It's not about the current spending it's about the overall system of allocation. Currently our political economy has implemented a system where some people accumulate billions of dollars in private wealth. I've seen people in the EA-sphere and beyond defend this system on the basis of effective philanthropy. So I made a post evaluating this claim and found it lacking. My hope is that people will now either stop, or find a new defense for why this is the best we can do (well, I say 'hope', but that might be gone by now).

ITN framework? This is post is not a proposal for a cause area, it's an analysis of whether Billionaire Philanthropists are effective. If someone says 'but the government is bigger' then that doesn't really change the evaluation.
Same for two, we can't assume that billionaire philanthropy is effective if we haven't even compared it to the other options. So I'm making an inductive claim that, given the demonstrated problems with billionaire philanthropy and given that there are many other options out there, it seems reasonable to assume that something else is actually 'the most good we can do'.

Hi Ben, thanks for reading

I included these common counterarguments to show that they don't really address the issue.
Argument 1 isn't relevant. It does get used all the time, but it's a whataboutism at best.
Argument 2 is a false dilemma. It might be true that billionaire philanthropy is better than government programs (although while I've often seen it being asserted, I've never actually seen it demonstrated), but even if we grant that it doesn't matter because those two aren't our only options, it's a false dilemma.

$2.5k for general families (more than one person), $737 for the mean individual American, so even lower for the median. I think that holds.

I also think that if poorer people indeed give a higher proportion to church, this is probably because you're expected to give a certain amount to your local church that does not scale linearly with your wealth (e.g. a billionaire that goes to church is also expected to place a couple bills in the jar, and not e.g. give them some gold bars). If that's the case that would mean that the wealthy give a lower proportion by virtue of them having more money, and if that money was redistributed not much would change.

As for redistribution. It might be redistributed towards lower income Americans and not global priorities, but that would still be a vast improvement over the status quo if the billionaires are spending that money on luxuries, or worse, buying votes, politicians, social media platforms, etc.

But the tag has changed

The tag has not changed, they have explicitly closed it (see their site) and I don't think those three links count as examples since it's not targeted at reform (nor general immigration), but even if they did, it's still much lower than it used to be. They never told us why they closed it (which is annoying in itself) but the writing was already on the wall a year earlier with them saying:

We have never had a clear theory of how to change the political economy to be supportive of substantially larger immigration flows, which is what would be necessary to achieve the global poverty improvements that motivate our interest in this issue. Accordingly, our recent spending has been lower than in macro or land use reform.

The open borders website wrote a post tracking the downturn, e.g. writing under the section "Evidence that Open Philanthropy is reducing its involvement in and commitments to migration policy":

The grants database includes only one grant in 2021 [...] and otherwise no other grants in 2020. Open Philanthropy has been using exit grants as well as reducing levels of commitment even for grantees that they are continuing to support.

Speaking of the site. They posted every month from 2013 through 2015, only some months between 2016 and 2021, twice in 2022, zero times in 2023, once in 2024, and zero times in 2025. A clear sign that its engagement is going down (despite the number of EAs increasing over the years).

Thanks for the comment, that seems like a strange null hypothesis to me but alright. My earlier aversion to commenting on the EA forum has borne out again, so I'm going to stop commenting now.

if you want to have true beliefs about how to improve the world, economics can provide a bunch more useful insights than other parts of the social sciences

Source?

EDIT: I'm getting downvoted for asking for a source on a controversial claim? Why? Why does the heterodox EA have to cite dozens of academic sources and still get more downvotes than someone just asserting an academically controversial (but orthodox within EA) claim without a citation or justification? Why does asking for one generate downvotes?

If it was literally 2 we couldn't do statistics, but say it was the same ratio but one we could do statistics on, e.g. 1000.000 vs 2000, I would say this research is valid. If it was just about citations it would be a problem, but what's being polled there is opinions on interdisciplinary research, so it's about attitude towards working with other disciplines in general.

If a higher percentage of (a quantitatively smaller number of) political scientists think working with other disciplines is better, whereas a lower percentage of (a quantitatively higher number of) economists think so,  then even though there is (in absolute numbers) a higher quantity of economists who think that interdisciplinary research is better, we can still (comparatively) say that economists are more in favor of being insular than political scientists.

I've already responded to Larks on this