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I’d wager that after a certified point funds to lobby on an issue like this have substantially diminished near zero marginal returns. But if you are way behind the first few millions spent may have very high payoffs.
I’d wager that after a certified point funds to lobby on an issue like this have substantially diminished near zero marginal returns. But if you are way behind the first few millions spent may have very high payoffs.
Yeah, I think that's true on a lot of politics. Just think that many millions have been spent to make "actually international aid is really important both for saving lives and US soft power" an unfashionable argument in Republican circles, and Big Aid already has very good lobbyists working on the Dems too.
An interesting question is whether there's much more scope in a European context, where questions about foreign aid are driven more by budget constraints and less by partisanship and xenophobia and "might the money be spent better on filling gaps in PEPFAR etc than current policy" is an argument policymakers might not be hearing so much from existing aid lobbyists.
Question from a newbie. I am constantly seeing negative references to the gutting of US foreign aid. It seems pretty clear that global development-focused EAs generally view the change in policy to be a bad thing. But I do not think I have once seen any discussion at all about how to reverse this state of affairs. Building on a running theme as of recently, it seems like political giving may have an outsize effectiveness, due to the relatively sparse funding in the space. So, naively, it would seem like you probably could get a great rate of return on efforts to reinstate USAID. I understand that political coalition building and organizing is not easy, etc. I'm not someone with those skills, just a rando. But I'm a little surprised that I don't think I've ever seen it taken up here when it seems like the downstream effects are making our goals harder to achieve. Basically, not only is it at face value cost effective, but also, we are collectively burning a lot of human capital working around this problem. Why not confront it head on?
At the risk of undermining the strategy somewhat, Matt Yglesias said at a recent EA event that efforts to restore US foreign aid have been quietly going well and that it would not be helpful to raise the political salience of the issue.
Interesting but that is a rather thin reed to rely on here