Has EA given up on politics?

I think most answers here are missing what seems the most likely explanation to me: the people who are motivated by EA principles to engage with politics are not public about their motivations or affiliations with EA. Not just because the EA brand is disliked by some political groups, but it seems generally wise to avoid having strong idealogical identities in politics beyond motivations like "do better for my constituents".

Joseph_Chu

We tried earlier. Carrick Flynn received substantial support from EA and the result was mediocre, with criticisms of EA actually having a negative effect on his campaign, as people pointed out the connection to the "billionaires and techbros" who apparently fund EA and such.

Also, the head of RAND, Jason Matheny, is an EA, and there's some connections between EA and the American NatSec establishment. CSET for instance was funded partly by OpenPhil. There is a tendency among a lot of EAs is to try not to be partisan and mostly support effective governance and policy kind of things.

That being said, Dustin Moskovitz, the billionaire who is the main donor behind what was previously called Open Philanthropy and is now Coefficient Giving, has donated significantly and repeatedly to Democrats. OpenPhil has historically been by far the largest funder of EA stuff, particularly since SBF fell from grace, so Dustin's contributions can be seen tacitly as EA support for the Dems.

So, I don't think it's accurate to say EAs have made absolutely no effort on this front. We have, and it has stupidly backfired before and we're in this very awkward position politically where the whole TESCREAL controversy makes the EA brand tarnished to the Left, even though past surveys have shown that most rank and file EAs are centre-left to left. It's a frustrating situation.

jacquesthibs

So, I don't think it's accurate to say EAs have made absolutely no effort on this front.

Thanks for the comment. I’m aware of the situations you mentioned and did not say that EA had not previously put effort into things. In fact, my question is essentially “Has EA given up on politics (perhaps because things went poorly before)?”

Also, note that I am not exactly suggesting pushing for left-wing things. Generally remedying the situation may need to go beyond trying to get one person in elected office. In fact, I think that such a bet would be unambitious and fail to meet the moment.

John Huang

My interest is in transformative reforms and the question of, "how could we do politics better?" How could decision making be improved? Politics is not just about funding some electoral candidate.

In my opinion, and I think it's been well known for decades, that electoral democracy has woeful limitations on good decision making. This opinion is shared by numerous political scientists. Since the 1950's, Downs Paradox has suggested that it has never been rational, in a self interested sense, to vote. The following 60 years of research has also demonstrated the woeful incompetence of voters. This latest cycle also demonstrates their incompetence, how Donald Trump was elected and his supporters being surprised by his policies - with many immigrant and gen Z voters quickly supporting, and then opposing, Trump. Anybody "in the know" understood what the Trump 2nd term was going to be about. Any surprise is a result of incompetent decision making.

The status quo of EA seems to be trying to get in on the rat race of electoral politics, to persuade these ignorant voters. Yet propaganda has never been the strength of EA. I then claim that most potential future efforts of campaigning will have mediocre results.

The typical fascist is always going to have an easier time. It's just easy to use a tried and true tactic - scapegoat a minority (ie trans people and immigrants), blame them for all our problems, and use them as a vehicle to take power. Fascism takes advantage of our tribal instincts, whereas something like EA demands a rationality that is too expensive to transmit through mass propaganda.

Is there something better out there? In my opinion yes, and it's called sortition. The premise is simple. Instead of demanding everyone participate in politics, you draw a random sample. With fewer participants, you can now focus resources on the sample.

Imagine you want to select a president or some other leadership role for government. You could use sortition to construct a representative electoral college. Pay these representatives to do the job. Give them months, or years, to make decisions.

So whereas the typical voter might use a couple hours to make a voting decision, a full time committee could be making decisions on the time scale of months to years. In other words, a sortition electoral college would use literally thousands of times more man-hours to make a decision compared to the ignorant voter.

This is no shower thought. Political scientists and advocates have been experimenting with sortition in the form of deliberative polls and citizens assemblies for around 3 decades starting in the 1990s. The results of these experiment in my opinion have been very promising. For example, whereas the American electorate has gone full xenophobic anti immigration, deliberative polls showed opposite results. American participants in citizen deliberation showed moderation and embrace of immigration. However most these expeiements remain in an advisory capacity with no real powers, though Citizens Assemblies for example have been implemented in Paris and Mongolia.

Moreover, there is essentially no experiments with giving sortition style assemblies real political power.

