DavidNash requested that I repost my comment below, on what to make of discussions about EA neglecting systemic change, as a top-level post. These are my off-the-cuff thoughts and no one else's. In summary (to be unpacked below):

  • Actual EA is able to do assessments of systemic change interventions including electoral politics and policy change, and has done so a number of times
  • The great majority of critics of EA invoking systemic change fail to present the simple sort of quantitative analysis given above for the interventions they claim excel, and frequently when such analysis is done the intervention does not look competitive by EA lights
  • Nonetheless, my view is that historical data do show that the most efficient political/advocacy spending, particularly aiming at candidates and issues selected with an eye to global poverty or the long term, does have higher returns than GiveWell top charities (even ignoring nonhumans and future generations or future technologies); one can connect the systemic change critique as a position in intramural debates among EAs about the degree to which one should focus on highly linear, giving as consumption, type interventions
  • EAs who are willing to consider riskier and less linear interventions are mostly already pursuing fairly dramatic systemic change, in areas with budgets that are small relative to political spending (unlike foreign aid)
  • As funding expands in focused EA priority issues, eventually diminishing returns there will equalize with returns for broader political spending, and activity in the latter area could increase enormously: since broad political impact per dollar is flatter over a large range political spending should either be a very small or very large portion of EA activity

In full:

