All of Ryguy's Comments + Replies
I'm new to EA, and my experience talking to people about it has been different than yours Gleb: They're very pragmatic, and ask an important question I don't have a good answer to.
Here's how my conversations usually go:
I explain EA/Peter Singer THEM..."yeah, but the ECONOMY! It would be bad for everyone because the world economy is driven by consumption. If we stop that it won't work." ME: "when people get richer, they have more money to spend to buy things, which provides a larger market for the first world, and thus could improve the world...
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9y
The phrase you are looking for in the economics literature is 'pecuniary externality'. In general there are good reasons not to care about them.
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9y
Not sure about economist, but you can always make the counter-argument that spending on charity will get the economic wheels moving as well, and in a much better direction. For example, spending on AMF would cause production of malaria nets, and then shipping them overseas, and then the malaria net would cause a mosquito to not bite a productive worker, and that worker would not be sick and lose work time, etc.
Thanks Gleb. Any suggestions for where else I could post/who else I could ask? I'm sure someone's got to have put some numbers together!
Thanks! Ryan