I’m a little confused by the claim that “personal choices” aren’t effective, but corporate pressure campaigns are. Isn’t the way a corporate pressure campaign works that you convince the target that they will be boycotted unless they make the changes you are demanding? So the corporate pressure campaign is only effective if you have people that are willing to change their personal choices. Or am I misunderstanding and that’s not how corporate pressure campaigns work?
a relatively small number of organized activists (maybe, like, 10 − 100, not tens of thousands)...
...asking a corporation to commit to some relatively cheap, achievable set of reforms (like switching their chickens to larger cages or going cage-free, not like “you should all quit killing chickens and start a new company devoted to ecological restoration”)
...while also credibly threatening to launch a campaign of protests if the corporation refuses
Then rinse & repeat for additional corporations / additional incremental reforms (while also keeping an eye out to make sure that earlier promises actually get implemented).
My impression is that this works because the corporations decide that it’s less costly for them to implement the specific, limited, welfare-enhancing “ask” than to endure the reputational damage caused by a big public protest campaign. The efficacy doesn’t depend at all on a threat of boycott by the activists themselves. (After all, the activists are probably already 100% vegan, lol...)
You might reasonably say “okay, makes sense, but isn’t this just a clever way for a small group of activists to LEVERAGE the power of boycotts? the only reason the corporation is afraid of the threatened protest campaign is because they’re worried consumers will stop buying their products, right? so ultimately the activists’ power is deriving from the power of the mass public to make individual personal-consumption decisions”.
This might be sorta true, but I think there are some nuances:
i don’t think the theory of change is that activists would protest and this would kick off a large formal boycott—most people don’t ever participate in boycotts, etc. instead, I think the idea is that protests will create a vague haze of bad vibes and negative associations with a product (ie the protests will essentially be “negative advertisements”), which might push people away from buying even if they’re not self-consciously boycotting. (imagine you usually go to chipotle, but yesterday you saw a news story about protestors holding pictures of gross sad caged farmed chickens used by chipotle—yuck! this might tilt you towards going to a nearby mcdonalds or panda express instead that day, even though ethically it might make no sense if those companies use equally low-welfare factory-farmed chicken)
corporations apparently often seem much more afraid of negative PR than it seems they rationally ought to be based on how much their sales would realistically decline (ie, not much) as a result of some small protests. this suggests that much of the power of protests is flowing through additional channels that aren’t just the immediate impact on product sales
even if in a certain sense the cage-free activists’ strategy relies on something like a consumer boycott (but less formal than a literal boycott, more like “negative advertising”), that still indicates that it’s wise to pursue the leveraged activist strategy rather than the weaker strategy of just trying to be a good individual consumer and doing a ton of personal boycotts
in particular, a key part of the activists’ power comes from their ability to single out a random corporation and focus their energies on it for a limited period of time until the company agrees to the ask. this is the opposite of the OP’s diffuse strategy of boycotting everything a little bit (they’re just one individual) all the time
it’s also powerful that the activists can threaten big action versus no-action over one specific decision the corporation can make, thus creating maximum pressure on that decision. Contrast OP—if Nestle cleaned up their act in one or two areas, OP would probably still be boycotting them until they also cleaned up their act in some unspecified additional number of areas.
We’ve been talking about animal welfare, which, as some other commenters have notes, has a particularly direct connection to personal consumption, so the idea of something like a boycott at least kinda makes sense, and maybe activists’ power is ultimately in part derived from boycott-like mechanisms. But there are many political issues where the connection to consumer behavior is much more tenuous and indirect. Suppose you wanted to reduce healthcare costs in the USA—would it make sense to try and get people to boycott certain medical procedures (but people mostly get surgeries when they need them, not just on a whim) or insurers (but for most people this comes as a fixed part of their job’s benefits package)?? Similarly, if you’re a YIMBY trying to get more homes built, who do you boycott? The problem is really a policy issue of overly-restrictive zoning rules and laws like NEPA, not something you could hope to target by changing your individual consumption patterns. This YIMBY example might seem like a joke, but OP was seriously suggesting boycotting Nestle over the issue of California water shortages, which, like NIMBYism, is really mostly a policy failure caused by weird farm-bill subsidies and messed-up water-rights laws that incentivize water waste—how is pressure on Nestle, a european company, supposed to fix California’s busted agricultural laws?? Similarly, they mention boycotting coca-cola soda because coca-cola does business in israel. How is reduced sales for the coca-cola company supposed to change the decisions of Bibi Netanyahu and his ministers?? One might as well refuse to buy Lenovo laptops or Huawei phones in an attempt to pressure Xi Jinping to stop China’s ongoing nuclear-weapons buildup… surely there are more direct paths to impact here!
