Political Donations

    Effective Altruism as a community has more or less agreed to stay out of politics. Most of the community is probably very liberal, but there is still some large variance within the community. I am still unconvinced that voting is important. William MacAskill argues that on an expected return basis, voting is very important. He argues that even if there is a 0.00000001% chance that your vote swings the presidential election, the value could be so great (worth $1,000,000,000,000 or something) due to averting ex-risk or allocating foreign aid or some other thing, it is worth it to vote. In reality your vote has a 0% chance of mattering (on a national scale, regional elections are probably pretty important and impactful) and the difference between politicians is probably overstated. There is a lot of inertia, bureaucracy, and infrastructure, and legal precedent in place that tie the hands of even radical politicians here in the U.S.. In foreign countries the elections are either similarly low-impact or completely rigged. However, with political donations you may be able to thoroughly swing votes.

    If you are a billionaire such a Michael Bloomberg, you could bankroll candidates or pay for millions of targeted political advertisements. Through the power of absurd wealth, an individual can actually make an impact. Whether actually an effective use of money or not (I would guess the significant majority of political donations are entirely wasted and ineffective) I do not have the data to say. I would guess malaria nets are much cheaper and more impactful than spending a million dollars on a one-minute political ad for Biden which will be unlikely to sway aggregate voters a single basis point in voting polls. One of the problems is that there is already a massive amount of money in politics, so the marginal value of another million dollars is likely to be zero. For this reason, I would argue against political donations of all kinds. If one candidate has pledged to start an unjust nuclear civil war, assassination or voter suppression would be much more effective ways to spend your time. Given that this is rarely the case (and also I think democracy works well generally, I doubt the American public would knowingly elect such a candidate), we should stick to effective charities. To me, donating to political parties is likely one of the most useless uses of your funds, slightly more useless than donating to universities and slightly more useful than setting all of your cash ablaze.