Capitalism and the Very Long Term

By NikhilVenkatesh @ 2025-01-29T16:12 (+22)

This is a linkpost to https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/mopp-2023-0092/html

"Since effective altruism is committed to whatever would maximise the social good, it might for example turn out to support anti-capitalist revolution." (Srinivasan 2015)

In this peer-reviewed article for Moral Philosophy and Politics, I explore this suggestion. This connects with my EA forum piece 'Why not socialism?' but is more thorough and more focused on longtermism in particular.

ABSTRACT: Capitalism is defined as the economic structure in which decisions over production are largely made by or on behalf of individuals in virtue of their private property ownership, subject to the incentives and constraints of market competition. In this paper, I will argue that considerations of long-term welfare, such as those developed by Greaves and MacAskill (2021), support anticapitalism in a weak sense (reducing the extent to which the economy is capitalistic) and perhaps support anticapitalism in a stronger sense (establishing an alternative economic structure in which capitalism is not predominant). I hope to encourage longtermists to give anticapitalism serious consideration, and to encourage anticapitalists to pursue criticisms of capitalism’s efficiency as well as its injustices.

huw @ 2025-01-30T04:26 (+5)

Great paper & a strong argument. I would even take it further to argue that most EAs and indeed, longtermists, probably already agree with weak anticapitalism; most EA projects are trying to compensate for externalities or market failures in one form or another, and the increasing turn to policy, rather than altruism, to settle these issues is a good sign.

I think a bigger issue, as you’ve confronted on this forum before, is an unwillingness (mostly down to optics / ideological inoculation), to identify these issues as having structural causes in capitalism. This arrests EAs/longtermists from drawing on centuries of knowledge & movement-building, or more to the matter, even representing a coherent common cause that could be addressed through deploying pooled resources (for instance, donating to anticapitalist candidates in US elections). It breaks my heart a bit tbh, but I’ve long accepted it probably won’t happen.

Ebenezer Dukakis @ 2025-01-30T10:48 (+9)

This arrests EAs/longtermists from drawing on centuries of knowledge & movement-building

The track record of anticapitalist advocacy seems quite poor. See this free book: Socialism: The failed idea that never dies

If you're doing anticapitalist advocacy for EA reasons, I think you need a really clear understanding of why such advocacy has caused so much misery in the past, and how your advocacy will avoid those traps.

I'd say what's needed is not anticapitalist advocacy, so much as small-scale prototyping of alternative economic systems that have strong theoretical arguments for how they will align incentives better, and scale way past Dunbar's number.

You don't need a full replacement for capitalism to test ideas and see results. For example, central planning often fails due to corruption. A well-designed alternative system will probably need a solution for corruption. And such a solution could be usefully applied to an ordinary capitalist democracy.

I concede that AI companies are behaving in a harmful way, but I doubt that anticapitalist advocacy is a particularly tractable way to address that, at least in the short term.

huw @ 2025-01-30T11:19 (+6)

Yes. That’s why I only scoped my comment around weak anticapitalism (specifically: placing strong restrictions on wealth accumulation when it leads to market failures), rather than full-scale revolution. I’m personally probably more reformist and generally pretty pro-market, but anti-accumulation, FWIW.

As I said, I think that instead of siloed advocacy in distinct cause areas, EAs could realise that they have common cause around opposing bad economic incentives. AI safety, farmed animal welfare, and some global health concerns come from the same roots, and there are already large movements well-placed to solve these problems on the political left (ex. labour unions, veganism, environmentalism, internationalist political groups). Indeed, vegan EAs have already allied well with the existing movement to huge success, but this is the exception.

Frankly, I don’t see how that leads to bread lines but I am open to a clearer mechanism if you have one?

Matthew_Barnett @ 2025-01-30T20:14 (+2)

That’s why I only scoped my comment around weak anticapitalism (specifically: placing strong restrictions on wealth accumulation when it leads to market failures), rather than full-scale revolution.

For what it's worth, it is the mainstream view among economists that we should tax or regulate the market in order to address market failures. Yet most economists would not consider themselves "anticapitalist". Using that term when what you mean is something more similar to "well-regulated capitalism" seems quite misleading.