I find it paradoxical that the signature strategy of a major cause area—threatening a “haze of bad vibes and negative associations” if a corporation doesn’t somewhat clean up its animal-welfare record—probably would be ineffective if everyone acted like EAs. The mechanism of action is still dependent on individual consumer choice (“tilt you towards going to a nearby mcdonalds or panda express instead that day”) and the commentariat can be read as implying to OP that making individual consumption decisions based on such considerations is too low-impact to pay attention to.
There’s something that feels vaguely non-cooperative about this—we’re dependent on other people responding to our threatened PR campaigns regarding animal welfare (or at least on corporations believing other people would respond), but seem not interested in cooperating with other people’s altruistic PR campaigns. I’m not sure there is anything practical to do with with this mood—other than encourage OP to present clearer models of impact for the interventions they mentioned—but I think it is worthwhile to acknowledge the mood. And maybe if you have a choice in the supermarket between a Nestle and non-Nestle chocolate product, consider purchasing the latter?
Agreed that it’s a weird mood, but perhaps inevitable.
In terms of the inequality between running PR campaigns but “not interesting cooprating with other people’s altruistic PR campaigns”: insofar as attention is ultimately a fixed resource, it’s an intrinsically adversarial situation between different attempts to capture peoples’ attention. (Although there are senses in which this is not true—many causes are often bundled together in a political alliance. And there could even be a broader cultural shift towards people caring more about behaving ethically, which would perhaps “lift all boats” in the do-gooder PR-campaign space!) Nevertheless, given the mostly fixed supply of attention, it certainly seems fine to steal eyeballs for thoughtful, highly-effective causes that would otherwise be watching Tiktok, and it seems similarly fine to steal eyeballs for good causes that would otherwise have gone to dumb, counterproductive causes (like the great paper-straw crusade). After that, it seems increasingly lamentable to steal eyeballs from increasingly reasonably-worthy causes, until you get to the level of counterproductive infighting among people who are all trying hard to make the world a better place. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that everyone naturally thinks their own cause is worthier than others. Nevertheless, I think some causes are worthier than others, and fighting to direct attention towards the worthiest causes is a virtuous thing to do—perhaps even doing one’s civic duty as a participant in the “marketplace of ideas”.
In terms of the inequality between organizers (who are being high-impact only because others are low impact) vs consumers whose behavior is affected:
This is omnipresent everywhere in EA, right? Mitigating x-risks is only high-impact because the rest of the world is neglecting it so badly!
Are we cruelly “stealing their impact”? I mean, maybe?? But this doesn’t seem so bad, because other people don’t care as much about impact. Conversely, some causes are much better than EA at going viral and raising lots of shallow mass awareness—but this isn’t so terrible from EA’s perspective, because EA doesn’t care as much about going viral.
But talk of “stealing impact” is weird and inverted… Imagine if everyone turned EA and tried to do the most high-impact thing. In this world, it might harder to have very high impact, but this would hardly be cause for despair, because the actual world would be immensely better off! It seems perverse to care about imagined “impact-stealing” rather than the actual state of the world.
It also seems like a fair deal insofar as the organizers have thought carefully and worked hard (a big effort), while it’s not like the consumers are being coerced into doing menial low-impact gruntwork for long hours and low pay; they’re instead making a tiny, nearly unconscious choice between two very similar options. In a way, the consumers are doing marginal charity, so their impact is higher than it seems. But asking people to go beyond marginal charity and make costlier sacrifices (ie, join a formal boycott, or consciously keep track of long lists of which companies are good versus bad) seems like more of an imposition.
