Thanks for putting in this effort, and upvoted for taking up the empirical task, Zach. My main thoughts, adding on to those from my comment in the last thread:
These examples are mixing cause selection (malaria bednets vs climate) and the tactic of protesting vs donation/lobbying/research/writing and other alternative things to spend time on
Estimates of the effectiveness of attending protests derived from the Tea Party rain study include follow-on effort in donations, volunteering, attending further protests, etc; so you can’t substitute the cost of attending one protest for an hour (including travel time) for all the many hours and dollars a Tea Party activist might have contributed
I remain open to the idea that political action does better than AMF; indeed, I think it likely that the best political interventions for improved immigration and foreign aid will do better than AMF in terms of QALYs
Even for areas where I suspect politics is the best approach, that doesn’t mean that protesting is competitive with donation: funding think tanks like the Center for Global Development, lobbyists, public interest law firms, and social scientists, or even paying for protests are all competing with spending time protesting, and division of labor tends to pay off
It might help to do a head-to-head comparison within the same cause, e.g. your DxE protests vs a donation of the cash value of a typical EA DxE protester’s time to one of ACE’s top charities (or ACE), or an hour of the time of someone working for one of those charities; or contrast the climate march with donations to thinks tanks and lobby groups working on climate
Responses to particular points in the piece are below:
I assume he is going with GiveWell’s estimate that $3,340 given to the Against Malaria Foundation can, on expectation, save one life.
I was.
But beyond this anecdotal evidence, there is a fairly strong scholarly consensus that protests work...political scientists’ estimates of the effectiveness of nonviolent protest movements range from 37% to 75% of such movements achieving their goals
The analysis I did assumed complete success in eliminating all police shootings without doing any harm. Accounting for the chance of failure, or converting to a concrete goal, e.g. mandatory bodycams for police, would reduce estimated cost-effectiveness.
Suppose each person at the People’s Climate March produced an extra 1.2 votes in favor of climate action.
There is a switch here from the marginal person at a Tea Party rally to your attendance at a single rally. Presumably much of the impact comes from people who attended the Tea Party rally on a non-rainy day following up by volunteering, donating, etc. Those are substantial additional costs. But then if you spend the day protesting but don’t do all those follow-up activities, you won’t get the same benefits, and so the cost-effectiveness will fall, perhaps greatly if the impact came mostly from some attendees doing vigorous activity later.
Now if we use as a ballpark estimate the EPA’s estimated net global benefits of climate regulations ($67 billion), this march would, on expectation, yield an expected $201 million in benefits—enough to save 60,000 lives.
This looks off by orders of magnitude.
Most of this economic value is health benefits to richer people, and won’t be spent on malaria bednets.
The EPA says the plan would involve a cut of 730 million metric tons of CO2, and various benefits to Americans from reducing local emissions of particulate matter, soot, and smog from coal plants. The latter would save some thousands of American lives (from the whole program, not the part attributed to the protest), and save hundreds of thousands of work-days otherwise lost from asthma or other health problems. The EPA values American lives at $7.4 million, but the cost of saving a life in Africa is thousands of times less than that.
For the 730 million tons of carbon, again the social cost of carbon is based on economic output and WTP rather than DALYs, so losses to rich countries play a disproportionate role. Giving What We Can thinks that the direct DALY effects of buying carbon credits are orders of magnitude worse than their recommended charities. Using those estimates of DALYs per ton of carbon, we would again get lives saved orders of magnitude smaller.
and while police in the U.S. kill 1,000 people each year,
That was my point, that the money donated to the protests and the value of person-hours spent on them, applied to cost-effective foreign aid charity, would save more lives than eliminating all those police shootings in the United States for decades, which would be a surprisingly large effect on shootings.
Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter marches have made racism in the criminal justice system one of the principal political issues of 2015…
Capturing media and political attention for one issue to some extent pulls it away from other issues. Progressives might instead have been more focused on climate or mass incarceration or immigration or education.
the U.S. prison population numbers above 2,000,000, which is significant considering the potential tractability of the problem and the misery of being imprisoned, is a worthwhile problem.