In my opinion there is enormous value in supporting experimentation to create a 21st century government capable of making informed decisions at a faster rate. The value added to superior government is likely at several additional percentage points of GDP every year. In other words, the the potential gain is is the multi trillions every year.

Alternatively we can believe that electoral democracy is already at its optimal state and that further efficiency gains would be miniscule. The election of candidates like Donald Trump in my opinion make this viewpoint unlikely.

Of all the proposals I have heard about to reform democracy, sortition is the ONLY proposal with a viable strategy towards improving democratic decision making. alternatives to democracy in my opinion are mostly terrible and have no accountability mechanism to reign in the meritocrats turned oligarchs.

Take for example the typical progressive policy that we "need more education". Progressives have been advocating for more education for more than a century. And we are better educated than ever.

But education doesn't defeat Down's Paradox. Voting demands specific and up to date knowledge. Education can only teach you about the past, and hopefully use propaganda to inspire Americans to overcome their self interest in favor of a civic duty. Yet in our new world of artificial intelligence and LLM's, it's only going to get harder and harder to parse out truth and facts from disinformation. Our best efforts, amateur by definition, just aren't enough anymore.

Benton 🔸

When I first joined the forum early last year, I was also surprised that politics seems neglected in EA circles. Though I still think the current geopolitical situation is an incredibly important issue (perhaps the most important due to how many other issues it affects), I unfortunately don’t think it’s very tractable. Maybe I’m missing something, but I really don’t see anything a niche community can do to improve the complex situation that is the current political climate. I imagine most EAs think the same.

Ebenezer Dukakis

I expect that very novel approaches, like as described in my old post Using game theory to elect a centrist in the 2024 US Presidential Election, could be more tractable.

titotal

I think the problem here is that novel approaches are substantially more likely to be failures due to being untested and unproven. This isn't a big deal in areas where you can try lots of stuff out and sift through them with results, but in something like an election you only get feedback like once a year or so. Worse, the feedback is extremely murky, so you don't know if it was your intervention or something else that resulted in the outcome you care about.

David T

Also failures trying to do really outlandish things like bribing Congresspeople to endorse Jim Mattis as a centrist candidate in the 2024 US Presidential Election are likely to backfire in more spectacular ways than (say) providing malaria nets for a region with falling malaria or losing a court case against a factory farming conglomerate. That said, this criticism does apply to some other things EAs are interested in, particularly actions purportedly addressing x-risks.

Ebenezer Dukakis

If each election is a rare and special opportunity to collect a bit of data, that makes it even more important to use that data-collection opportunity effectively.

Since we are looking for approaches which are unusually tractable, if effectiveness looks extremely murky, that's probably not what we wanted.

Jackson Wagner

There is a very substantial "abundance" movement that (per folks like matt yglesias and ezra klein) is seeking to create a reformed, more pro-growth, technocratic, high-state-capacity democratic party that's also more moderate and more capable of winning US elections. Coefficient Giving has a big $120 million fund devoted to various abundance-related causes, including zoning reform for accelerating housing construction, a variety of things related to building more clean energy infrastructure, targeted deregulations aimed at accelerating scientific / biomedical progress, etc. https://coefficientgiving.org/research/announcing-our-new-120m-abundance-and-growth-fund/

You can get more of a sense of what the abundance movement is going for by reading "the argument", an online magazine recently funded by Coefficient giving and featuring Kelsey Piper, a widely-respected EA-aligned journalist: https://www.theargumentmag.com/

I think EA the social movement (ie, people on the Forum, etc) try to keep EA somewhat non-political to avoid being dragged into the morass of everything becoming heated political discourse all the time. But EA the funding ecosystem is significantly more political, also does a lot of specific lobbying in connection to AI governance, animal welfare, international aid, etc.

technocratic... more moderate

Abundance or abundance liberalism originated with the journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their book Abundance (which was my favourite non-fiction book of 2025). Since Klein and Thompson popularized the term abundance in Democratic politics, a number of others have latched onto the term and assigned their own meanings to it. Klein and Thompson themselves do not advocate for the Democratic Party to become more moderate. Maybe some people who have picked up the abundance label do. But Klein, for instance, argues that the Democratic Party needs to allow for ideological diversity based on geography. That is, it should be a party that can include both a mayor like Zohran Mamdani in New York City and a senator like Joe Manchin in West Virginia. Klein and Thompson’s own views are not more moderate than the Democratic Party currently is or has been recently.