  • Actual EA is able to do assessments of systemic change interventions including electoral politics and policy change, and has done so a number of times
    • Empirical data on the impact of votes, the effectiveness of lobbying and campaign spending work out without any problems of fancy decision theory or increasing marginal returns
      • E.g. Andrew Gelman's data on US Presidential elections shows that given polling and forecasting uncertainty a marginal vote in a swing state average something like a 1 in 10 million chance of swinging an election over multiple elections (and one can save to make campaign contributions
      • 80,000 Hours has a page (there have been a number of other such posts and discussion, note that 'worth voting' and 'worth buying a vote through campaign spending or GOTV' are two quite different thresholds) discussing this data and approaches to valuing differences in political outcomes between candidates; these suggest that a swing state vote might be worth tens of thousands of dollars of income to rich country citizens
        • But if one thinks that charities like AMF do 100x or more good per dollar by saving the lives of the global poor so cheaply, then these are compatible with a vote being worth only a few hundred dollars
        • If one thinks that some other interventions, such as gene drives for malaria eradication, animal advocacy, or existential risk interventions are much more cost-effective than AMF, that would lower the value further except insofar as one could identify strong variation in more highly-valued effects
      • Experimental data on the effects of campaign contributions suggest a cost of a few hundred dollars per marginal vote (see, e.g. Gerber's work on GOTV experiments)
      • Prediction markets and polling models give a good basis for assessing the chance of billions of dollars of campaign funds swinging an election
      • If there are increasing returns to scale from large-scale spending, small donors can convert their funds into a small chance of huge funds, e.g. using a lottery, or more efficiently (more than 1/1,000 chance of more than 1000x funds) through making longshot bets in financial markets, so IMR are never a bar to action (also see the donor lottery)
      • The main thing needed to improve precision for such estimation of electoral politics spending is carefully cataloging and valuing different channels of impact (cost per vote and electoral impact per vote are well-understood)
        • More broadly there are also likely higher returns than campaign spending in some areas such as think tanks, lobbying, and grassroots movement-building; ballot initiative campaign spending is one example that seems like it may have better returns than spending on candidates (and EAs have supported several ballot initiatives financially, such as restoration of voting rights to convicts in Florida, cage bans, and increased foreign spending)
    • A recent blog post by the Open Philanthropy Project describes their cost-effectiveness estimates from policy search in human-oriented US domestic policy, including criminal justice reform, housing reform, and others
      • It states that thus far even ex ante estimates of effect there seem to have only rarely outperformed GiveWell style charities
      • However it says: "One hypothesis we’re interested in exploring is the idea of combining multiple sources of leverage for philanthropic impact (e.g., advocacy, scientific research, helping the global poor) to get more humanitarian impact per dollar (for instance via advocacy around scientific research funding or policies, or scientific research around global health interventions, or policy around global health and development). Additionally, on the advocacy side, we’re interested in exploring opportunities outside the U.S.; we initially focused on U.S. policy for epistemic rather than moral reasons, and expect most of the most promising opportunities to be elsewhere. "
    • Let's Fund's fundraising for climate policy work similarly made an attempt to estimate the impacts of their proposed intervention in this sort of fashion; without endorsing all the details of their analysis, I think it is an example of EA methodologies being quite capable of modeling systemic interventions
    • Animal advocates in EA have obviously pursued corporate campaigns and ballot initiatives which look like systemic change to me, including quantitative estimates of the impact of the changes and the effects of the campaigns
  • The great majority of critics of EA invoking systemic change fail to present the simple sort of quantitative analysis given above for the interventions they claim excel, and frequently when such analysis is done the intervention does not look competitive by EA lights
    • A common reason for this is EAs taking into account the welfare of foreigners, nonhuman animals and future generations; critics may propose to get leverage by working through the political system but give up on leverage from concern for neglected beneficiaries, and in other cases the competition is interventions that get leverage from advocacy or science combined with a focus on neglected beneficiaries
    • Sometimes systemic change critiques come from a Marxist perspective that assumes Marxist revolution will produce a utopia, whereas empirically such revolution has been responsible for impoverishing billions of people, mass killing, the Cold War, (with risk of nuclear war) and increased tensions between China and democracies, creating large object-level disagreements with many EAs who want to accurately forecast the results of political action
  • Nonetheless, my view is that historical data do show that the most efficient political/advocacy spending, particularly aiming at candidates and issues selected with an eye to global poverty or the long term, does have higher returns than GiveWell top charities (even ignoring nonhumans and future generations or future technologies); one can connect the systemic change critique as a position in intramural debates among EAs about the degree to which one should focus on highly linear, giving as consumption, type interventions
    • E.g. I would rather see $1000 go to something like the Center for Global Development, Target Malaria's gene drive effort, or the Swiss effective foreign aid ballot initiative than the Against Malaria Foundation
    • I do think it is true that well-targeted electoral politics spending has higher returns than AMF, because of the impacts of elections on things such as science, foreign aid, great power war, AI policy, etc, provided that one actually directs one's efforts based on the neglected considerations
  • EAs who are willing to consider riskier and less linear interventions are mostly already pursuing fairly dramatic systemic change, in areas with budgets that are small relative to political spending (unlike foreign aid)
    • Global catastrophic risks work is focused on research and advocacy to shift the direction of society as a whole on critical issues, and the collapse of human civilization or its replacement by an undesirable successor would certainly be a systemic change
    • As mentioned previously, short-term animal EA work is overwhelmingly focused on systemic changes, through changing norms and laws, or producing technologies that would replace and eliminate the factory farming system
    • A number of EA global poverty focused donors do give to organizations like CGD, meta interventions to grow the EA movement (which can eventually be cashed in for larger systemic change), and groups like GiveWell or the Poverty Action Lab
      • Although there is a relative gap in longtermist and high-risk global poverty work compared to other cause areas, that does make sense in terms of ceiling effects, arguments for the importance of trajectory changes from a longtermist perspective, and the role of GiveWell as a respected charity evaluator providing a service lacking for other areas
    • Issue-specific focus in advocacy makes sense for these areas given the view that they are much more important than the average issue and with very low spending
  • As funding expands in focused EA priority issues, eventually diminishing returns there will equalize with returns for broader political spending, and activity in the latter area could increase enormously: since broad political impact per dollar is flatter over a large range political spending should either be a very small or very large portion of EA activity
    • Essentially, the cost per vote achieved through things like campaign spending is currently set by the broader political culture and has the capacity to absorb billions of dollars at similar cost-effectiveness to the current level, so it should either be the case that EA funds very little of it or enormous amounts of it
      • There is a complication in that close elections or other opportunities can vary the effectiveness of political spending over time, which would suggest saving most funds for those
    • The considerations are similar to GiveDirectly: since cash transfers could absorb all EA funds many times over at similar cost-effectiveness (with continued rapid scaling), it should take in either very little or almost all EA funding; in a forced choice it should either be the case that most funding goes to cash transfers, whereas for other interventions with diminishing returns on the relevant scale as mixed portfolio will yield more impact
    • For now areas like animal advocacy and AI safety with budgets of only tens of millions of dollars are very small relative to political spending, and the impact of the focused work (including relevant movement building) makes more of a difference to those areas than a typical difference between political candidates; but if billions of dollars were being spent in those areas it would seem that political activity could be a competitive use (e.g. supporting pro-animal candidates for office)

Comments17
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[meta] Carl, I think you should consider going through other long, highly upvoted comments you've written and making them top-level posts. I'd be happy to look over options with you if that'd be helpful.

In one key way this post very solidly completely misses the point.