Re: Nestle in particular, I get the spirit of what you’re saying, although see my recent long comment where I try to think through the chocolate issue in more detail. As far as I can tell, the labor-exploitation problems are common to the entire industry, so switching from Nestle to another brand wouldn’t do anything to help?? (If anything, possibly you should be switching TOWARDS nestle, and away from companies like Hershey’s that get a much higher % of their total revenue from chocolate?)
I think this spot-check about Nestle vs cocoa child labor (and about Nestle vs drought, and so forth) illustrates my point that there are a lot of seemingly-altruistic PR campaigns that actually don’t do much good. Perhaps those PR campaigns should feel bad for recruiting so much attention only to waste it on a poorly-thought-out theory of impact!
I don’t think that the analogy between X-risk work and this kind of protest makes sense.
The reason X-risk work is so impactful is that very few people are working on X-risk at all. As you say, if more people worked on X-risk, the (marginal) impact of each one would be lower, but that’s a good thing because more work would be getting done.
The claim being made about the animal welfare activists is that the mechanism of change relies on both the “high-impact” organizers, as well as the “low-impact” responsive consumers who will change their behavior in response to the protests. I think Jason’s point is that:
(a) it doesn’t make sense to call the organizers “high-impact” and the responsive consumers “low-impact”, if both of these groups are necessary for the protest to have impact at all,
(b) if we, as EAs, take the “organizer” role in our campaigns, we’re expecting a bunch of people to take the “responsive consumer” role, even if they don’t care as much about the issue as we do. So the cooperative thing to do would be to ourselves take the “responsive consumer” role in campaigns that others are organizing, even if we don’t care as much about the issue as those organizers do.
--
I do, however, think that (b) only applies to cases where there is an organized protest. If there was a prominent group of anti-Nestle protesters who had specific demands of Nestle that had a reasonable chance of being adopted and that would lead to positive impact, and they were protesting because Nestle didn’t do those, then maybe this argument would counsel that we should support them if it doesn’t cost too much. But I don’t really think this applies to the OP, who seemed to be suggesting that we should do a bunch of one-person “personal boycotts”, which I don’t think will have much impact.
The boycott of Nestlé isn’t solely an individual action; there are others who also avoid Nestlé, Amazon, and similar companies. That said, these efforts remain relatively small in scale and don’t constitute a large, coordinated movement.
Re: Nestle in particular, I get the spirit of what you’re saying, although see my recent long comment where I try to think through the chocolate issue in more detail. As far as I can tell, the labor-exploitation problems are common to the entire industry, so switching from Nestle to another brand wouldn’t do anything to help??
That could be correct. But I think the flip side of my individual chocolate purchasing decisions aren’t very impactful is that maybe we should defer under some circumstances to the people who have thought a lot about these kinds of issues, even if we think their modeling isn’t particularly good. Weak modeling is probably better, in expectancy, than no modeling at all—and developing our own models may not be an impactful use of our time. Or stated differently, I would expect the boycott targets identified by weak modeling to be more problematic actors in expectancy than if we chose our chocolate brands by picking a brand out of a hat.[1] (This doesn’t necessarily apply to boycotts that are not premised on each additional unit of production causing marginal harms.)
That is some useful information. It seems like what you’re saying is that these campaigns really involve three different groups:
(a) the “inner circle” of 10-100 activists that are organizing the campaign,
(b) some larger number of supporters that are waiting in the wings to execute the threatened protests if the original demands aren’t met,
(c) the “audience” of the protests—i.e. this is the general public who will be driven away from the target in response to the protests.
And it’s really only group (c) that needs to be big enough as a fraction of the target’s total business that the target finds it worth listening to.
Are there any good sources that go into more detail about how these kind of campaigns work? (I’m interested in this in general, not just in relation to this specific post)
That’s an interesting way to think about it! Unfortunately this is where the limits of my knowledge about the animal-welfare side of EA kick in, but you could probably find more info about these progest campaigns by searching some animal-welfare-related tags here on the Forum, or going to the sites of groups like Animal Ask or Hive that do ongoing work coordinating the field of animal activists, or by finding articles / podcast interviews with Lewis Bollard, who is the head grantmaker for this stuff at Open Philanthropy / Coefficient Giving, and has been thinking about the strategy of cage-free campaigns and related efforts for a very long time.