One of the popular criticisms voiced against Abundance following the publication of the book is that economic populist policies poll better than abundance-style policies. Klein and Thompson’s reply is that these policies are not incompatible, so it would be possible for Democratic politicians to do both. A mistake many people have made in interpreting abundance liberalism is that it’s not a complete theory of politics or a complete political worldview. It doesn’t answer every question Democratic politicians need to answer.

Abundance is specifically focused on governments providing people with an abundance of the things they need and expect: housing, infrastructure (e.g., highways and high-speed rail), government administrative services (e.g. timely processing of claims for unemployment benefits), and innovations in science, technology, and medicine that translate into practical applications in the real world. The book offers a diagnosis for why governments, particularly governments run by Democrats, have so often failed to provide people with these things. It also offers ideas for improving Democrats’ governing performance in the aforementioned areas. Other topics are outside of scope, although Klein and Thompson have also expressed their opinions on those topics in places other than their book.

It’s easy to see how a somewhat complex and subtle argument like this gets simplified into ‘the Democratic Party should become more moderate and technocratic’. But that simplified version misses a lot.

(I wrote a long comment here addressing objections to abundance liberalism and to Coefficient Giving’s work in that area, specifically housing policy reform and metascience.)

Jackson Wagner

To be clear I personally am a huge abundance bro, big-time YIMBY & georgist, fan of the Institute for Progress, personally very frustrated by assorted government inefficiencies like those mentioned, et cetera! I'm not sure exactly what the factional alignments are between abundance in particular (which is more technocratic / deregulatory than necessarily moderate -- in theory one could have a "radical" wing of an abundance movement, and I would probably be an eager member of such a wing!) and various forces who want the Dems to moderate on cultural issues in order to win more (like the recent report "Deciding to Win"). But they do strike me as generally aligned (perhaps unified in their opposition to lefty economic proposals which often are neither moderate nor, like... correct).

This might be a correct description of some people who have adopted the abundance label, but it's not a correct description of the book Abundance or its authors, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who coined and popularized abundance (or abundance liberalism) as a political term and originated the abundance movement that's playing out in U.S. politics right now. Abundance is deregulatory on NIMBY restrictions to building housing and environmental bills that are perversely used to block solar and wind projects. However, it also advocates for the government of California to in-house the engineering of its high-speed rail project rather than try to outsource it to private contractors. There is a chapter on government science funding, of which it is strongly in favour. Abundance is in favour of the government getting out of the way, or deregulating, in some areas, such as housing, but in other areas, it's in favour of, for lack of a better term, big government.

Others are of course free to read Abundance and run with it any direction they like, even if the authors disagree with it. Nobody owns the abundance label, so people can use it how they like. But I think the framing of abundance as necessarily or inherently moderate, technocratic, or deregulatory is limiting. That's one particular way that some people think about abundance, but not everybody has to think of it that way, and not even the originators of the idea do. The progressive mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is a fan of Abundance and recently voiced his support for YIMBY housing reform in the state of New York. Abundance is not synonymous with either the moderate or progressive wings of the Democratic Party; it's a set of ideas that is compatible with either a moderate or progressive political orientation.

Klein and Thompson, and of course Mamdani, are not "unified in their opposition to lefty economic proposals".

I think saying that abundance implies moderate politics or technocracy is not only limiting and at least partially inaccurate, it also encourages progressives to oppose abundance when, as we've seen in Mamdani's case, it is compatible with progressivism and largely independent from and orthogonal to (in the figurative sense) the disagreements between moderates and progressives.

Jackson Wagner

it also advocates for the government of California to in-house the engineering of its high-speed rail project rather than try to outsource it to private contractors

Hence my initial mention of "high state capacity"? But I think it's fair to call abundance a deregulatory movement overall, in terms of, like... some abstract notion of what proportion of economic activity would become more vs less heavily involved with government, under an idealized abundance regime.

Sorry to be confusing by "unified" -- I didn't mean to imply that individual people like klein or mamdani were "unified" in toeing an enforced party line!

Rather I was speculating that maybe the reason the "deciding to win" people (moderates such as matt yglesias) and the "abundance" people, tend to overlap moreso than abundance + left-wingers, is because the abundance + moderates tend to share (this is what I meant by "are unified by") opposition to policies like rent control and other price controls, tend to be less enthusiastic about "cost-disease-socialism" style demand subsidies since they often prefer to emphasize supply-side reforms, tend to want to deemphasize culture-war battles in favor of an emphasis on boosting material progress / prosperity, etc. Obviously this is just a tendency, not universal in all people, as people like mamdani show.