The post makes a number of very good points about systemic change. But bases all of the points on financial cost-effective estimates. It is embedded in the language throughout, discussing: options that "outperformed GiveWell style charities", the "cost ... per marginal vote", lessons for "large-scale spending" or for a "small donor", etc.

I think a way the EA community has neglected systemic change in exactly in this manner. Money is not the only thing that can be leveraged in the world to make change (and in some cases money is not a thing people can give).
I think this some part of what people are pointing to when they criticise EA.

To be constructive I think we should rethink cause priotisation, but not from a financial point of view. Eg:
- If you have political power how best to spend it?
- If you have a public voice how best to use it?
- If you can organise activism what should it focus on?

(PS. Happy to support with money or time people doing this kind of research)

I think we could get noticeably different results. I think things like financial stability (hard to donate to but very important) might show up as more of a priority in the EA space if we start looking at things this way.

I think the EA community currently has a limited amount to say to anyone with power. For example:
• I met the civil servant with oversight of UK's £8bn international development spending who seemed interested in EA but did not feel it was relevant to them – I think they were correct, I had nothing to say they didn’t already know.
• Another case is an EA I know who does not have a huge amount to donate but lots of experience in political organising and activism, I doubt the EA community provides them much useful direction.

It is not that the EA community does none of this, just that we are slow. It feels like it took 80000 Hours a while to start recommending policy/politics as a career path and it is still unclear what people should do once in positions of power. (HIPE.org.uk if doing some research on this for Government careers)

--
Overall a very interesting post. Thank you for posting.

I note you mention a "relative gap in long-termist and high-risk global poverty work". I think this is interesting. I would love it if anyone has the time to do some back of the envelope evaluations of international development governance reform organisations (like Transparency International)


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Shulman's not speaking only in terms of donations. You must recognize this since you quote "cost ... per marginal vote". It seems like you're taking issue with some of the basic economic concepts like efficiency and marginalism. This is something that other critics have done. However I have not seen any good defense of that point of view.

I think the EA community currently has a limited amount to say to anyone with power.

Please let this myth die. For yet another example, I have 200 pages judging policies & politicians: https://1drv.ms/b/s!At2KcPiXB5rkyABaEsATaMrRDxwj?e=VvVnl2

I think the EA community currently has a limited amount to say to anyone with power.

I think it would be useful for governments to have response plans for agricultural catastrophes such as nuclear and volcanic winter, and also for electricity/industry disrupting catastrophes including solar storms and high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (HEMPs). Governments could also fund research related resilience including alternative foods and backup communications systems.

As an EA with political organizing experience I think EA has plenty to say to your friend. Money is useful as a unit of analysis because it's quantifiable and fungible, but the same analytical framework can easily apply to donations of time, with the caveats that 1) Donating time will vary a lot more in its value depending on the specific service one performs and it becomes a lot more important to pick the right volunteer activity in addition to the right cause, 2) there will be some causes or organizations where it is not possible to donate time effectively, so the highest-value intervention might be different.

Being politically experienced, I would think your friend already has an idea of the highest-value services they would perform for a candidate or organization, although in some cases the highest-value candidates/organizations may have no need for those specific skills, so there could be a tradeoff between doing a more useful activity for a less impactful candidate/org vs. a less useful activity for a higher-impact candidate/org. But if you have a sense of the marginal values of different activities that should be easy to quantify, and then you can assess how high-impact the candidate/org is. For the latter as applied to the Presidential race, see the Candidate Scoring system at https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AMwfqLPOC5Rim5E&cid=E49A0797F8708ADD&id=E49A0797F8708ADD%217949&parId=E49A0797F8708ADD%217946&o=OneUp. For a better example of the former analysis than most political people seem to have done, I recommend Graber and Green's Get Out The Vote, with 2 caveats: 1) it focuses only on turnout, and persuasion may be different; 2) the effects that seem to be the strongest are under-studied because political scientists seem to have a fetish for grassroot-y stuff over mass media. https://www.amazon.com/Get-Out-Vote-Increase-Turnout/dp/0815732686. If your friend needs help with the quantitative analysis of these tradeoffs I'm happy to help.

I think the EA community currently has a limited amount to say to anyone with power.

More broadly, CSER has these recommendations for governments for global catastrophic risks.

