I think you are usually an insightful, reasonable, and truthful commenter on the forum and off the forum. That said, I think there are a few errors and important facts on this topic that are omitted.
This is the Gini coefficient (measurement of inequality) in the United States over the last 20 years (the country I expect you are talking about).
Here it is for several more countries where EAs predominantly live.
I don’t know why it “seems” like inequality is getting worse. I think a lot of that has to do with news coverage and such. But Gini coefficients are flat in most of the world over this time and going down (towards less inequality) in a few countries.
With respect to donations, I again want to point out that EAs themselves don’t donate very much money. This link is from 2019, I don’t have more recent data, but I expect that the trend has gone down significantly since then (i also think there is a good chance that these surveys overestimate donations) as there has been less emphasis on earning to give in the community. I understand that the majority of EAs aren’t billionaires, but they do often earn a significant amount of money, definitely enough to put them in the global top 5% and often the top 1%. The median EA donates something like 3%. These are people who self-identify as charitable.
On the power of the ultra-wealthy, I expect some of this is coming from Elon Musk’s power, but keep in mind that the majority of billionaires supported the candidate that lost the election. I’m not sure which measure would have billionaires being more powerful than previous years (unless of course that there are more of them since the world is getting richer + inflation).
In absolute terms, the income share of the top 1% in the US has been steadily rising since the 1980′s (although this is not true for countries like japan or sweden)
Your point about the top 1%’s rising income share uses pre-tax and transfers data, which can be misleading here because the discussion is specifically about how much income rich people actually control and can redirect towards their desired ends. Post-tax and transfer measures are more informative in this context since they directly reflect the resources individuals genuinely have available after taxes and redistribution. In other words, taxes and transfers matter because they substantially reduce the actual amount of wealth the rich can freely use, donate, or influence society with. Ignoring this gives a distorted picture of how much power or control rich people practically possess, which is central to the original discussion.
Other studies have notably not found meaningful increases in the top 1%’s income share after taxes and transfers are taken into account:
If the relative amount of wealth in the top 0.1% increases compared to the top 1%, it makes sense for EA to prioritize more the former (assuming constant relative tractability)
Using the data cited in your source (the Distributional Financial Accounts (DFA) provided by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors), it seems to me that the growth in the share of wealth held by the top 0.1% has not been very fast in the last 20 years—growing from around 10-11% to around 14% over that period. In my opinion, this is a significant, albeit rather unimportant trend relative to other social shifts in the last 20 years.
Moreover, this data does not include wealth held in social insurance programs (as I pointed out in another comment). If included, this would presumably decrease the magnitude of the trend seen in this plot, especially regarding the declining share of wealth held by the bottom 90%.
Thanks for replying with data. I think what matters for EA fundraising strategy is the relative share of wealth in the top 0.1% and in the top 1% (or maybe top 10%), it’s great that the share of wealth in the bottom 50% is increasing, but I don’t expect many there to be significant donors (with important but rare exceptions).
It’s also not clear to me how liquid is the wealth in social insurance programs, I don’t expect it to be a viable source of donations/influence/impact (but of course it’s great that more people are covered by insurance)
I also think that I was mistaken to mention “the last decades”, as “the last 5-10 years” seems a more relevant time frame for changes in EA strategy.
In my opinion the perception that inequality is increasing could also be due to relative comparisons between the top 1%-10% and the top 0.1%-0.01%, as the former becomes relatively less influential.
With respect to donations, I again want to point out that EAs themselves don’t donate very much money. This link is from 2019, I don’t have more recent data, but I expect that the trend has gone down significantly since then (i also think there is a good chance that these surveys overestimate donations) as there has been less emphasis on earning to give in the community.
It’s not clear to me how this is relevant for my argument. I could picture a few claims you could make from this.
From my point of view a whole bunch of EAs are doing direct work at low salaries, and several prominent EA-aligned billionaires do seem to significantly donate. I’d love to see higher donations from other E2G-ers, and imagine we have things to learn from paying more attention here (that could ideally translate to other groups).
I should have made my response clearer. I am suggesting a few things.
It seems that on a relative basis, billionaires are on average, about as or more charitable than EAs. I think this is a sign that EAs should be far more charitable.
