The EA case for Trump 2024

Counting up the utils

The title of this post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek as I am not (exactly) an Effective Altruist nor do I speak for anyone in the EA movement.

That said, I still consider myself a kind of rationalist, and am aligned with EAs on a number of important policy issues. My disagreements with EA are more technical / philosophical. In particular, I think utilitarianism is an incomplete moral philosophy that, per Charles Taylor, neglects the “deep diversity” of human goods; and that, per Robert Brandom, makes the mistake common to most modern moral philosophy of inverting the relationship between abstract normative theory and concrete social practice. The corollary is that I believe our ethical commitments have to be in some sense “instituted” within networks of reciprocal recognition to be real and binding. This is what generates the special roles and obligations associated with family, community, professional associations, nation-states, and so on.

That doesn’t mean utilitarian or consequentialist arguments are useless. On the contrary, there are many areas of life where “greatest good for the greatest number”-style thinking is the only practical framework. This is especially true in public policy, where discrete decisions often affect millions of people with diverse interests in a way that all but necessitates a more abstract, “system-level” decision criterion. I’ve previously described this as a kind of “moral gestalt,” as if we sometimes need to moralize about the forest and other times about the trees. Independent of the content of a particular moral theory, different types of theories naturally “supervene” to these different levels of construal. Thus, as a rule, we should be relatively utilitarian about system-level questions, like how to structure an economy or allocate scarce public resources, but guided more by personal duty and virtue in our day-to-day life.

The delta between our system-level and interpersonal ways of moralizing is why many utilitarian conclusions can seem “repugnant” to the man on the street. Economists are all-too familiar with this phenomenon. Both EAs and economists are partial to legalizing kidney markets, for example, in spite of the common intuition that the human body has an inviolable “dignity” that must resist “commoditization.” Similarly, many left-wing commentators were aghast when Matt Yglesias argued that “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK” following the deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. And yet his arguments were perfectly correct, if maybe a bit “too soon.”

Rationalists strive to pierce the “social veil” that colors our moral intuitions and perceptions of reality more generally. As social animals, the human capacity for truth-seeking was built atop cognitive processes that first evolved for norm-following. We therefore tend to assimilate to the beliefs of our peer group and are easily manipulated by perceptions of social status and authority. Yet “reading the room,” while superb for group cohesion, is not a sound epistemology. It instead leads to intellectual fads and fashions that entangle the search for truth with aristocratic social graces. Like a fish in water, the conventional nature of belief is an obvious fact that’s usually invisible in the moment, though easily noticed by cultural outsiders and people immune to social desirability.

A Pivotal Act

So how should one think about the upcoming Presidential election from an EA or rationalist-consequentialist perspective? Let’s set aside the fact that voting is largely an exercise in self-expression and imagine that, against all odds, we’re casting the decisive vote; a potential “Pivotal Act.” At this fork in the road, which path leads to the better outcomes — the higher social welfare — relative to the counterfactual and independent of good intentions?

First, we should start by acknowledging the potential influence of our peer group on our perception of either candidate, and attempt to transcend the high-status prejudice against Donald Trump in particular. Everything about Trump is offensive to the folkways of America’s academic, cultural and media elites. To say he elicits “repugnance” is an understatement. Vance, as a Yale Law grad, is seen as a kind of class traitor and thus particularly “weird.” But unless these perceptions of cultural cachet have direct bearing on the society-wide outcomes of a Trump-Vance administration, they should be ignored as no more relevant than Kamala Harris’s laugh.

Second, we should focus on a marginal analysis and ignore sunk costs. Roe v. Wade cannot be overturned twice, and is not something a Harris administration can simply reinstate. Trump has expressed a moderate position on abortion, opposing a ban and supporting nation-wide access to mifepristone. Abortion access is thus unlikely to be substantially affected by the outcome of the election either way, despite being a motivating issue for many voters. There are any number of other issues that fall into this general category, i.e. culturally salient but irrelevant on most policy margins.

Third, without necessarily adopting a zero social discount rate, we should at least take the welfare of future people into serious consideration, which means caring about population growth and attending to low-probability existential risks. I’ve previously argued that “longtermism” of this sort is best thought of as a civilizational project, as our capacity to coordinate across generations and survive Black Swan events is largely downstream of competent institutions and high-functioning cultures.

Fourth, we should adopt a realist political economy based on a cold analysis of means and ends. The idealistic and sacred dimensions of politics have their place but can easily muddy the waters. Blame, just deserts, personal character, and other ethical or aesthetic variables only enter a consequentialist analysis indirectly, if at all.

