I blog about political/economic theory and moral philosophy.
Sam Battis
Karma: 168
A Newcomer’s Critique of EA—Underprioritizing Systems Change?
I think that countries for whom reducing inequality was almost a religious conviction, such as the USSR, had terrible governments which should never be replicated. However, I think that countries that invest in their public sector and social safety net more so than the US or the UK have very good track records today. There’s always the classic Scandinavia example and I think the UK’s rocky economic performance over the past twenty years has a lot to do with its push to privatize and reduce provision of public services. Germany does fairly well although they do tend to try to undercut the rest of the EU with their (more permissive) labor regulation. Impossible to tell for sure, but I think Japan would have had an even rougher go of it if it engaged in as little public investment as the Anglophone countries. The biggest issue for many of these countries is birth rate, although it’s worth noting that Scandinavia outperforms the rest of the EU on this except France and way outperforms East Asia, and their generous maternity/paternity leave is likely part of that.
Providing these public goods does indeed require persuading billionaires to give you money, and there is always the issue of capital flight. Thankfully, countries like the US and the UK are often the recipients of that capital flight because they have a large population, speak English, and have lots of fun things for rich people to do, plus lower taxes. So I’m sure that some amount of capital flight or attempts at tax evasion would result from these countries raising obligations on their richest citizens, but I think if anything it is likely to be less dramatic than what most of Europe has suffered for their welfare states, and I think the decision was still a net positive for those countries. In my reckoning, combining Northern European institutions with America’s birth rate and dynamic multiculturalism would probably result in even greater economic growth than America currently enjoys.
It’s all definitely up for debate though. Thanks for the response!
I agree, and I think shoring up democracy and creating strong public guarantees of human wellbeing/opportunity like the social safety net and public goods including parks and education are great ways to do that.
AIs will still have to work with governments, so we want to be in a place of strong social cohesion and international cooperation when singularity is reached.
Thank you for the reply, it was very thought provoking. It seems to me you have successfully found a niche that provides higher altruistic ROI with regard to career than a large portion of political-adjacent careers. As far as I can tell, many STEM-inclined people can make their greatest impact by focusing on innovation and to a lesser extent earning-to-give.
I wrote a paper on kidney sales for an undergrad philosophy course, and with my small sliver of knowledge on the debate, I agree that it is likely not the best time sink for changing the world efficiently. I think the conclusion I came to is that if there was a strong social safety net (to reduce the incentive for impoverished people who may not be healthy enough to donate to attempt to do so anyways, as occurs when people try to donate blood more often than permitted in order to obtain the cash rewards), the kidneys were added to the waiting list rather than sold to the highest bidder, and participants were well informed of the risks, it would be a net positive to legalize a regulated market. But as you said, this is a debate where it is extremely difficult to be confident that one’s position would actually produce a net positive outcome in practice.
I feel very differently with regard to lack of public services—I think there is enough evidence to suggest that there is probably a pretty significant economic boost to be expected from investment in high-speed railways and single-payer healthcare, to say nothing of the moral impact of the latter. Plus, in contrast to allowing kidney sales, there seems to be far less emotional intuition warning me against such reforms. My conviction is strongly reinforced by the fact that most developed countries in the world provide these services, which are considered indispensable by most of the inhabitants of those countries. On the other hand, kidney sales have not been legalized anywhere in the world, as far as I’m aware.
As you point out, it may take a prohibitive amount of time for one of us to convince the other of our economic stances, but I will try to summarize my opposition to your points succinctly for the sake of it.
Efforts of ancestors in vain—I believe that the majority of policies that provide opportunities to working people in developed countries have had lasting and significant net positive impacts, and that when almost any of these policies are repealed (as many have been in the US and the UK over the last few decades), there is a marked negative impact on both natl GDP growth and natl wellbeing. In essence, it is not an all-or-nothing debate, but rather a struggle worth fighting every generation anew. I believe the American middle class as we knew it was largely created by policies from the 1930s-1970s, for example, and that its decline has been caused more by a shift rightward economically than by shipping jobs overseas, technological disruption, or any of the other explanations provided by some economists. Such arguments, in my view, fail to explain the totality of the change, or the fact that it has been so much more pronounced in countries that gutted their public sector.
