Definitely; good point—I am sort of just deploying the generic longtermist argument, with all the advantages and drawbacks that brings.
I wonder if you could actually build up a bit of an evidence base from historical case studies?? There’s a long history of trying to help people escape oppressive regimes: slaves in the American south, Jewish people during WW2, East Berliners and other refugees of communism. It might be interesting to do a historical survey and try to analyze what interventions did the most good for people in those situations. (Spreading information, helping individual people escape, supporting internal resistance or reform, lobbying your own country’s policy towards the problematic regime, fighting the full-scale war.) Obviously the situations are very different from each other, but it might turn out helpful. Although for sheer cost-effectiveness, it might be tough for “helping people escape totalitarian regimes” to compete with “helping refugees from very poor and violent countries immigrate to rich and stable ones”, which seems like it ought to be cheaper to do at scale.
Definitely; good point—I am sort of just deploying the generic longtermist argument, with all the advantages and drawbacks that brings.
I wonder if you could actually build up a bit of an evidence base from historical case studies?? There’s a long history of trying to help people escape oppressive regimes: slaves in the American south, Jewish people during WW2, East Berliners and other refugees of communism. It might be interesting to do a historical survey and try to analyze what interventions did the most good for people in those situations. (Spreading information, helping individual people escape, supporting internal resistance or reform, lobbying your own country’s policy towards the problematic regime, fighting the full-scale war.) Obviously the situations are very different from each other, but it might turn out helpful. Although for sheer cost-effectiveness, it might be tough for “helping people escape totalitarian regimes” to compete with “helping refugees from very poor and violent countries immigrate to rich and stable ones”, which seems like it ought to be cheaper to do at scale.