The greatest concentration of concern about issue X is usually found where the best performance on issue X has already been achieved. For a variety of reasons, most people focus on improving things near to them more than things far away. Combine these two facts and you get that ‘activism’ on issue X is frequently concentrated where it is least needed and the smallest incremental gains are still to be found.
Some possible examples of this effect:
- A great concentration of feminist activism is found on Western university campuses and in related professions where women are already found in larger numbers and have great freedom.
- Environmentalists work hard to be extra green in their own actions, when greater gains might be found by redirecting their effort to changing the behaviour of others.
- Social justice crusaders often try to reduce inequality or poverty in their own country, even when it is rich and egalitarian by international standards.
- Economists write a lot about the policies of the countries they live in, even though most good economists live in countries with relatively sound economic policy (because of the concentration of policy expertise).
- Rationalist, scientific and skeptic groups work hard to ensure they are especially rational and their beliefs are especially accurate, even when they are already much more rational and scientific than the general population.
- The most rabid and best funded civil liberties organisations are found in countries where civil liberties are already comparatively well protected.
- Religious services are usually delivered to believers rather than to non-believers.
There can be good reasons for focussing one’s effort locally. Maybe it’s very hard for university feminists to get to the places where women are most oppressed, and maybe they’d be ignored there anyway. Maybe environmentalist organisations need to be especially pure to show it can in fact be done or avoid damaging accusations of hypocrisy. Maybe it’s very too hard to get non-believers to listen to a religious sermon let alone convert them.
However, these seem like post-hoc justifications for our locally-focussed actions, so we should at least be skeptical of them and double-check that they are true.
For example, while of course it’s costly to learn Hindi and travel to rural India, I would bet a feminist in a rich liberal could do more good for women (and humans for that matter) by getting a job and sending the money to a feminist organisation run by Indians in India (or locals in a host of other less liberal countries) than they could by working to improve the status of women in Europe, the US or Australia.
Tagged: altruism, efficiency, rationality
