Collective Action and Individual Impact

By zdgroff @ 2015-05-28T03:12 (+2)

Cross posted at zachgroff.com.

In September 2014, 400,000 people took to the streets of New York City to protest inaction against climate change in what was the single biggest demonstration of the last decade in the United States. In the previous month, and in nearly every month since, protests against racism in the criminal justice system have roiled nearly every major U.S. city. This comes in a decade when the national conversation has already been shaped profoundly by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

 It's common to view participation in mass protests as a choice. I want to argue that, sometimes, participation in protests is not a choice: it is wrong not to participate.

 I don’t claim that community or solidarity or anything like that has inherent importance. Instead, I want to argue that it may be immoral to stay home from a protest because doing so causes harm.

 To start, I offer perhaps the most influential thought experiment of contemporary times – one that has led thousands of people associated with a movement called Effective Altruism to commit their lifetime earnings to addressing extreme poverty. The thought experiment comes from Peter Singer's Famine, Affluence and Morality:

If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

By analogy, Singer argues, we are obligated to save children in developing countries by donating our money, even if it comes at the cost of our own wants.

In More Than Good Intentions, economist Dean Karlan extends this pond analogy. Suppose I don't know how to save the child - I can jump in after him or I can throw something to him in the water. Knowing which is more effective could save his life. By analogy, if we are obligated to help those suffering from extreme poverty, we are obligated to figure out the most effective way to help them. Unsurprisingly, Karlan is the founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, a nonprofit (where, full disclosure, I work) that is dedicated to finding effective solutions to global poverty.

I'd like to extend the pond analogy in a different way. Suppose I am walking past a deep pond and see a child drowning in it. The child is drowning in the middle of the pond, where I would have to swim in to get him. This is not safe - I risk being pulled in by the drowning victim. Instead, I see a large plank of wood that I could throw to the child as a flotation device. With a group of about 10 people, we could throw the wood to the middle of the pond to reach the child. Any less, and we would not be strong enough for it to reach the child. There is no time to run and get any additional people.

If there are nine other people around the lake determined to help, I ought to assist them in throwing the plank of wood. The choice isn't much different from that in the original analogy. If there are eight people, and I really know that we need at least ten to throw it, then it seems I am under no obligation to assist. If there are ten or more, then I am again under no obligation to assist, because they will save the child on their own.

Now the number should not really matter for this decision - if it takes one million people to throw the plank of wood and I am the millionth person, then my obligation is equally strong. Similarly, it should not matter whether the child is in a far away country, living in the far future, or of a different species.

Clearly, this example is both trivial and unrealistic. So we can relax some the assumptions. Maybe I don't know how many people it will take to throw the plank of wood. In that case, if there is still a significant chance I am the threshold person, and I don’t have an equally pressing need to rush off to, I am obligated to help the group.

We can modify the thought experiment in another way: maybe there isn't a sharp cutoff where we can suddenly throw the plank, but each additional person helps get the plank a little bit closer. Again, this modification is easily dealt with - if I significantly increase the chance that the plank reaches the child, I am obligated to assist (and given that a child's life is on the line, I don't need to make much of a contribution for it to be wrong to sit out).

We can modify this hypothetical in further ways, but the basic idea is clear: if collective action can produce major change, and my potential contribution is large enough, it is wrong to stay home. If a collective action’s potential impact is great, even a tiny contribution to it may be morally required.

Singer’s pond analogy makes very salient our individual obligation to those in need. The growing numbers of people – termed Effective Altruists – who take his analogy seriously are changing the world in a meaningful way. I would identify myself as an EA and encourage readers of my blog to join this compelling and rapidly growing movement. Effective Altruists (EAs) are collaborating more and more to build a community. But EAs’ outward engagement with the world tends to focus overly narrowly on ways to act alone. Donating to effective charities and eating a vegan diet are important and necessary ways to relieve suffering, but sometimes, more traditional collective action is required too. I fear a movement centered around doing the most good risks doing far less good for overlooking more traditional forms of protest.

The months following the People’s Climate March saw a new accord between the U.S. and China, the defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline in the U.S. Senate, and the growth of a vibrant fossil fuels divestment movement across the U.S. The #blacklivesmatter marches that have swept the country are leading police departments even in cities untouched by the national spotlight to revise their training. And there is evidence that not just the Tea Party movement but specific Tea Party protests altered the course of national and local politics.

It is far from rare that collective action changes the world. If we can contribute meaningfully to it – which if we cannot do as an individual activist, we almost certainly can as an organizer – we have no choice but to do so.

