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Why do EA’s prefer Democrats?
Dustin Moscovitz did a an AMA on twitter about EA and he had this quote:
Roughly speaking, the Democrats are better in every area. It’s not a hard question, though it might be later. (I hope so frankly!)
https://twitter.com/moskov/status/1578828433269760000?s=46&t=vJrA2cQt5gplx-0s4AOuiw
This reminds me of the old Catholic split between Paul Ryan and roughly the camp ran behind Nancy Pelosi. Where one side went libertarian and wanted private action and the other side thought capturing the government was the best way to ease human suffering.
I can see the EA argument for thinking Democrats. If we just capture the Democrats then they spend more and we can be more effective. But is that realistic or would we get more build back better which was just costs subsidizing industries that already had inflation problems. Versus keeping more of your own money to self direct.
And of course the old Milton Friedman belief that it doesn’t matter the intentions of the policy but what it actually accomplishes.
Should the EAs pursue politics and try to cause better spending (I find this doubtful) or pursue the Andrew Carnegie route of just spending his money on what he thinks benefits society.
This is what scares me about EA. It seems like it’s becoming just another group that believes if their the ones to control the government purse that we will live in a good world. As long as they are the ones in charge.
Obligatory complaint that twitter is a miserable website, and a particularly bad proxy for discussing politics.
With that out of the way—I think you’re borrowing trouble. It appears EA sometimes funds politicians if it thinks they’re effective enough. And these politicians are probably Democrats, if only because EA is incredibly tied to urban California. I suppose there’s probably some ideological friction with Republicans, especially around redistribution and social obligation, but I’m inclined to agree with @Walterodim that these politics are downstream of culture.
Dustin argues that separating political from other causes is a “false dichotomy.” I don’t see signs that EA (as represented by this one billionaire’s Q&A thread) are pivoting to ignore philanthropy in favor of politics. Elsewhere in the thread he specifically says a major donor is more important than congressmen.
To put it another way, conditional on an EA grant involving politics, it’s probably favoring Democrats. That doesn’t imply a trend towards involving politics, or an ideological alignment that excludes Republicans. It’s more that Democrats occasionally pick up EA Cause Areas, while Republicans rarely do.
I took an hour to dig through what sort of political movements EA gives money to, and it is all bog-standard political advocacy, "consciousness raising" etc. etc.
Nothing particularly effective, nothing out of what you'd get if you just shoveled cash into ACT BLUE (which they did too).
It's not effective, it's not altruistic. EA is DNC politics, full stop.
Disappointing, but I’m glad you checked. Would you mind sharing those examples?
It's a comment in this thread on the reddit site: i'll copypasta below, but the links probably won't work. https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/vdwwso/a_critical_review_of_open_philanthropys_bet_on/
I don't care much about tacking made-up numbers to QUALYs to fit a policy to my preferences, so I'll ignore entirely that section and speculate purely on why they made what is obviously not a cost-effective outlay of 200 million bones. The key will be in who they gave it to. So, from the links:
1:
Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $4,000,000 over three years to Impact Justice to support its Restorative Justice Project, under the leadership of sujatha baliga. This project partners with local community organizations in cities around America to support the introduction of restorative justice diversion, before the filing of any charges in a case, to completely remove cases from the conventional justice system.
Oh look, a Harvard grad with a pretentious spelling of an ethnic name and presumably a white-passing appearance with just enough melanin to give the DIE pipplez a lady-boner. Man, am I good or what?
"Restorative Justice" being the current term for not punishing criminals at all, but asking them nicely to apologize to their victims, and then turning them loose onto new ones. This program is going to crash and burn once the press starts talking to victims who feel hard done by this approach, or they get their first all-star recidivist.
Their site is here: Note their focus listings. Not a word about victims, only the perpetrators, criminals, inmates etc. This is the same old 1960's decarceration bullshit that helped produce the crime waves that drove the backlash they're trying to reverse. This isn't justice at all, it's criminal support. The complete lack of any shrift given to victims of crime sets the tone for the entire enterprise. This is about throwing unreconstructed criminals back onto the street as fast as possible with no record, so they can be "diverted" again and again and again.
