A distinction needs to be made between arguments that EA is good but could be better, and arguments that EA is actively bad. I often see people treat arguments for the former conclusion as arguments for the latter, even though they're nearly opposites. The former implies we need more EA, while the latter implies we need less. And I don't really think there are any serious arguments for the latter conclusion, but there are lots of arguments for the former. For example, the criticism that EA focuses on addressing symptoms but not root causes and doesn't do enough to support systemic change makes a lot of sense, and it should especially appeal to EAs with a longtermist perspective. However, it's not an argument against EA - it's an argument that EA could be doing more. If you have a deadly disease, addressing the symptoms is still a good and important thing to do, even if addressing the root cause would be even better. Likewise, the criticism that EA doesn't listen to local activists and the people it's meant to help about what would be most effective could be a problem - maybe EA would be more effective if it took more account of these people's voices. But again, it doesn't show that EA is bad, just that it may be less effective than it could be in a hypothetical scenario where it took more voices into account. I'm also not 100% sure the criticism is valid - maybe examining something with a detached view gives you a better picture of what interventions would be best than you would get from asking local activists personally tied up with the issue, and maybe EAs have better access to information and more time to analyze it - but it at least seems likely enough to be valid that EAs should look for ways to get more input from them.
The only criticism that could actually show EA to be bad is the idea that it hurts long-term development by making people dependent on aid, but the evidence is lacking for this, and it's much more likely to be the other way around - desperately poor countries are going to have a much harder time developing if people are constantly dying of malaria and don't have the excess resources to invest into long-term development. So improving people's material conditions in the short term is also much more likely to foster long-term development.
I 𝚠̶𝚊̶𝚗̶𝚝̶ ̶𝚝̶𝚘̶ agree with you that improving the material conditions by giving malaria bednets, vaccines etc, outweighs the harms of eroding local institutions, but I'm also very hesitant to be disagreeing with two Nobel prize winning development economists about development economics.
I think either way you'll be disagreeing with Nobel prize winning development economists about development economics, with Duflo, Banerjee and Kremer winning in 2019.
It's been years since I read poor economics so take this with a grain of salt, but I seem to distinctly remember that they were much closer to the decolonial side on the 'decolonial-paternalism' spectrum, with them deferring a lot to the recipients, stressing that they had a lot of local knowledge, and them championing direct cash transfers and field tries with input from local institutions.
They might edge more towards paternalism than their fellow nobel prize winners, but it seems they're much more on the decolonial side than mainstream EA.
They seem more similar to me, a lot of mainstream development EA is based on early work by J-PAL. And a lot of the paternalistic critiques of Poor Economics is connected to their use of RCTs.
So after reading your first comment I took my copy of Poor economics and started reading through it again, and I'm now even more convinced they're less paternalistic than EA. They again and again emphasize the limits of outside experts and the importance of local knowledge, listening to the poor, building local capacity, adapting to specific locations... Very different from the kinds of top-down utilitarianism that wants to bypass governments (while not seeking out local voices) that I known from my half a decade of working for EA.
I agree the book talks about that a lot, but the main suggestions they come up with are RCT focused, which by their nature are more paternalistic (if you're testing for what works, that is trading off against listening to beneficiaries).
Interesting! Re arg. 3 listening to recipient voices - I worry there's a potential gap between the kinds of help people ask for and the kinds of help that are cost-effective in helping the most f people possible? If someone asked what kind of help I wanted, I'd say that I'd rather have a decent job than a .1% reduction in my risk of death. But if a philanthropist with limited funds has a choice between giving me a job or giving a thousand people a .1% reduction in their risk of death, I'd think they should probably do the latter (as long as we all at least consent to the intervention). It also seems important to note that many ea interventions help very young children whose preferences can't be polled directly...
Wait, is the tradeoff between a decent job and *only me* having a .1% reduction in risk of death, or me having a job and a thousand people having a .1% reduction in the risk of death? I get that for a "homo-economicus" (purely self-interested rational agent) there is no difference, but for real humans this would make a huge amount of difference. In any case, if everyone consents to a collective .1% reduction over a .1% chance at a job, this is the same as letting them choose.
But I think you were trying to set up a dilemma where a poor persons stated preference might not be cost-effective. I think that, in this case, we run into a bit of philosophical issue. If you're a moral realist, you might think you can measure what's best for people, but a moral anti-realist might want to defer to the people themselves. However, even if, like some (most?) EAs you believe in moral realism and think our current measurements of effectiveness are (approximately) correct, there's still a case to be made for deferring.
As I briefly touched on in my previous post, direct cash transfers are extremely cost effective, and was one of GiveWell's top charities for years. For most of human history people have thought they know better than recipients, and for most of human history it would've been both easier, and better, if they had just given them the money.
Now, maybe this time we really nailed it, and the four top GiveWell charities are genuinely the best, but even GiveWell thinks DCTs are *one of* the best (~top 10) and gave a grant to GiveDirectly (DCT charity) just months ago. If you put any credence in the possibility that our paternalistic overconfidence of the past centuries is still present, or if you put any credence into moral anti-realism, it might be a good idea to give to GiveDirectly instead.
As for children, a very similar argument applies but for giving money to the parents. I'll admit that it's slightly weakened, but I personally think it's still "strong enough".
>Wait, is the tradeoff between a decent job and *only me* having a .1% reduction in risk of death, or me having a job and a thousand people having a .1% reduction in the risk of death?
Sorry - I meant the latter! Seems that while any given person would prefer a job to a .1% risk in death, we might not be able to afford to give every person a job, but we can give everyone a .1% risk reduction of death. I suppose if people preferred a .1% at a job over a .1% reduction of death risk, that would be an interesting question. But I would just be a little surprised if that turned out to be anyone's considered preference, just as I'd be surprised if someone were willing to take the probabilistically equivalent gamble of flipping a coin to either get a job or die.
My point is to simply push back against simplistically framing the dilemma as "people care about jobs and infrastructure, but they care much less about malaria, so we should give them jobs and infrastructure" w/o taking into account the quantity tradeoff at all. That seems clearly wrong to me - we need to consider how many people we're helping, and accept that this may conflict w/ giving people their top-preference if it's too difficult and expensive. I don't I'm necessarily appealing to any controversial ethical view - if people were totally indifferent, upon reflection, to dying from malaria, then per moral anti-realism, subjectivism, value pluralism etc., then sure, protecting them from malaria might not be best for them. My understanding is that they aren't - it's just much lower on their list of priorities due to the low probability of it happening to any given person, sort of like the flu in the US.
>If you put any credence in the possibility that our paternalistic overconfidence of the past centuries is still present, or if you put any credence into moral anti-realism, it might be a good idea to give to GiveDirectly instead.
Interesting thought, I'll have to think about this! The main reason I'd expect (totally from the armchair) for the T4 charities to robustly win out is that they transport extremely valuable goods (malaria nets, vaccines, etc) to remote areas where people otherwise wouldn't be able to buy those goods with their own money at the local store (and they might not have the purely factual knowledge to demand the import of these goods). But perhaps, with enough foreign currency floating around from DCT's, those goods would show up in the long-run.
>As for children, a very similar argument applies but for giving money to the parents. I'll admit that it's slightly weakened, but I personally think it's still "strong enough".
Not sure I follow - my original worry is just that the shot-calling adults in a community might not care about child mortality as much as their own interests, because their own lives aren't directly at stake.
> Sorry - I meant the latter! Seems that while any given person would prefer a job to a .1% risk in death, we might not be able to afford to give every person a job, but we can give everyone a .1% risk reduction of death. I suppose if people preferred a .1% at a job over a .1% reduction of death risk, that would be an interesting question. But I would just be a little surprised if that turned out to be anyone's considered preference
So, I can interpret this scenario in two ways: 1) the 1000 recipients don't know in advance whether they would be selected for the job, so it becomes a tradeoff between a .1% chance of a job for them, or a .1% risk reduction of death for everyone. In this scenario, I agree, people would likely choose the latter. So you probably meant:
2) One of the 1000 potential recipients has to choose between either certainly getting a job, or giving themselves and the 999 other recipients a .1% risk reduction of death. In this scenario I would contend that the relevant person to ask consent from is not just the 1 person, but all of the 1000 (e.g. putting it to a vote).
The purpose is not to give everyone a job, the purpose is to give everyone a voice. If people vote for the job, the job it is, if people vote for the risk reduction, we provide the risk reduction.
> Not sure I follow - my original worry is just that the shot-calling adults in a community might not care about child mortality as much as their own interests, because their own lives aren't directly at stake.
This seems to go against what we know about parental psychology. By and large, a stranger in a foreign country will be less invested and knowledgeable about a child, than the parents of said child. So, the reasoning goes, by giving parents cash to spend on their children, they will spend it better than what we can come up with from our faraway information-deprived state.
>The purpose is not to give everyone a job, the purpose is to give everyone a voice. If people vote for the job, the job it is, if people vote for the risk reduction, we provide the risk reduction.
As long as, when we listen to people's voices, we get super crystal clear on the cost-effectiveness tradeoffs they're willing to make, I'm on board with this!
Thank you! Though, as I alluded to in my EA democracy post, my years on the EA forum have given me extreme aversion towards posting there. There's currently a discussion on the forum on whether the "karma system" should be reformed. Depending on how that conversation goes, I might return there and post it, though don't hold your breath.
Al does not have emotions or emotional intelligence. Yes that is something that is really needed for it to be a truly general purpose technology . I don’t think that it is useless or counterproductive even though it has that killer flaw to it. I think people just need to keep engaging with it and the companies that are developing the technology.
I think you might have left this comment on the wrong post :). Regardless, it does appear that LLM's do not have emotions or emotional intelligence, though I don't think the former is necessary for the latter, and we might reach a future where AIs have the latter, but not the former.
On the one hand, this is a horrible comment I should ban, on the other hand, the username does provide an accurate social signal on what kinds of people hold this opinion...
What I understand concern over “neocolonialism” to mean is concern with developing countries adapting policies and attitudes that have been successful in making developed countries “developed.” EA is an example of that kid of pragmatic more bang for the buck attitude.
Euhm no, no one uses "neocolonialism" in that way and I don't know how you walked away from this post with that definition given that I had a whole section explicitly on "What Is Neocolonialism":
> Colonialism, as defined by political philosophers, is the reduction of one people’s sovereignty by another, typically through direct political and military domination.
Neocolonialism, by contrast, operates after formal independence. It sustains the same power dynamics through economic control, international institutions, and cultural influence.
As philosopher Oseni Taiwo Afisi writes, neocolonialism refers to “the actions and effects of certain remnant features and agents of the colonial era in a given society.” It’s colonialism without conquest.
That sound pretty much to me like like what I said. But if opposing “sustaining the same power dynamics through economic control” is compatible with EA, I’m sure they will be happy to take the donation.
'A country becoming democratic' and 'A country being subjected to colonialism without the conquest' sound the same to you? Also what do you even mean by "But if opposing “sustaining the same power dynamics through economic control” is compatible with EA, I’m sure they will be happy to take the donation."? Who's "they", the grammar indicates it's EA but that doesn't make sense with the "donation", but the donation part doesn't really make sense in any case.
This is spiraling away from anything sensible. Let’s go back to seeing if I can find any sense in “neocolonialism.” The definition you gave is word salad to me. I’m hugely on board with colonialism having left a negative social legacy but I’d cash that out in specific policies, institutions and attitudes rather than calling it “neocolonialism.”
This just isn't true, because the effective altruist movement stands for something much more specific than "altruism should be effective" (which probably the vast majority of people believe).
Charity is often *in practice* neocolonial (see e.g. the books I linked), but charity is not *necessarily* neocolonial (see e.g. my discussion in this post and the previous on direct cash transfer charities)
"EA's most celebrated charities may save lives without empowering communities".