I think the fact that even EAs don’t seem to donate very much suggests that it actually is very hard to get people to donate significant percentages of their income/wealth.
I think it’s going to be quite hard to convince others (in this case, billionaires) that they should be donating significant sums of their income/wealth when we don’t. It’s just too easy to dismiss people as hypocrites at first glance or that we don’t really believe it.
I think I just don’t see that most EAs are taking very low salaries. Many (most?) make comparable salaries to what they would make in industry, some more, some less. I don’t think EA salaries are particularly low in general.
I think I just don’t see that most EAs are taking very low salaries. Many (most?) make comparable salaries to what they would make in industry, some more, some less.
I’d be curious to later see data on this (not asking you in particular). It seems like a tough thing to measure—ideally we’d want a good idea of what people’s career trajectories are like before and after taking EA directions.
There’s definitely a bunch of anecdotal data around me to suggest that many people take lower salaries than they would otherwise. At the same time, it’s hard to do an apples to apples comparison, as the EA jobs look quite different to the other jobs. For example, it being more altruistic makes it more enjoyable to some people, the work can come with more agency, you can work around people you like more, it can be higher-status in your community, etc.
Yep. Kamala Harris significantly out-raised Trump in 2024. At the same time, in total, the donations seem pretty low to me. Kalama Harris raised and spent around $2B. But given the importance of this election, I think it could have well been safe for donors (ideally, across the income ladder) to donate a lot more. My rough impression is that the “Too Much Dark Money In Almonds” post is broadly correct, though maybe 2-4x off.
My point was never that billionaires cause active damage (though some definitely do). It was that most have the opportunity to cause a lot of good, and rarely do.
I’m a bit confused what you are arguing for. Do you want the wealthy to have even more influence on our politics? Is this just a supposition that Kamala Harris would have been better than Trump (I agree) and thus it would have been good for billionaires to donate for this reason?
I think that the question “Do you want the wealthy to have even more influence on our politics?” often maps to an ongoing debate that basically says, “the wealthy have a big influence over politics, and that looks like politics being more favorable to the very wealthy, for example with tax benefits and similar.”
I think that there are many things billionaires could do that are highly cooperative with society. For example, try to stop misinformation across the board, make sure that the government is actually run well (i.e. government department competence), etc.
Personally, I’m sympathetic to the idea that the MAGA movement is unusually high-risk, and should have been uniquely opposed. I think it could have been good, looking back, for Dustin Moskovitz and other similar donors, to have done more around the 2024 election.
Elon Musk is an incredibly frustrating example, as he’s a case of a billionaire who more arguably is doing things he actually believes will be good, but by doing so he’s causing a lot of damage. But I think he’s the exception rather than the rule for the wealthy (where some evidence is the fact that Kamala Harris raised more money).
I’m fairly skeptical that more money would really have done anything. I understand that politics should get more money than almonds. But I think that would mainly be done by giving money to both sides.
As an exercise, what should Kamala have spent more money on if she had it? She had name recognition. I don’t think anyone in the country was unsure about who she was. I think it’s really hard to come up with things more money would have done for the Democrats. The real thing you need to do is not purchasable with money; you need to make Democrat policies work better for people. I think Ezra Klein is onto something here really.
I’m pretty sure you’ve thought through the most obvious answers and they haven’t convinced you. The TLDR seems likely that we then just disagree on basics.
The 2024 election was somewhat close by historical standards. Eying it now, Trump won by 80k votes in Michigan, 120k in PA, 30k in WI, 40k in Nevada, 190k in Arizona, 115k in Georgia. To flip this election, I think MI/PA/WI could have been enough, so that means (80k+120k+30k) ~ 230k votes, or half if they could come from Republican votes.
A quick check suggests that advertising/outreach costs $100 to $1k to change votes in certain settings. Say it’s a lot more, so $10k. $10k * 230k = 2.3B, which still isn’t that much.
All that said, smarter donors would have started sooner and done more strategies. By the time Harris officially started running, it was already very late in the game.