FYI, I'm totally 100% on board with your idea that abundance is fully compatible with many progressive goals and, in fact, is itself a deeply progressive ideology! (cf me being a huge georgist.) But, uh, this is the EA Forum, which is in part about describing the world truthfully, not just spinning PR for movements that I happen to admire. And I think it's an appropriate summary of a complex movement to say that abundance stuff is mostly a center-left, deregulatory, etc movement.

Imagine someone complaining -- it's so unfair to describe abundance as a "democrat" movement!! That's so off-putting for conservatives -- instead of ostracising them, we should be trying to entice them to adopt these ideas that will be good for the american people! Like Montana and Texas passing great YIMBY laws, Idaho deploying modular nuclear reactors, etc. In lots of ways abundance is totally coherent with conservative goals of efficient government services, human liberty, a focus on economic growth, et cetera!!

That would all be very true. But it would still be fair to summarize abundance as primarily a center-left democrat movement.

Hence my initial mention of "high state capacity"? But I think it's fair to call abundance a deregulatory movement overall, in terms of, like... some abstract notion of what proportion of economic activity would become more vs less heavily involved with government, under an idealized abundance regime.

I guess it depends what version of abundance you're talking about. I have in mind the book Abundance as my primary idea of what abundance is, and in that version of abundance, I don't think it's clear that a politics of abundance would result in less economic activity being heavily involved with government. It might depend how you define that. If laws, regulations, or municipal processes that obstruct construction count as heavy involvement with the government, then that would count for a lot of economic activity, I guess. But if we don't count that and we do count higher state capacity, like more engineers working for the government, then maybe abundance would lead to a bigger government. I don't know.

I think you're right about why abundance is especially appealing to people of a certain type of political persuasion. A lot of people with more moderate, centrist, technocratic, socially/culturally less progressive, etc. tendencies have shown a lot of enthusiasm about the abundance label. I'm not ready to say that they now own the abundance label and abundance just is moderate, centrist, technocratic, etc. If a lot of emos were a fan of my favourite indie rock band, I wouldn't be ready to call it an emo band, even if I were happy for the emos' support.

There are four reasons I want to deconflate abundance and those other political tendencies:

It's intellectually limiting, and at least partially incorrect, to say that abundance is conceptually the same thing as a lot of other independent things that a lot of people who like abundance happen to also like.
I think the coiners and popularizers of abundance deserve a little consideration, and they don't (necessarily, wholeheartedly) agree with those other political tendencies. For instance, Ezra Klein has, to me, been one of the more persuasive proponents of Black Lives Matter for people with a wonk mindset, and has had guests on his podcast from the policy wonk side of BLM to make their case. Klein and Thompson have both expressed limited, tepid support for left-wing economic populist policies, conditional on abundance-style policies also getting enacted.
I'm personally skeptical of many of the ideas found within those other political tendencies, both on the merits and in terms of what's popular or wins elections. (My skepticism has nothing to do with my skepticism of the ideas put forward in the book Abundance, which overall I strongly support and which are orthogonal to the ideas I'm skeptical of.)
It's politically limiting to conflate abundance and these other political tendencies when this isn't intellectually necessary. Maybe moderates enjoy using abundance as a rallying cry for their moderate politics, but conflating abundance and moderate politics makes it a polarized, factional issue and reduces the likelihood of it receiving broad support. I would rather see people try to find common ground on abundance rather than claim it for their faction. Gavin Newsom and Zohran Mamdani are both into abundance, so why can't it have broad appeal? Why try to make it into a factional issue rather than a more inclusive liberal/left idea?

Edit: I wrote the above before I saw what you added to your comment. I have a qualm with this:

But, uh, this is the EA Forum, which is in part about describing the world truthfully, not just spinning PR for movements that I happen to admire. And I think it's an appropriate summary of a complex movement to say that abundance stuff is mostly a center-left, deregulatory, etc movement.

I think it really depends on which version of abundance you're talking about. If you're talking about the version in the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, or the version that the two authors have more broadly advocated (e.g. on their press tour for the book, or in their writing and podcasts before and after the book was published), then, no, I don't think that's an accurate summary of that particular version of abundance.

If you're referring to the version of abundance advocated by centrists, moderates, and so on, then, okay, it may be accurate to say that version of abundance is centrist, moderate, etc. But I don't want to limit how I define to "abundance" to just that version, for the reasons I gave above.

