Effective Altruism as a Market in Moral Goods – Introduction

[Remmelt]

This is post 1 of a 5-part series, where I tentatively apply the market and network concepts in the table below (links to definitions/​examples) to hopefully gain a better applied understanding of how the EA community operates. I welcome your feedback in the comments section throughout.

1)	Introduction
2)	Markets	➔ Markets in Moral Goods	➔ EA Market in Moral Goods (EA community)
	Agents
	Capital
	Goods	➔ Moral goods	➔ ’Impact’ goods
	Exchange
3)	Networks	➔ Moral networks	➔ EA networks
4)	Preferences	➔ Moral preferences	➔ Consequentialist preferences
	Improving intrinsic preferences	➔ Moral development	➔ Rationality-guided (meta-)ethics
	Improving revealed preferences	➔ Applied ethics	➔ Improving the accuracy of beliefs
5)	Division of labour

1. Introduction

Free markets are social systems that create powerful forces towards decentralised productivity (I’ll also cover downsides in my next post). Likewise, social network analysis is a powerful lens through which to analyse community interactions (see book chapter 9).

In the coming weeks, I will tentatively apply market and network concepts in the hope of gaining a better understanding of how the EA community works and how its collective impact can be more reliably improved. At the end of each post, I will speculate on its implications and the possible actions that flow from those.

Credits: I want to thank Matthijs Maas, Dora Zupka and Victor Sint Nicolaas, Chris van Merwijk and Max Dalton for their valuable feedback and contributions so far, making me look less of an amateur.

[Remmelt]

Update: this series is going to take months – not weeks – to finish.

After further reflection, I’m doing another major overhaul of my draft. I’ve also had to commit to doing more other work than in the last month than expected.

(In other words: planning fallacy.)