I think EA is missing education as a priority. Here are the best reading on the subject.
Education and Health: Redrawing the Preston Curve Wolfgang Lutz Endale Kebede
Global Sustainable Development priorities 500 y after Luther: Sola schola et sanitate Wolfgang Lutz
Hunger and Public Action by Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze
all of them freely available online to read
The reasons/politics for why good ventures or gates foundation does not try to spend their money for effective causes is not important. If we go down that path we can also ask why don’t rich countries plug gaps for basic health, basic education, or even ubi programs like that of give directly.
Whatever their reasons, we as individuals can have relatively big impacts, and as long as the cheaper interventions are not funded, we can help.
Health interventions work and child mortality dropped dramatically https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-globally
Its not very interesting to think about Capitalism and Socialism because the terms are too broad. I see Chomsky mentioned in other posts. He is an Anarchist https://chomsky.info/20130528/ https://www.amazon.com/Chomsky-Anarchism-Noam/dp/1904859208
Also it is not clear to me how countries should be classified, and also how they changed over time. E.g. which year UK become capitalist? how about USA? How should Nigeria, India, China be described today? Also how should one describe Nigeria, India, China pre independence?
We can try to look at it public policy. Are free public schools socialist or capitalist? How about free public healthcare? How about social security or Medicare?
The core of Singer’s argument is the principle that, if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do so. We can. So we should.
This is solid. I fully agree. Individuals in th EA movement can avoid the pitfalls that might come from large scale initiatives. For EA’s until their individual donations collectively become large the unintended systemic effects can be ignored.
I did not downvote (or upvote). Thinking about effectiveness is very useful, however I am not sold on the idea of Altruism, I think in terms of justice. I have unjust power how can I give it up for the greater good?
Not asking how and why we have so much power is a blindness that I see in the EA movement. This also leads to assumptions that “Free Trade” is good. Were the Opium wars “free trade”? Was the trans atlantic slave trade “Free Trade”?
but often includes a hardline commitment to open borders or at least opposition to effective security measures against illegal immigrants.
This statement is flat out wrong. There is no commitment to open borders. It was well known in 2015 that illegal immigration was going down.
Obama was known as deporter in chief Overall illegal immigration is down and has gone negative from Mexico
Immigration from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala will continue for another 10 years and taper off as the fertility rates fall
As of today I see the “left” position or justice position is to treat asylum seekers and illegal immigrants humanely.
We’re equipped to make right decisions regardless of these subtle things.
None of give well top charities focus on women or girls, given that women and girls are valued less in poor countries, from a strictly utilitarian perspective, this is a miss for the EA movement
Malala Fund has a report that claims girls education is the world best investment I dont see serious research from EA community on this front either.
Atleast the CEA has a good page on gender and inclusion. Its not actual recommendations of any charity, but its a start.
Justice (goals) must inform institutions and policy.
An “altruistic” position might be to pass a quick bill, no political strings attached, giving funding to CBP to just improve the conditions at the camps and expedite processing, leaving bigger decisions for later. The “justice” position could be to fight tooth and nail to abolish CBP/ICE instead.
Thinking and talking about justice does not mean lack of pragmatics politics. One could point out the injustice of immigration law and still compromise.
Should we talk about altruism or talk about justice?
Since EA is not an electoral political movement, thinking in terms of justice makes more sense. This allows space to carefully think the world. Electoral politics are not good analogies for what EA should do.
I am just trying to paint the bigger picture. Whatever the politics in USA are, emigration from around the world will decrease going forward. As countries start to have better human development people will decide to stay home more. Which is why the example of mexico is important, going further back South Koreans, Japanese used to move not anymore, going even further back Italians, Swedish etc moved to USA.
In 20 years net immigration per year into USA will start to fall with no end in sight.
You may be interested in Founders’ Pledge report: Women’s Empowerment
Thanks for this.
But maybe the best interventions aren’t easy or efficient to target towards women only
There has been very little effort to find and prove this. I have seen very little research from give well or else where on women’s issues.
Give Directly could easily run a pilot and test giving to women only. I cant imagine why this would be inefficient.
When there is actual discrimination e.g. missing women It means that women’s lives are less happier. A track of “saving lives” would not care about this difference. (As the list of top charities of Give Well show). A justice oriented thinking would adjust for this and spend more money of women’s empowerment.
Many of the judgments we have moved away from since the earlier days of EA seem to be cases where we did the sort of things “altruism” is evocative of, and increasingly we find ourselves doing the “justice” things.
Thanks for writing this. I am relatively new to EA it helps to understand history.
I think about justice without judging people, I hope that avoids hostility.
Thanks for sharing your story. I am short of time and keeping this brief.
And I don’t support free trade because I think it worked with slaves or opium, I support it because I think it works now, according to the best economic evidence that we have.
