EA - The Hundred Billion Dollar Opportunity that EAs mostly ignore by JeremiahJohnson

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Hundred Billion Dollar Opportunity that EAs mostly ignore, published by JeremiahJohnson on September 22, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic Status: Relatively confident but also willing to take advantage of Cunningham's Law if I'm wrong. May lack deep knowledge of EA efforts in this area. About me: I'm a sometime EA and looking to dive into the EA world more fully, including potentially shifting my career to work in EA. I currently work in US politics and specialize in online movement building and communications. I trend towards near-termist and global health EA causes, although I think the argument below also has long-termist implications. The Central Premise There is a potentially massive method of doing good out there that's mostly ignored. This method is at the absolute heart of the very concept of Effective Altruism, and yet is rarely discussed in EA communities or spaces. We should try harder to influence the average non-EA person's donation. The Current Charitable Landscape A few quick facts: The United States donated almost $500 billion just in 2021. Without listing every individual country, European charitable donations are on the scale of hundreds of billions as well. Overall, yearly charitable donations in rich countries worldwide are in the high hundreds of billions of USD. Most of this money, from an EA perspective, is wildly inefficiently spent. While it's impossible to break down exactly where each of these dollars goes, a little bit of common sense and some basic statistics paints a discouraging picture. Of this giant pile of money, only 6% is donated internationally, despite donations to poor countries usually having a better per-dollar impact than donations inside a rich country. The largest categories for donation are religious organizations. The second largest category is educational donations. Three quarters of that educational money is given to existing 4-year colleges and universities. Much of that is the stereotypical worst kind of donation, a huge donation to an elite school that already has billions in endowment. Beyond the statistics, any casual glance at how normal people donate their money can confirm this. People give to local schools, their friend's charity, or generally whatever they feel a connection to. My parents, who are highly charitable people who gave >10% of their income long before it was an EA idea, have made significant charitable donations to a children's puppetry program. This is the landscape in which the better part of a trillion dollars is being spent. None of this should be surprising to EAs. The core of Effective Altruism is the argument that when you attempt to do good, you should try to be effective in doing so. The equally core fact about the world that EAs recognize is that historically, most people have not been very good at maximizing how much good they do. For the vast majority of charitable dollars, that's still true. The Argument for Impact I believe Effective Altruism should spend more time trying to shift the behavior of the general public. I believe this area has the potential for large impact, and that it's currently neglected as a way to do good. Scale - Enormous. Not going to spend much time on this point, but obviously changes to how hundreds of billions of charitable dollars are given would be huge in scale. Tractability - This problem is likely more difficult and less tractable than many other cause areas. It's very difficult to simply spin wide-ranging cultural changes into existence. But it's not impossible, and the enormous size of the pile of money mitigates the low tractability. Using some relatively low numbers - If you had even a 1% chance of success, and success meant only shifting 5% of US charitable dollars, that's still 250 million dollars of donations going to more effect...