You can only spend your resources once. Unless you argue that there is a free lunch somewhere, any money and time spent by UN inevitably has to come from somewhere else. Arguing that longtermist concerns should be prioritized necessarily requires arguing that other concerns should be de-prioritized.
If EA’s or the UN argue that longtermism should be a priority, it’s reasonable for the authors to question from where those resources are going to come.
For what it’s worth I think it’s a no-brainer that the UN should spend more energy on ensuring the future goes well, but we shouldn’t pretend that it’s not at the expense of those who currently exist.
In the early 2000′s when climate change started seriously getting onto the multilateral agenda, there were economists like Bjørn Lomborg arguing that we instead should spend our resources on cost-effective poverty alleviation.
He was widely criticized for this, for example by Michael Grubb, an economist and lead author for several IPCC reports, who argued:
To try and define climate policy as a trade-off against foreign aid is thus a forced choice that bears no relationship to reality. No government is proposing that the marginal costs associated with, for example, an emissions trading system, should be deducted from its foreign aid budget. This way of posing the question is both morally inappropriate and irrelevant to the determination of real climate mitigation policy.
Yet today, much (if not most) multilateral climate mitigation, is funded by countries’ foreign aid budgets. The authors of this article, like Lomborg was almost two decades ago, are reasonable to worry that multilateral organizations adopting new priorities comes at the expense of the existing.
I believe we should spend much more time and money ensuring the future goes well, but we shouldn’t pretend that this isn’t at the expense of other priorities.
You can only spend your resources once. Unless you argue that there is a free lunch somewhere, any money and time spent by UN inevitably has to come from somewhere else. Arguing that longtermist concerns should be prioritized necessarily requires arguing that other concerns should be de-prioritized.
If EA’s or the UN argue that longtermism should be a priority, it’s reasonable for the authors to question from where those resources are going to come.
For what it’s worth I think it’s a no-brainer that the UN should spend more energy on ensuring the future goes well, but we shouldn’t pretend that it’s not at the expense of those who currently exist.
In the early 2000′s when climate change started seriously getting onto the multilateral agenda, there were economists like Bjørn Lomborg arguing that we instead should spend our resources on cost-effective poverty alleviation.
He was widely criticized for this, for example by Michael Grubb, an economist and lead author for several IPCC reports, who argued:
Yet today, much (if not most) multilateral climate mitigation, is funded by countries’ foreign aid budgets. The authors of this article, like Lomborg was almost two decades ago, are reasonable to worry that multilateral organizations adopting new priorities comes at the expense of the existing.
I believe we should spend much more time and money ensuring the future goes well, but we shouldn’t pretend that this isn’t at the expense of other priorities.