I think potential donors are quite good at suggesting that absolutely everything they could do is useless, as they really don’t want to donate. (I imagine this is much less the case for you specifically, but I suspect it is the case of the argument as it’s often used)
At very least, for such a problem, I’d hope that donors would have spent say $10M to $100M this year getting more clarity on the question of tractability, and I don’t think much of this happened.
I think most wealthy donors on the Republican side would really prefer other Republican candidates over Trump. I think Trump is uniquely bad and disliked by many elites.
All this to say, when I don’t see even $5B spent to prevent say $1T-$10T+ of damage, I get pretty suspicious.
Even if it were the case that the results demonstrated that it was impossible ex-post, I think there were many possible worlds, ex-ante, where donations were more valuable. Generally I judge actions in terms of expectations ex-ante.
I know SBF was considering various strategies, potentially for $1B to $5B or so.
I agree that we should judge the actions ex ante. I also agree that (you are implying this I think) you have to start early and do good thinking in order to be effective here. 3 months before the election is too late. We had to get on this years before the election and the most effective solutions will look like getting good, sound, authentic, moderate candidates into the running or paying Biden $100mm to committ to not running.
I think if you went to say Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and others and said “it’s going to cost $10B, $10B and we flip this election.”, I think they would probably put in ~100mm (maybe less tbh) each, personally and go pretty gung-ho to get you to $10B.
The main problem is that I just don’t think you can turn money into votes through advertising past a point. I think you need to actually just pay people (which is illegal) and then you can flip votes. But for the vast majority of people, showing them more ads just does nothing. There’s even some evidence that it turns people off.
I’m not going to scrutinize your calculations. I think you realize that you don’t know in advance how many votes you need and where and that perhaps $1k/vote flip is on the margin and once you pick that fruit, it gets a lot harder and that you don’t have good accuracy on which votes you flip (even in a model where you do get to pay $1k/vote flip, most of the time that vote flip just happens in some random unimportant state). Thus, you basically got this advantage where the math looks great due to the importance of certain states due to the electoral college but that advantage gets effectively undone because you don’t get to perfectly target the states you want.
I would greatly expect that once everything is accounted for, donating EA money to politics won’t be cost effective but I like that you’re thinking about this and realize that it’s not going to be “EA money” predominantly.
I would greatly expect that once everything is accounted for, donating EA money to politics won’t be cost effective but I like that you’re thinking about this and realize that it’s not going to be “EA money” predominantly.
To be clear, I wasn’t advocating here to donate EA money. I think this would place this at a significantly higher bar. My point instead is that I think that the political issue is much more mainstream than EA causes, and would have been a clearer cause for many other people, including the top 0.1%.
Didn’t mean to imply you were, sorry if it came off that way.
Yup, I agree. But I think most people don’t care as much about political outcomes as they purport to, based on their actions. I think a lot of that is social desirability bias.
Thanks for calling me out on these points. (Also, thanks to titotal for providing other useful metrics!) I find your take insightful, though from these arguments, I still very much stay with my overall position.
I’ll respond in different comments, to help keep discussion manageable.
When I said “inequality is on the rise”, my statement wasn’t very precise. I find it interesting that the gini coefficient has stayed somewhat flat for the last 20 years in the US, though would note that:
1. It clearly rose significantly right before ~20 years ago. (Looking back, I think “20 years” wasn’t a well chosen number to start this post with)
2. It still did definitely rise, according to the official stats, in the last 20 years. I think the graph you provide is arguably deceiving because it sets the bottom of the y-axis at 0. Consider this instead. Here it looks like it did grow from 40 in 1995 to 41.3 in 2022. While this might seem small, I suspect it still adds up.
3. The US’s gini coefficient is quite bad compared to many other countries. Given it’s massive wealth, I think this is a sizable deal.
4. I found titotal’s post below quite interesting and relevant on this.
5. For my main argument, the more key relevant question is something like, “Is it true that there’s an incredible amount of wealth contained by the ultra-wealthy, or similar?” So while I find the discussion about inequality interesting (I especially enjoy the use of official data here), It’s arguably not particularly key. It could have well been a mistake for me to begin with that sentence—I was quickly thinking that people would “know what I meant”, but it seems to have gotten in the way of my point.
