I’d flag that Dustin Moskovitz is a top Democratic donor. He certainly doesn’t seem to have a problem directly donating to support Democrats. So I don’t see a need to donate to Abundance as a way to counter Trump while being bi-partisan.
That said, I know that Abundance-proponents do consider it as an area that has wide-ranging positive effects. So while “reducing political extremism” might not be the only purpose, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was part of the pie.
I think the theory of change here is that the Abundance Agenda taking off in the US would provide an ideological frame for the Democratic Party to both a) get competitive in the races in needs to win power in the Executive & Legislature and b) have a framing that allows it to pursue good policies when in power, which then unlocks a lot of positive value elsewhere
It also answers the ‘why just the US?’ question, though that seemed kind of obvious to me
And as for no cost-effectiveness calculation, it seems that this is the kind of systemic change many people in EA want to see![1] And it’s very hard to get accurate cost-effectiveness-analyses from those. But again, I don’t know if that’s also being too harsh to OP, as many longtermist organisations don’t seem to publicly publish their CEAs apart from general reasoning like about “the future could be very large and very good”
I’d flag that Dustin Moskovitz is a top Democratic donor. He certainly doesn’t seem to have a problem directly donating to support Democrats. So I don’t see a need to donate to Abundance as a way to counter Trump while being bi-partisan.
That said, I know that Abundance-proponents do consider it as an area that has wide-ranging positive effects. So while “reducing political extremism” might not be the only purpose, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was part of the pie.
https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Dustin+Moskovitz
I think the theory of change here is that the Abundance Agenda taking off in the US would provide an ideological frame for the Democratic Party to both a) get competitive in the races in needs to win power in the Executive & Legislature and b) have a framing that allows it to pursue good policies when in power, which then unlocks a lot of positive value elsewhere
It also answers the ‘why just the US?’ question, though that seemed kind of obvious to me
And as for no cost-effectiveness calculation, it seems that this is the kind of systemic change many people in EA want to see![1] And it’s very hard to get accurate cost-effectiveness-analyses from those. But again, I don’t know if that’s also being too harsh to OP, as many longtermist organisations don’t seem to publicly publish their CEAs apart from general reasoning like about “the future could be very large and very good”
Maybe it’s not the exact flavour/ideology they want to see, but it does seem ‘systemic’ to me