Hi everyone,
I really hesitated to bring this into the EA Forum, because of how potentially polarizing the issue is, but I trust the folks in this group for recommendations, and I am struggling to make a decision.
I allot my money to various causes, and I would like to donate a small percentage of my total donations to helping the Democatic party nominee to get president of the USA. I donated some money to Joe Biden’s campaign, but I am not sure that is the most effective use of my funds. Does anyone have any recommendations for organizations that might do this more effectively?
I do not want to politicize this post further by going into my justifications for making this donation. But I do want to highlight that I generally try to diversify my donations into a wide variety of cause areas, to kind of hedge my ideological bets. This is the smallest allocation area of all my donations, but I still want to make it as effectively as possible. I would appreciate any recommendations anyone has.
Thanks!
(I have a comment nephew to this one that argues against "politics doesn't belong here", but I also wanted to provide a cautionary suggestion...)
I have found it pretty difficult to think in a balanced way about...any election in the last three cycles...but I want to propose that, on the outside view, "candidate seems Obviously Bad" and "candidate would have a negative counterfactual effect on [classical EA cause area]" is nowhere near as correlated as it intuitively feels it should be.
The example that I will keep pointing to, probably forever, is that George W. Bush was almost certainly the best president in the modern era for both Global Health and Welfare[1] and for GCBRs[2], based on programs that were very far from what I (still) think of as his major policy positions.
I think that Bush's interest in HIV response in Africa was in theory knowable at the time[3], but figuring it out would have required digging into some pretty unlikely topics on a candidate that my would-have-been intellectual circles[4] was pretty strongly convinced was the worse one. (I'm not sure how knowable his proactive interest in pandemic prep was.)
I don't want to claim that it's correct to equivocate this cycle's Republican candidate and W. Bush here, and I don't have any concrete reason to believe that the Republican candidate is good on particular cause areas. I just mean to say, I wouldn't have believed it of W. Bush, either. And in this cycle, I'm not aware of anyone who has really done the reasearch that would convince me one way or another in terms of the shut-up-and-multiply expected counterfactual utility.
So, while I don't oppose making decisions on other-than-consequentialist and/or commonsense grounds here (which is likely what's going to actually sway my ballot as a citizen), I want to argue for a stance of relatively deep epistemic uncertainty on the consequentialist dimension, until I see more focused argument from someone who really has done the homework.
In a word, PEPFAR. ↩︎
The National Pharmaceutical Stockpile was founded under Clinton with $51mln of initial funding, but Bush increased the budget tenfold between the Project BioShield Act and PAHPA; expansion of the program since then has been small by comparison. Plus I think that the effect of PEPFAR on the "biosecurity waterline" of the world is under-appreciated. ↩︎
Wikipedia: "According to [Bush's] 2010 memoir, Decision Points, [George W. and Laura Bush] developed a serious interest in improving the fate of the people of Africa after reading Alex Haley’s Roots, and visiting The Gambia in 1990. In 1998, while pondering a run for the U.S. presidency, he discussed Africa with Condoleezza Rice, his future secretary of state; she said that, if elected, working more closely with countries on that continent should be a significant part of his foreign policy." ↩︎
I was too young to have "intellectual circles" during the GWB presidency; I'm approximating myself by my parents here, though it's conflated by EA, LessWrong, et al. not existing at the time. ↩︎
This is just speculation, but I wonder if it's more cost-effective to donate to a Senate candidate who is also running in a Presidential swing state? Maybe Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Arizona?
It seems plausible that a strong Senate candidate could inspire voters to get out and vote for a President they're not enthusiastic about - essentially a 'reverse coattails' effect (though I don't think there's particularly strong evidence for this)
or Governor candidates in states like North Carolina
I empathize with the desire for the request which is why I’m responding, but yeah, unsure the EA forum is the right place for the presidential election.
I wonder if one were to make an argument for a candidate strictly across causes which are more EA consensus/funded by Open Phil. X candidate is good for animal welfare, global health and development, and pandemic and AI catastrophic/existential risk. And here are the policies and here is the total analysis across these which differentially directs this many GiveDirectly rated dollars/QALYs.
But yeah, seems hard. Also open to just being wrong here.
I think that your argument is a fair one to make, but I think it's easier to argue for than against, so I want to argue against to avoid an information cascade towards consensus.
Relevant to x-risks, quoting Zvi:
I think this is a good instance of focusing through cause areas and one I had in mind