I think you are usually an insightful, reasonable, and truthful commenter on the forum and off the forum. That said, I think there are a few errors and important facts on this topic that are omitted.
This is the Gini coefficient (measurement of inequality) in the United States over the last 20 years (the country I expect you are talking about).
Here it is for several more countries where EAs predominantly live.
I don’t know why it “seems” like inequality is getting worse. I think a lot of that has to do with news coverage and such. But Gini coefficients are flat in most of the world over this time and going down (towards less inequality) in a few countries.
With respect to donations, I again want to point out that EAs themselves don’t donate very much money. This link is from 2019, I don’t have more recent data, but I expect that the trend has gone down significantly since then (i also think there is a good chance that these surveys overestimate donations) as there has been less emphasis on earning to give in the community. I understand that the majority of EAs aren’t billionaires, but they do often earn a significant amount of money, definitely enough to put them in the global top 5% and often the top 1%. The median EA donates something like 3%. These are people who self-identify as charitable.
On the power of the ultra-wealthy, I expect some of this is coming from Elon Musk’s power, but keep in mind that the majority of billionaires supported the candidate that lost the election. I’m not sure which measure would have billionaires being more powerful than previous years (unless of course that there are more of them since the world is getting richer + inflation).
The gini coefficient “is more sensitive to changes around the middle of the distribution than to the top and the bottom”. When you are talking about the top billionaires, like Ozzie is, it’s not the correct metric to use:
In absolute terms, the income share of the top 1% in the US has been steadily rising since the 1980′s (although this is not true for countries like japan or sweden)
Your point about the top 1%’s rising income share uses pre-tax and transfers data, which can be misleading here because the discussion is specifically about how much income rich people actually control and can redirect towards their desired ends. Post-tax and transfer measures are more informative in this context since they directly reflect the resources individuals genuinely have available after taxes and redistribution. In other words, taxes and transfers matter because they substantially reduce the actual amount of wealth the rich can freely use, donate, or influence society with. Ignoring this gives a distorted picture of how much power or control rich people practically possess, which is central to the original discussion.
Other studies have notably not found meaningful increases in the top 1%’s income share after taxes and transfers are taken into account:
I think looking at the top 1% is a bit misleading, as the top 0.1% and the top 1% had very different growth rates in the last decades.
https://archive.is/MFFPq
If the relative amount of wealth in the top 0.1% increases compared to the top 1%, it makes sense for EA to prioritize more the former (assuming constant relative tractability)
Using the data cited in your source (the Distributional Financial Accounts (DFA) provided by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors), it seems to me that the growth in the share of wealth held by the top 0.1% has not been very fast in the last 20 years—growing from around 10-11% to around 14% over that period. In my opinion, this is a significant, albeit rather unimportant trend relative to other social shifts in the last 20 years.
Moreover, this data does not include wealth held in social insurance programs (as I pointed out in another comment). If included, this would presumably decrease the magnitude of the trend seen in this plot, especially regarding the declining share of wealth held by the bottom 90%.
Thanks for replying with data. I think what matters for EA fundraising strategy is the relative share of wealth in the top 0.1% and in the top 1% (or maybe top 10%), it’s great that the share of wealth in the bottom 50% is increasing, but I don’t expect many there to be significant donors (with important but rare exceptions).
It’s also not clear to me how liquid is the wealth in social insurance programs, I don’t expect it to be a viable source of donations/influence/impact (but of course it’s great that more people are covered by insurance)
I also think that I was mistaken to mention “the last decades”, as “the last 5-10 years” seems a more relevant time frame for changes in EA strategy.
In my opinion the perception that inequality is increasing could also be due to relative comparisons between the top 1%-10% and the top 0.1%-0.01%, as the former becomes relatively less influential.
It’s not clear to me how this is relevant for my argument. I could picture a few claims you could make from this.
From my point of view a whole bunch of EAs are doing direct work at low salaries, and several prominent EA-aligned billionaires do seem to significantly donate. I’d love to see higher donations from other E2G-ers, and imagine we have things to learn from paying more attention here (that could ideally translate to other groups).
I should have made my response clearer. I am suggesting a few things.
