EA for institutions vs. individuals?
Hello! I am very early on in my exploration of EA principles; I’m pursuing some graduate work in climate change and energy economics at Strathclyde this coming academic year and a lot of the EA reading I’ve done so far—mostly journal articles and blog posts online—resonates with me.
One question I have for the EA community (and this very well may be naive or a result of my inexperience with this stuff) is: It seems to me that (a) identifying the kinds of activities that can do the most good and (b) marshalling the magnitude of resources necessary to truly make a difference are both tasks beyond the ability of average people. As an individual making a decision about which causes to support and how much of my income to donate, I don’t have a lot of good information—I bring a lot of personal bias and I probably don’t have that much money. Also, it seems odd to make systemic and natural failings—the excesses of capitalism, military-industrial complex, the reality of disease and infection, etc. -- the responsibility of individuals.
Rather than focus on the individual, doesn’t it perhaps make more sense for us to compel institutions/government agencies to take an EA lens to their decision-making? For example, the development agencies of donor countries seem much better-positioned to evaluate the effectiveness of various interventions. When wealthy countries reveal their national security strategy papers, we ought to demand that they look beyond narrow conceptions of national interest and work out how they can contribute best to stability and peace globally. (I know that, in the U.S., where I’m originally from, how to support global development and public health is not really a question that features prominently in our political discourse, despite the volume of resources at our disposal; for a fraction of what the U.S. spends on national defense, we could solve global hunger, pay for education in emergency settings, and hit the $100 billion climate finance target, all of which seem like they would pay more dividends to American and global security than more military hardware. Nobody seems to be loudly making this kind of argument, though.)
If this is something already being discussed, I’d find it awfully helpful if someone could point me to the relevant things to read.
Thanks all!
Here is a post of EA reasons not to pursue political action and how to do political action well. Check out the electoral politics tag for some of the political efforts EA has done and how they turned out!
From what I understand: Government money is notoriously inaccessible. Often, it can only be changed by a long process of approvals or people inside organizations who generally have no interest in changing things because stirring the pot would enrage everyone else in the department/their electoral base and possibly break quite a lot of informal arrangements that keep things running. There is almost no incentive to make things better and quite a lot of disincentive for the power-wielding individuals to change anything.
A lot of EA energy then moved to how to fixing that by improving institutional decision-making processes. This has lead to a lot of discussion of better voting systems (approval,quadratic), prediction markets, impact certificates, and other things. These are being tried and deployed.
EA tends to see gov intervention and diplomacy as 1/3: Important, but not Neglected or Tractable, with some exceptions.
I’m not terribly acquainted with this area and hopefully someone else who knows more about this can weigh in.