Thanks to Aaron Gertler for inviting me to do this AMA.
My name is Jeremiah Johnson, and I'm one of the founders and directors of the Neoliberal Project. The Project is a organization dedicated to advancing liberalism with thousands of members and 70+ chapters around the world. You can find the quick version of what we believe here or here (happy to go into more detail). I help run the Project day to day, host the Neoliberal Podcast, and do basically anything/everything else including social media, political commentary, content creation, managing local chapters, etc.
Aaron was kind enough to invite me here because the EA and neoliberal online communities have a surprising amount of overlap. I've been personally involved in the EA movement in a number of ways. I created a series of charity drives on the neoliberal subreddit that have in total raised more than 1/3 of a million dollars for EA favorites like DeWorm The World and Against Malaria Foundation. I've interviewed EA-related guests on my podcast like Alvin Roth, (Nobel winning economist who created the algorithms for kidney swaps) Robert Wiblin (of 80000 hours), Rob Mather (CEO of Against Malaria), etc. I donate a portion of my salary to GiveWell recommended charities every year, and two years ago I donated a kidney to a stranger after some EA-aligned people convinced me that it was a good choice (I had a popular AMA on donating a kidney here, but happy to answer any questions here as well).
Ask Me Anything about:
- Purely EA topics like
- Kidney donation - either the policy side or my personal experiences going through the process
- Raising money for AMF, and why I like malaria bednets so much
- The intersection between the neoliberal community and the EA community
- Why I think politics is an underrated way to do good that the EA community sometimes overlooks
- The Neoliberal Project, neoliberalism, politics or political philosophy, etc.
- Or anything else that seems relevant or that you're curious about.
I'm not massively familiar with neoliberalism or your project but I'm struggling to understand where the specific recommendations/positions come from. To what degree are they derived from a set of clear principles or a philosophy as opposed to being the concensus of leaders in the inside of the movement or some other method?
I feel like EAs are generally strongly 'bought in' on there being a moral obligation to help other people if you can do so easily and it's important to use evidence and reason when working out how to do good but beyond that I see most EA cause areas more like things that some EAs are interested in, I don't think most EAs are strongly compelled by all mainstream cause areas. Would you say that neoliberals are generally strongly bought in at the policy level (e.g. we believe in a carbon tax) or a more fundamental level and do you think that you need to support all of those policies outlined in the first what we believe link to be a neoliberal?
There's definitely a set of principles that underpins our policy beliefs. A lot of this goes all the way back to classical liberalism - to be a neoliberal means first and foremost that you are a liberal and are grounded in liberal political philosophy. This means we hold the core liberal values of equality before the law, democratic governance, a market economy, freedoms of press/religion/speech/assembly/etc.
Modern neoliberals take that liberalism and add and emphasize a few things. Neoliberals are internationalist and globalist, which le... (read more)