Not good to act in opposition to billionaire interests—I think this defers unnecessarily to individuals who are citizens of developed nations, after all, and whose power similarly rests in the vehicles of corporations which also can be effectively regulated by national or international law. During the Gilded Age we had powerful, unprecedently rich men, and corporations wielded intolerable power over the lives of many of their workers. Then in the early 1900s Progressives came in and guaranteed shorter workdays, did some trust-busting, and passed a bunch of worker protections generally. FDR and LBJ continued that legacy. Now, we’ve gotten rid of the protections and the taxes on the hyper-wealthy that enabled them, and we’re in the same place again. The US experienced the most economic and social vitality as a nation in the interim between these two periods. Obviously, there is no way to test models of different historical economic and political decisions to see what changed what. But I feel at least 90% confident that it is better for the US to be farther left economically than it is currently, perhaps by going in some unorthodox direction, like embracing Georgism. I also think the butterfly impacts of such reforms often are far more relevant than they initially appear.
If you think it would be optimal for us to debate further, DM me, although I suspect the depth of our knowledge of economics is similar, so neither of us will be able to convert the other by pulling overwhelming data or expertise out of a hat.
Is the nonprofit lawyer really making a lower impact per hour worked compared to the earning-to-give corporate lawyer? This could be a good case study of system change efforts vs direct donation.
Let’s say the lawyer is donating $200,000/year less than they would have if they stayed at a for-profit firm (donating $200,000 requires an extremely high percentile conviction in the efficacy of effective donation and something like top 1-5% earnings for a lawyer, but I’ll use this to be conservative), but now is working on enforcing environmental legislation.
$4500 to save a life with AMF in Guinea according to Givewell: $200,000/$4500 = 45 lives saved per year from malaria. So in a twenty-year career at the nonprofit, say, the lawyer would have to accomplish good equivalent to saving 900 lives.
The easiest way to convert impact to lives is probably estimating the lives lost for a given amount of carbon emitted. Thankfully, this has been done. They found that 4434 metric tons of carbon saved is a life saved. So the lawyer needs to save 3,990,600 tons of carbon to hit equivalence.
Looking through the “recent wins” page of Earthjustice, the largest environmental justice employer, is a case that is estimated to have saved 970,000,000-1,800,000,000 tons of carbon by 2050. Earthjustice can’t take full credit for this—they were just part of a team suing, along with many city and state governments. Let’s say their expertise was responsible for 1% of the win. Taking the midpoint of the carbon estimate, 1,385,000,000 was saved, of which Earthjustice was responsible for 13,850,000.
This means that if every lawyer at Earthjustice (there are 200+, so we’ll estimate 299 to be super safe and account for other workers who are supporting them) had a win that big just once over their twenty-year career, they would each be outperforming $200,000/yr donated by a factor of 4.
If this singular recent win was the whole impact of Earthjustice for 2022, how would that stack up, divided among 299 lawyers/personnel?
Well, that’s 46,321 tons of carbon, per lawyer, per year. Over 20 years that’s 926,421 tons. So, rather poor. That’s about a fourth of the impact of the $200,000/year. Equivalently, Earthjustice needs to put out 4 wins of that magnitude a year to justify its existence through proactive action alone (though a decent percentage of their actual impact is in deterrence, I’d imagine). Here’s the recent victories page if you want to judge for yourself how large the impact of various wins are. (EDIT: I found at least one other 2022 win with comparable carbon impact, see comments below).
Overall, I’d say it’s quite plausible—even probable, after further consideration (see the comments below)--that the environmental lawyer would have equivalent or greater impact. To be fair, OP was written when the cost estimate of saving a life with GiveWell was much lower.
Bonus evaluation of another 2022 win: 66,160 electric mail trucks replacing 8mpg gasoline trucks over the next few years, directly as a result of suing over a plan that would have purchased 106,000 entirely gasoline trucks over that time. They also got them to guarantee all electric from 2026 onwards.
If a mail truck does a 30-mile route, and idling and driving back account for 3⁄4 of total fuel usage, then 120miles/8mph = 15 gallons of gas would have been burned. Every gallon is 8.887kg of carbon. So over a year, assuming the vehicle is driven 320 days, that’s 42,658kg or 42.7 metric tons. Let’s say the electricity still pollutes 2⁄3 of the amount as gasoline, because a lot of it is fossil fuels. That’s 14.2 metric tons saved, per vehicle, per year. Let’s say the vehicles are in use for 15 years each. 66,160 vehicles * 15 years * 14.2 tons/vehicle/year = 14,092,080 metric tons saved. And that’s not even to mention the guarantee of only electric after 2026, or the fact that the electricity will probably start to come from cleaner sources.
