First off, welcome to the EA community! If you haven’t already, you might want to read the Introduction to Effective Altruism. I don’t have time to write up a full answer, so here are a few of my thoughts.
Usually in the effective altruism community, we are cause-neutral; that is, we try to address whichever charitable cause area maximizes impact. While it’s intuitively compelling that the most cost-effective effort is to eliminate the root cause of a problem, this could be a suboptimal choice for a few reasons.
Most things have multiple causes, and it’s not obvious which one to spend the most resources on without an in-depth analysis; one could just as easily say that the root cause of poverty-related problems is a lack of caring about the poor, or inability to coordinate to fix large problems, or the high cost of basic necessities like medicine and clean water.
Even if systemic change would fix wealth inequality, actually finding and implementing such change could be difficult or expensive enough that it’s more impactful to address the needs of the extreme poor first.
It could be tractable to research, say, government structures that incentivize redistribution of wealth if you have a political science PhD, but there might be no good way for the average person to spend money on the cause area.
I haven’t looked in depth at the arguments for systemic change being cost-effective, partly because global health isn’t my specialty. If you have a strong argument for it that isn’t already addressed in a literature review, I encourage posting it here as an article or shortform post.
First off, welcome to the EA community! If you haven’t already, you might want to read the Introduction to Effective Altruism. I don’t have time to write up a full answer, so here are a few of my thoughts.
Usually in the effective altruism community, we are cause-neutral; that is, we try to address whichever charitable cause area maximizes impact. While it’s intuitively compelling that the most cost-effective effort is to eliminate the root cause of a problem, this could be a suboptimal choice for a few reasons.
Most things have multiple causes, and it’s not obvious which one to spend the most resources on without an in-depth analysis; one could just as easily say that the root cause of poverty-related problems is a lack of caring about the poor, or inability to coordinate to fix large problems, or the high cost of basic necessities like medicine and clean water.
Even if systemic change would fix wealth inequality, actually finding and implementing such change could be difficult or expensive enough that it’s more impactful to address the needs of the extreme poor first.
It could be tractable to research, say, government structures that incentivize redistribution of wealth if you have a political science PhD, but there might be no good way for the average person to spend money on the cause area.
I haven’t looked in depth at the arguments for systemic change being cost-effective, partly because global health isn’t my specialty. If you have a strong argument for it that isn’t already addressed in a literature review, I encourage posting it here as an article or shortform post.