I think to Open Borders campaigners associated with GiveWell’s Open Philanthropy Project, the perception of the project as just about the most intractable policy prospect around (I’d say a moratorium on AI research is up there), but at the same time, non identification of a villain in the picture. That’s not entirely unsuprising. I recall the hate I received when I suggested that people should consider prostituting themselves for effective altruism, or soliciting donations from the porn industry where donors struggle to donate since many, particularly relgious charities refuge to accept their donations. Likewise, it’s hard to get rid of encultured perceptions of what’s good and what’s bad, rather then enumerating (’or checking, as Eleizer writes in the sequence) the consequences.
Yet you wrote nothing about the cost of making well-funded enemies.
Do you support or oppose the government suing tobacco companies to recover health care costs caused by tobacco use?
Why should a government do that, if it can simply tax tabacco directly and then doesn’t have to pay a lot of money for court costs and the risk of losing a case?
Given that you are from Australia it’s you also don’t talk about the current legal battles between Philip Morris and Australia.
Giving What We Can describes some opposition to governments that tobacco companies bring:
France cut its smoking rate in half between 1990 and 2005 by using tax to steadily increase the real price of cigarettes. And South Africa, a middle-income country, was able to do the same over a similar period (Jha and Peto 2014, pp.64-65).
However, there is one powerful reason to think tobacco taxation might not be a tractable intervention. The tobacco industry and its agents directly and indirectly oppose tobacco control measures, including taxation. They lobby governments, spread misinformation, and bring costly lawsuits against governments that attempt to control tobacco use (see e.g., Mamudu et al. 2008 and Sebrie at al. 2006 )
As a result, organizations that advocate for tobacco taxes not only have to design and build support for effective tobacco taxes, but also help defend the policies against the tobacco industry’s attempts to block, dismantle, and neuter them. In addition to this kind of direct opposition, tax advocates may find themselves operating in places where the institutions needed to establish and maintain the tax system are weak, dysfunctional, or corrupt. Such factors and others may explain the (relative) absence of “global level policy prescriptions” and the “lack of public involvement in tax-related policies” noted by Uwe Gneiting (2015, pp.9-10). Finally, some countries may be parties to international agreements that, in practice, limit their ability to defend the legality of tobacco taxes even when these taxes are morally and politically justified.
Governments actively suing the tobacco industry seems like it would suffer from the same political problems as taxation, only that the problems are stronger.
Yet you wrote nothing about the cost of making well-funded enemies.
Why should a government do that, if it can simply tax tabacco directly and then doesn’t have to pay a lot of money for court costs and the risk of losing a case?
Given that you are from Australia it’s you also don’t talk about the current legal battles between Philip Morris and Australia.
Giving What We Can describes some opposition to governments that tobacco companies bring:
Governments actively suing the tobacco industry seems like it would suffer from the same political problems as taxation, only that the problems are stronger.