Surely it would be easier to just take the money from them, with taxes
No, but seriously—the U.S. presently has an extremely clear example of the excesses of oligarchy and low taxation. The idea that billionaires need less tax in order to invest more in the economy is laughable when Elon has used his excess money to essentially just enrich himself. I think it would be pretty high leverage to put money, time, and connections into this movement (if you can legally do so); and if the enemy is properly demarcated as oligarchy, it should result in reducing wealth inequality once its proponents take power.
Just flagging that I very much agree it would be good to tax them far more. However, I’m not sure how doable that is vs. other things. More thinking/research on options here seems good to me.
I think there’s generally been recognition by many academics and intellectuals that the rich get a highly overly-favorable deal, due to their capture of politics.
I think it’s tractable, right? The rich had a far greater hold over American politics in the early 1900s, and after financial devastation coupled with the threat of communism, the U.S. got the New Deal and a 90% marginal tax rate for 20 years following the war (well after the war effort had been fully paid off), during the most prosperous period in U.S. history. My sense of these changes is that widespread labour & political organisation threatened the government into a compromise in order to protect liberalism & capitalism from a near-total overthrow. It can be done.
But equally, that story suggests that things will probably have to get much worse before the political will is there to be activated. And there’s no guarantee that any money raised from taxation will be spent on the global poor!
My honest, loosely held opinion here is that EA/adjacent money could be used to build research & lobbying groups (rather than grassroots organising or direct political donations—too controversial and not EA’s strong suit), that would be ready for such a moment if/when it comes. They should be producing policy briefs and papers that, and possibly public-facing outputs, on the same level as the current YIMBY/abundance movement, who are far more developed than the redistributionists on these capabilities. When the backlash hits and taxes get raised, we should already have people well-placed to push for high redistribution on an international and non-speciesist level.
My honest, loosely held opinion here is that EA/adjacent money could be used to build research & lobbying groups (rather than grassroots organising or direct political donations—too controversial and not EA’s strong suit), that would be ready for such a moment if/when it comes.
This seems like a reasonable potential option to me. I think a lot of policy work works this way—you realize that there are only windows every so often, so a lot of work is around “getting ready.”
I’m not sure if we disagree on tractability for policy work here. What you said seems broadly reasonable to me.
Where I may disagree is that I’m not convinced that this strategy will be the best one, after a lot of investigation. I could imagine a lot of creative approaches, like, “do a targeted marketing campaign of a very certain kind, aimed at a specific subset of the ultra-wealthy.” Or maybe something like, “find existing charities/groups that are trying to do better things with Billionaires, and steer them to be more effective and to have better epistemics.”
I’d be excited if OP staff investigate this area more. I suspect they’ve done some early investigation around it. That said, perhaps it would be awkward with Dustin being a billionaire. (Personally I think this could be fine, but could imagine situations where it won’t be. I.E. maybe work here would get in the way of other OP work to convince ultra-wealthy people of other things.)
Surely it would be easier to just take the money from them, with taxes
No, but seriously—the U.S. presently has an extremely clear example of the excesses of oligarchy and low taxation. The idea that billionaires need less tax in order to invest more in the economy is laughable when Elon has used his excess money to essentially just enrich himself. I think it would be pretty high leverage to put money, time, and connections into this movement (if you can legally do so); and if the enemy is properly demarcated as oligarchy, it should result in reducing wealth inequality once its proponents take power.
Just flagging that I very much agree it would be good to tax them far more. However, I’m not sure how doable that is vs. other things. More thinking/research on options here seems good to me.
I think there’s generally been recognition by many academics and intellectuals that the rich get a highly overly-favorable deal, due to their capture of politics.
I think it’s tractable, right? The rich had a far greater hold over American politics in the early 1900s, and after financial devastation coupled with the threat of communism, the U.S. got the New Deal and a 90% marginal tax rate for 20 years following the war (well after the war effort had been fully paid off), during the most prosperous period in U.S. history. My sense of these changes is that widespread labour & political organisation threatened the government into a compromise in order to protect liberalism & capitalism from a near-total overthrow. It can be done.
But equally, that story suggests that things will probably have to get much worse before the political will is there to be activated. And there’s no guarantee that any money raised from taxation will be spent on the global poor!
My honest, loosely held opinion here is that EA/adjacent money could be used to build research & lobbying groups (rather than grassroots organising or direct political donations—too controversial and not EA’s strong suit), that would be ready for such a moment if/when it comes. They should be producing policy briefs and papers that, and possibly public-facing outputs, on the same level as the current YIMBY/abundance movement, who are far more developed than the redistributionists on these capabilities. When the backlash hits and taxes get raised, we should already have people well-placed to push for high redistribution on an international and non-speciesist level.
This seems like a reasonable potential option to me. I think a lot of policy work works this way—you realize that there are only windows every so often, so a lot of work is around “getting ready.”
I’m not sure if we disagree on tractability for policy work here. What you said seems broadly reasonable to me.
Where I may disagree is that I’m not convinced that this strategy will be the best one, after a lot of investigation. I could imagine a lot of creative approaches, like, “do a targeted marketing campaign of a very certain kind, aimed at a specific subset of the ultra-wealthy.” Or maybe something like, “find existing charities/groups that are trying to do better things with Billionaires, and steer them to be more effective and to have better epistemics.”
I’d be excited if OP staff investigate this area more. I suspect they’ve done some early investigation around it. That said, perhaps it would be awkward with Dustin being a billionaire. (Personally I think this could be fine, but could imagine situations where it won’t be. I.E. maybe work here would get in the way of other OP work to convince ultra-wealthy people of other things.)