What an odd argument. Do you think that personal consumption is also "an inherent subversion", or do you only object when people spend their money on someone other than themselves?
What an odd argument. Do you think that personal consumption is also "an inherent subversion", or do you only object when people spend their money on someone other than themselves?
There is certainly an argument that personal consumption is a subversion - that underlies certain left positions, but it is not one I am on board with.
It may be odd, but it is coherent.
It gets to the question of surplus, and who has a right to that surplus. If you presume that there is a natural right to obtain, then my argument will not make sense. I believe that society/government exists in proportion to surplus, and the disposition of surplus is why we have government. The very concept of "personal" implies ownership and property, both of which are definitional constructs of society. They are useful constructs, but artificial.
If we separate the form of government (who is it by, for and of) from its function, we would want to ask two questions:
1. What is the best disposition of surplus/spoils?
2. What form of organization/system of government provides the greatest likelihood of achieving that disposition?
Because we are nominally decent people, we would very much like to allocate the surplus in ways that achieve some good, usually divided between forms of investment to maintain/increase the surplus and forms of spending to achieve direct ends (health, happiness, etc.). As a species, we have been immensely creative at deriving different rule sets to deal with these two questions, including ones with property and without, with "personal consumption" and without. But the underlying objectives are the same: how do we determine the "best" allocation of surplus.
After about 10,000 years of civilization, our current model believes that the objective is personal satisfaction (freedom writ largely as freedom to consume) and that some combination of markets, capital, labor, property, and representative democracy is the best algorithm. Of course, this has only held true for about 200 years, and is probably almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels.
And the current model, while fabulous at extraction and consumption, is unbelievably bad at solving non-market problems (transactional conditions like education, healthcare, and shelter where the "consumer" cannot choose to "not buy"). So we need a non-market arbiter, and we have chosen taxes and public spending steered by democratically-elected representatives.
And the algorithm will change over time as it always does, shifting both the means of allocation and the system of determining the optimum outcome.
The issue with contemporary philanthropy, especially EA, is that it monopolizes substantial portions of the surplus and subverts the roughly agreed-upon algorithm in favor of what is essentially just neo-oligarchy or neo-monarchy. When you advocate for aggregating capital under an investor or a set of trustees that are unaccountable to the people, you are essentially saying that democracy is not, in fact, good at either picking the right outcome or achieving it. Given that there is ample evidence that philanthropic organizations are largely quite bad at deploying resources, we should ask why do we still believe they should be the allocators?
The Jedi mind-trick of EA has been to suggest that the Oxford Philosophy department has deduced an algorithmic, deterministic way of divining the correct outcomes and allocating resources with precision to attain them. This is obvious hogwash. EA is just a new set of Saudi Princes picking winners without accountability. And this is essentially undemocratic.
I think you are aware of this, because you suggest a thought-experiment of distributing the surplus evenly to all citizens to deploy philanthropically. Logically, this is no different than direct democracy except the administrative apparatus would be non-profits that presumably would operate more efficiently and effectively than governments. Having been on the boards of Habitat for Humanity and a high-quality charter school, I will tell you that a large philanthropy is often less productive than an equivalent bureaucracy, and always much more expensive to administer.
Honestly, I think we as a society are so drunk on the right to personal consumption that we are shockingly bad at using surplus to alleviate suffering. I suspect that the most effective person-level altruism is mutual aid - people helping families and neighbors - though I do believe that our government has a critical role to play (FEMA is a good example). But large-scale philanthropy, especially in its new incarnation, is laughable. And undemocratic.
What an odd argument. Do you think that personal consumption is also "an inherent subversion", or do you only object when people spend their money on someone other than themselves?
And seriously, you should read this. Especially the section starting at the last paragraph of 163.
https://aa-netherlands.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/en_tradition7.pdf
There is certainly an argument that personal consumption is a subversion - that underlies certain left positions, but it is not one I am on board with.
It may be odd, but it is coherent.
It gets to the question of surplus, and who has a right to that surplus. If you presume that there is a natural right to obtain, then my argument will not make sense. I believe that society/government exists in proportion to surplus, and the disposition of surplus is why we have government. The very concept of "personal" implies ownership and property, both of which are definitional constructs of society. They are useful constructs, but artificial.
If we separate the form of government (who is it by, for and of) from its function, we would want to ask two questions:
1. What is the best disposition of surplus/spoils?
2. What form of organization/system of government provides the greatest likelihood of achieving that disposition?
Because we are nominally decent people, we would very much like to allocate the surplus in ways that achieve some good, usually divided between forms of investment to maintain/increase the surplus and forms of spending to achieve direct ends (health, happiness, etc.). As a species, we have been immensely creative at deriving different rule sets to deal with these two questions, including ones with property and without, with "personal consumption" and without. But the underlying objectives are the same: how do we determine the "best" allocation of surplus.
After about 10,000 years of civilization, our current model believes that the objective is personal satisfaction (freedom writ largely as freedom to consume) and that some combination of markets, capital, labor, property, and representative democracy is the best algorithm. Of course, this has only held true for about 200 years, and is probably almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels.
And the current model, while fabulous at extraction and consumption, is unbelievably bad at solving non-market problems (transactional conditions like education, healthcare, and shelter where the "consumer" cannot choose to "not buy"). So we need a non-market arbiter, and we have chosen taxes and public spending steered by democratically-elected representatives.
And the algorithm will change over time as it always does, shifting both the means of allocation and the system of determining the optimum outcome.
The issue with contemporary philanthropy, especially EA, is that it monopolizes substantial portions of the surplus and subverts the roughly agreed-upon algorithm in favor of what is essentially just neo-oligarchy or neo-monarchy. When you advocate for aggregating capital under an investor or a set of trustees that are unaccountable to the people, you are essentially saying that democracy is not, in fact, good at either picking the right outcome or achieving it. Given that there is ample evidence that philanthropic organizations are largely quite bad at deploying resources, we should ask why do we still believe they should be the allocators?
The Jedi mind-trick of EA has been to suggest that the Oxford Philosophy department has deduced an algorithmic, deterministic way of divining the correct outcomes and allocating resources with precision to attain them. This is obvious hogwash. EA is just a new set of Saudi Princes picking winners without accountability. And this is essentially undemocratic.
I think you are aware of this, because you suggest a thought-experiment of distributing the surplus evenly to all citizens to deploy philanthropically. Logically, this is no different than direct democracy except the administrative apparatus would be non-profits that presumably would operate more efficiently and effectively than governments. Having been on the boards of Habitat for Humanity and a high-quality charter school, I will tell you that a large philanthropy is often less productive than an equivalent bureaucracy, and always much more expensive to administer.
Honestly, I think we as a society are so drunk on the right to personal consumption that we are shockingly bad at using surplus to alleviate suffering. I suspect that the most effective person-level altruism is mutual aid - people helping families and neighbors - though I do believe that our government has a critical role to play (FEMA is a good example). But large-scale philanthropy, especially in its new incarnation, is laughable. And undemocratic.