons not to pursue this approach. Rather, I think it could make more sense for the activist to let the broader cultural and demographic changes to do some of the hard work for them.
I don’t agree with this causal model/explanatory theory.
This is some kind of at least partly deterministic theory about culture that says culture is steered by forces that can’t be steered by human creativity, agency, knowledge, or effort. I don’t agree with that view. I think culture is changed by what people decide to do.
That’s not an accounting trick in my book—there are clear redistributive effects here. If I spend my money on basic science to promote hologram technology, the significant majority of the future benefits of my work are likely going to flow to future for-profit hologram companies, future middle-class+ people in developed countries, and so on. Those aren’t the benefits I care about, and Big Hologram isn’t likely to pay it forward by mailing a bunch of holograms to disadvantaged children (in your terminology, they are going to free-ride off my past efforts).
That depends on two things:
If I fund research, then no one else in the future will subsidize the technology and provide it for free.
If I don’t fund research, somebody else will.
I guess it could theoretically be true that both assumptions are correct, and maybe we can imagine a scenario where you would have good reasons to believe both of these things, but in practice, in reality, I think it’s rare that we ever really know things like that. So, while it’s possible to imagine scenarios where the upfront money will definitely be supplied by someone else and the down-the-line money definitely won’t, what does this tell us about whether this is a good idea in practice?
The hologram example is making the point: if the pool of dollars required to produce an outcome is a certain amount, the overall cost-effectiveness of producing that outcome doesn’t change regardless of which dollars are yours or not. I think your point is: your marginal cost-effectiveness could be much higher or lower depending on what’s going to happen if you do nothing. Which is true, I just don’t think we can actually know what’s going to happen if you do nothing, and the best version of this still seems to be guesswork or hunches.
It also seems like an oddly binary choice of the sort that doesn’t really exist in real life. If you have significant philanthropic money, can you really not affect what others do? Let’s flip it: if another philanthropist said they would subsidize holograms down the line, that would affect what you would do. So, why not think you have the same power?
What seems to be emerging here is an overall theme of: ‘the future will happen the way it’s going to happen regardless of what we do about it’ vs. ‘we have the agency to change how events play out starting right now’. I definitely believe the latter, I definitely disbelieve the former. We have agency. And, on the other hand, we can’t predict the future.
Who was it who recently quoted someone, maybe the physicist David Deutsch or the psychologist Steven Pinker, saying something like: how terrible would it be if we could predict the future? Because that would mean we had no agency.
I think that relies on a certain model of the effects of social advocacy. Modeling is error-prone, but I don’t think our activist in 1900 would be well-served spending significant money without giving some thought to their model. More often, I think the model for getting stuff done looks more like a more complicated version of: Inputs A and B are expected to produce C in the presence of a sufficient catalyst and the relative absence of inhibiting agents.
Putting more A into the system isn’t going to help produce C if the rate limit is being caused by the amount of B available, the lack of the catalyst, or the presence of inhibiting agents. Although money is a useful input that is often fungible at various rates to other necessary inputs, and sometimes can influence catalyst & inhibitor levels, sometimes it cannot (or can do so very inefficiently and/or at levels beyond the funder’s ability to meaningfully influence).
Sometimes for social change, having the older generation die off or otherwise lose power is useful. There’s not much our hypothetical activist could do to accelerate that. One might think, for instance, that a significant decline in religiosity and/or the influence of religious entities is a necessary reagent in this model. While one could in theory put money into attempting to reduce the influence of religion in 1900s public life, I think there would be good reasons not to pursue this approach. Rather, I think it could make more sense for the activist to let the broader cultural and demographic changes to do some of the hard work for them.
There’s also the reality that efforts often decay if there isn’t sufficient forward momentum—that was the intended point of the Pikachu welfare example. Ash doesn’t have the money right now to found a perpetual foundation for the cause that will be able to accomplish anything meaningful. If he front-loads the money—say on some field-building, some research grants, some grants to graduate students—and the money runs out, then the organizations will fold, the research will grow increasingly out of date, and the graduate students will find new areas to work in.
The more neutral-to-positive way to cast free-riding is employing leverage. I’m really not concerned about free-riding on for-profit companies, or even much governmental work (especially things like military R&D, which has led to various socially useful technologies).
That’s not an accounting trick in my book—there are clear redistributive effects here. If I spend my money on basic science to promote hologram technology, the significant majority of the future benefits of my work are likely going to flow to future for-profit hologram companies, future middle-class+ people in developed countries, and so on. Those aren’t the benefits I care about, and Big Hologram isn’t likely to pay it forward by mailing a bunch of holograms to disadvantaged children (in your terminology, they are going to free-ride off my past efforts).
As a society, we give corporations and similar entities certain privileges to incentivize behavior because a lot of value ends up leaking out to third parties. For example, the point of patents is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Art” with the understanding that said progress becomes part of the commons after a specified time has passed. Utilizing that progress after the patent period has expired isn’t some sort of shady exploitation of the researcher; it is the deal society made in exchange for taking affirmative actions to protect the researcher’s IP during the patent period.
I don’t agree with this causal model/explanatory theory.
This is some kind of at least partly deterministic theory about culture that says culture is steered by forces that can’t be steered by human creativity, agency, knowledge, or effort. I don’t agree with that view. I think culture is changed by what people decide to do.
That depends on two things:
If I fund research, then no one else in the future will subsidize the technology and provide it for free.
If I don’t fund research, somebody else will.
I guess it could theoretically be true that both assumptions are correct, and maybe we can imagine a scenario where you would have good reasons to believe both of these things, but in practice, in reality, I think it’s rare that we ever really know things like that. So, while it’s possible to imagine scenarios where the upfront money will definitely be supplied by someone else and the down-the-line money definitely won’t, what does this tell us about whether this is a good idea in practice?
The hologram example is making the point: if the pool of dollars required to produce an outcome is a certain amount, the overall cost-effectiveness of producing that outcome doesn’t change regardless of which dollars are yours or not. I think your point is: your marginal cost-effectiveness could be much higher or lower depending on what’s going to happen if you do nothing. Which is true, I just don’t think we can actually know what’s going to happen if you do nothing, and the best version of this still seems to be guesswork or hunches.
It also seems like an oddly binary choice of the sort that doesn’t really exist in real life. If you have significant philanthropic money, can you really not affect what others do? Let’s flip it: if another philanthropist said they would subsidize holograms down the line, that would affect what you would do. So, why not think you have the same power?
What seems to be emerging here is an overall theme of: ‘the future will happen the way it’s going to happen regardless of what we do about it’ vs. ‘we have the agency to change how events play out starting right now’. I definitely believe the latter, I definitely disbelieve the former. We have agency. And, on the other hand, we can’t predict the future.
Who was it who recently quoted someone, maybe the physicist David Deutsch or the psychologist Steven Pinker, saying something like: how terrible would it be if we could predict the future? Because that would mean we had no agency.