And a much delayed response...
It is actually ‘prima facie obvious’ to some people that philanthropic do-gooders—those who ‘aim at making the world better’ through individualised charity are not actually having a positive impact. This kind of critique of charity and philanthropy is much older than EA.
So maybe everyone will agree with the thin claim that people who try to make the world better in some way will usually have more positive impact than those who don’t try. But this has no implications for charity vs politics or anything else—it seems to be no more than the truism that its good to care about goodness. Though I guess some consequentialists would quibble with that too.
I did indeed cherry pick some provocative issues to put in the article, but this was to illustrate the complexity of the issues rather than just to score cheap points.
And you may well be right that I don’t get it, as I am not steeped in decision theory or Bayesian methods. So maybe the point is better put this way: EAs do indeed have this prior assumption that charity is good and a charitable movement is a good movement. But plenty of people quite justifiably have the opposite prior—that charity is mostly bad and that a charitable movement does more harm than good by slowing down and distracting from necessary change. If so, EA and its critics are in the same position—and so its not reasonable for EAs to chide their critics for somehow not caring about doing good or adopting anti-charity positions because it makes them sound cool to their radical friends.
Hi—thanks for your comments! Apologies for the delay in getting back to this. Some responses.
1. Re: labelling. I’m not familiar with the Pritchett stuff—is it his ‘four fold smell test’, which asks whether the proposed development intervention involves something that actually is widespread in developed countries? It looks like a shorthand that is underpinned by a systemic analysis of the history and causes of development, plus some idea that it will happen the same way now as in the past.
My critique is intended to be primarily epistemic—that EA underestimates the urgency and significance of necessarily rather speculative social analysis—and that this therefore puts it at risk of endorsing interventions that are either not the best available or actually make the problem worse by perpetuating the system that causes it.
I think that is the general form of any systemic change objection—that EA ignores relevant ‘systemic evidence’ and thus gets the wrong answers about effective interventions. This critique can be mounted from the perspective of any substantive social analysis. I develop a socialist version both because I endorse it (though I don’t defend it in the paper) and because there are many lefty critics of charity and I think their arguments have been both a bit weak and unfair to EA and that EA’s have often responded with similarly weak and unfair arguments.
2. Two points.
I’m very sympathetic to pretty radical critiques of neo-classical economics, especially in its mainstream dominant forms, so I don’t think that there is any reason to think that the majority of economists are correct and, in fact, some basic reasons of institutional incentivisation (as well as ideology etc.) to think that they mostly pretty wrong.
I do not offer a direct argument against the claim that capitalist/growth is the best anti-poverty tool. In fact I am quite happy to shift the argument on to this terrain—the terrain of macro-economics, political economy, historical analysis etc. - my aim is precisely to show that this kind of reasoning is inevitably implicated in any attempt to do the most good, and thus in defenses of charity, however obvious it seems that charity is helpful. And of course I think that there is no straightforward empirical data that proves the overall benefits of capitalism at all or as it has actually played out—the relevant counterfactual (i.e. a history of socialism) cannot be tested.
3. It is certainly conjectural—trying to illustrate a genre of reasoning rather than prove the specific claim. I think its an interesting open question whether donations to socialist charities do more harm than good by exploiting NOYB norms—certainly, socialists will usually insist that giving money by itself is far from a sufficient contribution.
I actually included a very approximate quantitative analysis in an early draft, but it was taken out after review as seeming to contradict the overal argument defending qualitative evidence. But, basically, it does sound implausible but it really depends how you specify the all important ‘numbers’ about a) how much an individual could contribute to the revolution, b) how likely it is that socialism would happen and work and c) how much better it would be. But: there are relatively few affluent people in the world, those who help start a movement probably ‘do more’ than those who take it to final victory and its conceivable that a long period of socialism would save a truly vast number of lives, as well as relieving a huge amount of other suffering. Once you think in those terms, the trade off is less obviously in favor of e.g. AMF.
4. Excellent question! Socialists have always had big problems with internationalism vs nationalism and current democratic institutions are a big part of this. Undoubtedly, a really effective economic democracy would have to be international in character.