Oh no. What bastards those EAs are. Next time your surgeon gives you life-saving open-heart surgery, remember he's done nothing to empower your community.
No one used the term bastard here. My surgeon, the arguments goes, would actually empower my community since they provided the benefit of improving my material needs, without undermining my local institutions.
*I hope that's also what EA-aid does, but it's hard to tell.
1. It's much less obvious that colonialism was a (large) net negative in Africa than, say, India. The Indian subcontinent was ~25% of estimated global GDP on the eve of Company rule IIRC but less than 4%, to my best recollection, upon full independence. The argument that British mercantilism & the deindustrialization policies, along with the abuses of the East India Company, harmed India much more than European institutions helped it is pretty persuasive.
With Africa, two countries were never colonized - Liberia & Ethiopia (not counting the brief Italian occupation for the former). I'm going to exclude Liberia because it's a strange edge case and factor in Botswana, which was one of the "least" colonized African countries in that the current state is fairly coterminous with pre-colonial polities, has a lot of elite continuity, and was a fairly autonomous British protectorate. Ethiopia is a worst-case scenario, since the last Solomonic emperor, and the communist government that succeeded him, both pretty horribly mismanaged the country, and it's GDP per capita is just over $1k USD. Botswana is the best-case example - it is resource "blessed" (its diamond deposits were not discovered until after the British left) and its elites have generally managed the country well - its per capita GDP is ~$8k - much better than India, and not too far behind China. We'd therefore expect a no-colonialism alternative Africa to average somewhere between these extremes, and an African continent with an average per capita GDP of, say, $4k or $6k would still be terribly poor (though less poor than India, to be fair.)
This point might have been better addressed to a previous piece of yours, in that the utilitarian argument for economic assistance to Africa is much better than the reparations argument.
2. Even if EA is neocolonial in all the way its critics assert, it's not necessarily net bad. I'd be surprised to hear that a mother of children in Africa would refuse to give her children donated mosquito nets or include them in vaccine incentive programs if she read an essay about EA and neocolonialism by a western academic.
It's just not obvious to me that marginally contributing to corruption is bad enough to make EA net negative - and contributing to (certain forms of) corruption might not even be bad! Look at Tammany Hall and the Irish! The biggest piece of anti-corruption / civil service reform legislation in US history - the Pendleton Act - was in large part designed to break up Republican patronage networks in the Deep South, thereby crushing the economic and political prospects of southern freedmen. There was a good piece from Yaw a while back wherein he pointed out that countries usually get rich, then fix corruption - not the other way around.
I don't think we can use Botswana and Ethiopia as a counterfactual mirror into what an uncolonized Africa would have looked like, since politics and markets are interconnected. As an analogy, the Netherlands was neutral during WW1, yet their life-expectancy still declined sharply. Yet it would be ludicrous for a German to say "What we did to Belgium wasn't a (large) net negative, if we take the Netherlands as a counterfactual Belgium we'll see it's not (that) bad". Obviously we can't do that since if all the neighboring countries are going to shit, you're not going to be doing well either.
We do have more academic ways to study the effects of colonialism on Africa. For example, we can compare groups that were ethnically partitioned by the colonizers vs those that weren't. When we do so we find (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17620/w17620.pdf):
> we find that the incidence, severity and duration of violence are higher in the historical homelands of partitioned groups. Third, we shed some light on the mechanisms showing
that military interventions from neighboring countries are much more likely in the homelands of split groups. Fourth, our exploration of the status of ethnic groups in the political arena reveals that partitioned ethnicities are systematically discriminated from the national government and are more likely to participate in ethnic civil wars. Fifth, using individual-level data we document that respondents identifying with split groups have lower access to public goods and worse educational outcomes. The uncovered evidence brings in the foreground the detrimental repercussions of ethnic partitioning.
We also have historical records of what colonizers did in the colonies, e.g. king leopold's "congo free state" was responsible for the deaths of *millions* of people, through brutal forced labor practices, decreased agricultural productivity and the destruction of many local economies: https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905 (the 10 million cited in this book is disputed by some scholars, but all scholars agree that it's in the millions) And it's not like Belgian meddling in Congo is all in the distant past, as recently as 1961 did they assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the DRC: Neocolonialism is ongoing. I mean, basically all scholars of colonialism agree that it was bad for the colonies, maybe scroll through the wikipedia page if you want to see some further research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_European_colonialism_and_colonization#Colonial_actions_and_their_impacts
> It's just not obvious to me that marginally contributing to corruption is bad enough to make EA net negative - and contributing to (certain forms of) corruption might not even be bad!
This post is not about whether EA is net negative, also I primarily talked talked about institutional weakening, not corruption. However, corruption *is* actually very bad for an economy. Just because we can find individual historical examples of it turning out good doesn't mean it's not bad. We can also find individual examples of murders and theft and arson across history that turned out to be good, yet we can still say that murder and arson and theft are bad for an economy. I think yaw would agree, since he ends that post with:
> I am not saying that corruption is good, nor am I saying removing corruption isn’t necessary.
That's a fair point about Belgium and the Netherlands; my Botswana/Ethiopia analysis was very "off-the-cuff" and not totally scientific, but it should cast doubt that Africa's economic development would be on par with Europe had colonialism never occurred.
And I should be clear that I'm referring solely to current economic outcomes in Africa when discussing the negative effects of colonialism, but you're absolutely right to point out the atrocities committed by European empires in the region. Belgium Congo was a moral horror regardless of its net effects on current per capita GDP in the DR Congo.
One point I do have to quibble with is about the partitioning of ethnic groups in Africa. I unfortunately forgot to save this, but there was an interest post on this site earlier about the supposed partition of pre-colonial states in Africa during the Berlin Conference. TL;DR, colonial borders in Africa pretty closely correspond to pre-colonial African states, and most straight-line borders are in empty desert or other lightly inhabited areas. There's probably something to be said about the British style of divide-and-rule imperialism, which was and is probably detrimental to the development of state capacity in post-colonial Africa.
The significance of this is that most ethnic groups that are partitioned in Africa are so divided as much because of pre-European imperialism than European imperialism.
RE: the corruption point, I was perhaps a bit too flippant about this, because you are of course correct that, generally speaking, corruption is bad. By broader point is that what we think of as "corruption" in the west used to be very common in much of the world and is more politely known as "patronage," and it's a fact of life basically everywhere without extremely high state capacity, rule of law, and centralized, bureaucratic social insurance systems. This argument against EA strikes me as being similar to rightists arguing against assistance to foreign countries b/c "well don't the corrupt dictators just take it all" but with leftist-y vibes.
***
I do want to be a little deferential here, because you clearly know more about this topic than I do, but my broader point is that "colonialism" and "neocolonialism" is thrown around to frame how we think of African development; while European imperialism has obviously had a profound effect on the continent, I don't think it's obvious that colonialism explains most or even a significant fraction of the difference in economic development, institutional strength, and general quality of life between Africa and Europe.
(Since this is the internet, and the internet is home to many unsavory characters, it is unfortunately necessary that I clarify that I'm not trying to be a "race realist" or HBD rightoid.)
Basically, I'm trying to say that Good Things Are Good and saving children from dying of malaria or malnutrition or preventable diseases is Good, and my credence that there are net-negative effects on institutional development or state capacity large enough to outweigh this good is extremely low. Moreover, the utilitarian argument for aid (Africa is very very poor and utility is a function of log consumption) very obviously works, but the reparations argument is less obvious because precolonial Africa was already very poor, and it's very difficult to sus out how much less poor Africa would be today if the European powers left them alone.
> Africa's economic development would be on par with Europe had colonialism never occurred.
This was not a claim I was defending, we we're talking about the claim:
> It's much less obvious that colonialism was a (large) net negative in Africa
The former claim is obviously not true given things like, geography, ecology, first mover advantage, compounding interests etc etc, however the latter claim is also not true given things like extractive infrastructure, population loss, new ethnic tension, development of asymmetric bargaining etc etc.
> And I should be clear that I'm referring solely to current economic outcomes in Africa when discussing the negative effects of colonialism, but you're absolutely right to point out the atrocities committed by European empires in the region. Belgium Congo was a moral horror regardless of its net effects on current per capita GDP in the DR Congo.
Well it almost certainly *did* have an effect on economic outcomes. We treat colonial history as a courtroom, where the colonizers are innocent until proven guilty and if we can't prove it had a negative effect on gdp we'd assume it didn't. However, this is almost impossible to prove quantitatively given there was basically no data collection going on and also everything was going to shit. But if we don't treat it like a courtroom, but treat it as a scientific question, then what would the null-hypothesis be? Remember, this was not in a time where there were billions of people, when Leopold killed between 5 and 13 million people that was about *half* of the population. I think I'm not being unreasonable when I say we should probably assume that killing half the population (among many other things) has a negative effect on gdp growth.
> an interest post on this site earlier about the supposed partition of pre-colonial states in Africa during the Berlin Conference. TL;DR, colonial borders in Africa pretty closely correspond to pre-colonial African states
I don't know which post you're referring to, but I would caution against believing what some blogger writes over what scientific studies show. Unless the blogpost debunked the studies I linked, but I very much doubt that. I mean, not only do we have scientific that show it, but in some cases we even explicitly have historical records of the colonizers saying they were doing it.
It's also important to note that it's not just the borders that were a problem with europe's ethnic partitioning project, it was also stoking/creating the ethnic tensions. A Belgian example again, because that's where I'm from and it's the history I know the best:
Before the european colonizers the difference between Hutis and Tutsis was mainly a fluid socioeconomic one, not a rigid ethnic one. Think: Hutu as word for the stereotypical farmer (class) and Tutsi as a word for stereotypical pastoralist (class). But then the Belgians came and not only transformed it into a racial division, they also said invented a story that Tutsi's came from the north and were closer to europeans and therefore the superior race. They backed this up with pseudo-scientific measurement (think skull stuff) to give it legitimacy. Then they gave Tutsis exclusive access to education, government jobs, and power, while Hutus were relegated to manual labor. To lock it in place they mandated ethnic ID cards, permanently locking people into Hutu or Tutsi categories based on ancestry, eliminating fluidity (previously, it was more like a class so Hutus could become Tutsis through things like cattle ownership or marriage).
If you think the Belgians couldn't have done more to guarantee an ethnic conflict, you don't know the Belgians: as decolonization neared they abruptly shifted support to the Hutu majority, fearing Tutsi-led independence movements. Then they armed Hutu extremists and allowed anti-Tutsi propaganda. This lead to mass killings, which were reciprocated with more massacres on and on and on, culminating in the Rwandan genocide (~75% of the Tutsi population was exterminated).
Again, if we treat this like a courtroom, we can't have a quantitative mathematical proof that Belgium created the massacres (though some quantitative studies come about as close as you possibly can with a historical case without a control group). And we don't have a direct decree for the massacres from Belgium (There is no secret tape of a Belgian saying "execute order 66, or something). But if instead we look at it like researchers it's pretty clear to say that Belgium created it. You know who also believes that? The Belgians, not only the contemporary Belgians (e.g. historian Filip Reyntjens wrote that the ID cards made the genocide "logistically possible") but even the colonizers themselves (e.g. Colonial administrator Pierre Ryckmans admitted: "We created a monster")
> used to be very common
Just because something is common, doesn't mean it's good. I think that in general we should look at the scientific evidence and not at whether something is common/a tradition, to determine if it's good.
> This argument against EA strikes me as being similar to rightists arguing against assistance to foreign countries b/c "well don't the corrupt dictators just take it all" but with leftist-y vibes.
No, it's not at all similar because leftists are in favor of giving and are even in favor of giving much *much* more, they just want to give it directly to the people, not to western foundations/charities.