So actually, this case is even bigger than the other I examined. It’s exceeded the impact by 2041, nine years earlier, plus it has even more impact, potentially twice the impact, after the guarantee is added in. So there were at least two major wins for Earthjustice in 2022, and if all the rest of its victories and deterrence added up to four major wins, then working as an Earthjustice lawyer was at least as good as donating $200,000 to GiveWell.
And this isn’t even to consider the fact that some of the bigshot corporate law cases might have moral negatives, e.g. a citizen or government body righteously sues a company, and you’re helping the company get away with it.
True, their role in defending the endangered species act, conserved land, and water/air quality regulations is also extremely valuable, just harder to quantify in terms of lives saved. If those types of victories account for, say, 3⁄4 of Earthjustice’s impact, then the numbers start to suggest that each of the lawyers make a much bigger impact (3x+ perhaps) than $200,000 in donations per year, as I was able to find another large strictly-carbon win for 2022 (electrifying mail trucks).
Adding in the value of deterrence and the diffuse cultural impact of the group, it could conceivably be an order of magnitude better.
I think that for consequentialists, capability-maximization would fall into the same sphere as identifying and agitating for better laws, social rules, etc. Despite not being deontologists, sophisticated consequentialists recognize the importance of deontological-type structures, and thinking in terms of capabilities (which seem similar to rights, maybe negative rights in some cases like walking at night) might be useful in the same way that human rights are useful—as a tool to clarify one’s general goals and values and interpersonally coordinate action.
I also think that EA sometimes dismisses categories of problems out of an assumption that most solutions currently proposed to those problems are either not neglected or have a low expected value, despite the likelihood that high-value opportunities are lurking amidst the chaff.
After all, EA’s original focus was sorting through the labyrinth of ineffective direct global health and poverty reduction interventions. In theory, we should now be sorting through other broad fields like public policy, climate change, and so on, to find interventions comparable to the best direct aid/global development opportunities.
In the climate change realm, environmental law groups like Earthjustice appear on paper to be competitive with top GiveWell nonprofits. Much more thorough research would be needed, but napkin calculations seem promising.
I’m pretty new to the movement and generally have never done research at a high formal level, so I suppose expertise. Is there a link somewhere to a sort of guide for doing research at the level of detail expected?
Why are you pessimistic? I assume it has something to do with perceived power dynamics or incentive misalignment?
It seems like a crowd sourcing mechanism for potential solutions, plus a small team to manage the data and make estimates on expected info cost, actual cost, and impact, would be fairly simple to implement.
Maybe one could even lean harder into crowdsourcing the info/actual costs and impact by operating a sort of prediction market on it, so if a solution is indeed researched at some point and your prediction of the info and actual estimated costs was correct/close, you get points and higher weighting in future crowdsourced estimates?
I don’t believe Facebook’s structure and people’s prior associations with the quality of discussion that occurs on Facebook would enable rational debate at the level of the EA forum, but on any platform, I would agree that if a line in the sand is crossed and discussions of specific policies become conceived of as “Politics”, and tribalism creeps in, the results are usually quite bad.
I can’t imagine that political tribalism would fly on the EA forum, although of course it is necessary to be vigilant to maintain that. Indeed, if I were to rewrite that post today I would revise it to express much less confidence in a particular view of global systems, and focus more on the potential for thinking about global systems to offer opportunities for large impacts.
I think there is evidence EA is capable of doing this without damaging epistemics. It is currently widely accepted to talk about AI or nuclear regulations that governments might adopt, and I haven’t seen anything concerning in those threads. My argument is essentially just that policy interventions of high neglectedness and tractability should not be written off reflexively.
Earthjustice and other law groups (there’s a YIMBY Law group as well that is probably less impactful but at least worth looking into) are nice because they improve de facto systems, but don’t need to engage with the occasional messiness of overt system change. Instead, they ensure local governments follow the laws that are already in place.
Worth noting that although those factors likely increase the expected strength of the relationship between money and happiness, when it comes to interpreting that strength, there are factors potentially reducing the proportion of the relationship that can be explained by “more money causes more happiness:”
Reverse causality (Being happier plausibly makes you earn more money through various social and health impacts)
Confounding variables (E.g. being a hard worker makes you happier, and being a hard worker just happens to make you more money on average)
Also, if you perceive success (i.e. status) as being strongly associated with having higher income, then the actual mechanism by which higher income raises your happiness may be through a status gain, rather than a consumption increase. And as status is a positional good, this would be a reason to down-revise our expectation that increasing a person’s consumption at these levels will actually increase a society’s net happiness.