Perhaps the primary distinction between anticapitalists and mainstream economists is that anticapitalists often think we should have very heavy taxation or outright wealth confiscation from rich people, even if this would come at the expense of aggregate utilitarian welfare, because they prioritize other values such as fairness or equality. Since EA tends to be rooted in utilitarian moral theories, I think they should generally distance themselves from this ideology.

huw @ 2025-01-31T02:49 (+4)

Yeah sorry, to emphasise further, I’m referring to the position where we should place strong restrictions on wealth accumulation when it leads to market failures. The difference between this and the mainstream (in this conception) is that mainstream views take more of a siloed approach to these outcomes, and prefer income taxes or laws to remedy them.

An anticapitalist view contrasts with this by identifying wealth accumulation / concentrated ownership of the means of production as a root cause of these issues and works to restrain it in a more preventative capacity. As you identified, such a view typically advocates for policies like wealth taxes, worker co-determination on boards, and high tax surveillance.

Also loosely on your claim that anticapitalism is incompatible with EA because anticapitalists foreground equality over utility—I disagree. First, EA is scoped to ‘altruism’, not to ‘all policy worldwide’, so a view that aims to maximise altruism also maximises equality under regular conditions. Second, it’s not necessarily the case that there is a tradeoff between equality and global utility, and highly socialist societies such as the Scandis enjoy both higher equality and higher utility than more capitalist countries such as the United States or the UK.

(I’ve read Piketty and don’t remember him ever suggesting he would trade one for the other; can’t speak to the other authors you cite)

Larks @ 2025-01-31T05:49 (+2)

and highly socialist societies such as the Scandis enjoy both higher quality and higher utility than more capitalist countries such as the United States or the UK.

While Scandinavian countries generally are less capitalist than the US or UK, the difference is small. Here are their rankings on the Economic Freedom index:

Rank	Country	Score
5	United States	8.09
6	Denmark	8.02
12	United Kingdom	7.88
13	Finland	7.87
14	Iceland	7.84
25	Sweden	7.61
28	Norway	7.58

All of them are comfortably in the top quartile, and Denmark is actually above the UK in the rankings.

huw @ 2025-01-31T06:50 (+2)

I am trying my hardest to disambiguate ‘market/economic freedom’ from ‘unrestrained accumulation of wealth’ (please please please explain how I’ve been unclear here—I feel like I’m going a bit crazy!). Europe produces a huge amount of tax revenue (see below; I don’t have an anticapitalism index at hand so this is as close as I could get in a 5 minute search) while maintaining similar levels of economic freedom to the US, and manages much higher life satisfaction and equality despite lower GDP per capita. That’s insane!

Anticapitalism in a strict economic sense is merely the opposition to unrestrained accumulation of wealth and/or concentration of ownership of the means of production in private hands. It doesn’t have to take a position on anything to do with markets. (Obviously, the popular Western conception of anticapitalism is also often anti-market, but actually-existing-anticapitalism in Europe is pro-market!)

David Mathers🔸 @ 2025-01-30T20:18 (+4)

"anticapitalists often think that we should have very heavy taxation or outright wealth confiscation from rich people, even if this would come at the expense of aggregate utilitarian welfare"

What's the evidence for this? I think even if it is true, it is probably misleading, in that most leftists also just reject the claims mainstream economists make about when taxing the rich will reduce aggregate welfare (not that there is one single mainstream economist view on that anyway in all likelihood.) This sounds to me more like an American centre-right caricature of how socialists think, than something socialists themselves would recognize.

Matthew_Barnett @ 2025-01-30T20:58 (+4)

What's the evidence for this? I think even if it is true, it is probably misleading, in that most leftists also just reject the claims mainstream economists make about when taxing the rich will reduce aggregate welfare

To support this claim, we can examine the work of analytical anticapitalists such as G. A. Cohen and John E. Roemer. Both of these thinkers have developed their critiques of capitalism from a foundation of egalitarianism rather than from a perspective primarily concerned with maximizing overall social welfare. Their theories focus on issues of fairness, justice, and equality rather than on the utilitarian consequences of different economic systems.

Similarly, widely cited figures such as Thomas Piketty and John Rawls have provided extensive critiques of capitalist systems, and their arguments are overwhelmingly framed in terms of egalitarian concerns. Both have explicitly advocated for significant wealth redistribution, even when doing so might lead to efficiency losses or other negative utilitarian tradeoffs. Their work illustrates a broader trend in which anticapitalist arguments are often motivated more by ethical commitments to equality than by a strict adherence to utilitarian cost-benefit analysis.