> I do want to be a little deferential here, because you clearly know more about this topic than I do, but my broader point is that "colonialism" and "neocolonialism" is thrown around to frame how we think of African development; while European imperialism has obviously had a profound effect on the continent, I don't think it's obvious that colonialism explains most or even a significant fraction of the difference in economic development, institutional strength, and general quality of life between Africa and Europe.
I only know about Belgium, since that's where I live, though from what I've heard the other colonial empires weren't exactly nice either (I mean, the pirates of the carribean movies had a literally heartless chtulu grimreaper, but the biggest villains were still the british EIC and everyone was like; yeah that makes sense).
Again, the claim we we're discussing is not whether colonialism created *all* of the badness, but about whether it created *some* of the badness. And pretty much all the scholars agree that it did, and if you read the history you'll quickly be like; yeah that makes sense.
I appreciate you for indulging the ramblings of a random reply guy (I've been traveling, and jet lag may or may not have turned my brain to jelly, and in hindsight my posts could have been more focused & concise, and therefore productive)
I *think* we both agree that European imperialism had a net negative effect on the *current* economic and social conditions in Africa, and that it probably doesn't explain the entirety of the disparity between Africa and Europe. Over the course of this discussion you've raised a lot of good points and have certainly changed my credence on the relative weight of European imperialism on this disparity.
I want to try to offer better quality comments by specifying the underlying thing I'm trying to address about this post and another post of yours that I somewhat interpret as a companion post, in which you discuss the utilitarian vs. justice-based arguments for providing humanitarian & economic assistance to Africa.
Broadly, I think you're asserting that the EA community, and other similar philanthropic movements, should take the legacy of colonialism more seriously when they go about delivering aid to Africa. Specifically, I think there are two possible ideas that you've raised and discussed various arguments about:
1) The ongoing legacy of colonialism creates a moral responsibility for the Global North to indemnify the Global South for the continuing harms thereof;
2) The ongoing legacy of colonialism distorts aid given from the Global North to the Global South, raising the possibility that organizations like GiveWell might do more harm than good, or at least substantially reduce the net good that they do with second-order harms.
Essentially, I don't think that EA or philanthropy in general needs to be overly concerned with the legacy of colonialism because I think arguments (1) and (2) both fail.
I think (1) can be formulated in several ways, any of which probably fail.
You can argue that Europe was a net beneficiary and Africa was net harmed by colonialism, and that creates a moral obligation for Europe to indemnify Africa. But consider a hypothetic case where country A historically colonized country B. Let's say, that after extensive research, economists, historians, sociologists, etc. have determined that A's conquest of being actually had a net negative effect *on A* - because A-elites captured the rents of colonialism but dumped the cost of maintaining the empire on the general public, that mercantilism & income taxes to support imperial conquests distorted investments, etc. Let's also suppose that in this scenario, country B was a net beneficiary because country A built roads, schools, etc. that outweighed the burdens of imperial extraction. In this case, it would be *extremely odd* to assert that the people of country B ought to indemnify the people of country A - especially if B was still poorer than A today!
You might instead argue that colonialism a) harmed Africa and b) was imposed on Africans by Europeans against the will of the former; therefore, it is the *agency* of the Europeans and the *lack of agency* of the Africans that creates a moral responsibility. This runs into various problems of collective responsibility, like, should *all* Europeans have to pay an indemnity, even those who opposed their own nations' imperial projects? What about European states that were principalities or oligarchies for much or all of their colonial history? Can you justly hold a people responsible for the actions of the state when they are not their own masters?
Regarding (2), I think that the first-order positive effect on the maximally effective charities is so enormous that it would take some truly extraordinary magnitudes of negative second-order effects to outweigh them. The top charities right now save one marginal life for every ~$5k invested in the program; assuming 1 QALY is worth $100k and conservatively estimating that each life saved corresponds to only 2.5 QALYs, the proportional return on the original investment is x50 (!!!) Cash transfers might have fewer second-order negative effects, and they also have enormous first-order positive effects, but I think a lot of the maximum-impact in-kind transfers target places with little market penetration, where the effect of direct cash transfers would be dulled (if I'm wrong about this, I'm happy to be corrected!)
Importantly, I'm not even accounting for *positive* second order effects of current EA things like vaccine incentive programs and bed nets, such as:
- lower child/infant mortality rates --> reduction in hoarding --> higher female labor force participation --> improved economic output & status of women
- reduced school absences from disease, malnutrition, etc. --> increased human capital stocks --> higher state capacity, less violence
- reduced dependency on non-market & non-state social insurance systems (patronage, clan/family ties, etc.) --> stronger rule of law, reduction in authoritarian social norms, less corruption, etc. The benefits of this are enormous.
I'm therefore doubtful that the neocolonialism-related negative second-order effects of EA would overwhelm even the *positive* second-order effects of EA programs; they certainly don't overwhelm the first-order positive order effects of EA.
In short; I think EA succeeds at improving the human condition, the utilitarian argument for aid to Africa (or even more general Kantian arguments like a universal duty to help) work better than any justice-as-indemnification argument, and I don't think the legacy of colonialism changes either of these facts.
I don't believe 1. I never argued for 1. I endorse neither CJ nor utilitarianism, I was merely describing the arguments in the previous posts. It's also a bit strange to interpret that post as being either an endorsement of CJ or utilitarianism, since I discussed both.
But also, you're mixing deontology and consequentialism in a way no-one (to my knowledge) does. With consequentialism we only look at the consequences so we look at the hurt, independent of what caused it. With deontology we only looks at the actions, regardless of the consequences. But in your argument we look at the (inter)actions to establish the existence of reparations, but then look at consequences to establish the recipients of reparations. So if I try to punch you, but you dodge and I dislocate my shoulder, you have to compensate me? I know of no-one that endorses this view. This seems to be related to the conversation I had with Sol Hando (and many others) when I try to talk about reparations; they seem to assume (perhaps uncharitably) that deontology and consequentialism are mixed in ways no-one actually endorses.
> should *all* Europeans have to pay an indemnity, even those who opposed their own nations' imperial projects?
Sol Hando gave the same objection, but it's not applicable. Reparations are paid by *governments*, not individual people.
> What about European states that were principalities or oligarchies for much or all of their colonial history?
So to reuse the example I used with Sol Hando; CJ says you should repay if you benefit from it, even if you didn't do the crime. So if I steal your wallet and give it to my son then die of a heart-attack, CJ says my son should give it back to you even if he didn't steal it. I'm not a Belgian, I'm dutch, but I benefit from belgian infrastructure that was paid for by colonizers, so, according to CJ, I shouldn't oppose belgian reparations even if it's coming out of my taxes.
For 2) you're echoing the argument I laid out in my posts back to me (albeit with more EA vocabulary): see everything I wrote in the counterarguments of 2. I had hoped you'd go more into the second part of the statement: "or at least substantially reduce the net good that they do with second-order harms.". The first part is trivial but that second part is where the real meat is. Do the second order effects of GiveDirectly put it above other EA charities like deworming? I think it's plausible, especially for *some* charities EA has endorsed like DMI (and I'm not even going into the more speculative charities EAs have endorsed like 'leverage research').
But also, let's take a step back and look at some meta reasons why we might want to defer to local people. To adapt ideas from another comment I left in this thread:
If you endorse (most forms of) moral realism, you might think you can measure what's best for people, but if you endorse (most forms of) moral anti-realism you might want to defer to the people themselves. So if you put some credence into moral anti-realism, it might be a good idea to give to GiveDirectly. Since GiveDirectly scores almost at the top in an EA moral realist framework (top 8), and at the top in a (conventional) moral anti-realist framework.
Similarly, we can give a historical argument for erring on the side of DCT. For most of human history people have had a paternalistic bias: people thought they knew better than recipients. And for most of human history it would've been both easier, and better, if they had just given them the money.
Now, maybe this time is not like all the previous times we thought we had it, this time we really actually have it, and those four top GiveWell charities are genuinely the best. But if you put any credence in the possibility that our paternalistic bias of the past is still present, it might be worth it to give to the one on the top 8 (out of millions) that's not paternalistic, and not those in the top 4.
>I don't believe 1. I never argued for 1. I endorse neither CJ nor utilitarianism, I was merely describing the arguments in the previous posts. It's also a bit strange to interpret that post as being either an endorsement of CJ or utilitarianism, since I discussed both.
In both your posts you've raised arguments for and against the ideas that you've put forward, so I'm not trying to assume which position you actually hold, but register an opinion on the arguments you've put forth, regardless of which ones you agree with. One of the ideas you discuss is reparations which, unless I'm very mistaken, is basically (1). Sorry if that wasn't clearer.
>But also, you're mixing deontology and consequentialism in a way no-one (to my knowledge) does.
I'm not sure I follow here. Any conception of justice-as-indemnification, which is a very common view of justice, I think, is necessarily deontic (utilitarians reject justice as a moral concept, even if it might be *socially* useful) but has to account for quantifiable harms because the indemnity has to be calculated. Like, unless I am profoundly misunderstanding deontology, if you're a deontologist who thinks that stealing is wrong, and you witness A steal $100 from B, you'd think A would have a duty to return *$100* The broader point being that I don't agree that a purely deontic worldview would be totally insensible to measurable harms.
>Sol Hando gave the same objection, but it's not applicable. Reparations are paid by *governments*, not individual people.
Yes, but there is an opportunity cost. A Keynesian quibble might be that if European macroeconomies are below general equilibrium than the marginal cost to society to pay out reparations might be effectively zero. But if the economy is close to general equilibrium and/or the reparations are very large, then they'd be crowding out public/private spending through budget cuts/tax hikes. If your local government levied a one-time fine on you to cover the medical costs of a guy who was bit by your neighbor's dog, I assume you'd be mad about that.
>So if I steal your wallet and give it to my son then die of a heart-attack, CJ says my son should give it back to you even if he didn't steal it. I'm not a Belgian, I'm dutch, but I benefit from belgian infrastructure that was paid for by colonizers, so, according to CJ, I shouldn't oppose belgian reparations even if it's coming out of my taxes.
That's a fair point.
>For 2) you're echoing the argument I laid out in my posts back to me (albeit with more EA vocabulary): see everything I wrote in the counterarguments of 2. I had hoped you'd go more into the second part of the statement: "or at least substantially reduce the net good that they do with second-order harms.". The first part is trivial but that second part is where the real meat is. Do the second order effects of GiveDirectly put it above other EA charities like deworming?
I did try to allude to this a little, but didn't take the point further because I don't have all the information I'd need to have a more substantive opinion here. I generally support direct cash transfers over in-kind transfers (ironically in the west, this seems to often be coded as a "neoliberal" opinion). The reason I suspect that in-kind aid to Africa is more cost effective than cash transfers is that I think (though, again, I could be wrong) that poorest people in the world live in communities with the least market penetration (also by definition) and therefore *could not buy things like malaria bed nets even if they wanted to*. It's not a matter of paternalism, it's a matter of market access. Again, I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise here - if I'm wrong about the above, that would definitely change my credence on the net utility of cash transfers vs in kind aid, and I'd redirect at least some of my donations from GiveWell to GiveDirectly.
>If you endorse (most forms of) moral realism, you might think you can measure what's best for people, but if you endorse (most forms of) moral anti-realism you might want to defer to the people themselves. So if you put some credence into moral anti-realism, it might be a good idea to give to GiveDirectly. Since GiveDirectly scores almost at the top in an EA moral realist framework (top 8), and at the top in a (conventional) moral anti-realist framework.
My combined credence in moral realism and the "hard" anti-realisms (error theory, non-cognitivism, etc.) is very nearly 100%, and my credence in any relativist or particularist "middle ground" or "soft" anti-realism is close to 0%. I.e. I think that morality is either a) fake (giving me no reason to donate to charity at all, or do anything for that matter) or b) universal (giving me no a priori reason to defer to the people I'm giving charity to).
