Ozzie Gooen
Bio
I'm currently researching forecasting and epistemics as part of the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute.
Posts 85
Comments1047
Topic contributions4
I think that the question "Do you want the wealthy to have even more influence on our politics?" often maps to an ongoing debate that basically says, "the wealthy have a big influence over politics, and that looks like politics being more favorable to the very wealthy, for example with tax benefits and similar."
I think that there are many things billionaires could do that are highly cooperative with society. For example, try to stop misinformation across the board, make sure that the government is actually run well (i.e. government department competence), etc.
Personally, I'm sympathetic to the idea that the MAGA movement is unusually high-risk, and should have been uniquely opposed. I think it could have been good, looking back, for Dustin Moskovitz and other similar donors, to have done more around the 2024 election.
Elon Musk is an incredibly frustrating example, as he's a case of a billionaire who more arguably is doing things he actually believes will be good, but by doing so he's causing a lot of damage. But I think he's the exception rather than the rule for the wealthy (where some evidence is the fact that Kamala Harris raised more money).
Thanks for the clarification.
I think I just don't see that most EAs are taking very low salaries. Many (most?) make comparable salaries to what they would make in industry, some more, some less.
I'd be curious to later see data on this (not asking you in particular). It seems like a tough thing to measure - ideally we'd want a good idea of what people's career trajectories are like before and after taking EA directions.
There's definitely a bunch of anecdotal data around me to suggest that many people take lower salaries than they would otherwise. At the same time, it's hard to do an apples to apples comparison, as the EA jobs look quite different to the other jobs. For example, it being more altruistic makes it more enjoyable to some people, the work can come with more agency, you can work around people you like more, it can be higher-status in your community, etc.
Thanks. I tried adjusting the opening of this argument accordingly.
I don't expect at the time that this point was that contentious within our community. I was naively thinking, "this point is broadly assumed to be true, and would help provide context for my main point." I also believed/believe that it was true, but I'd agree with you that there are a lot of specific interpretations of it that wouldn't be true.
It seems like there are interesting debates to be had here of "How should we think about inequality? What aspects of the world are become more or less equal? What measures are the most important?" I think this does get fairly far from my main topic, though at the same time, I'm happy to see that get discussed either here or elsewhere, as long as it could be understood that it's very arguably a only-partially-related point.
From what I can tell, it very much seems the case that some important measures of inequality are both increasing and very high (the high is probably more important), and also that other important measures might be constant/low/decreasing.
I suspect that commenters here have much stronger feelings about "is inequality increasing?" than they do "does the top 0.1% of the global elite have an incredibly large amount of wealth?"
What's your source for this claim?
I could sympathize with the frustration, but I feel like I'm being attacked in a way that's pretty unfair.
This question seems to presume that I have "one single source, that's so good that I could just link to it and the debate would mostly be over." That's clearly not the way most people work. There's a whole lot of points some people might assume is common knowledge within a certain community, to some extent, for the purpose of making other points, but that doesn't come with one incredibly clean paper.
I find your other papers you linked in other comments interesting. That said, I don't see them changing my main argument much.
My honest, loosely held opinion here is that EA/adjacent money could be used to build research & lobbying groups (rather than grassroots organising or direct political donations—too controversial and not EA’s strong suit), that would be ready for such a moment if/when it comes.
This seems like a reasonable potential option to me. I think a lot of policy work works this way - you realize that there are only windows every so often, so a lot of work is around "getting ready."
I'm not sure if we disagree on tractability for policy work here. What you said seems broadly reasonable to me.
Where I may disagree is that I'm not convinced that this strategy will be the best one, after a lot of investigation. I could imagine a lot of creative approaches, like, "do a targeted marketing campaign of a very certain kind, aimed at a specific subset of the ultra-wealthy." Or maybe something like, "find existing charities/groups that are trying to do better things with Billionaires, and steer them to be more effective and to have better epistemics."
I'd be excited if OP staff investigate this area more. I suspect they've done some early investigation around it. That said, perhaps it would be awkward with Dustin being a billionaire. (Personally I think this could be fine, but could imagine situations where it won't be. I.E. maybe work here would get in the way of other OP work to convince ultra-wealthy people of other things.)
I think a lot of great discussions are being had in private Google Docs. I also think that a lot of this discussion gets completely lost and/or forgotten.
"Quick Takes" can act as an alternative. Arguably, this is a good place to try out smaller ideas and/or get feedback on them. Any early discussion on quick takes is arguably more useful than similar discussion with Google Comments, as it would all be public.
Personally I've been enjoying my quick take use. I feel like I could get a good amount of discussion and interaction, for the level of work I'm required to put in for the post. I might later convert some of this into full regular posts, but I don't feel a rush. I also do a lot of writing quick similar post to my Facebook account, especially if they seem like a better fit for that audience.
Likewise, I feel more comfortable commenting on other people's short takes than I do private docs, because that way it feels like my comments are more likely to be useful. With Google Docs it's easy for a lot of work to get totally ignored and then lost.