Thats an understandable position. I am skeptical of Free Trade because it was used to justify Slave trade and opium trade. Why should I assume that this time is different?
To take a more contemporary example: “IP” is a restriction on Trade, yet the same people who are for “Free Trade” are for “IP” more correctly called “Intellectual Monopolies”. Read Against Intellectual Monopoly
Wikipedia, Linux are perfect examples of lack of monopolies in knowledge. And can be traded freely, the positive welfare effects are enormous.
Thanks much, that was good reading. Education is not like Childbirth or Breast Cancer (99% female) which are women specific. It makes sense that Girls learning outcomes can be improved without specifically targeting them. However access to school should be done specifically by targeting them.
Hypothetically if only 50% of kids can be educated, having them be all boys is much worse than if 50% of all genders make it to school. Thankfully we don’t need to make such a choice there is enough money to educate everyone to 12 years of education regardless of gender. Whats lacking is political will.
I think you may find pro-free-trade people in favor of IP reform, these are rather separate issues.
Intellectual Monopolies are restrictions on Trade, when trade hurts profitability of the powers that be, they see are happy to support monopoly and see no contradiction.
When human rights are affected negatively by trade (slave trade, colonialism/capitalism, opium war), trade takes first place if necessary by force.
the countries are still willingly taking these deals so they are better than nothing.
Kings lasted thousands of years, Communism lasted for 50+ years (depending on region), colonialism lasted 400+ years. Slavery is thousands of years old. Just because something exists does not mean it is good for humanity. Nor does it mean consent. People try to survive as best as they can given their circumstances.
Don’t put your hopes on working at any EA organization. Dream careers in any field are really hard to come by. Focus on finding meaningful work could be in industry or non profit. In terms of studying I like AI/statistics/CS. Evolution is much better than Economics, you can gain a lot by watching Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA)
Most importantly try to shed your deep rooted conditioning / biases. Humanity’s worst trait is ingroup thinking Overcoming it is a challenge, but the rewards are great.
I wholeheartedly agree that non-capitalist system are strictly worse than capitalist ones and have cited evidence that corporations do a huge amount of good in the world. I’m not denying that reducing ill-effects from socialist systems (see Venezuela) still deserve a lot of attention.
Let me start by agreeing that the people of Venezuela are in deep distress, and ill served by the ruling government.
I am not a fan of -isms and labels. Is public education socialist? how about public universal healthcare (like in Europe or Japan)? North Korea calls itself DPRK (Democratic.. Republic) I laugh at it and don’t take it seriously, why should we take it seriously when Venezuela claims that it is socialist? Anyway what do broad terms like socialism and capitalism mean? When did USA become capitalist? How about Britain? India? China? South Africa? Guatemala? Socialist/communist/capitalist institutions are steeply hierarchical and with few exceptions have male leaders, likewise kingdoms before that were male led and steeply hierarchical. I see more similarities between the various -isms than differences.
I think the world we see today is an effect of industrialization, and the political systems today are reflections of that, on an evolutionary substrate of human behavior that is atleast a million years in the making.
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sigh the questions are serious ones, if downvoting please tell me why either via private message or as a reply
Thanks
I expect most of the money to be given to local charities and not to government or to charities like give well. UBC (Universal Basic Charity) will quickly turn into UBI. That not a bad thing either.
Overall I expect it to have the same effects as UBI.
Thanks. Give Well is big, and is about 100 million dollars a year. And about 50 million from individual donors (less than 1 million a year). This is not much money in the overall scheme of things. Even if Malaria and schistosomiasis are fulled funded by that 50 million, there are many more things to do.
There 5 million kids dying every year 1 2, lets say 4 million are preventable, give well cost per life saved estimate is lets say $1000 of lower end.
The required funding to solve child deaths is 4 billion a year, just for this alone.
We have to think about unintended effects, but there are likely to be marginal and small.
I agree that small amounts of money could in theory have systemic side effects, but that is only if the money is spent on effecting something critical (say influencing the outcome of election etc..). Most of Give Well money is spent on health interventions which are far less likely to have critical systemic side effects.
The worst I could think of them is that they are insensitive/disrespectful to the local populations and have no health effect. Neither of these possible outcomes are critically negative in the systemic sense.
Two international health interventions are running into local resistance 1) Polio Vaccination in Pakistan 2) Ebola treatment in Democratic Republic of Congo neither of the efforts seem bad in my opinion.
Thanks for the post, I found this post and the following post Why & How to Make Progress on Diversity & Inclusion in EA to be very useful.
Hunger and Public Action by Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze
https://www.amazon.com/Hunger-Public-Studies-Development-Economics/dp/0198283652\
Demographic and human capital scenarios for the 21st century
http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/15226/1/lutz_et_al_2018_demographic_and_human_capital.pdf