>For most of human history people have had a paternalistic bias: people thought they knew better than recipients. And for most of human history it would've been both easier, and better, if they had just given them the money.
Again, I don't actually disagree here, and in market contexts I favor cash transfers over in-kind transfers. I think there's a very good chance that GiveWell's top charities outperform GiveDirectly for non-paternalistic reasons.
EA listening should not be measured by participation of beneficiaries in the running of the organizations. If they were enfranchised enough to run the organizations they wouldn’t be beneficiaries. What’s more, having a handful of people run organizations based on their small sample size lived experience is still very unrepresentative. The way to listen is to conduct proper needs assessments of your beneficiaries, and measure at scale whether the intervention is working (which nearly always involves speaking to beneficiaries at scale)
We can't really quantify "amount of listening" so we use an analysis of the charities, testimonies from on the ground, and the demographics of the movement. The demographics I used as a proxy were not those of the people running the organizations, but rather the movement as a whole. So if people on the ground were heavily represented in EA forum discussions we wouldn't expect to see the demographics we observe (i.e. mostly white, western males).
People who fill out the EA survey (which naturally skews very online, English speaking, and covers all cause areas) do not represent the staff of EA orgs and their delivery partners in the global health space. If you have much to do with any EA global health charities you’ll know that the in country staff doing the work are not likely to take the EA survey.
Replace “run” with “work at” and my points still stand.
Where’s the analysis of the charities? Is a survey that’s not representative of what it seeks to measure, “analysis of the charities” that amounts to a couple quotes from academics, and a single testimony from on the ground supposed to constitute a strong case that EA doesn’t listen?
I find it ironic that a post alleging that EA fails to meaningfully engage with and listen to the beneficiaries of aims to serve seems to have not meaningfully engaged with the movement it’s writing about
Interesting post, but you seem to come dangerously close to endorsing a stance that cash transfers = what recipients actually want. There are lots of situations in which cash might not actually be the thing recipients want. For instance, non-cash transfer charities can solve collective action problems, and have expertise that can't really be bought with cash. Somebody might receive a cash transfer, but really want a better healthcare facility where they live, yet their own cash transfer might not be sufficient to get that, since it's pretty all-or-nothing whether there's a new healthcare facility. There might also be social norms that make receiving goods better than cash, like how in many countries cash is not considered a suitable gift. Obviously I can't say what EA aid recipients think, as I have the typical white American EA background, but if somebody were trying to help me I wouldn't necessarily want cash as my top priority. I'm not actually sure if I'm arguing against something anybody actually believes, but it seems possible for somebody reading this post to come to that conclusion so I wanted to point out a reason against it. Again, I do appreciate you writing this post a lot.
> but you seem to come dangerously close to endorsing a stance that cash transfers = what recipients actually want.
Not at all, to quote another comment of mine in this thread:
> there is a way to both give in-kind *and* respect people's autonomy, namely by asking them in advance (though many times this is impossible for logistical reasons).
A very good analysis! The point on unequal demographics stands, even when considering Aidan's point that EA survey data =/= on the ground charity work or employee demographics. I want to highlight some great community building initiatives within developing economies such as the very popular EAGx Phillipinnes in 2023 and EAGx Latam in 2024 and next month there will be (one of?) the first EAGx Nigeria. EA started in Oxford and expanding its demographics internationally is tough, even western countries such as Italy and Poland somewhat struggled in their community building efforts.
As an academic exercise, this is a fine piece. It’s a touchy subject, and I appreciate that you are broaching it.
I do think there’s an unaddressed element, however. The comments here and on ACX that question the existence of such a thing as “neocolonialism”, or suggest that colonialism in Africa wasn’t that bad, are echoes of a broader discussion that has been a mainstay of Scott Alexander’s writing and the broader Rationalist community which EA is embedded in: race and IQ.
Alexander defends Lynn’s flawed IQ maps, and has spun off two forums — datasecretslox and themotte — that are so severely anti-black that few non-“witches” even participate.
Of course, Alexander is a public intellectual first and an EA second, and many if not most of the anonymous contributors to the spinoff forums are not themselves EA.
But as a public intellectual, Scott Alexander and the Rationalist community do bear considerable responsibility for the mainstreaming of race-and-IQ discourse in recent years. This discourse is not inherently racist, but I think it is fair to notice that it is deployed to justify oppression and exclusion of black people historically and contemporarily, in Africa and the diaspora.
If blacks are genetically determined to have low IQ, what is the point of investing in their education or economic development? Why help them to improve their institutions and gain sovereignty? Wouldn’t these resources be wasted on people with such low human capital?
These are the underlying logics of many people within and surrounding the EA community.
As a black person who has been around EA and Rationalist spaces for 10+ years, I continue to observe and take part in these environments because there is still some alpha when it comes to AI research, but I and most other black people I know are deeply suspicious of the motives and intentions behind EA.
To put it simply, people who explain the inequalities of the world by appealing to the heritability of intelligence tend to downplay other plausible explanations (again, see the dismissal of neocolonialism as a concept), and tend to disregard or display animus towards high IQ black people.
Yes I agree, this was also the (biggest) reason I left EA, as can be seen on my EA forum page. However, while it's certainly related, it's also strictly speaking beyond the scope of this blogpost, which only analyzes the donations. If people are interested in an overview of the links between EA/Rationalism and HBD, I would recommend this series by philosopher David Thorstad (in which I'm also featured): https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/human-biodiversity/
Thanks for the link. Yeah, I get the point of scoping the piece to donations, but I do think that it’s equally important to address the relevant ideological background.
I’m reading to the Reflective Altruism series on HBD now.
I recall the brouhaha around Hanania et al at Manifest. I suppose I take a different view to it, though.
The prevalence of these worldviews in Rationalist (and thus EA by extension) spaces was clear back in 2014. Anti-SJW discourse was always a thing. Sneerclub was a thing. By 2020, wokeness in the pejorative sense had become unbearably annoying, even (or especially) to people who want a more egalitarian world.
The educated liberal world had become culturally hegemonic, and consequently racism was framed as a disease infecting Red States, poor White ethnics, the police, “systems”, and sociopaths. Everyone and everything except elite liberals.
The taboo against racism, cancellation campaigns for airing commonly-held if gauche views, and norms against platforming problematic voices created a chilling effect, making racism a transgressive act. This opened the door for vice signaling, where young men could garner status and sex appeal for edgelording.
Given the real range of worldviews that exist, I see the silver lining in an expanded Overton window. Overt racism is now expressed by many of the most successful technologists of our time. It may be jarring to process the implications, but is it really worse that people who were shamed into silence are now freely speaking their mind?
Among the most effective anti-anti-racist arguments was that racism is rare and people of color are oversensitive. In the era of Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, that’s no longer plausible.
Now, we all have to acknowledge that racism is prevalent, that racial stereotypes are simple heuristics, and that their simplicity trades off against more nuanced, accurate, and ethical cognitive processes that require more cognitive resources to process.
We simply can’t tell people to not think how they think, not say what they think, and expect that repression won’t encounter backlash.
Consider how deplatforming, exclusion, and the refusal to engage in controversial discussions applies to conversations like this one. Many people get triggered by words like “neocolonialism” and refuse to engage in good faith, as this comment section demonstrates.
> The taboo against racism, cancellation campaigns for airing commonly-held if gauche views, and norms against platforming problematic voices created a chilling effect, making racism a transgressive act.
Right, but this is a "damned if you do damned if you don't" scenario for the lefties, and a (as we TV-tropes editors call it) "xanatos gambit" for the alt-right agitators. Allow them to "punch down" and the marginalized get punched. Try to prevent them from doing so and they can get more news coverage on how they got "cancelled" (I maintain that most of these "canceled" agitators really didn't get censored/cancelled, and true censorship is at an historic low). I don't have a quick solution for this btw. I think it requires a restructuring of social media algorithms away from controversy/rage-bait posts and towards peer-vetted/well-cited posts, which won't happen as long as they're operated for profit.
> This opened the door for vice signaling, where young men could garner status and sex appeal for edgelording.
I don't think they, on average, actually got sex appeal from it. (see, e.g. loneliness epidemic)
> Given the real range of worldviews that exist, I see the silver lining in an expanded Overton window. Overt racism is now expressed by many of the most successful technologists of our time. It may be jarring to process the implications, but is it really worse that people who were shamed into silence are now freely speaking their mind?
If it was the case that it didn't cause racism to increase but merely to reveal how prevalent it is, I would agree with you. My worry is that it *is* causing racism to increase.
Anti racism got excessive. Defund the police was a right-wing framing: cut the govt budget. But what’s actually needed is investment in building communities. DEI trainings became racist in their own way, reifying tropes of racial essentialism (“timeliness is White Supremacy culture”).
Racist jokes are harmful not because their magic words are injurious, but because they remind people of their powerlessness and subordinated position. It’s a mistake to think that they construct that position, or that protecting people from being reminded of their subordination is of real longterm benefit.
Without a hierarchy of social status by race, racial jokes aren’t offensive. And the flattening of racial hierarchies is a megatrend modulated by cycles of progress and backlash.
While there have been losses, eg of Affirmative Action and DEI programs, it’s worth mentioning that these are double-edged policies that mark their beneficiaries with stigma.
At the same time, there is a growing consciousness and discourse of decolonization and anti-imperialism.
In my mind, denial of the existence or impact of neocolonialism is substantially more racist than HBD/genetic determinism. The former requires flagrantly ignoring all observable evidence and scholarship; the latter is the normal discourse of all professional sports coverage.
Indeed, part of the lie of HBD discourse is that it’s controversial. You can’t watch ESPN for more than a few hours without hearing some discussion of genetics and race, with White players framed as “smart” and Black players as “freak athletes”.
I can't help but notice that these critics of EA mainly only talk in generalities, often in generalities that seem quite disconnected from reality. What are the EA "education" programs Emily Clough is referring to? What are the "key services" Acemoglu is referring to? Even if he is referring to bednet distribution, well, AMF doesn't actually do the net distribution and in the cases I've seen, that was done by national governments.
> What are the EA "education" programs Emily Clough is referring to?
Well she's talking about India and the research she did in Rajasthan, so probably TaRL?
> What are the "key services" Acemoglu is referring to? Even if he is referring to bednet distribution, well, AMF doesn't actually do the net distribution and in the cases I've seen, that was done by national governments.
I think he meant in general, not just healthcare. Though even with things like AMF and Vaccine Alliance, there is the risk of the government becoming reliant on their logistics chains/expertise (not saying that's definitely not "worth it" just saying that it could be a dependence). I think it does lower trust in the local government as he points out, although that might not be a bad thing in every case.
> Political scientist Emily Clough, for example, has argued that when an EA-aligned charity...
So the question isn't whether it's an EA organization itself, but whether it's EA aligned, which they are. TaRL has been praised in EA and had been added to GWWC top rated charities list. Same for the others, GAVI has been praised and helped by EA.
A distinction needs to be made between arguments that EA is good but could be better, and arguments that EA is actively bad. I often see people treat arguments for the former conclusion as arguments for the latter, even though they're nearly opposites. The former implies we need more EA, while the latter implies we need less. And I don't really think there are any serious arguments for the latter conclusion, but there are lots of arguments for the former. For example, the criticism that EA focuses on addressing symptoms but not root causes and doesn't do enough to support systemic change makes a lot of sense, and it should especially appeal to EAs with a longtermist perspective. However, it's not an argument against EA - it's an argument that EA could be doing more. If you have a deadly disease, addressing the symptoms is still a good and important thing to do, even if addressing the root cause would be even better. Likewise, the criticism that EA doesn't listen to local activists and the people it's meant to help about what would be most effective could be a problem - maybe EA would be more effective if it took more account of these people's voices. But again, it doesn't show that EA is bad, just that it may be less effective than it could be in a hypothetical scenario where it took more voices into account. I'm also not 100% sure the criticism is valid - maybe examining something with a detached view gives you a better picture of what interventions would be best than you would get from asking local activists personally tied up with the issue, and maybe EAs have better access to information and more time to analyze it - but it at least seems likely enough to be valid that EAs should look for ways to get more input from them.