Obviously, I realize there are some good reasons/circumstances for privacy and for Google Docs. But I suspect that these benefits are narrower than some assume. Being more public has some downsides, but I think it's often possible to overcome these downsides - after which the net-upsides both personally and collectively can be significant.
This comment has gotten me to think about this, and I have a corresponding public response there with my point.
I'll quickly flag that I might recommend the workflow of:
- Write up a bunch of thoughts on shortform. Maybe flag that this work is early, if you want.
- Try to get feedback there.
- If you still want to make it into a post, then at this point you'll be in a better place to do so.
Personally, I feel more comfortable giving most feedback in public spaces like this. That way, if I give a lengthy comment, others can see it. I'm used to settings where I'd spend a lot of time commenting on someone's Google Doc, for a reader count of 1, and typically most comments are ignored anyway.
With respect to donations, I again want to point out that EAs themselves don't donate very much money. This link is from 2019, I don't have more recent data, but I expect that the trend has gone down significantly since then (i also think there is a good chance that these surveys overestimate donations) as there has been less emphasis on earning to give in the community.
It's not clear to me how this is relevant for my argument. I could picture a few claims you could make from this.
From my point of view a whole bunch of EAs are doing direct work at low salaries, and several prominent EA-aligned billionaires do seem to significantly donate. I'd love to see higher donations from other E2G-ers, and imagine we have things to learn from paying more attention here (that could ideally translate to other groups).
On the power of the ultra-wealthy, I expect some of this is coming from Elon Musk's power, but keep in mind that the majority of billionaires supported the candidate that lost the election.
Yep. Kamala Harris significantly out-raised Trump in 2024. At the same time, in total, the donations seem pretty low to me. Kalama Harris raised and spent around $2B. But given the importance of this election, I think it could have well been safe for donors (ideally, across the income ladder) to donate a lot more. My rough impression is that the "Too Much Dark Money In Almonds" post is broadly correct, though maybe 2-4x off.
My point was never that billionaires cause active damage (though some definitely do). It was that most have the opportunity to cause a lot of good, and rarely do.
It seems like recently (say, the last 20 years) inequality has been rising. (Editing, from comments)Right now, the top 0.1% of wealthy people in the world are holding on to a very large amount of capital.
(I think this is connected to the fact that certain kinds of inequality have increased in the last several years, but I realize now my specific crossed-out sentence above led to a specific argument about inequality measures that I don't think is very relevant to what I'm interested in here.)
On the whole, it seems like the wealthy donate incredibly little (a median of less than 10% of their wealth), and recently they've been good at keeping their money from getting taxed.
I don't think that people are getting less moral, but I think it should be appreciated just how much power and wealth is in the hands of the ultra wealthy now, and how little of value they are doing with that.
Every so often I discuss this issue on Facebook or other places, and I'm often surprised by how much sympathy people in my network have for these billionaires (not the most altruistic few, but these people on the whole). I suspect that a lot of this comes partially from [experience responding to many mediocre claims from the far-left] and [living in an ecosystem where the wealthy class is able to subtly use their power to gain status from the intellectual class.]
The top 10 known billionaires have easily $1T now. I'd guess that all EA-related donations in the last 10 years have been less than around $10B. (GiveWell says they have helped move $2.4B). 10 years ago, I assumed that as word got out about effective giving, many more rich people would start doing that. At this point it's looking less optimistic. I think the world has quite a bit more wealth, more key problems, and more understanding of how to deal with them then it ever had before, but still this hasn't been enough to make much of a dent in effective donation spending.
At the same time, I think it would be a mistake to assume this area is intractable. While it might not have improved much, in fairness, I think there was little dedicated and smart effort to improve it. I am very familiar with programs like The Giving Pledge and Founders Pledge. While these are positive, I suspect they absorb limited total funding (<$30M/yr, for instance.) They also follow one particular highly-cooperative strategy. I think most people working in this area are in positions where they need to be highly sympathetic to a lot of these people, which means I think that there's a gap of more cynical or confrontational thinking.
I'd be curious to see the exploration of a wide variety of ideas here.
In theory, if we could move from these people donating say 3% of their wealth, to say 20%, I suspect that could unlock enormous global wins. Dramatically more than anything EA has achieved so far. It doesn't even have to go to particularly effective places - even ineffective efforts could add up, if enough money is thrown at them.
Of course, this would have to be done gracefully. It's easy to imagine a situation where the ultra-wealthy freak out and attack all of EA or similar. I see work to curtail factory farming as very analogous, and expect that a lot of EA work on that issue has broadly taken a sensible approach here.
From The Economist, on "The return of inheritocracy"
> People in advanced economies stand to inherit around $6trn this year—about 10% of GDP, up from around 5% on average in a selection of rich countries during the middle of the 20th century. As a share of output, annual inheritance flows have doubled in France since the 1960s, and nearly trebled in Germany since the 1970s. Whether a young person can afford to buy a house and live in relative comfort is determined by inherited wealth nearly as much as it is by their own success at work. This shift has alarming economic and social consequences, because it imperils not just the meritocratic ideal, but capitalism itself.
> More wealth means more inheritance for baby-boomers to pass on. And because wealth is far more unequally distributed than income, a new inheritocracy is being born.