It seems that on a relative basis, billionaires are on average, about as or more charitable than EAs. I think this is a sign that EAs should be far more charitable.
I think the fact that even EAs don’t seem to donate very much suggests that it actually is very hard to get people to donate significant percentages of their income/wealth.
I think it’s going to be quite hard to convince others (in this case, billionaires) that they should be donating significant sums of their income/wealth when we don’t. It’s just too easy to dismiss people as hypocrites at first glance or that we don’t really believe it.
I think I just don’t see that most EAs are taking very low salaries. Many (most?) make comparable salaries to what they would make in industry, some more, some less. I don’t think EA salaries are particularly low in general.
Thanks for the clarification.
I’d be curious to later see data on this (not asking you in particular). It seems like a tough thing to measure—ideally we’d want a good idea of what people’s career trajectories are like before and after taking EA directions.
There’s definitely a bunch of anecdotal data around me to suggest that many people take lower salaries than they would otherwise. At the same time, it’s hard to do an apples to apples comparison, as the EA jobs look quite different to the other jobs. For example, it being more altruistic makes it more enjoyable to some people, the work can come with more agency, you can work around people you like more, it can be higher-status in your community, etc.
Yep. Kamala Harris significantly out-raised Trump in 2024. At the same time, in total, the donations seem pretty low to me. Kalama Harris raised and spent around $2B. But given the importance of this election, I think it could have well been safe for donors (ideally, across the income ladder) to donate a lot more. My rough impression is that the “Too Much Dark Money In Almonds” post is broadly correct, though maybe 2-4x off.
My point was never that billionaires cause active damage (though some definitely do). It was that most have the opportunity to cause a lot of good, and rarely do.
I’m a bit confused what you are arguing for. Do you want the wealthy to have even more influence on our politics? Is this just a supposition that Kamala Harris would have been better than Trump (I agree) and thus it would have been good for billionaires to donate for this reason?
I think that the question “Do you want the wealthy to have even more influence on our politics?” often maps to an ongoing debate that basically says, “the wealthy have a big influence over politics, and that looks like politics being more favorable to the very wealthy, for example with tax benefits and similar.”
I think that there are many things billionaires could do that are highly cooperative with society. For example, try to stop misinformation across the board, make sure that the government is actually run well (i.e. government department competence), etc.
Personally, I’m sympathetic to the idea that the MAGA movement is unusually high-risk, and should have been uniquely opposed. I think it could have been good, looking back, for Dustin Moskovitz and other similar donors, to have done more around the 2024 election.
Elon Musk is an incredibly frustrating example, as he’s a case of a billionaire who more arguably is doing things he actually believes will be good, but by doing so he’s causing a lot of damage. But I think he’s the exception rather than the rule for the wealthy (where some evidence is the fact that Kamala Harris raised more money).
I’m fairly skeptical that more money would really have done anything. I understand that politics should get more money than almonds. But I think that would mainly be done by giving money to both sides.
As an exercise, what should Kamala have spent more money on if she had it? She had name recognition. I don’t think anyone in the country was unsure about who she was. I think it’s really hard to come up with things more money would have done for the Democrats. The real thing you need to do is not purchasable with money; you need to make Democrat policies work better for people. I think Ezra Klein is onto something here really.
A few quick things:
This is a complex issue, I’m not an expert
I’m pretty sure you’ve thought through the most obvious answers and they haven’t convinced you. The TLDR seems likely that we then just disagree on basics.
The 2024 election was somewhat close by historical standards. Eying it now, Trump won by 80k votes in Michigan, 120k in PA, 30k in WI, 40k in Nevada, 190k in Arizona, 115k in Georgia. To flip this election, I think MI/PA/WI could have been enough, so that means (80k+120k+30k) ~ 230k votes, or half if they could come from Republican votes.
A quick check suggests that advertising/outreach costs $100 to $1k to change votes in certain settings. Say it’s a lot more, so $10k. $10k * 230k = 2.3B, which still isn’t that much.
All that said, smarter donors would have started sooner and done more strategies. By the time Harris officially started running, it was already very late in the game.
