This is weird because other sources do point towards a productivity gap. For example, this report concludes that "European productivity has experienced a marked deceleration since the 1970s, with the productivity gap between the Euro area and the United States widening significantly since 1995, a trend further intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic".

Specifically, it looks as if, since 1995, the GDP per capita gap between the US and the eurozone has remained very similar, but this is due to a widening productivity gap being cancelled out by a shrinking employment rate gap:

This report from Banque de France has it that "the EU-US gap has narrowed in terms of hours worked per capita but has widened in terms of GDP per hours worked", and that in France at least this can be attributed to "producers and heavy users of IT technologies":

The Draghi report says 72% of the EU-US GDP per capita gap is due to productivity, and only 28% is due to labour hours:

Part of the discrepancy may be that the OWID data only goes until 2019, whereas some of these other sources report that the gap has widened significantly since COVID? But that doesn't seem to be the case in the first plot above (it still shows a widening gap before COVID).

Or maybe most of the difference is due to comparing the US to France/Germany, versus also including countries like Greece and Italy that have seen much slower productivity growth. But that doesn't explain the France data above (it still shows a gap between France and the US, even before COVID).

I'm registering a forecast: Within a few months we'll see a new Vasco Grilo post BOTECing that insecticide-treated bednets are net-negative expected value due to mosquito welfare. Looking forward to it. :)

He reframes EA concepts in a more accessible way, such as replacing “counterfactuals” with the sports acronym “VORP” (Value Over Replacement Player).

And here I was thinking hardly a soul read my suggesting this framing ...

Thanks for writing this, it's very interesting.

Instead, I might describe myself as a preferentialist or subjectivist about what matters, so that what’s better is just what’s preferred, or what would be better according to our preferences, attitudes or ways of caring, in general.

This sounds similar to Christine Korsgaard's (Kantian) view on value, where things only matter because they matter to sentient beings (people, to Kant). I think I was primed to notice this because I remember you had some great comments on my interview with her from four years ago.

Quoting her:

Utilitarians think that the value of people and animals derives from the value of the states they are capable of – pleasure and pain, satisfaction and frustration. In fact, in a way it is worse: In utilitarianism, people and animals don’t really matter at all; they are just the place where the valuable things happen. That’s why the boundaries between them do not matter. Kantians think that the value of the states derives from the value of the people and animals. In a Kantian theory, your pleasures and pains matter because you matter, you are an “end in yourself” and your pains and pleasures matter to you.

I guess "utilitarianism" above could be replaced with "hedonism" etc. and it would sort of match your writing that hedonism etc. is "guilty [...] of valuing things in ways that don’t match how we care about things". Anyway, she discusses this view in much greater detail in Fellow Creatures.

See also St. Jules, 2024 and Roelofs, 2022 (pdf) for more on ways of caring and moral patienthood, using different terminology.

Fyi, the latter two of these links are broken.

Thanks!

The correct "moral fix" isn't "don't get mail," it's "don't kick dogs." Do you share this intuition of non-responsibility?

I'm also not a philosopher, but I guess it depends on what your options are. If your only way of influencing the situation is by choosing whether or not to get mail, and the dog-kicking is entirely predictable, you have to factor the dog-kicking into the decision. Of course the mailman is ultimately much more responsible for the dog kicking than you are, in the sense that your action is one you typically wouldn't expect to cause any harm, whereas his action will always predictably cause harm. (In the real world, obviously there are likely many ways of getting the mailman to stop kicking dogs that are better than giving up mail.)

I'm not sure whether it makes sense to think of blameworthy actions as wrong by definition. It probably makes more sense to tie blameworthiness to intentions, and in that case an action could be blameworthy even though it has good consequences, and even though endorsing it leads to good consequences. Anyway, if so, obviously the mailman is also much more blameworthy than you, given that he presumably had ill intentions when kicking the dog, whereas you had no ill intentions when getting your mail delivered.

To clarify, I think I'm ok with having a taboo on advocacy against "it is better for the world for innocent group X of people not to exist", since that seems like the kind of naive utilitarianism we should definitely avoid. I'm just against a taboo on asking or trying to better understand whether "it is better for the world for innocent group X of people not to exist" is true or not. I don't think Vasco was engaging in advocacy, my impression was that he was trying to do the latter, while expressing a lot of uncertainty.

Thanks, that is a useful distinction. Although I would guess Vasco would prefer to frame the theory of impact as "find out whether donating to GiveWell is net positive -> help people make donation choices that promote welfare better" or something like that. I buy @Richard Y Chappell🔸's take that it is really bad to discourage others from effective giving (at least when it's done carelessly/negligently), but imo Vasco was not setting out to discourage effective giving, or it doesn't seem like that to me. He is -- I'm guessing -- cooperatively seeking to help effective givers and others make choices that better promote welfare, which they are presumably interested in doing.

There are obviously some cruxes here -- including whether there is a moral difference between actively advocating for others not to hand out bednets vs. passively choosing to donate elsewhere / spend on oneself, and whether there is a moral difference between a bad thing being part of the intended MoA vs. a side effect. I would answer yes to both, but I have lower consequentialist representation in my moral parliament than many people here.

Yes, I personally lean towards thinking the act-omission difference doesn't matter (except maybe as a useful heuristic sometimes).

As for whether the harm to humans is incidental-but-necessary or part-of-the-mechanism-and-necessary, I'm not sure what difference it makes if the outcomes are identical? Maybe the difference is that, when the harm to humans is part-of-the-mechanism-and-necessary, you may suspect that it's indicative of a bad moral attitude. But I think the attitude behind "I won't donate to save lives because I think it creates a lot of animal suffering" is clearly better (since it is concerned with promoting welfare) than the attitude behind "I won't donate to save lives because I prefer to have more income for myself" (which is not).

Even if one would answer no to both cruxes, I submit that "no endorsing MoAs that involve the death of innocent people" is an important set of side rails for the EA movement. I think advocacy that saving the lives of children is net-negative is outside of those rails. For those who might not agree, I'm curious where they would put the rails (or whether they disagree with the idea that there should be rails).

I do not think it is good to create taboos around this question. Like, does that mean we shouldn't post anything that can be construed as concluding that it's net harmful to donate to GiveWell charities? If so, that would make it much harder to criticise GiveWell and find out what the truth is. What if donating to GiveWell charities really is harmful? Shouldn't we want to know and find out?

To me, any moral theory that dictates that innocent children should die is probably breaking apart at that point. Instead he bites the bullet and assumes that the means (preventing suffering) justifies the ends (letting innocent children die). I am sorry to say that I find that morally repugnant. [...] Instead, I have a strong sense that innocent children should not be let die. If my moral theory disagrees with the strong ethical sense, it is the strong ethical sense that should guide the moral theory, and not the other way around.

Hmm, but we are all letting children die all the time from not donating. I am donating just 15% of my income; I could certainly donate 20-30% and save additional lives that way. I think my failing to donate 20-30% is morally imperfect, but I wouldn't call it repugnant. What is it that makes "I won't donate to save lives because I think it creates a lot of animal suffering" repugnant but "I won't donate to save lives because I prefer to have more income for myself" not?