Thanks for writing this up. On X, Joey Politano points out that this destruction of USAID (or even PEPFAR alone) dwarfs EA’s contribution to global development by an order of magnitude: https://x.com/josephpolitano/status/1896186144070729847
Is it a good idea for me to adjust the letter, or should I stick to the template?
The AIM charity UK Voters for Animals appears to think (based on when I attended a work party they ran) that letters/emails count for more when they are not obviously copied and pasted, to the extent it’s worth customising letters. I don’t know their epistemic basis for this, but I trust them to have one (I suspect they know people who have worked for MPs). But it might still make sense to give less-motivated friends a template to copy if that’s all you think they’ll be willing to do, since a templated letter is better than none at all. Though NB writetothem.com does block copy-and-pasted messages.
Thank you for this post. I’d like to add some argument for considering this a very high priority, or at least potentially one, since in your post people might not appreciate the scale we are talking about (due to comparison with ‘last time’ and mention of ‘low effort’).
Briefly, the slash to UK foreign aid dwarfs all EA spending on global health and development to date, and it seems like we are at a crucial moment that could influence whether the government feels this is at all accepted by the electorate.
Some quick figures from the Center for Global Development:
> In cash terms, the OBR projections of national income suggest this means an official development assistance (ODA) budget of £9.2 billion in 2027. The UK spent £15.3 billion on ODA in 2023
In total, EA is spending less than a billion on global health/dev each year (which makes up the majority of all EA spending). So this feels like a big lever to me, even given that not all UK aid spending will be as effective as Open Phil aid spending is.
Another lever to consider, rather than ‘punish government for cutting aid’, is ‘telling the government that effectiveness matters to me when they decide what to cut’. Don’t know how to compare those.
Is it really the case that the UK and US were competing for the gains to reputation that foreign aid brings? I suppose I’d try to answer that question by looking at the history of where the 0.7% target, which I thought was fairly broadly shared among rich countries, originally came from. One history I found said:
> It results from the 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2626. The 0.7% figure was calculated as a means to boost growth for developing countries. Since 1970, however, only several Nordic countries have met or surpassed this target.
Which makes it look like a potential failed case of cooperation: that no country wants to have the whole cost of international aid fall just on itself, so they try to establish international agreements so that others contribute too. Is that the right model, though? Perhaps countries don’t really experience pressure to adjust their contribution upwards when other countries drop out, and are happy to just continue doing the amount they were doing. I can think of a possible dynamic where ‘preventing bad runaway spillover effects like the spread of war and pandemics’ costs X billion dollars of aid (and has a threshold effect, where providing half of X billion is much less than half as effective as X), which no individual country is willing to stump up, but which is important to every rich country’s interest. In that dynamic, rich countries benefit from such UN-induced cooperation, by spreading the burden and getting the benefits of less instability and disease in the world.
If that’s the dynamic, then your idea of a race to the bottom in aid (a dis-‘alm’-ament, you could say) would not necessarily be what you expect after some country drops out — they’d possibly want to raise their contributions to make up the difference and still be able to reach the threshold of X. Alternatively, the UK now might expect that without the US it will be too difficult to reach that hypothetical threshold, and so there’s no point trying any more.
But if the incentives / dynamic of foreign aid is more about getting prestige for your country, then you could see a broad disalmament when the total pool of funding takes a hit — or alternatively you could see the second or third place players boosting their contribution to try and take the lead. So I’m not sure what determines what one would expect to see given this potential reputation-based dynamic.
Thanks for making the connection to Francois Chollet for me - I'd forgotten I'd read this interview with him by Dwarkesh Patel half a year ago that had made me a little more skeptical of the nearness of AGI.
Seems a lot of it is saying “you can’t put a price on x” — and then going ahead and putting a price on x anyway by saying we should prefer to fund x over y.
In her book, Ms. Schiller ties her criticism of effective altruism to broader questions about optimization, writing: “At a time when we are under enormous pressure to optimize our time, be maximally productive, hustle and stay healthy (so we can keep hustling), we need philanthropy to make pleasure, splendor and abundance available for everyone.”
Her conception of the good can include magnificence and meaning and abundance. But how can we make that available for everyone without the kinds of reasoning decried as ‘optimization’?
I feel like the people saying “you can’t put a price on a beautiful holy site” are trying to avoid saying “you can, and the holy site is worth more than the lives the money could have saved” - it’s not impossible that Notre Dame is worth the lives unsaved (with its millions of visitors a year), but it is impossible to refute the claim unless they are honest about how they’re valuing it.
It seems they’re missing the mood that our problems are larger than the resources we have to fix them, and so advocating for not facing the uncomfortable triage questions.
CAF charges a fee for its services. This seems crucial to deciding between GAYE/Payroll Giving vs Gift Aid — from the intro email when I registered to do GAYE:
For direct CAF Give As You Earn donors, we take a 4% fee of your total donation to cover our costs (the fee will never be more than £10 per pay period).
Many employers pay this fee for their employees, and you should contact your payroll team to confirm if this is the case.