The only criticism that could actually show EA to be bad is the idea that it hurts long-term development by making people dependent on aid, but the evidence is lacking for this, and it's much more likely to be the other way around - desperately poor countries are going to have a much harder time developing if people are constantly dying of malaria and don't have the excess resources to invest into long-term development. So improving people's material conditions in the short term is also much more likely to foster long-term development.
I 𝚠̶𝚊̶𝚗̶𝚝̶ ̶𝚝̶𝚘̶ agree with you that improving the material conditions by giving malaria bednets, vaccines etc, outweighs the harms of eroding local institutions, but I'm also very hesitant to be disagreeing with two Nobel prize winning development economists about development economics.
I think either way you'll be disagreeing with Nobel prize winning development economists about development economics, with Duflo, Banerjee and Kremer winning in 2019.
It's been years since I read poor economics so take this with a grain of salt, but I seem to distinctly remember that they were much closer to the decolonial side on the 'decolonial-paternalism' spectrum, with them deferring a lot to the recipients, stressing that they had a lot of local knowledge, and them championing direct cash transfers and field tries with input from local institutions.
They might edge more towards paternalism than their fellow nobel prize winners, but it seems they're much more on the decolonial side than mainstream EA.
They seem more similar to me, a lot of mainstream development EA is based on early work by J-PAL. And a lot of the paternalistic critiques of Poor Economics is connected to their use of RCTs.
So after reading your first comment I took my copy of Poor economics and started reading through it again, and I'm now even more convinced they're less paternalistic than EA. They again and again emphasize the limits of outside experts and the importance of local knowledge, listening to the poor, building local capacity, adapting to specific locations... Very different from the kinds of top-down utilitarianism that wants to bypass governments (while not seeking out local voices) that I known from my half a decade of working for EA.
I agree the book talks about that a lot, but the main suggestions they come up with are RCT focused, which by their nature are more paternalistic (if you're testing for what works, that is trading off against listening to beneficiaries).
Interesting! Re arg. 3 listening to recipient voices - I worry there's a potential gap between the kinds of help people ask for and the kinds of help that are cost-effective in helping the most f people possible? If someone asked what kind of help I wanted, I'd say that I'd rather have a decent job than a .1% reduction in my risk of death. But if a philanthropist with limited funds has a choice between giving me a job or giving a thousand people a .1% reduction in their risk of death, I'd think they should probably do the latter (as long as we all at least consent to the intervention). It also seems important to note that many ea interventions help very young children whose preferences can't be polled directly...
Wait, is the tradeoff between a decent job and *only me* having a .1% reduction in risk of death, or me having a job and a thousand people having a .1% reduction in the risk of death? I get that for a "homo-economicus" (purely self-interested rational agent) there is no difference, but for real humans this would make a huge amount of difference. In any case, if everyone consents to a collective .1% reduction over a .1% chance at a job, this is the same as letting them choose.
But I think you were trying to set up a dilemma where a poor persons stated preference might not be cost-effective. I think that, in this case, we run into a bit of philosophical issue. If you're a moral realist, you might think you can measure what's best for people, but a moral anti-realist might want to defer to the people themselves. However, even if, like some (most?) EAs you believe in moral realism and think our current measurements of effectiveness are (approximately) correct, there's still a case to be made for deferring.
As I briefly touched on in my previous post, direct cash transfers are extremely cost effective, and was one of GiveWell's top charities for years. For most of human history people have thought they know better than recipients, and for most of human history it would've been both easier, and better, if they had just given them the money.
Now, maybe this time we really nailed it, and the four top GiveWell charities are genuinely the best, but even GiveWell thinks DCTs are *one of* the best (~top 10) and gave a grant to GiveDirectly (DCT charity) just months ago. If you put any credence in the possibility that our paternalistic overconfidence of the past centuries is still present, or if you put any credence into moral anti-realism, it might be a good idea to give to GiveDirectly instead.
As for children, a very similar argument applies but for giving money to the parents. I'll admit that it's slightly weakened, but I personally think it's still "strong enough".
>Wait, is the tradeoff between a decent job and *only me* having a .1% reduction in risk of death, or me having a job and a thousand people having a .1% reduction in the risk of death?
Sorry - I meant the latter! Seems that while any given person would prefer a job to a .1% risk in death, we might not be able to afford to give every person a job, but we can give everyone a .1% risk reduction of death. I suppose if people preferred a .1% at a job over a .1% reduction of death risk, that would be an interesting question. But I would just be a little surprised if that turned out to be anyone's considered preference, just as I'd be surprised if someone were willing to take the probabilistically equivalent gamble of flipping a coin to either get a job or die.
My point is to simply push back against simplistically framing the dilemma as "people care about jobs and infrastructure, but they care much less about malaria, so we should give them jobs and infrastructure" w/o taking into account the quantity tradeoff at all. That seems clearly wrong to me - we need to consider how many people we're helping, and accept that this may conflict w/ giving people their top-preference if it's too difficult and expensive. I don't I'm necessarily appealing to any controversial ethical view - if people were totally indifferent, upon reflection, to dying from malaria, then per moral anti-realism, subjectivism, value pluralism etc., then sure, protecting them from malaria might not be best for them. My understanding is that they aren't - it's just much lower on their list of priorities due to the low probability of it happening to any given person, sort of like the flu in the US.
>If you put any credence in the possibility that our paternalistic overconfidence of the past centuries is still present, or if you put any credence into moral anti-realism, it might be a good idea to give to GiveDirectly instead.
Interesting thought, I'll have to think about this! The main reason I'd expect (totally from the armchair) for the T4 charities to robustly win out is that they transport extremely valuable goods (malaria nets, vaccines, etc) to remote areas where people otherwise wouldn't be able to buy those goods with their own money at the local store (and they might not have the purely factual knowledge to demand the import of these goods). But perhaps, with enough foreign currency floating around from DCT's, those goods would show up in the long-run.
>As for children, a very similar argument applies but for giving money to the parents. I'll admit that it's slightly weakened, but I personally think it's still "strong enough".
Not sure I follow - my original worry is just that the shot-calling adults in a community might not care about child mortality as much as their own interests, because their own lives aren't directly at stake.
> Sorry - I meant the latter! Seems that while any given person would prefer a job to a .1% risk in death, we might not be able to afford to give every person a job, but we can give everyone a .1% risk reduction of death. I suppose if people preferred a .1% at a job over a .1% reduction of death risk, that would be an interesting question. But I would just be a little surprised if that turned out to be anyone's considered preference
So, I can interpret this scenario in two ways: 1) the 1000 recipients don't know in advance whether they would be selected for the job, so it becomes a tradeoff between a .1% chance of a job for them, or a .1% risk reduction of death for everyone. In this scenario, I agree, people would likely choose the latter. So you probably meant:
2) One of the 1000 potential recipients has to choose between either certainly getting a job, or giving themselves and the 999 other recipients a .1% risk reduction of death. In this scenario I would contend that the relevant person to ask consent from is not just the 1 person, but all of the 1000 (e.g. putting it to a vote).
The purpose is not to give everyone a job, the purpose is to give everyone a voice. If people vote for the job, the job it is, if people vote for the risk reduction, we provide the risk reduction.
> Not sure I follow - my original worry is just that the shot-calling adults in a community might not care about child mortality as much as their own interests, because their own lives aren't directly at stake.
This seems to go against what we know about parental psychology. By and large, a stranger in a foreign country will be less invested and knowledgeable about a child, than the parents of said child. So, the reasoning goes, by giving parents cash to spend on their children, they will spend it better than what we can come up with from our faraway information-deprived state.
>The purpose is not to give everyone a job, the purpose is to give everyone a voice. If people vote for the job, the job it is, if people vote for the risk reduction, we provide the risk reduction.
As long as, when we listen to people's voices, we get super crystal clear on the cost-effectiveness tradeoffs they're willing to make, I'm on board with this!
This is a good piece - you should post it on the EA forum!
Thank you! Though, as I alluded to in my EA democracy post, my years on the EA forum have given me extreme aversion towards posting there. There's currently a discussion on the forum on whether the "karma system" should be reformed. Depending on how that conversation goes, I might return there and post it, though don't hold your breath.
Al does not have emotions or emotional intelligence. Yes that is something that is really needed for it to be a truly general purpose technology . I don’t think that it is useless or counterproductive even though it has that killer flaw to it. I think people just need to keep engaging with it and the companies that are developing the technology.
I think you might have left this comment on the wrong post :). Regardless, it does appear that LLM's do not have emotions or emotional intelligence, though I don't think the former is necessary for the latter, and we might reach a future where AIs have the latter, but not the former.
Don’t help blacks
On the one hand, this is a horrible comment I should ban, on the other hand, the username does provide an accurate social signal on what kinds of people hold this opinion...
To ask the question is an endorsement of EA. :)
How so?
What I understand concern over “neocolonialism” to mean is concern with developing countries adapting policies and attitudes that have been successful in making developed countries “developed.” EA is an example of that kid of pragmatic more bang for the buck attitude.
Euhm no, no one uses "neocolonialism" in that way and I don't know how you walked away from this post with that definition given that I had a whole section explicitly on "What Is Neocolonialism":
> Colonialism, as defined by political philosophers, is the reduction of one people’s sovereignty by another, typically through direct political and military domination.
Neocolonialism, by contrast, operates after formal independence. It sustains the same power dynamics through economic control, international institutions, and cultural influence.
As philosopher Oseni Taiwo Afisi writes, neocolonialism refers to “the actions and effects of certain remnant features and agents of the colonial era in a given society.” It’s colonialism without conquest.
That sound pretty much to me like like what I said. But if opposing “sustaining the same power dynamics through economic control” is compatible with EA, I’m sure they will be happy to take the donation.
'A country becoming democratic' and 'A country being subjected to colonialism without the conquest' sound the same to you? Also what do you even mean by "But if opposing “sustaining the same power dynamics through economic control” is compatible with EA, I’m sure they will be happy to take the donation."? Who's "they", the grammar indicates it's EA but that doesn't make sense with the "donation", but the donation part doesn't really make sense in any case.
This is spiraling away from anything sensible. Let’s go back to seeing if I can find any sense in “neocolonialism.” The definition you gave is word salad to me. I’m hugely on board with colonialism having left a negative social legacy but I’d cash that out in specific policies, institutions and attitudes rather than calling it “neocolonialism.”
This just isn't true, because the effective altruist movement stands for something much more specific than "altruism should be effective" (which probably the vast majority of people believe).
The CEA gives roughly a dozen "core principles of effective altruism": https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/core-principles. You don't have to adopt these specific principles to worry about poorly handled aid harming people.
Is charity neocolonial? What if the charity money is not wasted?
Charity is often *in practice* neocolonial (see e.g. the books I linked), but charity is not *necessarily* neocolonial (see e.g. my discussion in this post and the previous on direct cash transfer charities)
"EA's most celebrated charities may save lives without empowering communities".
Oh no. What bastards those EAs are. Next time your surgeon gives you life-saving open-heart surgery, remember he's done nothing to empower your community.
No one used the term bastard here. My surgeon, the arguments goes, would actually empower my community since they provided the benefit of improving my material needs, without undermining my local institutions.
*I hope that's also what EA-aid does, but it's hard to tell.