I don't think it makes sense to call it "spin" or "PR" to describe an idea in the terms used by the originators of that idea, or in terms that are independently substantively correct, e.g. as supported by examples of progressive supporters of abundance like Mamdani. If your impression of what abundance is comes from centrists, moderates, and so on, then maybe that's why you have the impression that abundance simply is centrist, moderate, etc. and that saying otherwise is "untruthful" or "PR". There is no "canonical" version of abundance, so to some extent, abundance just means what people who use the term want it to mean. So, that impression of abundance isn't straightforwardly wrong. It's just avoidably limited.

Imagine someone complaining -- it's so unfair to describe abundance as a "democrat" movement!! That's so off-putting for conservatives -- instead of ostracising them, we should be trying to entice them to adopt these ideas that will be good for the american people! Like Montana and Texas passing great YIMBY laws, Idaho deploying modular nuclear reactors, etc. In lots of ways abundance is totally coherent with conservative goals of efficient government services, human liberty, a focus on economic growth, et cetera!!

To the extent people care what Abundance says in deciding what abundance is, one could quote from the first chapter of the book, specifically the section "A Liberalism That Builds", which explicitly addresses this topic.

Ozzie Gooen

Quick things:
1. There are some neat actions happening, but often they are behind-the-scenes. Politics tends to be secretive.
2. The work I know about mostly falls into work focused on AI safety and bio safety. There's some related work trying to limit authoritarianism in the US.
3. The funding landscape seems more challenging/complex than with other things.

I think I'd like to see more work on a wider scope of interventions to do good via politics. But I also appreciate that there are important limitations/challenges here now.

Arden Koehler

Is it because EAs feel helpless in addressing this problem? Do they think it’s simply not neglected enough to be worth the impact?

I think this is part of why EA doesn't invest much here, along with what Ollie said.

I'm pretty excited about EAs doing good work in politics, but (1) it's a hard sell from a tractability / neglectedness perspective, & (2) it's easy to do bad work, so it's kind of hard to boot up much effort.

huw

I think maybe a little bit of nuance is lost when just saying ‘electoral politics isn’t neglected and might be quite hard’—that’s not the EA response to large global health issues, or existential risks. It’s just that once you get down to brass tacks, most Western political systems are pretty easy to buy your way into, and it’s substantially cheaper to effect meaningful piecemeal change by paying for lobbyists.

You only need electoral politics when trying to undertake massive political/ideological shifts (see: the kochs/mercers shifting the U.S. to a sort of anarcho-capitalism), and fundamentally, most EAs are on the centre-left and don’t see these kinds of changes as desirable.

(You can see this in the LessWrong post you linked, most of the post and replies are proposing exactly what Kamala Harris did in 2024 and lost doing)

((Vastly oversimplifying but I hope it provides some nuance that the other answers are missing))

Dylan Richardson

I accept that political donations and activism are among the best ways to do good as an individual.

But it is less obvious that EA as an academic discipline and social movement has the analytical frameworks that suit it to politics - we have progress studies and the abundance movement for that. Mainly, I think there is a big difference between consensus-building among experts or altruistically minded individuals and in the political sphere of the mass-public.

It is of course necessary for political donations to be analyzed as trade offs against donations to other cause areas. And there's a lot of research that needs doing on the effectiveness of campaign donations and protest movements in achieving expected outcomes. And certain cause areas definitely have issue-specific reasons to do political work.

But I wouldn't want to see an "EA funds for Democrats" or a "EAs Against Trump" campaign.

Jamie_Harris

Interesting question. Sorry not to answer directly, but some questions that would help clarify your question:

What is "the geopolitical situation of the world", and how does one improve it? Why is that plausibly one of the top most useful/cost-effective things one can do with their time/money?

(And who is this EA of which you speak? I haven't met them. EA is a community and a question, not a single hierarchical organisation. Although if you think there is something that is important and neglected, the Forum is a handy platform to make the case!)

Vaipan

It is interesting how so many EA think of EA as an 'apolitical' movement, e.g. that EA is beyond left and right because it's data-driven and not ideology-driven.

That does not make sense to me. Personally I'm an opportunist. When the Tories create the AISI, it's politics. When the left endorses campaigns promoting animal welfare and plant-base options, it's politics. When CoefficientGiving works on land reforms, it's politics.

I like to think in terms of cause-area and which party is the most well-placed to push for progress in these causes; which means I'm ready to collaborate with everyone who advocates for sensible things.

Comments