Merely comparing at the amount of money spent by the government or the economy on X or Y doesn’t tell you what is the best place for you to maximize your impact. Not that policy is always a waste of time, of course. It could very well be a great thing to pursue, but the benefits of policy advocacy are not that clear once you frame the problem correctly.
If you have no issue-specific info about crowdedness or tractability, then total effects seem a decent starting point. Right now what I see about policy (trade and wars) vs. charity is that there are a group of ~300 million US citizens who are somehow producing both. Therefore your expected contribution for both is something like (size of total effect)/(300 million).
Edit: I am also forgetting about immigration. Apparently there are 3.8 million black immigrants in the United States, who probably increased their standard of living enormously.
Well you can just point out that the amount of effort being put in by the average citizen is much greater for trade and war. You can tell by the amount of focus given to these issues in political debates and the amount of interest groups focused on these policies. The amount of person-hours and money spent by Americans producing wars and trade isn’t a clearly better ratio than the amount of person-hours and money spent by Americans producing charity.
I would agree there is more interest in war than international charity. On the other hand it could be that charity is limited in the interest it is capable of drawing, so there is effectively a hidden obstacle, or apathy. This would not pertain to your personal donations (since EAs are presumably not apathetic), but if you were thinking about outreach to build a movement with others, it would matter.
Also, even if changing these policies as a whole is not cost effective, I don’t see why changes orthogonal to partisan disputes would also be. For example, EAs prioritize Africa because of its low living standard. On immigration policy, instead of just fighting for more immigration, you might push for less immigration from, say, Mexico, and more from Africa.
Merely comparing at the amount of money spent by the government or the economy on X or Y doesn’t tell you what is the best place for you to maximize your impact. Not that policy is always a waste of time, of course. It could very well be a great thing to pursue, but the benefits of policy advocacy are not that clear once you frame the problem correctly.
If you have no issue-specific info about crowdedness or tractability, then total effects seem a decent starting point. Right now what I see about policy (trade and wars) vs. charity is that there are a group of ~300 million US citizens who are somehow producing both. Therefore your expected contribution for both is something like (size of total effect)/(300 million).
Edit: I am also forgetting about immigration. Apparently there are 3.8 million black immigrants in the United States, who probably increased their standard of living enormously.
Well you can just point out that the amount of effort being put in by the average citizen is much greater for trade and war. You can tell by the amount of focus given to these issues in political debates and the amount of interest groups focused on these policies. The amount of person-hours and money spent by Americans producing wars and trade isn’t a clearly better ratio than the amount of person-hours and money spent by Americans producing charity.
I would agree there is more interest in war than international charity. On the other hand it could be that charity is limited in the interest it is capable of drawing, so there is effectively a hidden obstacle, or apathy. This would not pertain to your personal donations (since EAs are presumably not apathetic), but if you were thinking about outreach to build a movement with others, it would matter.
Also, even if changing these policies as a whole is not cost effective, I don’t see why changes orthogonal to partisan disputes would also be. For example, EAs prioritize Africa because of its low living standard. On immigration policy, instead of just fighting for more immigration, you might push for less immigration from, say, Mexico, and more from Africa.