 

CarlShulman @ 2015-05-28T05:32 (+23)

My sense reading this post is that it gestures at a framework for assessing the impact of political action that is widely endorsed in EA and that I like, but to make it actionable one needs the empirical detail to show competitive gains for particular examples. [ETA: I see on your own blog that you are going to follow up with a post trying to do that, which I will look forward to along with Ben Kuhn!] Also, congratulations on starting posting, it's always great to see more thoughtful pieces like this.

I don't think 'collective action' is really an issue stopping EAs from prioritizing protests. Charitable donations have the same problem, as a given $10 donation is very unlikely to make the difference between an extra malaria bednet distribution or not (which might costs hundreds of thousands of dollars). When I give $10/n the cost of the distribution I have a 1/n chance of having n times the impact, so the expected value of my donation is unaffected by the chunkiness/collective action. I basically need to know about the returns on large amounts of marginal funds and can then consider what the scaled-down share for my contribution would be.

For protests I don't think anyone has a problem with asking what going from 100,000 to 400,000 protesters would do, and evaluating the individual decision to protest in terms of its scaled share. But to be convincing you have to actually show your work that the returns on protesting really are competitive with the opportunity cost of time (e.g. earning and donating some money, studying to advance your career and ability to get things done, doing malaria research, resting up after all of the above).

Some of the points that I think could be engaged with to make the OP case more concrete:

"It is far from rare that collective action changes the world. If we can contribute meaningfully to it – which if we cannot do as an individual activist, we almost certainly can as an organizer – we have no choice but to do so."

I strongly object to this. Everyone could use up every waking hour of every day protesting, writing letters, going door-to-door, etc for a thousand different causes. They can't all simultaneously exert an obligatory demand on our time, especially when they are worse than what we would otherwise doing.

You could make a case that while the opportunities available for political activism for cause X on a political day aren't competitive with the best alternatives, on certain unusual occasions, e.g. on election days (moreso in primary elections, etc) the impact of an hour of time on political activity is many times greater than usual, and that might temporarily 'push it over the top.' But the political campaigns discussed in the OP occur over multi-year time scales, and plausibly benefit from the cash one could earn in an hour more than from an hour holding a sign. And in any case, one should still be able to pass basic checks on the empirical plausibility of an effect large enough to make this a competitive use of altruistic time.

All that said, people don't have to be maximally effective or maximally altruistic all the time, and if they want to do something that is still good but far from maximally so, I don't object. But to claim that at present margins a focus on "donating to effective charities...risks doing far less good for overlooking more traditional forms of protest" calls for at least a rough empirical sketch of how that could be true, ideally for some particular examples.

I have some old posts reviewing the rough probabilities of votes swinging elections, the cost of buying votes with donations. But you need a lot more to get to the point of thinking protests are a winning move, e.g.:

undefined @ 2015-05-28T16:22 (+3)

I'm curious about the implicit framework where some things are obligatory and some things are choices.

undefined @ 2015-05-31T21:51 (+1)

I suspect the social intuition of when we consider someone obligated has at least a little to do with the level of personal sacrifice required.

As in, you are almost always obligated to be good if it the personal cost to you is nothing,and you are almost never obligated to be good if it costs you a great deal. (Which is why you are obligated to save a drowning child but you are a hero if you save the same child from a dangerous burning building.)

If Singer says we're "obligated" to be effective altruists, he's trying to transfer the social norm we have for being obligated to save drowning children because the personal cost is very slight, over to being obligated to, say, buy mosquito nets, because the personal cost is very slight.

(personal morality, divorced from social ideas of what is an obligation, of course, might widely differ)

That's also combined with whether the person is culpable. (You're obligated to clean up your mess, but you're extra good if you clean up someone elses.)

undefined @ 2015-05-31T21:58 (+2)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting

^ a related problem, and that page just informed me that there is a field of Public Choice Theory which might have more on this sort of thing.

(Of course, in all such problems, you still have to determine the effect of the collective action itself, in addition to the effect of your contribution on the strength of the collective action. That goes without saying, of course, for all actions.)

undefined @ 2015-06-02T00:19 (+1)

One hour of time for someone high-up in the organising process could plausibly cause 100 extra people to attend the rally.

If we're talking about the impact of volunteering time to help rallies, it would be more interesting to look at the main organisers instead of the marginal person who comes, since their time is having an impact several magnitudes higher.

undefined @ 2015-05-28T04:22 (+1)

The problem with demonstrations is that half of the time, people demonstrate against each other's causes. Or just for causes with unclear sign or scope of impact.

The whole thing has huge overhead; it blocks the streets and disrupts everyone, and additional police have to be paid to secure the whole thing.

On the other hand, there is no doubt some demonstrations have been of great historical significance.

So make sure this is worth your time, compared to just sending 20 bucks to some random effective charity,