2:
Alliance for Safety and Justice - link broken main site here
The notable victory on their home page is the restoration of voting rights to 1.4 million felons in Florida. So, a DNC vote-farming operation.
The organization focuses on reforms in eight states: Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and California.
Gee, I wonder if those states have any outsize importance in national elections.
3:
The National Council is a network of women impacted by incarceration focused on ending the incarceration of women and girls
Women are around ten percent of jail and prison populations, so this is a small minority, and notice the focus. "Ending the incarceration of women and girls". So, same as the first grantee, only sexist.
4:
Essie Justice Group organizes women with incarcerated loved ones for criminal justice reform. Essie Justice Group plans to use these funds to build its membership, train women impacted by incarceration in advocacy, and lead decarceration campaigns in California.
So, same as the first, but sexist and only in California.
5:
TOP plans to use these funds to expand its criminal justice reform and prosecutor accountability work in Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas.
TOP is a parent organization that controls and funds numerous political pressure groups, home site is here. They are a "Justice" organization, defining that into Climate justice, Healthcare Justice, Immigration Justice, Education Justice, Housing Justice, etc. etc. etc. So, bog-standard left-wing advocacy.
6:
The Open Philanthropy Project recommended two grants totaling $2,500,000 over two years to Color of Change and the Color of Change Education Fund to support prosecutorial reform and work related to the film “Just Mercy.”
Home site here. They describe themselves as a "racial justice" organization working to "build Black Power and Black joy". Given the prominence of BLM slogans and "defund the police" banners and ads on their page, I'm guessing they're on for the decarceration as well, and much more.
7:
The Open Philanthropy Project recommended three grants totaling $7,800,000 over two years to The Justice Collaborative (TJC), via the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy, for general support.
Home site here. It's full of word salad bullshit that is at once both vague and ridiculous. This is the last paragraph of their posted mission statement:
America’s incarceration crisis and our inability to help our neighbors meet their basic needs both trace back to a culture of dehumanization. To end that toxic politics and build an America with freedom and dignity for all of us, starting with those who are the most vulnerable, we need to rewrite the rules to shrink and transform our criminal legal system and put stability within everyone’s reach.
This is a blueprint to do it.
Narrator voice: There is no blueprint on the site. If you click on the link that says "blueprint", it just routes you back to the statement claiming there is a blueprint. Perhaps with 7.8 million dollars, they can write up a blueprint. Of course, they are a subsidiary of the Tides Foundation, itself an immensely rich organization that pulls in half a billion dollars a year.
So, now that we've looked at the various organizations, what can we deduce giving $200 mil to them might have been for? It's certainly not going to move the needle much on criminal justice reform, even if you think all these schemes are totally new and groundbreaking and haven't been tried a hundred times already and failed in flames. It's certainly not finding low-profile high-value projects that bigger funding outfits have missed, they're paying into the Tides foundation!
What do they get for $200 mil? My guess, credibility on the left as a hedge against getting painted as secret Republicans. Perhaps a seat at the table of all these wildly rich advocacy organizations that serve as funding and jobs programs for the left in general. This is "Altruism" debased to simple partisan politics. This is the Atheism + of rationalism.
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Republicans almost certainly agree with EA more on nuclear power, housing regulations, and the necessity of college, although you’re right that republicans aren’t exactly crusading on these issues.
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"A couple of kids on tumblr." variant? That is, a seemingly common refrain employed when leftist rhetoric proves indefensible and one instead has to marginalize its importance.
A statement about Twitter's quality of discourse is very different than a statement about the importance of its discourse.
I suppose you do prove your own point, in a way, by demonstrating that stupid takes based on poor reading comprehension can be found here, not just Twitter. And I, in turn, will do my part by demonstrating that dunking on dumb posts can happen here, just like Twitter.
Go us. 👍
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Yes. You’ve got me. I am just embarrassed that a billionaire has said the quiet part out loud, so I have no choice but to minimize Twitter.
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