A few somewhat unrelated thoughts:
1. It's much less obvious that colonialism was a (large) net negative in Africa than, say, India. The Indian subcontinent was ~25% of estimated global GDP on the eve of Company rule IIRC but less than 4%, to my best recollection, upon full independence. The argument that British mercantilism & the deindustrialization policies, along with the abuses of the East India Company, harmed India much more than European institutions helped it is pretty persuasive.
With Africa, two countries were never colonized - Liberia & Ethiopia (not counting the brief Italian occupation for the former). I'm going to exclude Liberia because it's a strange edge case and factor in Botswana, which was one of the "least" colonized African countries in that the current state is fairly coterminous with pre-colonial polities, has a lot of elite continuity, and was a fairly autonomous British protectorate. Ethiopia is a worst-case scenario, since the last Solomonic emperor, and the communist government that succeeded him, both pretty horribly mismanaged the country, and it's GDP per capita is just over $1k USD. Botswana is the best-case example - it is resource "blessed" (its diamond deposits were not discovered until after the British left) and its elites have generally managed the country well - its per capita GDP is ~$8k - much better than India, and not too far behind China. We'd therefore expect a no-colonialism alternative Africa to average somewhere between these extremes, and an African continent with an average per capita GDP of, say, $4k or $6k would still be terribly poor (though less poor than India, to be fair.)
This point might have been better addressed to a previous piece of yours, in that the utilitarian argument for economic assistance to Africa is much better than the reparations argument.
2. Even if EA is neocolonial in all the way its critics assert, it's not necessarily net bad. I'd be surprised to hear that a mother of children in Africa would refuse to give her children donated mosquito nets or include them in vaccine incentive programs if she read an essay about EA and neocolonialism by a western academic.
It's just not obvious to me that marginally contributing to corruption is bad enough to make EA net negative - and contributing to (certain forms of) corruption might not even be bad! Look at Tammany Hall and the Irish! The biggest piece of anti-corruption / civil service reform legislation in US history - the Pendleton Act - was in large part designed to break up Republican patronage networks in the Deep South, thereby crushing the economic and political prospects of southern freedmen. There was a good piece from Yaw a while back wherein he pointed out that countries usually get rich, then fix corruption - not the other way around.
I don't think we can use Botswana and Ethiopia as a counterfactual mirror into what an uncolonized Africa would have looked like, since politics and markets are interconnected. As an analogy, the Netherlands was neutral during WW1, yet their life-expectancy still declined sharply. Yet it would be ludicrous for a German to say "What we did to Belgium wasn't a (large) net negative, if we take the Netherlands as a counterfactual Belgium we'll see it's not (that) bad". Obviously we can't do that since if all the neighboring countries are going to shit, you're not going to be doing well either.
We do have more academic ways to study the effects of colonialism on Africa. For example, we can compare groups that were ethnically partitioned by the colonizers vs those that weren't. When we do so we find (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17620/w17620.pdf):
> we find that the incidence, severity and duration of violence are higher in the historical homelands of partitioned groups. Third, we shed some light on the mechanisms showing
that military interventions from neighboring countries are much more likely in the homelands of split groups. Fourth, our exploration of the status of ethnic groups in the political arena reveals that partitioned ethnicities are systematically discriminated from the national government and are more likely to participate in ethnic civil wars. Fifth, using individual-level data we document that respondents identifying with split groups have lower access to public goods and worse educational outcomes. The uncovered evidence brings in the foreground the detrimental repercussions of ethnic partitioning.
We can do similar studies showing that show how colonizers drew the borders had negative effects: https://books.google.be/books?id=KpUqnwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y
We also have historical records of what colonizers did in the colonies, e.g. king leopold's "congo free state" was responsible for the deaths of *millions* of people, through brutal forced labor practices, decreased agricultural productivity and the destruction of many local economies: https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905 (the 10 million cited in this book is disputed by some scholars, but all scholars agree that it's in the millions) And it's not like Belgian meddling in Congo is all in the distant past, as recently as 1961 did they assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the DRC: Neocolonialism is ongoing. I mean, basically all scholars of colonialism agree that it was bad for the colonies, maybe scroll through the wikipedia page if you want to see some further research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_European_colonialism_and_colonization#Colonial_actions_and_their_impacts
> It's just not obvious to me that marginally contributing to corruption is bad enough to make EA net negative - and contributing to (certain forms of) corruption might not even be bad!
This post is not about whether EA is net negative, also I primarily talked talked about institutional weakening, not corruption. However, corruption *is* actually very bad for an economy. Just because we can find individual historical examples of it turning out good doesn't mean it's not bad. We can also find individual examples of murders and theft and arson across history that turned out to be good, yet we can still say that murder and arson and theft are bad for an economy. I think yaw would agree, since he ends that post with:
> I am not saying that corruption is good, nor am I saying removing corruption isn’t necessary.
His claim seems to be that higher economic development makes it easier to tackle corruption, which scholars agree with, not that tackling corruption wouldn't help with economic development, which scholars would disagree with. Corruption does have a negative effect on economic growth, both in developed countries (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379122140_Corruption_and_Economic_Growth_An_Empirical_Study_in_12_Countries) and in developing countries ( https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23322039.2022.2129368#d1e879 )
Thanks for this reply!
That's a fair point about Belgium and the Netherlands; my Botswana/Ethiopia analysis was very "off-the-cuff" and not totally scientific, but it should cast doubt that Africa's economic development would be on par with Europe had colonialism never occurred.
And I should be clear that I'm referring solely to current economic outcomes in Africa when discussing the negative effects of colonialism, but you're absolutely right to point out the atrocities committed by European empires in the region. Belgium Congo was a moral horror regardless of its net effects on current per capita GDP in the DR Congo.
One point I do have to quibble with is about the partitioning of ethnic groups in Africa. I unfortunately forgot to save this, but there was an interest post on this site earlier about the supposed partition of pre-colonial states in Africa during the Berlin Conference. TL;DR, colonial borders in Africa pretty closely correspond to pre-colonial African states, and most straight-line borders are in empty desert or other lightly inhabited areas. There's probably something to be said about the British style of divide-and-rule imperialism, which was and is probably detrimental to the development of state capacity in post-colonial Africa.
The significance of this is that most ethnic groups that are partitioned in Africa are so divided as much because of pre-European imperialism than European imperialism.
RE: the corruption point, I was perhaps a bit too flippant about this, because you are of course correct that, generally speaking, corruption is bad. By broader point is that what we think of as "corruption" in the west used to be very common in much of the world and is more politely known as "patronage," and it's a fact of life basically everywhere without extremely high state capacity, rule of law, and centralized, bureaucratic social insurance systems. This argument against EA strikes me as being similar to rightists arguing against assistance to foreign countries b/c "well don't the corrupt dictators just take it all" but with leftist-y vibes.
***
I do want to be a little deferential here, because you clearly know more about this topic than I do, but my broader point is that "colonialism" and "neocolonialism" is thrown around to frame how we think of African development; while European imperialism has obviously had a profound effect on the continent, I don't think it's obvious that colonialism explains most or even a significant fraction of the difference in economic development, institutional strength, and general quality of life between Africa and Europe.
(Since this is the internet, and the internet is home to many unsavory characters, it is unfortunately necessary that I clarify that I'm not trying to be a "race realist" or HBD rightoid.)
Basically, I'm trying to say that Good Things Are Good and saving children from dying of malaria or malnutrition or preventable diseases is Good, and my credence that there are net-negative effects on institutional development or state capacity large enough to outweigh this good is extremely low. Moreover, the utilitarian argument for aid (Africa is very very poor and utility is a function of log consumption) very obviously works, but the reparations argument is less obvious because precolonial Africa was already very poor, and it's very difficult to sus out how much less poor Africa would be today if the European powers left them alone.
> Africa's economic development would be on par with Europe had colonialism never occurred.
This was not a claim I was defending, we we're talking about the claim:
> It's much less obvious that colonialism was a (large) net negative in Africa
The former claim is obviously not true given things like, geography, ecology, first mover advantage, compounding interests etc etc, however the latter claim is also not true given things like extractive infrastructure, population loss, new ethnic tension, development of asymmetric bargaining etc etc.
> And I should be clear that I'm referring solely to current economic outcomes in Africa when discussing the negative effects of colonialism, but you're absolutely right to point out the atrocities committed by European empires in the region. Belgium Congo was a moral horror regardless of its net effects on current per capita GDP in the DR Congo.
Well it almost certainly *did* have an effect on economic outcomes. We treat colonial history as a courtroom, where the colonizers are innocent until proven guilty and if we can't prove it had a negative effect on gdp we'd assume it didn't. However, this is almost impossible to prove quantitatively given there was basically no data collection going on and also everything was going to shit. But if we don't treat it like a courtroom, but treat it as a scientific question, then what would the null-hypothesis be? Remember, this was not in a time where there were billions of people, when Leopold killed between 5 and 13 million people that was about *half* of the population. I think I'm not being unreasonable when I say we should probably assume that killing half the population (among many other things) has a negative effect on gdp growth.
> an interest post on this site earlier about the supposed partition of pre-colonial states in Africa during the Berlin Conference. TL;DR, colonial borders in Africa pretty closely correspond to pre-colonial African states
I don't know which post you're referring to, but I would caution against believing what some blogger writes over what scientific studies show. Unless the blogpost debunked the studies I linked, but I very much doubt that. I mean, not only do we have scientific that show it, but in some cases we even explicitly have historical records of the colonizers saying they were doing it.
It's also important to note that it's not just the borders that were a problem with europe's ethnic partitioning project, it was also stoking/creating the ethnic tensions. A Belgian example again, because that's where I'm from and it's the history I know the best:
Before the european colonizers the difference between Hutis and Tutsis was mainly a fluid socioeconomic one, not a rigid ethnic one. Think: Hutu as word for the stereotypical farmer (class) and Tutsi as a word for stereotypical pastoralist (class). But then the Belgians came and not only transformed it into a racial division, they also said invented a story that Tutsi's came from the north and were closer to europeans and therefore the superior race. They backed this up with pseudo-scientific measurement (think skull stuff) to give it legitimacy. Then they gave Tutsis exclusive access to education, government jobs, and power, while Hutus were relegated to manual labor. To lock it in place they mandated ethnic ID cards, permanently locking people into Hutu or Tutsi categories based on ancestry, eliminating fluidity (previously, it was more like a class so Hutus could become Tutsis through things like cattle ownership or marriage).
If you think the Belgians couldn't have done more to guarantee an ethnic conflict, you don't know the Belgians: as decolonization neared they abruptly shifted support to the Hutu majority, fearing Tutsi-led independence movements. Then they armed Hutu extremists and allowed anti-Tutsi propaganda. This lead to mass killings, which were reciprocated with more massacres on and on and on, culminating in the Rwandan genocide (~75% of the Tutsi population was exterminated).
Again, if we treat this like a courtroom, we can't have a quantitative mathematical proof that Belgium created the massacres (though some quantitative studies come about as close as you possibly can with a historical case without a control group). And we don't have a direct decree for the massacres from Belgium (There is no secret tape of a Belgian saying "execute order 66, or something). But if instead we look at it like researchers it's pretty clear to say that Belgium created it. You know who also believes that? The Belgians, not only the contemporary Belgians (e.g. historian Filip Reyntjens wrote that the ID cards made the genocide "logistically possible") but even the colonizers themselves (e.g. Colonial administrator Pierre Ryckmans admitted: "We created a monster")
> used to be very common
Just because something is common, doesn't mean it's good. I think that in general we should look at the scientific evidence and not at whether something is common/a tradition, to determine if it's good.
> This argument against EA strikes me as being similar to rightists arguing against assistance to foreign countries b/c "well don't the corrupt dictators just take it all" but with leftist-y vibes.
