The Effective Altruism movement and open borders advocates have a long history of mutual sympathy. Last month, I tried to convince the Vanderbilt Effective Altruism club that this mutual sympathy is entirely justified. The essence of effective altruism is trying to minimize the cost of doing good. Open borders offers a way to do great good at a cost of less than zero.
How? Simple: Allowing people to move from places where their productivity is low to where their productivity is high doesn’t merely increase their own wages. They increase the total production of humanity. And while you might fear a Fallacy of Composition, in this case, you shouldn’t.
Curious? Here’s the full presentation.
The post Open Borders as Ultra-Effective Altruism appeared first on Bet On It.
Your post was linked at the Fringe Ideas EA meetup today:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/events/fyHXnGXmcBJQSPbi6/fringe-ideas-and-unconventional-cause-areas-1
The link was next to the cause area, "Lobbying for open border policies that enable free movement of people & goods without restriction." I initially marked this cause as "Strongly Agree" for the reasons you cite, but then people corrected me by noting that it has the keyword "Lobbying" at the front.
I agree that Open Borders has the biggest impact. But the only way to approach Open Borders is politically, and EAs can't price the cost-benefit of lobbying. "Tractability" is one of the EA core principles, and this cause area appears intractable.