I think potential donors are quite good at suggesting that absolutely everything they could do is useless, as they really don’t want to donate. (I imagine this is much less the case for you specifically, but I suspect it is the case of the argument as it’s often used)
At very least, for such a problem, I’d hope that donors would have spent say $10M to $100M this year getting more clarity on the question of tractability, and I don’t think much of this happened.
I think most wealthy donors on the Republican side would really prefer other Republican candidates over Trump. I think Trump is uniquely bad and disliked by many elites.
All this to say, when I don’t see even $5B spent to prevent say $1T-$10T+ of damage, I get pretty suspicious.
Even if it were the case that the results demonstrated that it was impossible ex-post, I think there were many possible worlds, ex-ante, where donations were more valuable. Generally I judge actions in terms of expectations ex-ante.
I know SBF was considering various strategies, potentially for $1B to $5B or so.
I agree that we should judge the actions ex ante. I also agree that (you are implying this I think) you have to start early and do good thinking in order to be effective here. 3 months before the election is too late. We had to get on this years before the election and the most effective solutions will look like getting good, sound, authentic, moderate candidates into the running or paying Biden $100mm to committ to not running.
I think if you went to say Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and others and said “it’s going to cost $10B, $10B and we flip this election.”, I think they would probably put in ~100mm (maybe less tbh) each, personally and go pretty gung-ho to get you to $10B.
The main problem is that I just don’t think you can turn money into votes through advertising past a point. I think you need to actually just pay people (which is illegal) and then you can flip votes. But for the vast majority of people, showing them more ads just does nothing. There’s even some evidence that it turns people off.
I’m not going to scrutinize your calculations. I think you realize that you don’t know in advance how many votes you need and where and that perhaps $1k/vote flip is on the margin and once you pick that fruit, it gets a lot harder and that you don’t have good accuracy on which votes you flip (even in a model where you do get to pay $1k/vote flip, most of the time that vote flip just happens in some random unimportant state). Thus, you basically got this advantage where the math looks great due to the importance of certain states due to the electoral college but that advantage gets effectively undone because you don’t get to perfectly target the states you want.
I would greatly expect that once everything is accounted for, donating EA money to politics won’t be cost effective but I like that you’re thinking about this and realize that it’s not going to be “EA money” predominantly.
To be clear, I wasn’t advocating here to donate EA money. I think this would place this at a significantly higher bar. My point instead is that I think that the political issue is much more mainstream than EA causes, and would have been a clearer cause for many other people, including the top 0.1%.
Didn’t mean to imply you were, sorry if it came off that way.
Yup, I agree. But I think most people don’t care as much about political outcomes as they purport to, based on their actions. I think a lot of that is social desirability bias.
I also don’t think it’s that clear that Kamala is obviously the better pick or that Trump being President over Kamala is worth $1-10T of value. I like this comment about the better choice for President being non-obvious.
Thanks for calling me out on these points. (Also, thanks to titotal for providing other useful metrics!) I find your take insightful, though from these arguments, I still very much stay with my overall position.
I’ll respond in different comments, to help keep discussion manageable.
When I said “inequality is on the rise”, my statement wasn’t very precise. I find it interesting that the gini coefficient has stayed somewhat flat for the last 20 years in the US, though would note that:
1. It clearly rose significantly right before ~20 years ago. (Looking back, I think “20 years” wasn’t a well chosen number to start this post with)
2. It still did definitely rise, according to the official stats, in the last 20 years. I think the graph you provide is arguably deceiving because it sets the bottom of the y-axis at 0. Consider this instead. Here it looks like it did grow from 40 in 1995 to 41.3 in 2022. While this might seem small, I suspect it still adds up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
3. The US’s gini coefficient is quite bad compared to many other countries. Given it’s massive wealth, I think this is a sizable deal.
4. I found titotal’s post below quite interesting and relevant on this.
5. For my main argument, the more key relevant question is something like, “Is it true that there’s an incredible amount of wealth contained by the ultra-wealthy, or similar?” So while I find the discussion about inequality interesting (I especially enjoy the use of official data here), It’s arguably not particularly key. It could have well been a mistake for me to begin with that sentence—I was quickly thinking that people would “know what I meant”, but it seems to have gotten in the way of my point.