No, it's not at all similar because leftists are in favor of giving and are even in favor of giving much *much* more, they just want to give it directly to the people, not to western foundations/charities.
> I do want to be a little deferential here, because you clearly know more about this topic than I do, but my broader point is that "colonialism" and "neocolonialism" is thrown around to frame how we think of African development; while European imperialism has obviously had a profound effect on the continent, I don't think it's obvious that colonialism explains most or even a significant fraction of the difference in economic development, institutional strength, and general quality of life between Africa and Europe.
I only know about Belgium, since that's where I live, though from what I've heard the other colonial empires weren't exactly nice either (I mean, the pirates of the carribean movies had a literally heartless chtulu grimreaper, but the biggest villains were still the british EIC and everyone was like; yeah that makes sense).
Again, the claim we we're discussing is not whether colonialism created *all* of the badness, but about whether it created *some* of the badness. And pretty much all the scholars agree that it did, and if you read the history you'll quickly be like; yeah that makes sense.
I appreciate you for indulging the ramblings of a random reply guy (I've been traveling, and jet lag may or may not have turned my brain to jelly, and in hindsight my posts could have been more focused & concise, and therefore productive)
I *think* we both agree that European imperialism had a net negative effect on the *current* economic and social conditions in Africa, and that it probably doesn't explain the entirety of the disparity between Africa and Europe. Over the course of this discussion you've raised a lot of good points and have certainly changed my credence on the relative weight of European imperialism on this disparity.
I want to try to offer better quality comments by specifying the underlying thing I'm trying to address about this post and another post of yours that I somewhat interpret as a companion post, in which you discuss the utilitarian vs. justice-based arguments for providing humanitarian & economic assistance to Africa.
Broadly, I think you're asserting that the EA community, and other similar philanthropic movements, should take the legacy of colonialism more seriously when they go about delivering aid to Africa. Specifically, I think there are two possible ideas that you've raised and discussed various arguments about:
1) The ongoing legacy of colonialism creates a moral responsibility for the Global North to indemnify the Global South for the continuing harms thereof;
2) The ongoing legacy of colonialism distorts aid given from the Global North to the Global South, raising the possibility that organizations like GiveWell might do more harm than good, or at least substantially reduce the net good that they do with second-order harms.
Essentially, I don't think that EA or philanthropy in general needs to be overly concerned with the legacy of colonialism because I think arguments (1) and (2) both fail.
I think (1) can be formulated in several ways, any of which probably fail.
You can argue that Europe was a net beneficiary and Africa was net harmed by colonialism, and that creates a moral obligation for Europe to indemnify Africa. But consider a hypothetic case where country A historically colonized country B. Let's say, that after extensive research, economists, historians, sociologists, etc. have determined that A's conquest of being actually had a net negative effect *on A* - because A-elites captured the rents of colonialism but dumped the cost of maintaining the empire on the general public, that mercantilism & income taxes to support imperial conquests distorted investments, etc. Let's also suppose that in this scenario, country B was a net beneficiary because country A built roads, schools, etc. that outweighed the burdens of imperial extraction. In this case, it would be *extremely odd* to assert that the people of country B ought to indemnify the people of country A - especially if B was still poorer than A today!
You might instead argue that colonialism a) harmed Africa and b) was imposed on Africans by Europeans against the will of the former; therefore, it is the *agency* of the Europeans and the *lack of agency* of the Africans that creates a moral responsibility. This runs into various problems of collective responsibility, like, should *all* Europeans have to pay an indemnity, even those who opposed their own nations' imperial projects? What about European states that were principalities or oligarchies for much or all of their colonial history? Can you justly hold a people responsible for the actions of the state when they are not their own masters?
Regarding (2), I think that the first-order positive effect on the maximally effective charities is so enormous that it would take some truly extraordinary magnitudes of negative second-order effects to outweigh them. The top charities right now save one marginal life for every ~$5k invested in the program; assuming 1 QALY is worth $100k and conservatively estimating that each life saved corresponds to only 2.5 QALYs, the proportional return on the original investment is x50 (!!!) Cash transfers might have fewer second-order negative effects, and they also have enormous first-order positive effects, but I think a lot of the maximum-impact in-kind transfers target places with little market penetration, where the effect of direct cash transfers would be dulled (if I'm wrong about this, I'm happy to be corrected!)
Importantly, I'm not even accounting for *positive* second order effects of current EA things like vaccine incentive programs and bed nets, such as:
- lower child/infant mortality rates --> reduction in hoarding --> higher female labor force participation --> improved economic output & status of women
- reduced school absences from disease, malnutrition, etc. --> increased human capital stocks --> higher state capacity, less violence
- reduced dependency on non-market & non-state social insurance systems (patronage, clan/family ties, etc.) --> stronger rule of law, reduction in authoritarian social norms, less corruption, etc. The benefits of this are enormous.
I'm therefore doubtful that the neocolonialism-related negative second-order effects of EA would overwhelm even the *positive* second-order effects of EA programs; they certainly don't overwhelm the first-order positive order effects of EA.
In short; I think EA succeeds at improving the human condition, the utilitarian argument for aid to Africa (or even more general Kantian arguments like a universal duty to help) work better than any justice-as-indemnification argument, and I don't think the legacy of colonialism changes either of these facts.
I don't believe 1. I never argued for 1. I endorse neither CJ nor utilitarianism, I was merely describing the arguments in the previous posts. It's also a bit strange to interpret that post as being either an endorsement of CJ or utilitarianism, since I discussed both.
But also, you're mixing deontology and consequentialism in a way no-one (to my knowledge) does. With consequentialism we only look at the consequences so we look at the hurt, independent of what caused it. With deontology we only looks at the actions, regardless of the consequences. But in your argument we look at the (inter)actions to establish the existence of reparations, but then look at consequences to establish the recipients of reparations. So if I try to punch you, but you dodge and I dislocate my shoulder, you have to compensate me? I know of no-one that endorses this view. This seems to be related to the conversation I had with Sol Hando (and many others) when I try to talk about reparations; they seem to assume (perhaps uncharitably) that deontology and consequentialism are mixed in ways no-one actually endorses.
> should *all* Europeans have to pay an indemnity, even those who opposed their own nations' imperial projects?
Sol Hando gave the same objection, but it's not applicable. Reparations are paid by *governments*, not individual people.
> What about European states that were principalities or oligarchies for much or all of their colonial history?
So to reuse the example I used with Sol Hando; CJ says you should repay if you benefit from it, even if you didn't do the crime. So if I steal your wallet and give it to my son then die of a heart-attack, CJ says my son should give it back to you even if he didn't steal it. I'm not a Belgian, I'm dutch, but I benefit from belgian infrastructure that was paid for by colonizers, so, according to CJ, I shouldn't oppose belgian reparations even if it's coming out of my taxes.
For 2) you're echoing the argument I laid out in my posts back to me (albeit with more EA vocabulary): see everything I wrote in the counterarguments of 2. I had hoped you'd go more into the second part of the statement: "or at least substantially reduce the net good that they do with second-order harms.". The first part is trivial but that second part is where the real meat is. Do the second order effects of GiveDirectly put it above other EA charities like deworming? I think it's plausible, especially for *some* charities EA has endorsed like DMI (and I'm not even going into the more speculative charities EAs have endorsed like 'leverage research').
But also, let's take a step back and look at some meta reasons why we might want to defer to local people. To adapt ideas from another comment I left in this thread:
If you endorse (most forms of) moral realism, you might think you can measure what's best for people, but if you endorse (most forms of) moral anti-realism you might want to defer to the people themselves. So if you put some credence into moral anti-realism, it might be a good idea to give to GiveDirectly. Since GiveDirectly scores almost at the top in an EA moral realist framework (top 8), and at the top in a (conventional) moral anti-realist framework.
Similarly, we can give a historical argument for erring on the side of DCT. For most of human history people have had a paternalistic bias: people thought they knew better than recipients. And for most of human history it would've been both easier, and better, if they had just given them the money.
Now, maybe this time is not like all the previous times we thought we had it, this time we really actually have it, and those four top GiveWell charities are genuinely the best. But if you put any credence in the possibility that our paternalistic bias of the past is still present, it might be worth it to give to the one on the top 8 (out of millions) that's not paternalistic, and not those in the top 4.
>I don't believe 1. I never argued for 1. I endorse neither CJ nor utilitarianism, I was merely describing the arguments in the previous posts. It's also a bit strange to interpret that post as being either an endorsement of CJ or utilitarianism, since I discussed both.
In both your posts you've raised arguments for and against the ideas that you've put forward, so I'm not trying to assume which position you actually hold, but register an opinion on the arguments you've put forth, regardless of which ones you agree with. One of the ideas you discuss is reparations which, unless I'm very mistaken, is basically (1). Sorry if that wasn't clearer.
>But also, you're mixing deontology and consequentialism in a way no-one (to my knowledge) does.
I'm not sure I follow here. Any conception of justice-as-indemnification, which is a very common view of justice, I think, is necessarily deontic (utilitarians reject justice as a moral concept, even if it might be *socially* useful) but has to account for quantifiable harms because the indemnity has to be calculated. Like, unless I am profoundly misunderstanding deontology, if you're a deontologist who thinks that stealing is wrong, and you witness A steal $100 from B, you'd think A would have a duty to return *$100* The broader point being that I don't agree that a purely deontic worldview would be totally insensible to measurable harms.
>Sol Hando gave the same objection, but it's not applicable. Reparations are paid by *governments*, not individual people.
Yes, but there is an opportunity cost. A Keynesian quibble might be that if European macroeconomies are below general equilibrium than the marginal cost to society to pay out reparations might be effectively zero. But if the economy is close to general equilibrium and/or the reparations are very large, then they'd be crowding out public/private spending through budget cuts/tax hikes. If your local government levied a one-time fine on you to cover the medical costs of a guy who was bit by your neighbor's dog, I assume you'd be mad about that.
>So if I steal your wallet and give it to my son then die of a heart-attack, CJ says my son should give it back to you even if he didn't steal it. I'm not a Belgian, I'm dutch, but I benefit from belgian infrastructure that was paid for by colonizers, so, according to CJ, I shouldn't oppose belgian reparations even if it's coming out of my taxes.
That's a fair point.
>For 2) you're echoing the argument I laid out in my posts back to me (albeit with more EA vocabulary): see everything I wrote in the counterarguments of 2. I had hoped you'd go more into the second part of the statement: "or at least substantially reduce the net good that they do with second-order harms.". The first part is trivial but that second part is where the real meat is. Do the second order effects of GiveDirectly put it above other EA charities like deworming?
I did try to allude to this a little, but didn't take the point further because I don't have all the information I'd need to have a more substantive opinion here. I generally support direct cash transfers over in-kind transfers (ironically in the west, this seems to often be coded as a "neoliberal" opinion). The reason I suspect that in-kind aid to Africa is more cost effective than cash transfers is that I think (though, again, I could be wrong) that poorest people in the world live in communities with the least market penetration (also by definition) and therefore *could not buy things like malaria bed nets even if they wanted to*. It's not a matter of paternalism, it's a matter of market access. Again, I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise here - if I'm wrong about the above, that would definitely change my credence on the net utility of cash transfers vs in kind aid, and I'd redirect at least some of my donations from GiveWell to GiveDirectly.
>If you endorse (most forms of) moral realism, you might think you can measure what's best for people, but if you endorse (most forms of) moral anti-realism you might want to defer to the people themselves. So if you put some credence into moral anti-realism, it might be a good idea to give to GiveDirectly. Since GiveDirectly scores almost at the top in an EA moral realist framework (top 8), and at the top in a (conventional) moral anti-realist framework.