Social Welfare

As an economist, I think of social welfare in terms of Pareto improvements: “win-win” outcomes that make at least one person better off without making anyone worse off. Markets tend to be welfare enhancing as trade only happens when both sides of an exchange believe they are better off by their own lights. Negative externalities and market frictions complicate this story, but it remains a good rule of thumb.

Pareto efficiency comes in two main flavors: allocative and innovative. Allocative efficiency is about letting assets flow to their highest valued use, like land-use reforms that allow apartments to be built in lucrative labor markets. Innovative efficiency is about pushing out the Pareto frontier and creating new production possibilities. The latter tends to be more important to social welfare in the long-run, as productivity improvements grow the economic pie in a way that compounds overtime and makes positive-sum negotiations easier to coordinate.

Medical innovation

At first order, the EA case for Trump is that a Trump-Vance administration will be much better for the innovative capacity of the U.S. economy. Pharmaceuticals are a case in point. As the economist Tomas J. Philipson notes in a recent piece for the WSJ,

A study I co-authored estimated that 135 fewer drugs will come to market through 2039 because of the Inflation Reduction Act. Research firm Vital Transformation’s forecast is even bleaker, predicting that the U.S. could lose 139 drugs within the next decade.

Dozens of life-sciences companies have announced cuts to their research and development pipelines because of the 2022 law. These announcements have come in earnings calls and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission—where deliberate misstatements would expose executives to civil and criminal penalties—so they can’t be chalked up to political posturing.

The social welfare benefits from America’s tolerance for high drug prices are such that Tyler Cowen has taken to calling proponents of pharmaceutical price controls “the supervillains”:

If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.

What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.” Or as Stalin supposedly put it, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.”

Pharmaceutical innovation is also an area where the choice of administration is likely to have a big impact on the margin. The Harris campaign has pledged to set drug prices at “no more than 100 percent of its average price in comparable high-income countries,” while a future Trump admin would likely try to undo the controls introduced by the IRA. A Trump FTC would also likely roll-back commissioner Lina Khan’s crusade against mergers and acquisitions, which have been detrimental to pharmaceutical innovation in particular.

The potential benefits of a second Trump term for medical innovation should be obvious from the high watermark of his first administration: Operation Warp Speed. Operation Warp Speed directly saved an estimated 140,000 American lives by pulling forward vaccine timelines, and may save thousands more still through its indirect impact on research into mRNA vaccines for malaria, cancer and influenza.

While Trump can’t take sole credit for the program, it is hard to imagine such a large and relatively unfettered public-private-partnership emerging through the stakeholder-based politics of modern “everything bagel” liberalism. In fact, the special authorizations employed by OWS were downstream of an existing deregulatory push at FDA, spearheaded by the same Philipson quoted above and his Chicago School colleague, Casey Mulligan. As Mulligan notes in his retrospective,

Although COVID-19 would not arrive in the U.S. for two more years, Trump’s CEA was also being asked by the National Security Council’s biodefense team to look at the economics of vaccine innovation during pandemics. This was an opportune time to bring the Chicago tradition on regulation together with its results on epidemiology and the value of medical innovation. In a report published in September 2019, CEA concluded that “…improving the speed of vaccine production is more important for decreasing the number of infections than improving vaccine efficacy” and emphasized the need for large-scale manufacturing and the possible advantages of public-private partnerships (Council of Economic Advisers 2019).

The CEA’s report prompted President Trump to sign Executive Order 13887, “Modernizing Influenza Vaccines in the United States To Promote National Security and Public Health,” on September 19, 2019. The order created the framework ultimately used by OWS to establish “incentives for the development and production of vaccines by private manufacturers and public-private partnerships,” including through the use of “innovative, faster, and more scalable” platforms like mRNA.

OWS wasn’t the only EA-aligned health policy adopted by the last Trump administration. Trump also took on the kidney shortage by establishing reimbursements for the expenses incurred by living donors alongside expanded support for home-based dialysis and various other fixes. Given kidney disease accounts for 7% of Medicare’s entire budget, these reforms plausibly saved billions of dollars and tens of thousands of Quality Adjusted Life Years. And yet the reforms were only possible thanks to Waitlist Zero, an EA-affiliated advocacy org, and the cohort of Federalist Society lawyers running policy at HHS. It would be surprising if a second Trump term didn’t provide similar opportunities for libertarians and EAs to team up once again.

Housing and tax policy

On the allocative efficiency front, the Harris campaign has pledged to impose nation-wide rent controls, an idea first floated by President Biden. Under the proposal, “corporate landlords” with 50+ units would have to “either cap rent increases on existing units to no more than 5% or lose valuable federal tax breaks,” referring to depreciation write-offs. This would be a disastrously bad policy for the supply-side of housing, and an example of the sort of destructive economic populism normally ascribed to Trump.