Mass incarceration, and the mandatory minimum laws and long sentences that increase prison time per crime, involve many more DALYs than police shootings and have simpler mechanistic responses available (pulling back on minimum sentences, as in the recent California initiative). I think that’s one reason why, for instance, GiveWell has focused on mass incarceration rather than police killings. But the protests have been focused on police killings rather than on prison.
The aggregate effects of systematic harassment, stop-and-frisk, disrespect of the citizenry, assault, and other police misconduct are plausibly larger than shootings, and the remedy of police bodycams would help to relieve those as well as illicit shootings (which are a subset, to eliminate all shootings would also require things like addressing the availability of guns). In Ferguson the Department of Justice found that the shooter should not have been indicted, but that excessive fines and other systemic problems with the Ferguson Police Department’s policies and police behavior demanded its intervention.
I could be convinced that protests about police shootings will have a large impact on sentencing or other harms that fall under criminal justice broadly rather than police shooting specifically, but I’d want to see more evidence showing how resources mustered for the one are transferring to the others.
I’d then want to characterize those benefits more realistically, rather than using bounds like “all police shootings cease for decades after 1 year of protests,” and consider costs like focusing the capturing the public and progressive agenda on this issue rather than others, or the billions of dollars of economic damage affecting poor neighborhoods from rioters exploiting the non-violent protests as cover.
Looking at just the evidence you’ve presented it still looks like it would be better to donate to AMF than to the protests, and that a modest opportunity cost of time or the price of public transportation or a Lyft fare would produce more QALYs/avert more DALYs applied to AMF.
At the end of the day, the question of collective action and its importance comes down to the question of emergence.
I still don’t see it. If the numbers in your examples were more favorable they would work fine without worries about emergence from a consequentialist perspective. When one takes into account diminishing marginal returns and things like the Gelman et al. paper on probability of tied elections that you cite above, expected value analysis on your individual action works fairly well.
Thanks for your comments, again. Very helpful, and good to have this discussion. Regarding your bullet points:
1) I thought I delineated this pretty clearly, but the effectiveness of protesting definitely depends on the cause.
2) This is correct—but I’m not sure this is all that crucial, since presumably the same increase in commitment to the cause would happen to someone else. An effective altruist would hopefully direct this in even more productive ways. The counter-argument is that EAs may already be motivated enough that this doesn’t matter. I’m unsure on that question.
3-4) Agreed, and you may be right. I would like to see that comparison done.
5) This might have been a better route to go, although I suspect there is room for protesting and social movement organizing around open borders, mass incarceration, and other important causes, which was why I made it more general. I will probably give a more specific treatment at some point.
Regarding much of your post, I agree that the crux of the issue is whether protesting around these shootings affects mass incarceration. I would think this moves the debate forward on mass incarceration fairly strongly, but I could be wrong. I didn’t provide much evidence on this question since it wasn’t the primary focus of the piece.
Yes, I don’t mean to say you didn’t acknowledge things differ by cause, just that without a benchmark of non-protest activities in the cause it’s hard to show the advantage of protesting as a tactic, and that I think the mixed examples haven’t shown an existence proof because of cause selection issues.
but I’m not sure this is all that crucial, since presumably the same increase in commitment to the cause would happen to someone else
Is the idea here that one goes to the protest and then donates to climate action instead of AMF in the future, possibly donating more in total? I.e. it’s like volunteering ineffectively for a charity to build affiliation with it? Or that if you attend you will cause others to commit and so will get almost the same gains even if you don’t put in further resources?
I imagine a protest where 1000 people attend and one where 1001 people attend. The extra impact could a) come mostly from the chance that the extra person will become entangled with the movement and invest more time, money, and social capital later; b) mostly come from a diffuse effect where each person who attends is more likely to become committed the more people who attend; c) some other effect like media coverage.
B) seems a bit strange because each attendee can only interact with so many other attendees, and it would imply more superlinear returns than the Tea Party study suggests. However, I could see that the impact of attendance might be as high as an exogenous attendee, even after subtracting out the average later donations and commitment (which would make the cost-benefit for you much worse), if you were much more likely to cause other attendees to commit their time and money. Basically, marketing to the enriched audience of protest attendees.