I’m a little confused by the claim that “personal choices” aren’t effective, but corporate pressure campaigns are. Isn’t the way a corporate pressure campaign works that you convince the target that they will be boycotted unless they make the changes you are demanding? So the corporate pressure campaign is only effective if you have people that are willing to change their personal choices. Or am I misunderstanding and that’s not how corporate pressure campaigns work?
I’m not an expert about this, but my impression (from articles like this: https://coefficientgiving.org/research/why-are-the-us-corporate-cage-free-campaigns-succeeding/ , and websites like Animal Ask) is that the standard EA-style corporate campaign involves:
a relatively small number of organized activists (maybe, like, 10 − 100, not tens of thousands)...
...asking a corporation to commit to some relatively cheap, achievable set of reforms (like switching their chickens to larger cages or going cage-free, not like “you should all quit killing chickens and start a new company devoted to ecological restoration”)
...while also credibly threatening to launch a campaign of protests if the corporation refuses
Then rinse & repeat for additional corporations / additional incremental reforms (while also keeping an eye out to make sure that earlier promises actually get implemented).
My impression is that this works because the corporations decide that it’s less costly for them to implement the specific, limited, welfare-enhancing “ask” than to endure the reputational damage caused by a big public protest campaign. The efficacy doesn’t depend at all on a threat of boycott by the activists themselves. (After all, the activists are probably already 100% vegan, lol...)
You might reasonably say “okay, makes sense, but isn’t this just a clever way for a small group of activists to LEVERAGE the power of boycotts? the only reason the corporation is afraid of the threatened protest campaign is because they’re worried consumers will stop buying their products, right? so ultimately the activists’ power is deriving from the power of the mass public to make individual personal-consumption decisions”.
This might be sorta true, but I think there are some nuances:
i don’t think the theory of change is that activists would protest and this would kick off a large formal boycott—most people don’t ever participate in boycotts, etc. instead, I think the idea is that protests will create a vague haze of bad vibes and negative associations with a product (ie the protests will essentially be “negative advertisements”), which might push people away from buying even if they’re not self-consciously boycotting. (imagine you usually go to chipotle, but yesterday you saw a news story about protestors holding pictures of gross sad caged farmed chickens used by chipotle—yuck! this might tilt you towards going to a nearby mcdonalds or panda express instead that day, even though ethically it might make no sense if those companies use equally low-welfare factory-farmed chicken)
corporations apparently often seem much more afraid of negative PR than it seems they rationally ought to be based on how much their sales would realistically decline (ie, not much) as a result of some small protests. this suggests that much of the power of protests is flowing through additional channels that aren’t just the immediate impact on product sales
even if in a certain sense the cage-free activists’ strategy relies on something like a consumer boycott (but less formal than a literal boycott, more like “negative advertising”), that still indicates that it’s wise to pursue the leveraged activist strategy rather than the weaker strategy of just trying to be a good individual consumer and doing a ton of personal boycotts
in particular, a key part of the activists’ power comes from their ability to single out a random corporation and focus their energies on it for a limited period of time until the company agrees to the ask. this is the opposite of the OP’s diffuse strategy of boycotting everything a little bit (they’re just one individual) all the time
it’s also powerful that the activists can threaten big action versus no-action over one specific decision the corporation can make, thus creating maximum pressure on that decision. Contrast OP—if Nestle cleaned up their act in one or two areas, OP would probably still be boycotting them until they also cleaned up their act in some unspecified additional number of areas.
We’ve been talking about animal welfare, which, as some other commenters have notes, has a particularly direct connection to personal consumption, so the idea of something like a boycott at least kinda makes sense, and maybe activists’ power is ultimately in part derived from boycott-like mechanisms. But there are many political issues where the connection to consumer behavior is much more tenuous and indirect. Suppose you wanted to reduce healthcare costs in the USA—would it make sense to try and get people to boycott certain medical procedures (but people mostly get surgeries when they need them, not just on a whim) or insurers (but for most people this comes as a fixed part of their job’s benefits package)?? Similarly, if you’re a YIMBY trying to get more homes built, who do you boycott? The problem is really a policy issue of overly-restrictive zoning rules and laws like NEPA, not something you could hope to target by changing your individual consumption patterns. This YIMBY example might seem like a joke, but OP was seriously suggesting boycotting Nestle over the issue of California water shortages, which, like NIMBYism, is really mostly a policy failure caused by weird farm-bill subsidies and messed-up water-rights laws that incentivize water waste—how is pressure on Nestle, a european company, supposed to fix California’s busted agricultural laws?? Similarly, they mention boycotting coca-cola soda because coca-cola does business in israel. How is reduced sales for the coca-cola company supposed to change the decisions of Bibi Netanyahu and his ministers?? One might as well refuse to buy Lenovo laptops or Huawei phones in an attempt to pressure Xi Jinping to stop China’s ongoing nuclear-weapons buildup… surely there are more direct paths to impact here!