Harris’s terrible housing policy can be discounted insofar as it would require an Act of Congress. That said, the impending expiration of key TJCA provisions creates a real opportunity for a version of this idea to be advanced via tax negotiations. As a senator, Harris introduced the Rent Relief Act in 2018, which would have offered “tax credits to renters who earn below $100,000 and spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities.” This tracks with her record as attorney general, where she drafted and helped pass the California Homeowner Bill of Rights while supporting a number of other dubious “affordable housing” initiatives. Her policy instincts are thus consistent with the worst “subsidize demand, restrict supply” form of lawyerly progressivism.

A Trump administration, in contrast, is likely to use tax negotiations to fight for an extension in the TCJA’s corporate tax cut. Research suggests corporate tax cuts cause a “sustained increase in GDP and productivity,” while the TCJA specifically “increased domestic investment in the short run by about 20 percent for a firm with an average-sized tax shock versus a no reform baseline.” Particularly valuable are incentives for R&D and full expensing. A long-term fix for R&D amortization is also more likely under Republican rule, as it has become a political football for Democrats seeking to increase the Child Tax Credit. The failure to fix amortization has induced layoffs in the tech sector and is contributing to a ~$15 billion drag on IP investment annually. While I also favor an expanded CTC, incentives for productive investment are far more important for social welfare in the long-run.

Science, labor and natalism

While JD Vance has expressed heterodox opinions on a handful of domestic policy issues, from antitrust to labor law, his net effect as VP is likely to be pro-technology. On antitrust, Vance admires Lina Khan but favors an approach based on breaking Big Tech’s network effect through open source and crypto, rather than targeting particular companies with flimsy test cases. And on labor, Vance follows Oren Cass in believing the Wagner Act model of adversarial, politicized trade unions is broken, and thus has no interest in passing the Pro Act, say.

Vance also supports a “substantial increase” in federal R&D spending. Importantly, a Trump admin is far less likely to funnel such investments through corrupt and moribund academic institutions. If Trump takes the advice of RFK Jr. and Nicole Shanahan, we may even see a push to “decentralize” science funding away from institutions like the NIH and NSF. While that could lead to more woo-woo ideas getting funded, any shake-up in federal R&D that enables high-variance and heterodox thinkers to thrive would be a very positive development.

Most notably, Vance is a card-carrying pro-natalist who has made collapsing fertility rates one of his signature issues. He is thus likely to push back against any effort to restrict access to fertility technologies like IVF, and may even advance initiatives to reduce the anti-fertility bias in certain government regulations and grant programs. As the Washington Post recently reported, Vance even drafted a bill designed to “make birth free” that was on the cusp of being introduced with three Democratic cosponsors. While obsessing about falling birth rates sets Vance up for being framed as “weird,” having a thoughtful natalist in the White House would be a clear EA win.

Immigration

Immigration is arguably the hardest policy area to make the EA case for Trump. Immigration has enormous economic benefits for both the immigrants themselves and the receiving country, however these benefits divide along the same allocative and innovative dimensions discussed above. Unskilled immigration primarily creates an allocative efficiency for both the immigrant and the high-skilled natives for whom their labor is a complement. High-skilled immigration, in contrast, has both allocative benefits and benefits for rates of innovation, as high-skilled immigrants found companies, file patents, and provide human capital for domestic R&D.

In The Culture Transplant, economist Garrett Jones makes an EA-adjacent case for favoring higher rates of skilled immigration while reducing unskilled immigration from countries with deep histories of institutional dysfunction. Even if those immigrants benefit in the short-run, Jones argues, protecting the cultural foundations of America’s innovative capacity should take priority, as the non-rivalry of ideas makes U.S. innovation a global public good.

I don’t fully buy Jones’ argument, though it should still be taken seriously. However, as a Canadian, I am already partial to the national interest argument for prioritizing skills-based immigration. This isn’t a strictly EA view, as EAs tend to be cosmopolitans. Nevertheless, the Canadian model has been unusually successful at maintaining a high and sustainable rate of immigration with limited public backlash. As Michael Cuenco argues, this success is inseparable from the perception that immigrants to Canada integrate into the middle-class, unambiguously benefit the domestic economy, and enter through a system under robust democratic control:

In Canada, governments of different political persuasions have cooperated to build a successful and dynamic immigration system, one that has earned the broad approval of its citizens. In the United States, on the other hand, the two political parties have managed to raise the level of ideological polarization to febrile extremes, in effect working together to maintain a highly dysfunctional status quo that in turn fuels greater backlash and polarization. The United States now has less of an immigration system and more of an intentionally anarchic “anti-system” in place.

