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CarlShulman comments on Politics as Charity - Less Wrong
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Comments (161)
The key question, however, is:
It seems to me that the entire running theme of this post greatly underestimates the uncertainty of any feasible answer to this question, and that it also greatly overplays the strength of this relationship. In modern Western political systems, the effective role of elected politicians is far smaller and subject to much stronger and more complicated constraints than people who care about day-to-day politics commonly imagine.
Another source of great uncertainty is the relation between policy outcomes and the kinds of consequences by which you measure their desirability. (To the extent that these measures are even defined clearly -- even if all the facts are known, in many situations there is no obviously correct definition of "saving a life," and different definitions will lead to very different evaluations.)
Also, b1shop has already made the important point that electioneering is rent-seeking behavior, so that contributing additional resources to it may have the effect of intensifying the arms race, resulting in even more resources wasted on it.
The post mentioned these elements, and explicitly focused on the cost of influencing votes. Otherwise, it would have bloated to a mega-post of many thousands of words, rather than a series of manageable chunks. The 'value of information' discussion at the bottom is illustrative, highlighting the use of analyzing the other components (an analysis forthcoming in the follow-on posts)
I understand that. However, in my opinion, before delving into the technical details of the economics of influencing voters (which you have indeed researched and discussed skilfully), it would be desirable to present at least a rough outline of a general argument showing that the whole approach is feasible in the first place. The problems I pointed out in my comment, in my view, make its feasibility uncertain at best.
All right. My summary: adding further measures to improve the effectiveness of one's political spending (voting in primaries, publicly conditioning one's spending on desired behavior through political action organizations, etc), using realistic data-driven probability estimates for the probability of swinging elections, data on legislative behavior, and information on foreign aid effectiveness/corruption raises the expected effectiveness of political action above the direct effects of GWWC and GiveWell's recommended charities, according to their own criteria (usually DALYs for existing people) using standard decision theory.
However, the indirect effects of giving to the recommended charities publicly as part of the GWWC or GiveWell efforts, e.g. strengthening a culture of efficient philanthropy and inducing others to follow one's example, complicate the issue.
I will then use the example to make various points about decision theory, sorting out our values, and the efficiency of charitable markets.