(How) Do you think about cost-effectiveness when deciding which projects to fund and videos to create, especially since cost-effectiveness and virality might not necessarily go together? If cost-effectiveness per se is not a metric you use to evaluate charitable projects, what other factors do you consider instead?
The videos on your youtube channel appear to range a lot in the cost effectiveness of their impact, but the active campaigns section of BeastPhilanthropy.org mostly highlights projects helping people in poor countries, so it seems likely that these projects are some of the more cost-effective ones you have done. Is this deliberate?
How do you think about the mission of BeastPhilanthropy (both the youtube channel and charitable organization)? How much is it about generating awareness (and viewer donations) towards particular worthy causes vs. being a vehicle for Mr. Beast/Jimmy’s personal philanthropy?
To be honest this reads much more like “The EA case for Mitt Romney” or “The EA case for generic republican” than “The EA case for Trump” specifically. That not necessarily unreasonable, but I think it might be worth distinguishing between the two, especially because there are many ways that Trump seems noticeably worse than a generic republican from an EA (or really from any) perspective.
1. Trade: Trump and Vance are terrible on trade, especially if you care about citizens of foreign countries in addition to Americans. Beyond the immediate consequences of increasingly restrictionist trade policy, it seems like there is a serious long term risk from letting the Republican party get taken over by a restrictionist faction.
2. Foreign Policy: Foreign Policy is obviously very complicated, and I don’t feel comfortable talking authoritatively here, but I find it very hard to imagine how one could make the EA case for an American first foreign policy. We should care deeply about our international role, and work hard to cooperate constructively with other countries and promote democratic/liberal values. Again it seems like there is a serious long term risk from letting the Republican party get taken over by an isolationist faction.
3. Immigration: Many republicans do favor increasing high skill immigration, but I do not think Trump is one of them. You cite a link to an article about Trump agreeing with a proposal to give green cards to foreign students who graduate (certain?) American colleges, but the same exact article says that Trump’s campaign immediately walked that statement back. Trump has a habit of endorsing many different contradictory policy positions, which makes it easy for potential supporters to convince themselves that he will support their preferred policies, but I think that this impulse is mostly cope.
Furthermore, many of the people he is is likely to place in charge of immigration policy (e.g. Stephen Miller) seem completely opposed to all types of immigration. Maybe Trump would achieve the immigration equivalent of Nixon going to China, but I think it’s unlikely, especially if it requires bipartisan legislation (Trump seems uniquely good at scaring democrats away from working with him). Perhaps most importantly, Trump has really awoken and strengthened a nativist portion of the Republican Party that opposes immigration full stop, and I think that anyone who cares about increasing any type of immigration should want to see this faction discredited within the Republican party. I find it extremely hard to imagine that republican legislators who secretly want to pass some sort of bipartisan immigration reform package that includes increases to high-skilled immigration will be able to do so when Trump has control of the Republican party
4. Long term survival/health of important American institutions:
You write that “longtermism … is best thought of as a civilizational project, as our capacity to coordinate across generations and survive Black Swan events is largely downstream of competent institutions and high-functioning cultures.”
This I agree with very strongly, but if you take this seriously, it suggests that you should care a lot more about preserving important institutions than short/medium term policy (even important policies). Trump has done a huge amount of damage to our institutions with his stop the steal stuff, his attacks on the press and basic truth in general, and also through the partisan response of many liberal institutions to his presidency. For me, this is the number one reason why another Trump presidency could be extremely dangerous.
There is probably more to say on climate change as well, but this comment is long enough already.
To recap, I think this article does a good job of making the case certain republican policy positions, but Trump is leading the faction of the Republican Party that wants to move away from almost all of their policies that I actually like. The Republican Party and the country would be much healthier without him, and that requires him losing.
At a more meta level:
Given that EA is a fairly liberal space, I think it is interesting and useful to consider arguments that certain conservative policies are actually better at advancing global welfare. I think some parts of this blog post did that pretty well, and I found them pretty thought provoking. As I said before, if this article were titled “The EA case for generic republican” then I would have viewed it rather positively.
However it was titled “The EA case for Trump 2024”.
I do not think that the decision on who to vote for this election is remotely close, especially for EAs. Donald Trump poses a unique threat to American democracy and to a global word order that promotes peace, prosperity, and human rights.
At the beginning of the post you said “The title of this post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek as I am not (exactly) an Effective Altruist nor do I speak for anyone in the EA movement.”
And yet (predictably) when I originally ran across this blog post on twitter, the vast majority of engagements were versions of people saying “oh I guess effective altruists really are evil capitalist facists”.
It is fairly common to see someone who is not an EA writes a badly reasoned and maximally provocative article about how EA values actually support bad (often right-wing) policies to an audience that is also primarily not EAs, and then the takeaway from the audience is a gross mischaracterization of what EA actually represents.
This is extremely frustrating and demoralizing and bad for the public image of EA, and we should recognize it and push back whenever we see it happen.