Has there been any good research regarding the effectiveness of different activism techniques? This feels like an important question when discussing EA and systemic change. Scotts post on political lobbying comes to mind, it makes me suspect that for most corporations and large organisations there are more effective ways to wield their influence than through lobbying efforts, but perhaps for organisations that have less in the way of deeply partisan appeal (like the NRA), and on the whole less power to throw around (I would suspect that large companies have better ways to wield influence than through direct lobbying, i.e building plants/factories in a particular congressmans district in return for public support), lobbying might be quite effective, especially if they have a talent pool to draw on as wide as EA does.

I wish the systemic change discussion was less focused on cost-effectiveness and more focused on uncertainty regarding the results of our actions. For example, in 2013 Scott Alexander wrote this post on how military strikes are an extremely cheap way to help foreigners ("at least potentially"). I'm glad he included the disclaimer, because although Scott's article works off the premise that "life is ~10% better in Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown", Libya isn't looking too hot right now - Obama says Libya is the biggest regret of his presidency. Scott also failed to mention that American intervention in Libya may have reduced North Korea's willingness to negotiate regarding its nuclear weapons program.

To me, uncertainty means it's valuable to research systemic changes well in advance of trying to make them. If systemic changes aren't cost-effective now, but might be cost-effective in the future, we should consider starting to theorize, debate, and run increasingly large experiments now anyway. (Disclaimer: Having productive disagreements about systemic changes is in itself a largely unsolved institution design problem, I'd argue! Maybe we should start by trying to solve that.)

Note that Scott himself has said he agrees the Libya intervention turned out poorly and is now no longer comfortable endorsing things similar interventions, see http://web.archive.org/web/20150731041537/https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/125060547081/how-have-your-political-positions-shifted-through

Some people have been asking for further details on the Swiss effective foreign aid ballot initiative ("1% initiative" in Zurich) by the Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF). The vote on a counterproposal that preserves the key points of the original initiative will take place on November 17th and I'll publish an EA forum post afterwards. Feel free to get in touch via PM if you'd like to get access to an early draft.

There's no need for any additional financial resources for that particular initiative, but I encourage people looking to support potential similar future initiatives (or other efforts to improve Swiss foreign aid policy) with ≥$10k to get in touch with me (firstname dot lastname at ea-foundation.org).

Update: The counterproposal to the initiative has passed!

Our social media update:

70% of Zurich voters in favor of more effective foreign aid: The counterproposal to the Stiftung für Effektiven Altruismus's ballot initiative has passed with a very strong majority! The city of Zurich’s development cooperation budget has thus just been increased from $3 million to $8 million per year. It is to be allocated “based on the available scientific research on effectiveness and cost-effectiveness”.
We supported the counterproposal because it contains the key points of our original initiative and had a high chance of success. This seems to be the first time that Swiss legislation on development cooperation mentions effectiveness requirements.

https://twitter.com/EA_Stiftung/status/1196090927305113611

https://www.facebook.com/ea.stiftung/photos/a.308052465977781/2540880699361602/

I expect to post a more thorough EA forum update in a couple of weeks.

This post was awarded an EA Forum Prize; see the prize announcement for more details.

My notes on what I liked about the post, from the announcement:

It was good to see Carl react to positive feedback on a comment by turning said comment into a full-fledged post; I hope more users will consider doing the same!

This post is dense with information, and thus difficult to summarize, but here are some elements of it that I appreciated:

  • Carl uses evidence from a wide range of sources in EA, academia, and the broader world to make his points.
  • He also points at specific organizations (e.g. the Center for Global Development) that he thinks may be strong options based on his views about systemic change.
    • If you’ve taken the time to develop a set of theories and beliefs, it can be really helpful to connect those to real-world actions you’d recommend.
    • (Note that Carl doesn’t go as far as actively endorsing that readers donate to these organizations.)
  • The post at one point notes that, while Carl doesn’t necessarily “endors[e] all the details of” an impact estimate from Let’s Fund, he does see it as a legitimate way to model a systemic intervention.
    • It can be easy to slip into categorizing things as either entirely good or entirely bad, and “mixed” reviews of this type are a useful preventative measure against this. In a field where individuals and organizations are constantly trying to solve very difficult problems, it seems important to appreciate partial progress and steps taken in the right direction.

Regarding the third point, do I understand that what David is suggesting is that dollars spend on campaigning for candidates focused on poverty reduction programs/spending will in the long run be more beneficial than dollars spend on funding organizations working on the problems that such candidates may focus on?


My main follow up question is therefore which are the priorities countries/hemispheres? Is he referring to candidates who have a focus on foreign aid, or candidates who have a focus on poverty reduction domestically - in other words, socialist?