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Jayson_Virissimo comments on Open Thread, April 27-May 4, 2014 - Less Wrong
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this piece is about whether earning to give is the best way to be altruistic.
but I think a big issue is what altruism is. do most people mostly agree on what's altruistic or good? have effective altruists tried to determine what real people or organizations want?
you don't want to push "altruism given hidden assumptions X, Y and Z that most people don't agree with." for example, in Ben Kuhn's critique he talks about a principle of egalitarianism. But I don't think most people think of "altruism" as something that applies equally to the guy next door and to a person in Africa. Maybe smart idealistic Anglophone folks in the 2010s do. And some people think religion has equal or greater importance than physical human life does. So if you can convert a person to Christianity then you've done a huge good. And abortions and adultery are grave sins and so forth. Also, making political improvements is not a core part of EA.
maybe you should talk about apolitical egalitarian secular altruism.
but there is also another thing effective altruists favor that I think is clearly good: they use evidence. We do want evidence-based altruism. Kinda like evidence-based policy.
I think once you get beyond apolitical secular egalitarian altruism there are lots of different possibilities and it's as hard to figure out where you stand as it is to maximize impact. so maybe we should add something like reflection-based altruism.
I wonder if you can have more political impact through "earning to give" to political causes or through direct political involvement. the answer may vary with the type of cause. We might include the three types of economically left (e.g. socialism), economically neutral (e.g. abortion) and economically right (e.g. abolish estate taxes)
That the effects of abortion are economically neutral seems like an extraordinary claim. What kind of evidence did you have in mind? If those anti-abortion people that hang out on campus are right, then roughly 50 million abortions have taken place in America since Roe v. Wade. How could an extra 50 million people have a neutral effect on the economy?
Not really. If I recall, legalizing abortion has almost no effect on the birth rate, accessible contraceptives are somewhat higher, but none come close to changing cultural norms.
50 million mostly legal abortions, even if the figure is correct, does not translate to 50 million more adults, of course. It is not even clear whether the overall effect is increase or decrease in population.
Well, this is what I found in < 5 minutes of searching:
-- Klerman, Jacob Alex. "US abortion policy and fertility." (2000).
-- Guldi, Melanie. "Fertility effects of abortion and birth control pill access for minors." Demography 45, no. 4 (2008): 817-827.
-- Coates, Brandi, Alejandro Companioni, and Zachary A. Bethune. "The Impact of Abortion Legalization on Birth Rates!."
Okay, so a quick search for studies on the effects of abortion legalization on birth rates seems to confirm my priors, so...it still looks like an extraordinary claim.
Agreed, I shouldn't have used that number, but according the first couple of studies I came across it definitely would be positive and over 40 years time it seems plausible that even some of those people that would have been born would have had kids by this point.
Interesting, thanks. Incidentally, the CDC data show that the abortions/life births ratio is pretty significant, though it's declined from 36% in 1979 to 22% in 2010. This is surprisingly high. I don't know what to make of it. My prior expectation was maybe a percent or two. Every 5th fetus is aborted? Or am I reading the data wrong? Canadian rates seem to be similar, with every 4th fetus being aborted.
I suggested this division of causes because, first, people who earn to give may join the upper or at least upper middle class. It seems harder to advocate for things like socialism when your peer group is rich. Your opinions aren't going to earn you praise or friends and friends and connections are really important for making money. It's also hard to devote time and energy to maintaining odd views when you're focused on a career that isn't directly involved with acting on those opinions. You're losing some potential synergy. It also possible that, second, the usefulness of cash donations varies with whether the cause has support among the rich or poor, although this might work the other way in that I would expect causes that favor the poor to need money more.
But with a topic like abortion this all seems unclear--although opinions on abortion do correlate some with income, I don't think that correlation is a strong as with outright economic redistribution. What do you think?
If you want to suggest a more clearly neutral topic than abortion I would be interested to hear it.
Um, there a lot of rich people who at least profess socialist views, the common somewhat dismissive term for them is champagne socialist.
What do you mean exactly when you say socialism?
As far as the numbers on abortion go, for <25k income 65% support restriction of abortion while only 46% for >75k