Neoliberalism is an explicitly globalist ideology, with heavy emphasis on free international trade, free immigration, and cooperative international institutions.
Of those
Free trade is something I see as incredibly beneficial to the world, but also an area where most of the hard work has already been done and the gains from further trade liberalization are small-to-medium sized. Not necessarily an EA area of focus.
Increasing immigration is something I think has enormous potential for EA action (I go into more depth in a different comment chain)
Cooperative international institutions are highly aligned with EA goals such as ‘preventing large scale war’ and ‘preventing nuclear explosions’ and other such global tail risk scenarios.
I also tend to think that advocacy for socially liberal causes in developing countries—women’s rights, ethnic minority rights/protections, LGBT rights—is a place where a little bit of political will can go a long way. I’m unsure how to set up a series of value calculations on this, but my instinct is that there’s a lot of opportunity in that area.
I’m someone who thinks of myself as an EA, but I don’t engage at a deep level with the community at all times, so this is my half-insider-half-outsider view of EA. My general sense is that EA famously focuses on a handful of areas—AI, animal welfare, catastrophic risk management, GiveWell-style medical interventions, etc. I very rarely see EAs talking about ‘normal politics’ as a place to do good, and I think there are some normal politics issues that have deep promise.
One example is advocacy for increased immigration for rich countries. The evidence seems incredibly strong to me that increased immigration is an enormously valuable opportunity. Estimates for this kind of drastic change are always a little fuzzy, but fully open borders would have an impact on the scale of doubling world GDP. It’s a multi-trillion dollar bill we’re passing on the sidewalk and refusing to pick up. Even making a small difference in immigration policy can produce extremely large benefits. And support for immigration is increasing over time, so there’s real promise for change.
There are probably some EA-oriented types thinking about this already, but I think it deserves more prominence. It would also make so many other EA favorites (like AI research) a lot easier to coordinate.