= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
CarlShulman comments on Politics as Charity - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (161)
I can think of one big advantage of charity over politics: Giving to politics is rent-seeking behavior. If you give money to support politicians against/for dairy tariffs, then you encourage the other side to give money to their politicians who are for/against dairy tariffs. In this game matrix, "cooperate" is don't give money.
I have a hard time swallowing the ten trillion dollar figure. I don't think the two parties are really that different, and there's good, game theory for them to be that way.
Re the Prisoner's Dilemma element in political competition, for this post I left it out (save the acknowledgement with respect to moral objections, and associated link to the Ezra Klein comments section). More on that to come.
Re the second point, the ten trillion dollar figure is not mine (my estimates and data are coming in subsequent posts). I have an upcoming post on the data regarding the applicability of median voter theorem style analysis in the U.S. (short answer: democratic competition constrains differences between candidates to a small fraction of the variation in outcomes with dictators, but different politicians representing the same electorate thanks to narrow wins, incumbency, etc show markedly different voting behavior; primaries and the need to motivate one's base to vote/volunteer/contribute the ideological lumpiness seem to play a large role in deviations from median voter type outcomes).
I'm assuming meta-political discussion isn't included in the ban on political discussion. Downvote me if I'm wrong, and I'll abandon this type of comment.
MVT very much applies to my model of U.S. politicians. I see them as having effectively similar policies but very different rhetoric. The similar policies are designed to woo the MV and the differing rhetoric chases the ideological fringes.
That's a fair description of many parts of U.S. politics (although that sounds more applicable to parties rather than individual politicians: note that foreign aid isn't a cleanly partisan issue, e.g. Bush massively increased anti-disease aid in Africa, and many Christian Republicans back such aid very strongly), but as I'll discuss in the relevant post the relevant sort of similarity depends on one's purpose: the variation among politicians (within, not just across parties) does seem to be enough for a narrowly-focused GWWC member (who can dismiss many standard political issues as trivial in terms of her objective function) to identify differences sufficient for politics to beat the direct effects of donations to the current GiveWell/GWWC charities.