Outside of academic discourse, the distinction becomes less clear. This is because most people do not explicitly frame their economic beliefs within formal theoretical frameworks, making it harder to categorize their positions precisely. I also acknowledge your point that many socialists would likely disagree with my characterization by denying the empirical premise that wealth redistribution can reduce aggregate utilitarian welfare. But this isn't very compelling evidence in my view, as it is common for people among all ideologies to simply deny the tradeoffs inherent in their policy proposals.

What I find most compelling here is that, based on my experience, the vast majority of anticapitalists do not ground their advocacy in a framework that prioritizes maximizing utilitarian welfare. While they may often reference utilitarian concerns in passing, it is uncommon for them to fully engage with mainstream economic analyses of the costs of taxation and redistribution. When anticapitalists do acknowledge these economic arguments, they tend to dismiss or downplay them rather than engaging in a substantive, evidence-based debate within that framework. Those who do accept the mainstream economic framework and attempt to argue within it are generally better categorized as liberals or social democrats rather than strong anticapitalists.

Of course, the distinction between a liberal who strongly supports income redistribution and an anticapitalist is not always sharply defined. There is no rigid, universally agreed-upon boundary between these positions, and I acknowledge that some individuals who identify as anticapitalists may not fit neatly into the categorization I have outlined. However, my original point was intended as a general observation rather than as an exhaustive classification of every nuance within these ideological debates.

Joseph @ 2025-01-29T21:11 (+5)

(my apologies for commenting here without having read your academic paper)

I suspect that two major elements prevent anti-capitalist ideas from being more popular within EA.

First, it tends to be an issue that draws a lot of negative attention as a result of being far outside the Overton window.^[1] I'm guessing that if influential EA organizations or figures came out against capitalism, that would do more harm than good: other EA organizations or figures would disagree, and many newspaper articles would be published ridiculing EA. While reputation and status is not the goal of EA, it is (much like other types of power) a useful tool for achieving altruistic goals.
Second, most of us lack a coherent vision of what else we would use as an economic system. The majority of people in EA have lived with a capitalistic economy and society their entire lives. Although some anthropologists or scholars might have a clear conception, I'm guessing that most of us have a lot of ignorance regarding what we would replace capitalism with.^[2]

And that isn't even getting into the tractability element.

^{^}
If the leader of some organization (say, the Catholic church) were to make a statement that capitalism is bad for people and a different economic system should pursued, many Catholics would (to varying degrees) disagree, disrespect, or leave the catholic church. Even people who are not part of the catholic church would talk about how ridiculous the church's statement is. It would make it harder to convert people to Catholicism.
^{^}
I have vague conceptions of worker's communes from documentaries I've watched, and I've read plenty about ways that non-capitalistic systems have failed, but I have a paucity of examples for ways that non-capitalistic systems have succeeded. I'd love to live in an intentional community with respect and equality and each contributing according to their ability, but I have no idea how that would work on a society-wide scale. So although the idea appeals to me, it is hard for me to envision how it would actually function.

Ulf Graf 🔹 @ 2025-01-30T18:43 (+1)

I skimmed in your article and must say that I am impressed. I think it is important for the EA community to think about what planet and what society we want. I looked at the summary of the IPBES Nexus Assesment and it seems clear to me that our economic system doesn't work in its current state. That 7 trillion in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, and damages on nature for 10-25 trillion in unaccounted costs is problematic. Also, the fact that there is 35 times more resources going to causes that destroys our planet than supports our nature shows that we need to do something. I think a realistic way might be national income, by Thomas Piketty. It is a global measurement instead of GDP. For example: “If you take 100 billion euros of oil from oil reserves underground or you take 100 billion euros in fish from the ocean, you have 100 billion euros of GDP, but you have zero euros of national income. And if in addition when you burn oil or gas you create global warming and you reduce the durability of life on earth, then if you put a price on the negative impact of these emissions you should have negative national income instead of positive GDP.” Buckton et al. (2024) give examples of other economic systems that might work and that are more or less capitalistic.

idea21 @ 2025-01-29T23:34 (+1)

Impressive work, but it is not difficult to convince people of the risks of capitalism when it comes to facing longtermism challenges. We have the "social market economy", in which there are supposedly democratic controls on capitalism.
But from an imaginative perspective, an alternative to capitalism based on a purely altruistic economy is not inconceivable. An altruistic economy should not be confused with a socialist economy (legislation for the common good), but rather should be related to individualistic cultural conceptions such as the ethics of caring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_care