One of the most popular critiques of effective altruism is that it is insufficiently open to large-scale systematic change. EAs will often respond to this by saying that there is nothing about the EA philosophy that is principally tied to supporting any economic system: Yes, most EAs are not revolutionary, but they might be one day! If there is convincing evidence for it, EA principles would simply demand of us that we become communists. It's just that that kind of evidence does not exist right now.
There is a clear tension here. On the one hand, it makes sense to err on the side of caution if we are deeply uncertain about the consequences of radical systematic change. Making such changes, especially without a detailed plan, could make the world a much much worse place. On the other hand, it seems that evidence for such a detailed plan is especially difficult to collect. I take it that most of you are at least open to lending some credence to the idea that the most just world we can imagine is not a capitalist one, or at least involves systems that look entirely different from the ones we operate in today. But if you truly believe, for example, that a classless society is the most just one, then you will not be convinced by some empirical study that seems to imply reducing class elements from economic interactions make all of us worse off. Your ideal society is so far off the status quo, that the empirical study cannot do justice to the changes you envision. But the other side of this coin is that, if only types of evidence at the top of the EA hierarchy of evidence are convincing, radical critiques of the status quo become mute.
And so I ask, dear friends, what kind of evidence would change your mind?
* Note: I say capitalism, but I guess I mean to say 'any system involving power structures for which there is a lot of attention on the left but almost no attention within EA'. It it just that openness to anticapitalism is the first thing that comes up in conversations I have with leftists who are unsympathetic to EA.
Edit: I guess most of the dislikes are coming from people who think this posts repeats the early systematic critique of EA. If this is the case, can you please point me to arguments from elsewhere that directly address the questions I raise here? The usual response I find online is the one in my post: It's just that that kind of evidence does not exist right now.
Disclaimer: politics is really hard and really controversial, and I'm about to give a political opinion.
I think the evidence is already overwhelming that capitalism is suboptimal. The difficulty isn't in providing evidence for that, it's in providing evidence for a specific superior system. No matter how clever you are, you can't write down a system for the organization of an entire world economy and know with perfect accuracy what would happen if that system were put into place. The world is too complicated. This isn't really a problem with anti-capitalism, but rather a problem with non-reformism. EA's have differing political opinions, although they cluster around social liberalism/social democracy (if the polls are to be believed), but they're universally reformist because reform is just a way safer bet.
For example, it's generally uncontroversial that markets lead to inequality of wealth, and if you're a utilitarian you should consider unequal distribution of wealth to be suboptimal (in a vacuum at least), because of the principle of diminishing marginal utility. In fact if you believed that market outcomes were axiologically perfect, you wouldn't be an effective altruist, because in order for that to be the case all dollars spent would have to have an equal effect on global utility. So let's say you're an EA looking at the cause area of "wealth inequality" and you brainstorm some solutions:
The empirical data doesn't like the first idea. It's been tried, and it successfully reduced inequality, which was the goal. In 1980, the GINI coefficient of the USSR was .29, which is pretty equal! But the country was plagued by political problems, mostly a result of a lack of democracy, which lead to mass executions, ethnic cleansing, and other things but I think we've proved the point already. The same approach led to similar problems elsewhere.
The second idea has also been tried, and it also successfully reduced inequality. The country with the highest income tax in the world is Belgium, which... okay that's a bad example because they also committed mass executions and ethnic cleansing. But the second highest income tax in the world belongs to Finland, which has a GINI coefficient of .26, even lower than the USSR! And it's a stable democracy with a very high standard of living. Other countries with mixed market economies and strong welfare states achieved similar results. This seems like the standout intervention so far, AND it requires the least effort!
The third idea has never been tried on a large scale, so there is no empirical data. You could give arguments for why it would or would not work, but it would ultimately all be speculative. I'm not sure what kind of non-empirical data would convince me that the non-speculative opportunity cost of revolution is worth the speculative benefits. Also, I have extremely strong suspicions that it wouldn't work because of things like price signals and rule of law.
The odds that the current global economic status quo is better than any possible alternative is 0%. However, constructing a system that performs better is very difficult. If it were easy, someone would have done it by now. There are some very interesting models of socialist economies. I find the Cockshott-Cotrrell model really interesting, I really like the Lange-Lerner model. I don't like Parecon. But can these models perform as well as or better than the current world economy? Predicting the behavior of the capitalist economy is infamously difficult, and we have hundreds of years of empirical data to work with. Predicting the behavior of an economy that doesn't even exist yet is impossible. It's too complicated. I can't predict what would happen if the whole world adopted the Lange-Lerner model, but on priors, I think that any system made "by hand" is automatically at a loss against a system with hundreds of years of tweaks, regulations, and real life trial-and-error adjustments to its known failure modes.
So I guess the only thing that could convince me to agitate for the founding of a specific radically different system would be if that radically different system already existed and was superior according to my value system. Previous attempts at socialist economies produced low inequality, low unemployment, and decent growth, which is cool and all, but the Nordic model can do exactly the same thing but with more consumer goods, more democracy, and without the shortages and surpluses that plagued the soviet bloc. I am aware that this approach means that there are utopias in possibility space that I am actively ignoring, but I think the risk-neutral approach is to do exactly that.
EA's of different political opinions than my own likely have different justifications.
I think you're absolutely right about the evidence strongly supporting capitalism being less than ideal from a utilitarian perspective but also not supporting any putative drop in replacement system (and providing a lot of evidence that revolutions are a terrible idea in most places). As Churchill once said of Parliamentary democracy, it's the worst system apart from all the others that have been tried.
But I would think for critics of capitalism there are plenty of feasible options short of completely eliminating it. The Nordic model is (for better and for... (read more)