I find it paradoxical that the signature strategy of a major cause area—threatening a “haze of bad vibes and negative associations” if a corporation doesn’t somewhat clean up its animal-welfare record—probably would be ineffective if everyone acted like EAs. The mechanism of action is still dependent on individual consumer choice (“tilt you towards going to a nearby mcdonalds or panda express instead that day”) and the commentariat can be read as implying to OP that making individual consumption decisions based on such considerations is too low-impact to pay attention to.
There’s something that feels vaguely non-cooperative about this—we’re dependent on other people responding to our threatened PR campaigns regarding animal welfare (or at least on corporations believing other people would respond), but seem not interested in cooperating with other people’s altruistic PR campaigns. I’m not sure there is anything practical to do with with this mood—other than encourage OP to present clearer models of impact for the interventions they mentioned—but I think it is worthwhile to acknowledge the mood. And maybe if you have a choice in the supermarket between a Nestle and non-Nestle chocolate product, consider purchasing the latter?
Agreed that it’s a weird mood, but perhaps inevitable.
In terms of the inequality between running PR campaigns but “not interesting cooprating with other people’s altruistic PR campaigns”: insofar as attention is ultimately a fixed resource, it’s an intrinsically adversarial situation between different attempts to capture peoples’ attention. (Although there are senses in which this is not true—many causes are often bundled together in a political alliance. And there could even be a broader cultural shift towards people caring more about behaving ethically, which would perhaps “lift all boats” in the do-gooder PR-campaign space!) Nevertheless, given the mostly fixed supply of attention, it certainly seems fine to steal eyeballs for thoughtful, highly-effective causes that would otherwise be watching Tiktok, and it seems similarly fine to steal eyeballs for good causes that would otherwise have gone to dumb, counterproductive causes (like the great paper-straw crusade). After that, it seems increasingly lamentable to steal eyeballs from increasingly reasonably-worthy causes, until you get to the level of counterproductive infighting among people who are all trying hard to make the world a better place. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that everyone naturally thinks their own cause is worthier than others. Nevertheless, I think some causes are worthier than others, and fighting to direct attention towards the worthiest causes is a virtuous thing to do—perhaps even doing one’s civic duty as a participant in the “marketplace of ideas”.
In terms of the inequality between organizers (who are being high-impact only because others are low impact) vs consumers whose behavior is affected:
This is omnipresent everywhere in EA, right? Mitigating x-risks is only high-impact because the rest of the world is neglecting it so badly!
Are we cruelly “stealing their impact”? I mean, maybe?? But this doesn’t seem so bad, because other people don’t care as much about impact. Conversely, some causes are much better than EA at going viral and raising lots of shallow mass awareness—but this isn’t so terrible from EA’s perspective, because EA doesn’t care as much about going viral.
But talk of “stealing impact” is weird and inverted… Imagine if everyone turned EA and tried to do the most high-impact thing. In this world, it might harder to have very high impact, but this would hardly be cause for despair, because the actual world would be immensely better off! It seems perverse to care about imagined “impact-stealing” rather than the actual state of the world.
It also seems like a fair deal insofar as the organizers have thought carefully and worked hard (a big effort), while it’s not like the consumers are being coerced into doing menial low-impact gruntwork for long hours and low pay; they’re instead making a tiny, nearly unconscious choice between two very similar options. In a way, the consumers are doing marginal charity, so their impact is higher than it seems. But asking people to go beyond marginal charity and make costlier sacrifices (ie, join a formal boycott, or consciously keep track of long lists of which companies are good versus bad) seems like more of an imposition.