Low trust makes replacing America’s immigration “anti-system” an uphill battle. Piecemeal reforms can help here and there, but a long-term solution will ultimately require a new “political settlement” that credibly restores perceptions of order and control. Paradoxically, the stalemated political economy of immigration may thus require conspicuous acts of restrictionism in the short-term to make future liberalizations credible. In his first administration, Trump supported moving to a points-based system, but immigration reform took a backseat to Paul Ryan’s tax agenda. This time around, Trump looks likely to make immigration reform a top legislative priority and has signaled strong support for high-skilled immigration, including at substantially higher rates. But to stick, truly comprehensive reform will require major investments in internal enforcement and employer-based verification a la the Canada model.

Just as only Nixon could go to China, there’s a legitimate case that only Trump can fix America’s broken immigration system. Indeed, right-wing rhetoric on immigration is often orthogonal to the policies right-wing governments adopt in practice. Just look at the recent record of the British Tories or Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. A Harris administration, in contrast, is likely to dither within the contours of the status-quo while passing social welfare reforms and domestic labor protections that undermine assimilation, fuel ethnic backlash, and push a new political settlement farther out of reach.¹

Situational Awareness

With shortening timelines to the advent of Artificial General Intelligence, there is a nontrivial chance that the next President of the United States will preside over the most significant technological inflection point in the history of the human race. How a Trump or Harris administration responds to transformative AI could easily overshadow the importance of all the issues discussed so far.

Anecdotally, EAs seem more optimistic about a Democratic administration getting AI policy right, in part because EAs are themselves mostly Democrats. This makes sense for sociological reasons: EAs tend to be college educated, socially liberal, open to new experiences, etc. At the same time, EAs are but a tiny island within the ocean of powerful lobbies that make up the modern Democratic Party.

As the political scientists Matt Grossman and David Hopkins argue in their book, Asymmetric Politics, the Democratic Party is best understood as a “coalition of social groups” while the Republican Party is a “vehicle for an ideological movement.” This explains why Republican leaders “prize conservatism and attract support by pledging loyalty to broad values” while Democratic leaders “seek concrete government action, appealing to voters' group identities and interests by endorsing specific policies.” There are ideological currents in the Democratic Party as well, but the raw power of ideas is usually subordinated to the interests of the major party factions, from teachers’ unions to the plaintiffs bar.

This is relevant to AI policy as the risks from AGI are still mostly theoretical, and thus easier to anticipate and respond to through an ideological lens. To the extent a policy issue can be made consistent with conservative principles, Republicans are often better at adopting a first-best approach. This was the case with Operation Warp Speed. There was no lobby or interest group that asked Trump to develop a vaccine preparedness policy. It came from the ideological commitments of the libertarian economists that staffed his administration.

Democratic interest groups, in contrast, are far more likely to a) shift focus to AI’s “ethical” implications for bias and discrimination (a la Harris’s AI Bill of Rights), and b) leverage incumbent interests to resist the structural reforms needed to navigate the AI transition. Would you entrust the future of humanity to Randi Weingarten?

Unfortunately, the EA vs e/acc debate on Twitter has created the perception that AI safety is left-right polarized. The polls tell a different story. And as a participant on the Project2025 AI policy committee, I can confidently report that Trump’s supposed shadow transition takes AGI and its associated risks seriously.

As they should. Libertarians fear the use of AI for supercharging government surveillance and censorship. Populists worry that AI will undermine what it means to be human. Evangelical Christians fear the Singularity for eschatological reasons. Right-wing tech bros are Defensive Accelerationists to the max. And while the modal Republican lawmaker is far more techno-optimist than doomer, their animus for Big Tech could trigger a backlash at any moment.

Trump has himself called the prospect of “super-duper AI” “alarming and scary,” though not as scary as China building it first. This may be why the draft executive order that leaked from the America First Policy Institute proposes a whole-of-government push for energy abundance, defense-oriented Manhattan Projects, and industry-level initiatives to secure advanced AI systems from foreign adversaries. In short, “Make America First in AI.”

If the first nation to achieve AGI internally has even a modest chance of securing a decisive economic, technological and military advantage over its geopolitical competition, it is surely imperative that the U.S. be that nation and not China. So when Democrats say that freedom and democracy are on the ballot this November, the EA in me worries they have a point.

1. I’d discuss the EA implications of a Trump administration for climate change and foreign policy but hit the email length limit. Short version: Permitting reform and no WW3.