All of Chantal's Comments + Replies
I would agree that the ITN framework, and perhaps the more quantitative analysis generally dominant within EA, is not so well suited to political questions. Great for assessing the value of a marginal dollar, or helping a person decide where to devote technical skills / a career, but not so much which protest to attend or even which representative to vote for.
I personally believe that many, if not most, of the world's most pressing problems are political problems, at least in part. For that reason I consider engagement in political movements and demo...
This surprises me, since on-budget ODA works through government and government accountability frameworks, whereas off-budget and totally private spending does not. Is this perhaps just because private philanthropy in international development is just very small (and therefore less risky) in dollar terms compared to ODA?
In the domestic context, excessive private philanthropic funding can be seen as undermining democracy and weakening the state, in relation to education policy for example.
I'm thinking for example of the arguments made in "Winner Takes ...
I think it is very difficult to argue that aid "didn't work well" in Afghanistan when you look at any education or health metric. According to UNICEF there was a 90% increase in child malnutrition in the year from June 2021-2022, capturing the period following the collapse of the state and the majority of aid projects (number is partially inflated by the expansion of UNICEF programming to cover gaps left by other actors).
I don't think it is controversial that there was too much money and way too much corruption in Afghanistan. Obviously, the state-bu...
Yes I would love to hear a little more from "mainstream" aid and development orgs and have that discussion around how they see EA ideas, and how EA-compatible ideas are growing (or not) within those spaces. Also USAID, World Bank etc. although I don't have a specific name.
My understanding of both Universal Basic Income and Guaranteed Minimum Income are as programs that cover all of a given population and that can essentially only be achieved by policy /government intervention. The reason being that the cost of both, to cover a whole population, is just so expensive that it could only ever be funded by tax revenue. My (far less than perfectly informed) instinct is that true UBI or GMI in a developed country isn't financially possible with private funding but only with a more radically mandated redistribution through tax (esp...
Separate but related to community, I think your point about identity, and whether fostering EA as an identity is epistemically healthy, is also relevant to (1).
Your analogy to church spoke very powerfully to me and to something I have always been a bit uncomfortable with. To me, EA is a philosophy/school of thought, and I struggle to understand how a person can "be" a philosophy, or how a philosophy can "recruit members".
I also suspect that a strong self-perception that one is a "good person" can just as often provide (internal and external) co...
Agree these estimates are high, but disagree with Salon. While there are plenty of mundane potential explanations, I think suggesting that the 144 minus 1 sightings investigated in the Pentagon report are in fact explained is misleading. My starting assumption is that the Pentagon would have been able to diagnose something like a FLIR glare filter.
I get that there's a sensationalism to the UFO angle, but I suspect in this community, we might be more susceptible to to letting cultural taboos around "seeing things in the sky" lead us to a really unscie...
I think so. As I understand the critique (and maybe I'm bringing my own baggage to it) EA brings with it a certain perspective that centers individual action and may have a tendency to overlook collective action and create certain blindspots around collective/political action.
That EA principles are not philosophically inconsistent with collective action is not, I believe, actually a very effective counter-argument to that point at all.
I agree. On the same note I really enjoyed Dylan Matthews' article about George W. Bush's PEPFAR program, apparently pursued somewhat independently by Bush: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/8/8894019/george-w-bush-pepfar
Wow, thank you! I especially appreciate the handbook, it expresses a lot of my thoughts much better than I could have.
It also made me realise that I didn't express the point you make in the very first section although it's kind of critical to my feeling that there's so much opportunity here - ie that politics is sort of unique in that it calls for mass engagement, and there are so many opportunities to be involved just as a citizen (or group of citizens) without necessarily making it your profession or becoming some kind of expert. Which is not generally often true in other spheres (eg charity) in my opinion.
Thank you for the resources and insightful comments! I pretty much agree with all of that.
If we're talking US Congress, then I also definitely agree that's super difficult and a huge investment. While it'll be relevant for some, maybe the more useful examples would be running for local office, getting involved in some of the organisations that work on primary challenges, or simply supporting the best candidate for office (with money and volunteer time) when elections do come around (looking at you Georgia).
Also for context, my family are American but I'm actually a New Zealand citizen and we have proportional representation which does make the national-level politics a very different beast.
I think EA-aligned people could probably learn a lot by running for local office, and I'd be enthusiastic to see more people try it (depending on the strength of their other opportunities).
One difficulty is that it often pays quite badly; one highly engaged community member was a state representative in New Hampshire, but eventually had to quit because the job was effectively unpaid and took a lot of time. She's running an AMA on the Forum soon -- keep an eye out, as you may want to ask her some questions!
I think the find-the-biggest-demos argument is probably the strongest argument for government spending instead of philanthropy. I really disagree with the nationalism inherent in the premise of the last two defenses for reasons of equity. I also don’t think that the nation is an obvious level to spend philanthropy at when most very rich people made their money through a globalized market
I think there's a mistake here. Yes it's partly about "democracy" in the nation-state sense but it's also a lot more specific than that, and it's about appropriate de...
Is the argument actually "against" philanthropy though? As I read the original content, the argument is for greater democratic scrutiny of large philanthropic gifts, as well as potential measures to reduce inequality generally and the elimination or minimisation of certain tax breaks, which is a much narrower debate.
I've not really seen a serious argument that philanthropy should be done away with. In fact, I think the argument is really more about failures in democracy than failures in philanthropy - democracy's arguable failure to provide basic needs (thus charitable giving having to pick up the slack) and the influence of money in policy and politics.
Just to comment on your footnote: my intuition is that political spending can be very effective and it is an important component of my family's donations. For anyone interested in this I really recommend Ezra Klein's interview with Amanda Litman from Run for Something.
She speaks compellingly about how most political donations, especially on the left, are reactionary and not necessarily effective, but about how in certain races and particularly state and local races, tiny sums of money can really make a huge difference. I don't think she explicitly us... (read more)