Re: Nestle in particular, I get the spirit of what you’re saying, although see my recent long comment where I try to think through the chocolate issue in more detail. As far as I can tell, the labor-exploitation problems are common to the entire industry, so switching from Nestle to another brand wouldn’t do anything to help?? (If anything, possibly you should be switching TOWARDS nestle, and away from companies like Hershey’s that get a much higher % of their total revenue from chocolate?)
I think this spot-check about Nestle vs cocoa child labor (and about Nestle vs drought, and so forth) illustrates my point that there are a lot of seemingly-altruistic PR campaigns that actually don’t do much good. Perhaps those PR campaigns should feel bad for recruiting so much attention only to waste it on a poorly-thought-out theory of impact!
I don’t think that the analogy between X-risk work and this kind of protest makes sense.
The reason X-risk work is so impactful is that very few people are working on X-risk at all. As you say, if more people worked on X-risk, the (marginal) impact of each one would be lower, but that’s a good thing because more work would be getting done.
The claim being made about the animal welfare activists is that the mechanism of change relies on both the “high-impact” organizers, as well as the “low-impact” responsive consumers who will change their behavior in response to the protests. I think Jason’s point is that:
(a) it doesn’t make sense to call the organizers “high-impact” and the responsive consumers “low-impact”, if both of these groups are necessary for the protest to have impact at all,
(b) if we, as EAs, take the “organizer” role in our campaigns, we’re expecting a bunch of people to take the “responsive consumer” role, even if they don’t care as much about the issue as we do. So the cooperative thing to do would be to ourselves take the “responsive consumer” role in campaigns that others are organizing, even if we don’t care as much about the issue as those organizers do.
--
I do, however, think that (b) only applies to cases where there is an organized protest. If there was a prominent group of anti-Nestle protesters who had specific demands of Nestle that had a reasonable chance of being adopted and that would lead to positive impact, and they were protesting because Nestle didn’t do those, then maybe this argument would counsel that we should support them if it doesn’t cost too much. But I don’t really think this applies to the OP, who seemed to be suggesting that we should do a bunch of one-person “personal boycotts”, which I don’t think will have much impact.
The boycott of Nestlé isn’t solely an individual action; there are others who also avoid Nestlé, Amazon, and similar companies. That said, these efforts remain relatively small in scale and don’t constitute a large, coordinated movement.
That could be correct. But I think the flip side of my individual chocolate purchasing decisions aren’t very impactful is that maybe we should defer under some circumstances to the people who have thought a lot about these kinds of issues, even if we think their modeling isn’t particularly good. Weak modeling is probably better, in expectancy, than no modeling at all—and developing our own models may not be an impactful use of our time. Or stated differently, I would expect the boycott targets identified by weak modeling to be more problematic actors in expectancy than if we chose our chocolate brands by picking a brand out of a hat.[1] (This doesn’t necessarily apply to boycotts that are not premised on each additional unit of production causing marginal harms.)
Of course, we may not be picking a brand at random—we may be responding to price and quality differences.
That is some useful information. It seems like what you’re saying is that these campaigns really involve three different groups:
(a) the “inner circle” of 10-100 activists that are organizing the campaign,
(b) some larger number of supporters that are waiting in the wings to execute the threatened protests if the original demands aren’t met,
(c) the “audience” of the protests—i.e. this is the general public who will be driven away from the target in response to the protests.
And it’s really only group (c) that needs to be big enough as a fraction of the target’s total business that the target finds it worth listening to.
Are there any good sources that go into more detail about how these kind of campaigns work? (I’m interested in this in general, not just in relation to this specific post)
That’s an interesting way to think about it! Unfortunately this is where the limits of my knowledge about the animal-welfare side of EA kick in, but you could probably find more info about these progest campaigns by searching some animal-welfare-related tags here on the Forum, or going to the sites of groups like Animal Ask or Hive that do ongoing work coordinating the field of animal activists, or by finding articles / podcast interviews with Lewis Bollard, who is the head grantmaker for this stuff at Open Philanthropy / Coefficient Giving, and has been thinking about the strategy of cage-free campaigns and related efforts for a very long time.