My employer doesn’t cover it so I’m looking for an alternative method.
OP here. Now that it's 2026, it now seems blindingly obvious how LLMs can be repurposed as agents.
I've written to my MP, James Asser, with something very similar to Sanjay's linked template.
Thanks for writing this up. On X, Joey Politano points out that this destruction of USAID (or even PEPFAR alone) dwarfs EA’s contribution to global development by an order of magnitude: https://x.com/josephpolitano/status/1896186144070729847
The AIM charity UK Voters for Animals appears to think (based on when I attended a work party they ran) that letters/emails count for more when they are not obviously copied and pasted, to the extent it’s worth customising letters. I don’t know their epistemic basis for this, but I trust them to have one (I suspect they know people who have worked for MPs). But it might still make sense to give less-motivated friends a template to copy if that’s all you think they’ll be willing to do, since a templated letter is better than none at all. Though NB writetothem.com does block copy-and-pasted messages.
Thank you for this post. I’d like to add some argument for considering this a very high priority, or at least potentially one, since in your post people might not appreciate the scale we are talking about (due to comparison with ‘last time’ and mention of ‘low effort’).
Briefly, the slash to UK foreign aid dwarfs all EA spending on global health and development to date, and it seems like we are at a crucial moment that could influence whether the government feels this is at all accepted by the electorate.
Some quick figures from the Center for Global Development:
> In cash terms, the OBR projections of national income suggest this means an official development assistance (ODA) budget of £9.2 billion in 2027. The UK spent £15.3 billion on ODA in 2023
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/breaking-down-prime-minister-starmers-aid-cut
In total, EA is spending less than a billion on global health/dev each year (which makes up the majority of all EA spending). So this feels like a big lever to me, even given that not all UK aid spending will be as effective as Open Phil aid spending is.
Another lever to consider, rather than ‘punish government for cutting aid’, is ‘telling the government that effectiveness matters to me when they decide what to cut’. Don’t know how to compare those.
Is it really the case that the UK and US were competing for the gains to reputation that foreign aid brings? I suppose I’d try to answer that question by looking at the history of where the 0.7% target, which I thought was fairly broadly shared among rich countries, originally came from. One history I found said:
> It results from the 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2626. The 0.7% figure was calculated as a means to boost growth for developing countries. Since 1970, however, only several Nordic countries have met or surpassed this target.
Which makes it look like a potential failed case of cooperation: that no country wants to have the whole cost of international aid fall just on itself, so they try to establish international agreements so that others contribute too. Is that the right model, though? Perhaps countries don’t really experience pressure to adjust their contribution upwards when other countries drop out, and are happy to just continue doing the amount they were doing. I can think of a possible dynamic where ‘preventing bad runaway spillover effects like the spread of war and pandemics’ costs X billion dollars of aid (and has a threshold effect, where providing half of X billion is much less than half as effective as X), which no individual country is willing to stump up, but which is important to every rich country’s interest. In that dynamic, rich countries benefit from such UN-induced cooperation, by spreading the burden and getting the benefits of less instability and disease in the world.
If that’s the dynamic, then your idea of a race to the bottom in aid (a dis-‘alm’-ament, you could say) would not necessarily be what you expect after some country drops out — they’d possibly want to raise their contributions to make up the difference and still be able to reach the threshold of X. Alternatively, the UK now might expect that without the US it will be too difficult to reach that hypothetical threshold, and so there’s no point trying any more.
But if the incentives / dynamic of foreign aid is more about getting prestige for your country, then you could see a broad disalmament when the total pool of funding takes a hit — or alternatively you could see the second or third place players boosting their contribution to try and take the lead. So I’m not sure what determines what one would expect to see given this potential reputation-based dynamic.
Agreed, “linear increases” seems to be an incorrect reading of the graph.
Thanks for making the connection to Francois Chollet for me - I'd forgotten I'd read this interview with him by Dwarkesh Patel half a year ago that had made me a little more skeptical of the nearness of AGI.
Seems a lot of it is saying “you can’t put a price on x” — and then going ahead and putting a price on x anyway by saying we should prefer to fund x over y.
Her conception of the good can include magnificence and meaning and abundance. But how can we make that available for everyone without the kinds of reasoning decried as ‘optimization’?
I feel like the people saying “you can’t put a price on a beautiful holy site” are trying to avoid saying “you can, and the holy site is worth more than the lives the money could have saved” - it’s not impossible that Notre Dame is worth the lives unsaved (with its millions of visitors a year), but it is impossible to refute the claim unless they are honest about how they’re valuing it.
It seems they’re missing the mood that our problems are larger than the resources we have to fix them, and so advocating for not facing the uncomfortable triage questions.
(My comments inspired by / plagiarised from https://x.com/trevposts/status/1865495961612542233 )
CAF charges a fee for its services. This seems crucial to deciding between GAYE/Payroll Giving vs Gift Aid — from the intro email when I registered to do GAYE:
My employer doesn’t cover it so I’m looking for an alternative method.