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.
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.