Good point. I’d imagine that this objection stems from the perspective “basically all the highest utility/dollar interventions are in x-risk, but continuing global health interventions costs us little because we already have those systems in place, so it’s not worth abandoning them.”
From this perspective, one might think that even maintaining existing global health interventions is a bad util/dollar proposition in a vacuum (as those resources would be better spent on x-risk), but for external reasons, splintering EA is not worth pressuring people to abandon global health.
Let’s imagine splintering EA to mean nearly only x-riskers being left in EA, and maybe a group of dissidents creating a competing movement.
These are the pros for x-riskers post-split:
Remaining EAs are laser-focused on x-risk, and perhaps more people have shifted their focus from partly global health and partly x-risk to fully x-risk than vice versa. (More x-risk EAs and x-risk EAs are more effective).
These are the cons for x-riskers post-split:
Remaining EAs have less broad public support and less money going into “general EA stuff” like community building and conferences, because some of the general EA money and influence was coming from people who mostly cared about global health. As a related consequence, it becomes harder to attract people initially interested in global health and convert them into x-riskers. (Less x-risk EAs and x-risk EAs are less effective).
It seems that most x-riskers think the cons outweigh the pros, or a split would have occurred—at least there would be more talk of one.
The thing is, refraining from adding climate change as an EA focus would likely have a similar pro/con breakdown to removing global health as an EA focus:
Pros: No EAs are persuaded to put money/effort that might have gone to x-risk into climate change.
Cons:
Loss of utils due to potentially EA-compatible people who expend time or money on climate change prevention/mitigation not joining the movement and adopting EA methods.
Loss of potential general funding and support for EA from people who think that the top climate change interventions can compete with the util/dollar rates of top global health and x-risk interventions, plus the hordes of people who aren’t necessarily thinking in terms of utils/dollar yet and just instinctively feel climate change is so important that a movement ignoring it can’t possibly know what they’re doing. Even if someone acting on instinct rather than utils/dollar won’t necessarily improve the intellectual richness of EA, their money and support would be pretty unequivocally helpful.
These are basically the same pros and cons to kicking out global health people, plus an extra cost to not infiltrating another cause area with EA methods.
Therefore, I would argue that any x-risker that does not want to splinter EA should also support EA branching out into new areas.
I agree that to the extent that EA engages in policy evaluation or political/economic evaluation more generally, it should use a sentient-experience maximization framework, while discarding the labels of particular political theories, in the way that you described. And I think that so far every discussion I’ve seen of those matters in EA follows that framework, which is great.
With regard to specific arguments about post-politics:
I thought you made a strong case for post-politics in general, but arguing that a specific economic strategy is the best possible beyond all doubt is much more difficult to defend, and besides, does not seem very post-political. In general, a post-political person might argue for any economic strategy under the sun as optimal for sentient beings, though of course some arguments will be stronger than others.
Also, regardless of the systems they believe to be optimal, post-political people should be sure to entertain the possibility that they, others, or a given group or polity are actually too post-political—not having the optimal amount or type of cultural orthodoxy/dogma and being unwilling to address that issue.
This may come into play when an individual or group’s conviction in rights and other deontological tools becomes too weak, or the deontological rules and norms they follow are worse than competing options.
After all, an orthodoxy or political culture beyond post-politics is necessary for “tie-breaking” or producing decisions in situations where calculation is inconclusive. Some political culture beyond post-politics will inevitably sway people in such situations, and it is worth making sure that that political culture is a good one.
An individual post-political thinker therefore may embrace advocacy of a certain political culture because they think it is so valuable and under-utilized that advocating for it is a more efficient use of their resources than advocating for post-politics.
Generally I would say most people and institutions could stand to be more post-political, but I am not sure whether post-politics is currently a better advocacy target than other cultural/political movements.
If one was to advocate for such a movement, I’d guess the best way would be to create a political forum based on those principles and try to attract the people who like participating in political forums. Then the goal would be to make sure the discourse is focused on doing the most good for the most people, with rigorous evidence-based breakdowns for particular policies. This might be a decent use of time given that this post-political approach could improve thousands of people’s decisions as they relate to systems change.
If something like this was created, I would recommend adding a system for users to catalogue, quantify, and compare their political positions, including their degree of confidence in each position. The capability to quickly and easily compare political positions between individuals seems like a very fast way to advance the accuracy of individuals’ beliefs, especially in a community dedicated to strong beliefs lightly held and finding the policies that do the most good.
