This post is coauthored with Sophie Hermanns, PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and a visiting fellow at Harvard University
Effective altruists are very interested in moral obligations and have developed a set of norms mainly focused on charitable giving and the use of our careers. For example, one effective altruist “moral baseline” is the Giving What We Can (GWWC) pledge, which obligates one to give at least 10% of your income to effective causes for the rest of your life. In this post, we propose a complementary “obligation to organize,” focused in particular on effective altruists who may find political activity rewarding. Importantly, we will not suggest that this obligation extends to all effective altruists or that it should replace the GWWC pledge, but merely that it should serve a complementary role. The exact formulation of this obligation will likely be arbitrary, just as GWWC’s pledge. However, we argue that organizing effective altruists to take effective political action likely represents a relatively low-effort, under-prioritized, and highly consequential set of actions that anyone can take. Our analysis focuses on actions in the United States, although we hope that others will expand our analysis to other contexts.
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In our experience, some of the approaches that characterize effective altruism - evidence-based intervention, a focus on impact, analyzing tradeoffs and counterfactuals - are often conspicuously absent in political organizing. EAs can contribute these approaches, making political campaigns more effective. Conversely, there’s probably plenty that effective altruists can learn about building communities and social movements from bigger or more experienced movements like Black Lives Matter, feminism, or social justice more broadly. EA already shares a fundamental concern for suffering with these communities - joining their political organizing is a way to show that EA speaks to their concrete concerns, too.
Most of us are here because at some point we’ve felt the impulse to save a drowning child in a thought experiment. Shrugging our shoulder at refugee children drowning in the Mediterranean because there’s no GiveWell-reviewed charity to donate to on this cause can’t be the next logical step. True: hundreds of thousands of children needlessly dying of malaria each year is also a humanitarian crisis and it’s one of the strengths of effective altruism that it takes all suffering seriously, not just that which makes it on the frontpage. But donating to the Against Malaria Foundation and calling on your representative to aid refugees are not mutually exclusive.
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Across industries, lobbying has an extremely high rate of return. One study concluded that corporations funding lobbying activities related to tax breaks on the American Jobs Creation Act earned $220 back for every single dollar they invested in influencing political activity, a 22,000% rate of return. Similar (much less rigorous) analyses have found extremely high rates of return on investment in other cases. It would be naive to conclude from these narrow examples that lobbying as an industry is always an effective investment or even assert that there is frequently a causal link between lobbying and desired legislative outcomes. However, it is clear that the sheer sum of resources at stake can make lobbying sensible from an expected value approach.
Even individuals seeking to improve the quality of American governance can have a major impact. For example, within the 1,300 pages of the Affordable Care Act is buried a few paragraphs that bar health insurers from imposing “lifetime limits” on the amount of care they provide to individuals. This provision only exists thanks to the advocacy of a North Dakota woman who persistently wrote, called, and lobbied her Senator. For families with medical bills reaching into the millions of dollars, this provision is literally life-saving.
Because the federal government’s priorities reach across so many fields, we suspect that there are many untapped opportunities for political action. At the moment, we identify one key issue area that we are confident is particularly high-impact: influencing global health allocation.
The Reach Every Mother and Child Act is one obvious target for effective altruists to focus on - this bill would restructure the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) global health efforts in order to move funding towards evidence-based and cost-effective interventions. Bills like this that focus on neglected issues that don’t have deeply partisan, entrenched views are often high-impact and emerge out of the efforts of a small group of committed politicians and constituents. Contrary to Congress’ gridlock on most major issues, in 2016, Congress passed three major pieces of legislation focused on global development and global health - the Foreign Aid, Transparency, and Accountability Act, the Global Food Security Act, and the Electrify Africa Act.
However, effective altruists should not limit themselves to advocacy on global health issues. Significantly attention should be paid to issues that don’t have highly entrenched constituencies or party-line views, such as pandemic prevention, existential risk mitigation, and more. Although we run the risk of hitting quickly diminishing returns, effective altruists should also consider ways to disrupt the Trump administration, as it represents a uniquely existential threat to American institutions and the world. Collaborating with existing social justice movements here, while attempting to pursue the strategies that are most likely to be impactful, is key.
