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Curated and popular this week
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Recent opportunities to take action
No, investing is not generally considered harmful; instead the effects of investing are probably slightly positive-sum (by slightly increasing long-run economic growth of the whole world). Positive or negative, though, the impact per dollar invested is extremely small compared to the impact per dollar of EA donations. So the logic of investing now to give later (or "patient philanthropy" as it is sometimes called) is sound, and depends much more on "should I give less now or more later" than any worries about the morality of investment.
This 80K article does a good job illustrating the huge extent to which the impact of EA donations dwarf even cartoonishly worst-case assumptions about potential evils of the financial system: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/show-me-the-harm/
Lots of other info can be found on the forum under tags for "socially responsible investing", "patient philanthropy", and others.
Socially responsible investing (e.g., divesting from certain companies for the purpose of social impact) is somewhat better than regular investing, but not by much: see Founders Pledge’s “Impact investing is only a good idea in specific circumstances”. So I wouldn’t worry about doing regular investing instead of socially responsible investing, if you plan on donating your earnings.