The idea behind effective altruism is that whatever resources you devote towards charity should be effectively spent. If 80% of your contribution is spent on overhead, then the resources you’ve used to finance the cause you care about are wasted. You should aim to get the most bang for your buck. You’d chastise yourself if you spent 200 dollars on a grapefruit for your consumption, as the market rate for grapefruits is considerably lower than what you paid. Unless this is a complicated quid pro-quo involving saving someone’s daughter to prevent John Wick from entering your life, or something of similar magnitude, you fail to exercise due diligence when you use your resources poorly.
At the same time, there’s a reason Bill Gates doesn’t scrimp and save on rolls of toilet paper, (or maybe he does, that could be the key to his success) that cognition is a limited resource, and heuristic judgements may be a more favorable way to optimize resources. In the same vein, it can be expensive to monitor every aspect of the charity’s progress- we depend on intermediaries and other resources, such as GiveWell to give us effective charities.
This idea of spending altruistic energy effectively seems foreign to politics however. I want to examine a couple odd prioritization schemes that I find, well, ridiculous.
Often, I hear arguments from economic progressives who care about elevating the poor but also argue that student loan forgiveness is essential. Unless forgiving college debt provides externalities to the poor greater than the comparable most cost-effective way to help the poor, it should be sidelined until poverty is taken care of. In a similar vein, income inequality, or how much rich people have, should be secondary to the wealth of poor people. If people are starving to death, the priority should be to stop their starving, not to care about someone owning their fifth Lamborghini.
I notice a similar problem with faux-environmentalists. If the Earth is literally going to burn in the next fifteen years, discussions about income inequality, social security, racism, sexism, transphobia, or pretty much any other social problem should not matter politically. The single-minded goal should be on saving the human race from going extinct. Yet, by insisting to a bundle of positions, many of which prevent others blocs from getting on board (ie, green new deal), they seem to be willing to doom the earth for internet points. Take problems with nuclear energy, let’s say it does poison the water and the towns around the respective plants. That’s chump change compared to FIERY HEAT DEATH FOR THE ENTIRE PLANET.
Conservatives are harder to place politically, because their ideology is less coherent. Many conservatives are worried that we’re losing to China, or that many people across the world aren’t able to live freely, yet argue voraciously against high-skilled immigration. If high skilled immigration is valuable for winning against a global rival, concerns about Americans speaking one language seem small.
Conservatives also talk a lot about free speech and cancel culture, seeing speaking freely as a fundamental right. They take a broad view of free speech, going beyond the realm of the first amendment. However, when it comes to issues like race and sex, many conservatives seem to desire punishment for people speaking views they find odious. This undermines the very foundation they wish to establish. Similarly, hoping to abolish Sec 230 would undo a lot of the speech that people take for granted.
Ultimately, there seems to be a lot of odd prioritization happening in current politics. Both parties seem to take their values and invert them when it comes to promoting the policies they want. I wonder what a party concerned with existential and larger scale risk would look like.
Isadore Johnson's Website 