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From The (In)Effective Altruism Diaries: The Case Of Centi-Millionaire Marxist
You possibly already heard about James Cox Chambers Jr.
He is character that would be laughed at and rejected outright in any creative writing class as crude, primitive and unfunny caricature of leftist written by hate filled right wing bigot.
And he is real.
Descendant of long line of distinguished WASP's. As close to hereditary aristocracy as you can get in today's world. Wikipedia article of your own is now what noble title used to be.
(Yes, pure Anglo Saxon ancestry, no documented Jewish ancestors, if you are looking for this thing, you can be disappointed)
Who is, since early age, dedicated Marxist devoted to fighting for revolutionary cause.
Now, his means are not negligible. 250M hard bourgeois bucks is nothing to sneer at.
Distinguished revolutionaries in the past used cash with great efficiency as weapon to hasten the demise of capitalist world.
Comrade Cox-Chambers is not one of them. In 30 years of struggle, he really achieved nothing much worth showing. The Berkshire Communists, The Berkshire People's Gym, The Butterfly Collective etc. are not up there with The Sealed Train.
Neither are Dakota pipeline protests or Cop City protests.
At least the Georgia commune members had some fun, while it lasted.
This shows once again weakness of premise of effective altruism and 80,000 hours movement that money alone is sufficient to change the world. It is not specific to communism/leftism, many cases of right wing money wasted in even more pointless way.
Now, if you are inclined to laugh at the outgroup, show how would you do better. Your homework, your hypothetical scenario for today is:
You are given 250M in USD.
Your mission is to promote COMMUNISM. Not some petty bourgeois hippy nonsense, but real, scientific and authentic Marx-Lenin-Stalin thought.
How would you get the greatest bang for the buck, how would you most efficiently use capitalist cash to bring forward glorious communist future?
Show your work. Best entries will be rewarded with eternal revolutionary glory and virtual Stalin Golden Prize.
One of the main premises of effective altruism is that some forms of altruism are vastly more effective than others. Some people wasting vast sums of money ineffectively is very much compatible with that.
Many effective altruists have also specifically been wary of political giving (like Scott's article Beware Systemic Change), especially when it takes the form of picking a side in a mainstream left-vs-right tug-of-war rather than finding niche "pulling the rope sideways" issues that are disproportionately important compared to how much the public cares about them. Yes the controversial issues also matter, but they believe those are generally not where you can most effectively spend a marginal dollar (or even a marginal 250 million dollars).
See, this is when the altruism is not effective. The issue is that politics controls vast amount of money. Soros and his organizations are famously very effective in leveraging their money to 10x or more: build basic system and organizations and then use public money to push your projects. Imagine it as having a think-tank that will help towns and villages across EU write projects that can tap into structural EU funds to improve temperature in chicken farm or any other pet EA project, pun intended. Imagine what you can do if you can actually influence politicians to provide subsidies for that, and include a specific fee for animal welfare in each meat purchase, something like renewable surcharge to electricity. All you need is to just make sure to promote some friendly technocrats who can influence some of the byzantine EU regulation creation process. Amazing ROI.
That would be effective, but imposing new taxes isn't "altruism" anymore.
It definitely is a multiplier on altruism, plus this ship already sailed. EA calls this incest with public money as policy enterpreneurship. There are other projects that require cooperation and schmoozing with governments, be it AI safety or many medical programs. Heck even the famous malaria nets are distributed in cooperation with African governments. We cannot have simple things like a little schmoozing with local politicians preventing us from saving of millions of lives, can we?
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