I didn’t provide much evidence on this question since it wasn’t the primary focus of the piece.
Oh, sorry—the first quote was very unclear. I meant that in EA attending a protest would presumably also become more invested in it like people in the Tea Party study. That could be a point against climate action, as you say, but if I already felt, say, open borders was the most important cause and I went to a protest for that, it would deepen my investment.
Thanks for putting in this effort, and upvoted for taking up the empirical task, Zach. My main thoughts, adding on to those from my comment in the last thread:
These examples are mixing cause selection (malaria bednets vs climate) and the tactic of protesting vs donation/lobbying/research/writing and other alternative things to spend time on
Estimates of the effectiveness of attending protests derived from the Tea Party rain study include follow-on effort in donations, volunteering, attending further protests, etc; so you can’t substitute the cost of attending one protest for an hour (including travel time) for all the many hours and dollars a Tea Party activist might have contributed
I remain open to the idea that political action does better than AMF; indeed, I think it likely that the best political interventions for improved immigration and foreign aid will do better than AMF in terms of QALYs
Even for areas where I suspect politics is the best approach, that doesn’t mean that protesting is competitive with donation: funding think tanks like the Center for Global Development, lobbyists, public interest law firms, and social scientists, or even paying for protests are all competing with spending time protesting, and division of labor tends to pay off
It might help to do a head-to-head comparison within the same cause, e.g. your DxE protests vs a donation of the cash value of a typical EA DxE protester’s time to one of ACE’s top charities (or ACE), or an hour of the time of someone working for one of those charities; or contrast the climate march with donations to thinks tanks and lobby groups working on climate
Responses to particular points in the piece are below:
I was.
The analysis I did assumed complete success in eliminating all police shootings without doing any harm. Accounting for the chance of failure, or converting to a concrete goal, e.g. mandatory bodycams for police, would reduce estimated cost-effectiveness.
There is a switch here from the marginal person at a Tea Party rally to your attendance at a single rally. Presumably much of the impact comes from people who attended the Tea Party rally on a non-rainy day following up by volunteering, donating, etc. Those are substantial additional costs. But then if you spend the day protesting but don’t do all those follow-up activities, you won’t get the same benefits, and so the cost-effectiveness will fall, perhaps greatly if the impact came mostly from some attendees doing vigorous activity later.
This looks off by orders of magnitude.
Most of this economic value is health benefits to richer people, and won’t be spent on malaria bednets.
The EPA says the plan would involve a cut of 730 million metric tons of CO2, and various benefits to Americans from reducing local emissions of particulate matter, soot, and smog from coal plants. The latter would save some thousands of American lives (from the whole program, not the part attributed to the protest), and save hundreds of thousands of work-days otherwise lost from asthma or other health problems. The EPA values American lives at $7.4 million, but the cost of saving a life in Africa is thousands of times less than that.
For the 730 million tons of carbon, again the social cost of carbon is based on economic output and WTP rather than DALYs, so losses to rich countries play a disproportionate role. Giving What We Can thinks that the direct DALY effects of buying carbon credits are orders of magnitude worse than their recommended charities. Using those estimates of DALYs per ton of carbon, we would again get lives saved orders of magnitude smaller.
That was my point, that the money donated to the protests and the value of person-hours spent on them, applied to cost-effective foreign aid charity, would save more lives than eliminating all those police shootings in the United States for decades, which would be a surprisingly large effect on shootings.
Capturing media and political attention for one issue to some extent pulls it away from other issues. Progressives might instead have been more focused on climate or mass incarceration or immigration or education.
Mass incarceration, and the mandatory minimum laws and long sentences that increase prison time per crime, involve many more DALYs than police shootings and have simpler mechanistic responses available (pulling back on minimum sentences, as in the recent California initiative). I think that’s one reason why, for instance, GiveWell has focused on mass incarceration rather than police killings. But the protests have been focused on police killings rather than on prison.
The aggregate effects of systematic harassment, stop-and-frisk, disrespect of the citizenry, assault, and other police misconduct are plausibly larger than shootings, and the remedy of police bodycams would help to relieve those as well as illicit shootings (which are a subset, to eliminate all shootings would also require things like addressing the availability of guns). In Ferguson the Department of Justice found that the shooter should not have been indicted, but that excessive fines and other systemic problems with the Ferguson Police Department’s policies and police behavior demanded its intervention.
I could be convinced that protests about police shootings will have a large impact on sentencing or other harms that fall under criminal justice broadly rather than police shooting specifically, but I’d want to see more evidence showing how resources mustered for the one are transferring to the others.
I’d then want to characterize those benefits more realistically, rather than using bounds like “all police shootings cease for decades after 1 year of protests,” and consider costs like focusing the capturing the public and progressive agenda on this issue rather than others, or the billions of dollars of economic damage affecting poor neighborhoods from rioters exploiting the non-violent protests as cover.
Looking at just the evidence you’ve presented it still looks like it would be better to donate to AMF than to the protests, and that a modest opportunity cost of time or the price of public transportation or a Lyft fare would produce more QALYs/avert more DALYs applied to AMF.
I still don’t see it. If the numbers in your examples were more favorable they would work fine without worries about emergence from a consequentialist perspective. When one takes into account diminishing marginal returns and things like the Gelman et al. paper on probability of tied elections that you cite above, expected value analysis on your individual action works fairly well.
Thanks for your comments, again. Very helpful, and good to have this discussion. Regarding your bullet points:
1) I thought I delineated this pretty clearly, but the effectiveness of protesting definitely depends on the cause. 2) This is correct—but I’m not sure this is all that crucial, since presumably the same increase in commitment to the cause would happen to someone else. An effective altruist would hopefully direct this in even more productive ways. The counter-argument is that EAs may already be motivated enough that this doesn’t matter. I’m unsure on that question. 3-4) Agreed, and you may be right. I would like to see that comparison done. 5) This might have been a better route to go, although I suspect there is room for protesting and social movement organizing around open borders, mass incarceration, and other important causes, which was why I made it more general. I will probably give a more specific treatment at some point.
Regarding much of your post, I agree that the crux of the issue is whether protesting around these shootings affects mass incarceration. I would think this moves the debate forward on mass incarceration fairly strongly, but I could be wrong. I didn’t provide much evidence on this question since it wasn’t the primary focus of the piece.
Yes, I don’t mean to say you didn’t acknowledge things differ by cause, just that without a benchmark of non-protest activities in the cause it’s hard to show the advantage of protesting as a tactic, and that I think the mixed examples haven’t shown an existence proof because of cause selection issues.
Is the idea here that one goes to the protest and then donates to climate action instead of AMF in the future, possibly donating more in total? I.e. it’s like volunteering ineffectively for a charity to build affiliation with it? Or that if you attend you will cause others to commit and so will get almost the same gains even if you don’t put in further resources?
I imagine a protest where 1000 people attend and one where 1001 people attend. The extra impact could a) come mostly from the chance that the extra person will become entangled with the movement and invest more time, money, and social capital later; b) mostly come from a diffuse effect where each person who attends is more likely to become committed the more people who attend; c) some other effect like media coverage.
B) seems a bit strange because each attendee can only interact with so many other attendees, and it would imply more superlinear returns than the Tea Party study suggests. However, I could see that the impact of attendance might be as high as an exogenous attendee, even after subtracting out the average later donations and commitment (which would make the cost-benefit for you much worse), if you were much more likely to cause other attendees to commit their time and money. Basically, marketing to the enriched audience of protest attendees.
Sure.
Oh, sorry—the first quote was very unclear. I meant that in EA attending a protest would presumably also become more invested in it like people in the Tea Party study. That could be a point against climate action, as you say, but if I already felt, say, open borders was the most important cause and I went to a protest for that, it would deepen my investment.
OK, I understand now. I think that there is a huge difference between:
1) Spending 4 person-hours on activity X will change the outside world to produce Y QALYs.
2) Spending 4 person-hours on activity X will lead you to spend 40 person-hours to produce Y QALYs
If I don’t think Y QALYs/40 hours is cost-effective enough to want to pursue, then I don’t want to do 2), even if Y/4 hours would be enough.