If the march had 1/200th the impact, it would still outweigh the opportunity cost.
If someone earning to give made 10x the minimum wage, and didn’t enjoy protesting (so it came out of their work time, not leisure time), then your estimate of the benefits of non-participation is already off by a factor of 100.
Add in that the case for the climate march is way less robust than the case for e.g. donations to AMF (problems: do the estimates for the Tea Party generalize to estimates for Democrats? Do protests about climate change, rather than partisan protests, actually affect the Presidential election?), and the case for non-participation seems much stronger for a large group of your audience.
Regarding the first, that’s why I included the caveat here: “Given this, it seems to me to be roughly a toss up that the average person in the People’s Climate March would have much of an expected impact, let alone a high-impact person with potential for higher wages and other factors.”
I think on other issues (e.g. animal agriculture) this may still be overwhelmed. Also, thanks for your comments, as usual.
Yeah, you said it was a toss-up after making a bunch of extremely favorable assumptions (other folks in this thread have pointed out other corrections, the most important probably being that dollars of environmental action != dollars to GW top charities). My point is that if you relax the extremely favorable assumptions to anything more realistic, the case for the climate march doesn’t seem strong at all. Not just “a toss-up” but a lot weaker.
Maybe the case is stronger for other causes, but you didn’t really talk concretely about those, so I can’t comment.
If someone earning to give made 10x the minimum wage, and didn’t enjoy protesting (so it came out of their work time, not leisure time), then your estimate of the benefits of non-participation is already off by a factor of 100.
Add in that the case for the climate march is way less robust than the case for e.g. donations to AMF (problems: do the estimates for the Tea Party generalize to estimates for Democrats? Do protests about climate change, rather than partisan protests, actually affect the Presidential election?), and the case for non-participation seems much stronger for a large group of your audience.
Regarding the first, that’s why I included the caveat here: “Given this, it seems to me to be roughly a toss up that the average person in the People’s Climate March would have much of an expected impact, let alone a high-impact person with potential for higher wages and other factors.”
I think on other issues (e.g. animal agriculture) this may still be overwhelmed. Also, thanks for your comments, as usual.
Yeah, you said it was a toss-up after making a bunch of extremely favorable assumptions (other folks in this thread have pointed out other corrections, the most important probably being that dollars of environmental action != dollars to GW top charities). My point is that if you relax the extremely favorable assumptions to anything more realistic, the case for the climate march doesn’t seem strong at all. Not just “a toss-up” but a lot weaker.
Maybe the case is stronger for other causes, but you didn’t really talk concretely about those, so I can’t comment.