Right, I was just looking for some ways to apply it to EA. I figured you were recommending that post-political-ness become a more explicit part of EA or more frequently used by EAs in their public or private evaluation of policy.
I agree this sort of loose framework of sentence maxing should be used by EAs when evaluating policy interventions, and it seems to be used, so I agree it should continue. And then on top of that, if someone EA-aligned wanted a potentially high-impact way to spend time advocating for post-political views, I would recommend the forum project.
When you say this is the only possible political framework for a utilitarian—if you’re referring to sentience maxing with whatever tools available, I agree. If you’re saying utilitarians should ignore the tools of political culture entirely and their instrumental uses, including supporting the rights and other deontological rules that utilitarians sometimes find justified, then I would disagree for the reasons stated.
For example, assuming democracy is the most effective government form, I would want some amount of pro-democracy emotional content in K-12 schools and a broader social penalty for advancing anti-democratic ideas like reducing voter eligibility/access, in order to safeguard it against short-term cultural shifts and meddling. I think hard-coding things that we are pretty sure are good or bad into culture is wise, so that we avoid having to rehash the same issues generation to generation. In this case “dogma” is basically just “accepting a moral conviction that has been baked into your culture through historical experience,” which is often quite useful.
If you’re saying that the economic system you outlined (which if I understand correctly is limited to a private market and wealth transfers, implying no public goods) is the only defensible one, then that’s also a separate debate we could have. I’m not sure if this is what you’re referring to when you say this is the only possible political framework.
Agreed on all counts.
I suspect that the social cost of making “I have [better/worse genetics] than this person” a widespread, politically relevant, and socially permissible subject outweighs the potential benefits of policies like subsidized abortions for people addicted to drugs and special incentives for educated women to have kids.
With regard to targeted abortion subsidies, what about the risk of reanimating the “abortion is eugenics” argument against its legality, particularly in the US, where abortion has been banned in many states? If you believe that abortion’s legality has had very positive genetic effects, then shouldn’t preserving that legality be an extremely high priority, and the political cost of proposing this policy prohibitive?
If you want to make abortions more accessible, why not make them free for everyone, making it a better option for people who might not be able to face the short-term financial burden of its cost, reducing the odds of it being banned by reinforcing the idea that it is is a right, and avoiding the backlash that a targeted subsidy would unleash?
It seems like ensuring that everyone gets to decide when they are best prepared to have and raise kids, if ever, has such incredibly high positive externalities that if anything there is a strong argument that abortion should be free already. The same goes for condoms, birth control pills, and IUDs.
Why not advocate for new, universal public goods, rather than policies that unnecessarily risk negative social and political impacts?
It’s true that you didn’t technically advocate for it, but in context it’s implied that subsidies for abortion for people who are addicted to drug use would be a good policy to consider.
“We are not going to stop hearing about eugenics. Every time someone tries to call it something different, the “e” word and its association with historic injustice and abuse is invoked to end the discussion before it can begin.
When someone says that screening embryos for genetic diseases, giving educated women incentives to have children (like free child care for college educated women), or offering subsidized abortions for women addicted to drugs is “eugenics” they are absolutely using the term correctly.”
I accept that the idea “abortion is eugenics” is already advanced by some conservatives. However, I think that the policy of targeted abortion subsidies would convince more people that “abortion is eugenics,” and I think that this would make it easier to ban abortion.
I think the fact that Israel already has a very different cultural environment regarding genetic interventions means that those examples of targeted subsidies may well be much more controversial in other countries.
I’m glad you agree on that last point.
For me it’s been good to make a habit of looking for the least controversial policy that achieves desired goals. I often discover reasons that the more controversial options were actually less desirable in some way than the less controversial ones. This isn’t always the case, but in my experience it has been a definite pattern.
Thank you for your response! I wasn’t aware of those EA political action funds or the fact that some EA groups do local work.
1. I agree wholeheartedly that rich country politics are a saturated field and EA should avoid conventional engagement with them. On its grandest scale, I believe EA should always be about more nonpartisan direct giving and existential risk prevention, because these things are very quantifiably good, and that’s extremely important.
My argument is more that building local EA groups through engagement with local issues could expand the movement and induce greater investment from those already on board, by giving your average EA with a job not directly related to the highest-impact fields another way to engage with the gospel of effective doing that unites EAs. This average EA might currently spend 20 money-units on a cocktail of GiveWell and existential risk donations and 20 time-units on deciding what to donate to and engaging with the local group. My hypothesis is that if local EA groups pursued a dual strategy of local and international work, discussing the highest-impact opportunities in each separately with an understanding that international work provides more bang-for-buck but there’s still effective ways to spend time on local issues, that average EA would still spend 20 money-units on Givewell and existential risk, but they might add 1 money-unit on seed money for a local political campaign and double their time-unit investment because there is now a local project that the group decided to work on. Plus EA’s fame grows as a movement that is most dedicated to the highest international good, but is nonetheless willing to put in some local effort. I think it Feels Good to do something local and outsiders will Feel Good about EA if it accomplishes some useful local thing.