Although crucial questions around the nature and extent of this obligation remain unresolved, it is clear that engaging in political activity is high-impact. For global poverty and global health issues, organizations such as the ONE Campaign and RESULTS already provide simple action pages (here and here) to help effective altruists take the first steps towards political activism. Similarly, Global Zero is another organization with a surprisingly active and popular presence on nuclear disarmament. Connecting with local chapters of these organizations, as well as fellow effective altruists, is also important for furthering the impact that one may have through political action.
Many effective altruists are already doing highly involved in political organizing and we’d like to thank them for this work. For example, many effective altruists organized highly successful phone canvassing campaigns during the presidential election. Similarly, the Humane League’s grassroots organizing on animal issues is extremely high-impact. EAs have also thoughtfully explored policy through Open Philanthropy’s Open Borders research project, through a policy track at EA Global 2016 in Berkeley and through many other routes.
Political organizing is a highly accessible way for many EAs to have a potentially high impact. Many of us are doing it already. We propose that as a community we recognize it more formally as way to do good within an EA framework, just as we do good by taking the GWWC pledge or by taking 80,000 Hours’ career advice.
I agree that EAs should look much more broadly at ways to do good, but I feel like doing political stuff to do good is a trap, or at least is full of traps.
Why do humans have politics? Why don't we just fire all the politicians and have a professional civil service that just does what's good?
But the takeaway is that politics is the arena in which we discuss ideas where different people in our societies disagree on what counts as good, and as a result it is a somewhat toxic arena with relatively poor intellectual standards. It strongly resists good decision-making and good quality debate, and strongly encourages rhetoric. EA needs to take sides in this like I need more holes in my head.
I think it would be fruitful for EA to get involved in politics, but not by taking sides; I get the impression that the best thing EAs can do is try to find pareto improvements that help both sides, and by making issues that are political into nonpolitical issues by de-ideologizing them and finding solutions that make everyone happy and make the world a better place.
Take a leaf out of Elon Musks's book. The right wing in the USA is engaging in some pretty crazy irrationality and science denial about global warming. Many people might see this as an opportunity to score points against the right, but global warming will not be solved by political hot air, it will be solved by making fossil fuels economically marginal or nonviable in most applications. In particular, we need to reduce car related emissions to near zero. So Musks goes and builds fast, sexy macho cars in factories in the USA which provide tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs for blue collar US workers, and emphasizes them as innovative, forward looking and pro-US. Our new right wing president is lapping it up. This is what effective altruism in politics looks like: the rhetoric ("look at these sexy, innovative US-made cars!") is in service of the goal (eliminating gasoline cars and therefore eventually CO2 emissions), not the other way around.
And if you want to see the opposite, go look at this. People are cancelling their Tesla orders because Musk is "acting as a conduit to the rise of white nationalism and fascism in the United States". Musk has an actual solution to a serious problem, and people on the political left want to destroy it because it doesn't conform perfectly to their political ideology. Did these people stop to think about whether this nascent boycott makes sense from a consequentialist perspective? As in, "let's delay the solution to a pressing global problem in order to mildly inconvenience our political enemy"?
I would personally like to see EA become more like Elon Musk and less like Buzzfeed. The Trump administration and movement is a bit like a screaming toddler; it's much easier to deal with by distracting it with it's favorite toys ("Macho! Innovative! Made in the US!") than by trying to start an argument with it. How can we find ways to persuade the Trump administration - or any other popular right wing regime - that doing good is in its interest and conforms to its ideology? How can we sound right wing enough that the political right (who currently hold all the legislative power in the US) practically thinks they thought of our ideas themselves?
I agree with much of this. Prior to joining CEA, I worked a bit on the bipartisan issue of how to make politics more rational (1, 2, 3, 4). I still think this is a wortwhile area, though my main focus right now is on other areas.
Nice points. I would distinguish "politics as rhetorical battles" vs. "getting things done in the halls of power". The latter could be executed in the way that special interests have done so well: by hiring full-time lobbyists who push their agendas with members of Congress, not necessarily in a public way (though enlisting public outcry when needed).
Ralph Nader (my political hero growing up) makes this point: