It seems plausible to me that the value of funding “Abundance and Growth” in the USA is not measured in QALYs, but in supporting a political alternative to Trump and MAGA. The “center-left” vibes might not be a bug, but a feature.
If you think USAID cuts are important, and AI is important, and that Trump is net-negative on both of these, maybe the most impactful thing you can do is support alternative narratives to Trumpism and help ensure he doesn’t get re-elected and that you swing the house as far as possible. Of course, it needs sound bi-partisan and not in-your-face, but “Abundance and Growth” is pretty clearly at contrast to the current administrations policies.
This both explains why OP won’t publicly their reasoning for this, and why it might be as cost-effective in EV as other options.
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”
Speculation only:
It seems plausible to me that the value of funding “Abundance and Growth” in the USA is not measured in QALYs, but in supporting a political alternative to Trump and MAGA. The “center-left” vibes might not be a bug, but a feature.
If you think USAID cuts are important, and AI is important, and that Trump is net-negative on both of these, maybe the most impactful thing you can do is support alternative narratives to Trumpism and help ensure he doesn’t get re-elected and that you swing the house as far as possible. Of course, it needs sound bi-partisan and not in-your-face, but “Abundance and Growth” is pretty clearly at contrast to the current administrations policies.
This both explains why OP won’t publicly their reasoning for this, and why it might be as cost-effective in EV as other options.
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