Effective Altruists Love Systemic Change

  • There is nothing in principle that rules out using wide-spread legal, cultural, or political changes to make the world a better place
  • Examples of EAs working on systemic change:
    • Many OpenPhilanthropy grants are are focused on immigration reform, criminal justice reform, macroeconomics, institutional development and other structural changes
    • OpenBorders.info – collates material promoting open borders as an option to increase the migration from poor countries to rich ones
    • EAPolicy – makes recommendations to open policy forums held by the US government
    • One of GiveWell’s primary goals has been to structurally change the nonprofit sector by promoting a new model for charity evaluation
    • Giving What We Can has met with the UK government to give feedback on foreign aid targeting
    • 80,000 Hours alumni have gone into politics and business to effect systemic change
    • Organizations focused on X-Risk have taken a large interest in government policies that could influence the regulation of new techologies and development of institutions which could promote inter-state cooperation and conflict prevention
  • There are other systemic changes which 80,000 Hours has researched that show promise for future action
    • Significantly more spending on development aid
    • Changes to financial regulations to make it more difficult to externalize risk
    • Pricing greenhouse gas emissions
    • More interantional cooperation around the containment and prevention of contagious disease
  • 80,000 Hours already has positive views on careers in politics and policy; however there isn’t enough research yet to confidently recommend such careers over all the alternatives
  • Therefore, it’s not accurate to say that 80,000 Hours is hostile to systemic change
  • So why might there be a perception that 80,000 Hours is against systemic change?
    • “Earning to give” is perceived as being anti-systemic change
      • However, earning-to-give is neutral on systemic change
      • Someone who earns to give and gives all of their income to a person working for systemic change is working for systemic change themselves
      • Example: Engels traveled back to Britain and entered his father’s business in order to earn an income to support Marx
    • Effective Altruists are usually not radicals or revolutionaries
      • Sudden dramatic changes in society usually lead to worse outcomes than gradual changes
      • EAs favor marginal changes to existing systems rather than throwing everything out and starting from scratch
    • Effective Altruists work on systemic changes that are more likely to be achieved
    • Effective Altruists have chosen to take on the task of figuring out what does the most good
      • This is an enormous task
      • Makes sense to start with the parts we can do right away, and then focus on the bigger systemic changes later
  • Effective Altruism is compatible with systemic change – the question is how best to get those systemic changes

Beware Systemic Change

  • One of the most common critiques of Effective Altruism is that it focuses too narrowly on specific monetary interventions rather than fighting for systemic change
  • This has led to leaders in the EA movement writing about how the EA movement isn’t opposed to systemic change, and is in fact in favor of it
  • However, maybe EA should be opposed to systemic change
    • Traditional charity is viewed as being universally good, or at least neutral
    • Some political issues are viewed like this
    • However, on many political issues, like gun control or increasing the minimum wage, there are activists on both sides
    • The lack of progress is because there are two sides, and each side is canceling out the efforts of the other
    • There’s no guarantee that EAs wouldn’t also split, and then cancel each other out, burning resources that could be better used for charity
    • Moreover, the track record of EAs pursuing systemic change isn’t great
      • Engels supported Marx in a manner that can only be described as effective altruism, but Marxism was a disaster
      • There was widespread liberal support for Stalin
      • There was also widespread liberal support for eugenics
    • Systemic change has significant asymmetric downside risk – there are many more ways of being wrong than there are of being right
  • Systemic change is controversial and focusing on it threatens to tear the nascent EA movement apart
    • EAs got into a controversy over the non-vegetarian food being an option at EA Global
    • Can a community which can’t even agree on what to serve for lunch really handle focusing on systemic issues that are genuinely controversial?
  • Advocating for incremental changes allows EA to avoid a whole host of failure modes
  • EA currently has a strong moral message – we should be wary of diluting it

How Not To Be A “White In Shining Armor”

  • One of the objections to EA is that EA approaches seem to only work for certain constrained problems, like infectious disease
  • Why doesn’t EA try to tackle broader issues, like economic growth, gender equity, economic inequality, etc?
  • This objection commits the fallacy of viewing the developed-world donor as being the only person who can help the developing-world beneficiary
  • EAs believe that progress must be locally-driven
    • Give money to “low-insulation” charities which have a good track record
    • Need to make sure that we’re not consolidating power among local elites
  • Global health and nutrition
    • EAs should focus on areas where they are confident that they can make a significant positive impact
    • Health issues is the most prominent of these areas
  • Another way of helping the poor is direct cash transfers
    • Direct cash transfers give complete control to locals
    • GiveWell now ranks GiveDirectly as one of its top three charities

The Animal-Free Food Movement Should Move Towards an Institutional Message

  • Vegetarianism and veganism started out as fringe diets for the ascetic
  • In recent years, however, these diets have started to become more mainstream
  • However, if we’re going to make vegetarianism truly universal, we need to focus on institutional messaging
  • Historical precedent for institutional messaging
    • The animal-free food movement has a virtually unprecedented focus on individual consumer change
    • One of the only other movements to have a similar focus was the “free-produce” movement, which focused on buying “slavery-free” products
    • The free-produce movement was influential in the early 1800s, but by 1840, even its proponents had come to the conclusion that institutional change was required to fight slavery
    • Some in the environmental movement feel the same way about “green consumerism”
      • Emphasis on affecting individual choices makes activists complacent
      • Environmental movement, as a result, has been moving more towards institutional messaging, by focusing on systemic changes go energy and industry regulation rather than individual choices
    • One potential counterexample for institutional messaging is the success of the anti-tobacco movement, which largely used individual messaging
  • Avoiding the “collapse of compassion”
    • “Collapse of compassion” refers to the low levels of compassion that many people feel towards large problems that affect large numbers of individuals
    • People expect the needs of large groups to be overwhelming and engage in emotional regulation in order to not experience overwhelming levels of emotion
    • We might be able to avoid the collapse of compassion by making it clear that problems are solvable and there’s a concrete path to success
    • Taking collective action feels more meaningful than just changing our own diet
    • On the other hand, institutional messaging might be too aggressive or totalitarian-sounding for people to accept
  • Evoking “moral outrage” and expressing the seriousness of the issue
    • Moral outrage: “a special type of anger, one that ignites when people recognize that a person or institution has violated a moral principle and must be prevented from continuing to do so”
    • Moral outrage is a response to others’ behavior, never one’s own
    • Institutional messaging places the blame for an issue on an outside institution or an institution that the person is only a small part of
    • Moral outrage allows people to break from “system justification” – an often irrational defense of the status quo
    • Activist motivation is often driven by emotions that are similar to, but broader than moral outrage
  • Peer pressure
    • Institutional messaging has more peer pressure built in
    • In order to deliver institutional messages people need to coordinate in large groups, which lets them know that they are not isolated individuals
  • We’re biased in favor of individual messaging because of our general psychological desire for instant gratification
  • Counterargument: individual messaging has a clear call to action with spillover benefits
    • Individual change is something that you can do right away
    • Individual change has a shorter feedback loop, allowing you to see if your messaging is having an impact
  • There might be ways to combine individual messaging and institutional messaging to capture the benefits of both
  • The tentative preponderance of evidence is that institutional messaging is a better use of marginal resources than individual messaging for the animal-free food movement