I am trying my hardest to disambiguate ‘market/economic freedom’ from ‘unrestrained accumulation of wealth’ (please please please explain how I’ve been unclear here—I feel like I’m going a bit crazy!). Europe produces a huge amount of tax revenue (see below; I don’t have an anticapitalism index at hand so this is as close as I could get in a 5 minute search) while maintaining similar levels of economic freedom to the US, and manages much higher life satisfaction and equality despite lower GDP per capita. That’s insane!

Anticapitalism in a strict economic sense is merely the opposition to unrestrained accumulation of wealth and/or concentration of ownership of the means of production in private hands. It doesn’t have to take a position on anything to do with markets. (Obviously, the popular Western conception of anticapitalism is also often anti-market, but actually-existing-anticapitalism in Europe is pro-market!)

Yeah sorry, to emphasise further, I’m referring to the position where we should place strong restrictions on wealth accumulation when it leads to market failures. The difference between this and the mainstream (in this conception) is that mainstream views take more of a siloed approach to these outcomes, and prefer income taxes or laws to remedy them.

An anticapitalist view contrasts with this by identifying wealth accumulation / concentrated ownership of the means of production as a root cause of these issues and works to restrain it in a more preventative capacity. As you identified, such a view typically advocates for policies like wealth taxes, worker co-determination on boards, and high tax surveillance.

Also loosely on your claim that anticapitalism is incompatible with EA because anticapitalists foreground equality over utility—I disagree. First, EA is scoped to ‘altruism’, not to ‘all policy worldwide’, so a view that aims to maximise altruism also maximises equality under regular conditions. Second, it’s not necessarily the case that there is a tradeoff between equality and global utility, and highly socialist societies such as the Scandis enjoy both higher equality and higher utility than more capitalist countries such as the United States or the UK.

(I’ve read Piketty and don’t remember him ever suggesting he would trade one for the other; can’t speak to the other authors you cite)

Yes. That’s why I only scoped my comment around weak anticapitalism (specifically: placing strong restrictions on wealth accumulation when it leads to market failures), rather than full-scale revolution. I’m personally probably more reformist and generally pretty pro-market, but anti-accumulation, FWIW.

As I said, I think that instead of siloed advocacy in distinct cause areas, EAs could realise that they have common cause around opposing bad economic incentives. AI safety, farmed animal welfare, and some global health concerns come from the same roots, and there are already large movements well-placed to solve these problems on the political left (ex. labour unions, veganism, environmentalism, internationalist political groups). Indeed, vegan EAs have already allied well with the existing movement to huge success, but this is the exception.

Frankly, I don’t see how that leads to bread lines but I am open to a clearer mechanism if you have one?

Great paper & a strong argument. I would even take it further to argue that most EAs and indeed, longtermists, probably already agree with weak anticapitalism; most EA projects are trying to compensate for externalities or market failures in one form or another, and the increasing turn to policy, rather than altruism, to settle these issues is a good sign.

I think a bigger issue, as you’ve confronted on this forum before, is an unwillingness (mostly down to optics / ideological inoculation), to identify these issues as having structural causes in capitalism. This arrests EAs/longtermists from drawing on centuries of knowledge & movement-building, or more to the matter, even representing a coherent common cause that could be addressed through deploying pooled resources (for instance, donating to anticapitalist candidates in US elections). It breaks my heart a bit tbh, but I’ve long accepted it probably won’t happen.

The Trump administration has indefinitely paused NIH grant review meetings, effectively halting US-government-funded biomedical research.

There are good criticisms of the NIH, but we are kidding ourselves if we believe that this is to do with anything but vindictiveness over COVID-19, or at best, a loss of public trust in health institutions from a minority of the US public. But this action will not rectify that. Instead of one public health institution with valid flaws that a minority of the public distrust, we have none now. Clinical trials have been paused too, so it’s likely that people will die from this.

I don’t have a great sense of what to do other than lament. Thankfully, there are good research funders globally—in my case, a lot of the research Kaya Guides relies on is funded by the WHO (😔) or the EU. We’re still waiting to see how the WHO withdrawal will affect us, but we’re lucky that there are other global leaders willing to pick up the slack. I hope that US philanthropic funding also doesn’t dry up over the coming years…

I think that the appropriate medium-term fit for the movement will be with organised labour (whether left or right!), as I’ve said before here. The economic impacts are not currently strong enough to have been felt in the unemployment rate, particularly since anti-inflationary policies typically prop up the employment rate a bit. But they will presumably be felt soon, and the natural home for those affected will be in the labour movement, which despite its currently weakened state will always be bigger and more mobile than, say, PauseAI.

(Specifically in tech, where I have more experience in labour organising, the largest political contingent among the workers has always been on the labour left. For example, [Bernie Sanders was far and away the most donated to candidate among big tech employees in 2020](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/election-2020-tech-workers-donations-bernie-sanders).)

In that world, the best thing EAs can do is support that movement. Not necessarily explicitly or directly—I can see a world where Open Phil lobbies to strengthen the U.S. NLRB and overturn key Supreme Court decisions such as Janus. But, such a move will be perceived as highly political, and I wonder if the allergy to labour-left politics within EA precludes it.

Someone noted that at the rate of US GHD spending, this would cost ~12,000 counterfactual lives. A tremendous tragedy.

I think that’s a false dichotomy. It should be possible to have uncomfortable/weird ideas here while treating them with nuance and respect. (Are you instead trying to argue that having a higher bar for these kinds of posts is a bad idea?)

Equally, the original post doesn’t try to understand the perspective that abortion might be net good for the world. So I think the crux might actually be more about who you think should shoulder the burden of attempting-to-understand.

I sort of think that Twitter/Bluesky is the place for that, to be honest. I’m not sure that the forum needs to be that.

We legalise abortion because it helps people live their lives on their own terms, which is good (and some small cases where abortions are medical procedures that prevent death or physical harm directly). Young people can take risks and be stupid without it changing the course of their lives; or in more extreme cases, escape their abusers.

So, in the sort of Quixotic spirit of trying to avoid this thread getting out of hand, I want to be constructive. I think that such an obviously fraught and tense issue deserves more thought and care than a quick BOTEC. I get the broader point that you’re making, but you’re making it in a pretty crude way that feels insensitive to the very real harms people face due to restricted abortion access; I am not sure that the comparison was needed to make that point either.