2. I want to steer super clear of DSA-like stuff. I am joining EA and not the DSA for a reason—the quality of meta-debate, introspection, and ideological diversity of EA make it far more likely to have a long-term positive impact on the world, in my opinion. I think EA’s reverence for quantification and transparency is also pretty unmatched. Plus I think EAs are correct, from a moral-calculus perspective, to spend their energies building a movement with more expansive goals than political groups and more focus on things like direct aid. I think local projects would have to target non-incendiary policies, if they targeted policies at all. YIMBYism or improving voting accessibility or advocating for public parks are the kind of policies that seem to be in the sweet spot of impactful, maybe a bit neglected, and not likely to alienate anyone (maybe some YIMBY policies are too dangerous in this regard though). On the individual or really small group level EAs might do little things like getting permission from the city to build a small bridge over a neighborhood creek or making one of those little book libraries from scratch. I think what I’m envisioning is just a bimodal culture of care where you put like 95% of your philanthropic money into international efforts but much of your philanthropic time goes towards bonding with EAs on local projects. Maybe what I’m describing isn’t actually that far off from some local EA groups. As far as I can tell, it’s pretty different from the one where I live, though.
I think even with regard to local policy-related issues, EA would do it better than a group like DSA, by identifying the policies that are most universally-desirable, and having the ability to ignore the political sphere if no impactful opportunities arise.
3. I have to agree that poverty in the UK is a different and altogether less pressing issue than poverty in Zimbabwe. I think that was probably the weakest segment of my argument. I do, however, think that the general compression of the middle classes of these countries have enough negative psychological and social impacts as to be concerned for the wellbeing of both the inhabitants of these countries and those countries’ institutions. If things aren’t going well in rich countries, how can we fix the world by making poor countries into rich countries? (Obviously it’s more efficient to focus on poor countries, but I think we should at least make symbolic or local efforts in rich countries).
4. I’m not sure how to improve the institutions of developing countries either, to be honest, but given how impactful it seems likely to be, I think EA should look into how it might be done. I suspect that at least some high-impact opportunities would be revealed by the search. To your other point, I think making the US less unequal and more democratic would actually have extremely dramatic impacts on future world history. From pure GDP and military numbers, it seems crucial that it perfects its institutions and is a global steward for good governance, especially in a world with reasonably strong autocracies that would like to see liberalism rot from the inside out. Good governance is a subject for debate, but assuming one’s assessment is accurate, if money could effectively be spent on improving US governance, it would probably be one of the most impactful causes in the world to focus on. Alas, it is also the most crowded market on earth and it is probably only worthwhile to spend money on extremely specific overlooked efforts to improve governance. For example, if there was a really promising, really transparent movement run by EA-aligned people to give everyone Election Day off, I might give it a bit of seed money.
5. That sounds great. Will have to investigate further.
6. I agree that “reducing inequality” is not an end that inherently justifies itself, and certainly wouldn’t make a good prospective tenet of EA. On the other hand, although this obviously is still up for debate, I think there’s pretty good evidence for the long-term economic and social benefits of a larger public sector and social safety net than the US and the UK currently have. Those are the kinds of policies I could see EA advocating for, at least from my relatively uninformed perspective about what EAs consider too political for the scope of the movement. I agree that ideological diversity is inherently good for a movement. I think if there was some apparatus for community endorsement of a policy, requiring 80% consensus would be a pretty good protection against alienation, but I could be wrong about this.
7. Really cool stuff, this is the kind of thing I was envisioning for selective engagement with the political system. I think it’s good to have this stuff on the side as long as it doesn’t come to dominate too much, especially not the “international” side of the local/international focuses. I’m currently using a 75/75/75 rule for my own donation where 75% goes to immediately-impactful GiveWell aid, 75% of the remaining 25% goes to existential risk, 75% of the remaining 6.25% goes to improving governance, and the remaining 1.56% goes to pet/local projects. I think I will be donating to these funds as part of my governance donation, particularly the YIMBY one as it seems underfunded to me.
Again, thanks for the reply!