My combined credence in moral realism and the "hard" anti-realisms (error theory, non-cognitivism, etc.) is very nearly 100%, and my credence in any relativist or particularist "middle ground" or "soft" anti-realism is close to 0%. I.e. I think that morality is either a) fake (giving me no reason to donate to charity at all, or do anything for that matter) or b) universal (giving me no a priori reason to defer to the people I'm giving charity to).
>For most of human history people have had a paternalistic bias: people thought they knew better than recipients. And for most of human history it would've been both easier, and better, if they had just given them the money.
Again, I don't actually disagree here, and in market contexts I favor cash transfers over in-kind transfers. I think there's a very good chance that GiveWell's top charities outperform GiveDirectly for non-paternalistic reasons.
EA listening should not be measured by participation of beneficiaries in the running of the organizations. If they were enfranchised enough to run the organizations they wouldn’t be beneficiaries. What’s more, having a handful of people run organizations based on their small sample size lived experience is still very unrepresentative. The way to listen is to conduct proper needs assessments of your beneficiaries, and measure at scale whether the intervention is working (which nearly always involves speaking to beneficiaries at scale)
We can't really quantify "amount of listening" so we use an analysis of the charities, testimonies from on the ground, and the demographics of the movement. The demographics I used as a proxy were not those of the people running the organizations, but rather the movement as a whole. So if people on the ground were heavily represented in EA forum discussions we wouldn't expect to see the demographics we observe (i.e. mostly white, western males).
People who fill out the EA survey (which naturally skews very online, English speaking, and covers all cause areas) do not represent the staff of EA orgs and their delivery partners in the global health space. If you have much to do with any EA global health charities you’ll know that the in country staff doing the work are not likely to take the EA survey.
Replace “run” with “work at” and my points still stand.
Where’s the analysis of the charities? Is a survey that’s not representative of what it seeks to measure, “analysis of the charities” that amounts to a couple quotes from academics, and a single testimony from on the ground supposed to constitute a strong case that EA doesn’t listen?
I find it ironic that a post alleging that EA fails to meaningfully engage with and listen to the beneficiaries of aims to serve seems to have not meaningfully engaged with the movement it’s writing about
Interesting post, but you seem to come dangerously close to endorsing a stance that cash transfers = what recipients actually want. There are lots of situations in which cash might not actually be the thing recipients want. For instance, non-cash transfer charities can solve collective action problems, and have expertise that can't really be bought with cash. Somebody might receive a cash transfer, but really want a better healthcare facility where they live, yet their own cash transfer might not be sufficient to get that, since it's pretty all-or-nothing whether there's a new healthcare facility. There might also be social norms that make receiving goods better than cash, like how in many countries cash is not considered a suitable gift. Obviously I can't say what EA aid recipients think, as I have the typical white American EA background, but if somebody were trying to help me I wouldn't necessarily want cash as my top priority. I'm not actually sure if I'm arguing against something anybody actually believes, but it seems possible for somebody reading this post to come to that conclusion so I wanted to point out a reason against it. Again, I do appreciate you writing this post a lot.
> Interesting post
Thanks!
> but you seem to come dangerously close to endorsing a stance that cash transfers = what recipients actually want.
Not at all, to quote another comment of mine in this thread:
> there is a way to both give in-kind *and* respect people's autonomy, namely by asking them in advance (though many times this is impossible for logistical reasons).
A very good analysis! The point on unequal demographics stands, even when considering Aidan's point that EA survey data =/= on the ground charity work or employee demographics. I want to highlight some great community building initiatives within developing economies such as the very popular EAGx Phillipinnes in 2023 and EAGx Latam in 2024 and next month there will be (one of?) the first EAGx Nigeria. EA started in Oxford and expanding its demographics internationally is tough, even western countries such as Italy and Poland somewhat struggled in their community building efforts.
As an academic exercise, this is a fine piece. It’s a touchy subject, and I appreciate that you are broaching it.
I do think there’s an unaddressed element, however. The comments here and on ACX that question the existence of such a thing as “neocolonialism”, or suggest that colonialism in Africa wasn’t that bad, are echoes of a broader discussion that has been a mainstay of Scott Alexander’s writing and the broader Rationalist community which EA is embedded in: race and IQ.
Alexander defends Lynn’s flawed IQ maps, and has spun off two forums — datasecretslox and themotte — that are so severely anti-black that few non-“witches” even participate.
Of course, Alexander is a public intellectual first and an EA second, and many if not most of the anonymous contributors to the spinoff forums are not themselves EA.
But as a public intellectual, Scott Alexander and the Rationalist community do bear considerable responsibility for the mainstreaming of race-and-IQ discourse in recent years. This discourse is not inherently racist, but I think it is fair to notice that it is deployed to justify oppression and exclusion of black people historically and contemporarily, in Africa and the diaspora.
If blacks are genetically determined to have low IQ, what is the point of investing in their education or economic development? Why help them to improve their institutions and gain sovereignty? Wouldn’t these resources be wasted on people with such low human capital?
These are the underlying logics of many people within and surrounding the EA community.
As a black person who has been around EA and Rationalist spaces for 10+ years, I continue to observe and take part in these environments because there is still some alpha when it comes to AI research, but I and most other black people I know are deeply suspicious of the motives and intentions behind EA.
To put it simply, people who explain the inequalities of the world by appealing to the heritability of intelligence tend to downplay other plausible explanations (again, see the dismissal of neocolonialism as a concept), and tend to disregard or display animus towards high IQ black people.
Yes I agree, this was also the (biggest) reason I left EA, as can be seen on my EA forum page. However, while it's certainly related, it's also strictly speaking beyond the scope of this blogpost, which only analyzes the donations. If people are interested in an overview of the links between EA/Rationalism and HBD, I would recommend this series by philosopher David Thorstad (in which I'm also featured): https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/human-biodiversity/
Thanks for the link. Yeah, I get the point of scoping the piece to donations, but I do think that it’s equally important to address the relevant ideological background.
I’m reading to the Reflective Altruism series on HBD now.
I recall the brouhaha around Hanania et al at Manifest. I suppose I take a different view to it, though.
The prevalence of these worldviews in Rationalist (and thus EA by extension) spaces was clear back in 2014. Anti-SJW discourse was always a thing. Sneerclub was a thing. By 2020, wokeness in the pejorative sense had become unbearably annoying, even (or especially) to people who want a more egalitarian world.
The educated liberal world had become culturally hegemonic, and consequently racism was framed as a disease infecting Red States, poor White ethnics, the police, “systems”, and sociopaths. Everyone and everything except elite liberals.
The taboo against racism, cancellation campaigns for airing commonly-held if gauche views, and norms against platforming problematic voices created a chilling effect, making racism a transgressive act. This opened the door for vice signaling, where young men could garner status and sex appeal for edgelording.
Given the real range of worldviews that exist, I see the silver lining in an expanded Overton window. Overt racism is now expressed by many of the most successful technologists of our time. It may be jarring to process the implications, but is it really worse that people who were shamed into silence are now freely speaking their mind?
Among the most effective anti-anti-racist arguments was that racism is rare and people of color are oversensitive. In the era of Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, that’s no longer plausible.
Now, we all have to acknowledge that racism is prevalent, that racial stereotypes are simple heuristics, and that their simplicity trades off against more nuanced, accurate, and ethical cognitive processes that require more cognitive resources to process.
We simply can’t tell people to not think how they think, not say what they think, and expect that repression won’t encounter backlash.
Consider how deplatforming, exclusion, and the refusal to engage in controversial discussions applies to conversations like this one. Many people get triggered by words like “neocolonialism” and refuse to engage in good faith, as this comment section demonstrates.
> The taboo against racism, cancellation campaigns for airing commonly-held if gauche views, and norms against platforming problematic voices created a chilling effect, making racism a transgressive act.
Right, but this is a "damned if you do damned if you don't" scenario for the lefties, and a (as we TV-tropes editors call it) "xanatos gambit" for the alt-right agitators. Allow them to "punch down" and the marginalized get punched. Try to prevent them from doing so and they can get more news coverage on how they got "cancelled" (I maintain that most of these "canceled" agitators really didn't get censored/cancelled, and true censorship is at an historic low). I don't have a quick solution for this btw. I think it requires a restructuring of social media algorithms away from controversy/rage-bait posts and towards peer-vetted/well-cited posts, which won't happen as long as they're operated for profit.
> This opened the door for vice signaling, where young men could garner status and sex appeal for edgelording.
I don't think they, on average, actually got sex appeal from it. (see, e.g. loneliness epidemic)
> Given the real range of worldviews that exist, I see the silver lining in an expanded Overton window. Overt racism is now expressed by many of the most successful technologists of our time. It may be jarring to process the implications, but is it really worse that people who were shamed into silence are now freely speaking their mind?
If it was the case that it didn't cause racism to increase but merely to reveal how prevalent it is, I would agree with you. My worry is that it *is* causing racism to increase.
Anti racism got excessive. Defund the police was a right-wing framing: cut the govt budget. But what’s actually needed is investment in building communities. DEI trainings became racist in their own way, reifying tropes of racial essentialism (“timeliness is White Supremacy culture”).
Racist jokes are harmful not because their magic words are injurious, but because they remind people of their powerlessness and subordinated position. It’s a mistake to think that they construct that position, or that protecting people from being reminded of their subordination is of real longterm benefit.
Without a hierarchy of social status by race, racial jokes aren’t offensive. And the flattening of racial hierarchies is a megatrend modulated by cycles of progress and backlash.
While there have been losses, eg of Affirmative Action and DEI programs, it’s worth mentioning that these are double-edged policies that mark their beneficiaries with stigma.
At the same time, there is a growing consciousness and discourse of decolonization and anti-imperialism.
In my mind, denial of the existence or impact of neocolonialism is substantially more racist than HBD/genetic determinism. The former requires flagrantly ignoring all observable evidence and scholarship; the latter is the normal discourse of all professional sports coverage.
Indeed, part of the lie of HBD discourse is that it’s controversial. You can’t watch ESPN for more than a few hours without hearing some discussion of genetics and race, with White players framed as “smart” and Black players as “freak athletes”.
I can't help but notice that these critics of EA mainly only talk in generalities, often in generalities that seem quite disconnected from reality. What are the EA "education" programs Emily Clough is referring to? What are the "key services" Acemoglu is referring to? Even if he is referring to bednet distribution, well, AMF doesn't actually do the net distribution and in the cases I've seen, that was done by national governments.
> What are the EA "education" programs Emily Clough is referring to?
Well she's talking about India and the research she did in Rajasthan, so probably TaRL?
> What are the "key services" Acemoglu is referring to? Even if he is referring to bednet distribution, well, AMF doesn't actually do the net distribution and in the cases I've seen, that was done by national governments.
I think he meant in general, not just healthcare. Though even with things like AMF and Vaccine Alliance, there is the risk of the government becoming reliant on their logistics chains/expertise (not saying that's definitely not "worth it" just saying that it could be a dependence). I think it does lower trust in the local government as he points out, although that might not be a bad thing in every case.
> probably TaRL?
I am not aware of any funding or any other engagement between EA organizations and Pathan, are you? The most I am aware of is some evaluations.
> there is the risk of the government becoming reliant on their logistics chains/expertise
That is explicitly not how AMF works. They provide the nets and that’s it. AMF does not run nor even provide technical assistance.
By “vaccine alliance”, I assume you’re referring to GAVI? Or perhaps https://www.vaccinealliance.org/? I don’t think either is an EA organization.
Well, in the post I said:
> Political scientist Emily Clough, for example, has argued that when an EA-aligned charity...
So the question isn't whether it's an EA organization itself, but whether it's EA aligned, which they are. TaRL has been praised in EA and had been added to GWWC top rated charities list. Same for the others, GAVI has been praised and helped by EA.