Leftist critics of effective altruism like to say this. Well, it’s not true, and I proved it by calculating (an estimate of) the expected utility of a communist revolution. It wasn’t even hard—it took me less than an hour.

I put my cost-effectiveness analysis on SquiggleHub: https://squigglehub.org/models/mdickens/communist-revolution-ev

According to my analysis, working to start a communist revolution is between 11x and 400x as good as donating to GiveDirectly (that’s the 95% credence interval).1 That makes it probably better than any GiveWell top charity.

That’s assuming communism is good, which it isn’t, but let’s say it is for the sake of argument.

My model includes calculations with extensive commentary. The model is relatively simple—I recommend reading it if you want to understand how it works.

In short, the cost-effectiveness analysis goes like this:

  1. Assume life under communism will be 20% better than the status quo. This is probably an underestimate because it’s hard to capture the soul-crushing indignities of capitalism2 but let’s say 20% to be conservative.
  2. Look at the number of revolutionaries in historical communist revolutions to estimate the probability of success per revolutionary.
  3. Downweight the probability of success based on the fact that the revolution might result in an inferior version of communism (like what happened with the Soviet Union).
  4. Estimate how long it would take until a communist revolution happened anyway. The value of doing a revolution now equals [time between now and when it would have happened anyway] x [number of people who get to live under the new regime] x [how good communism is compared to the status quo].
  5. The previous step gives us the total value of a revolution. Divide that by the probability of success per revolutionary to get the expected value of a single individual’s efforts.
  6. Compare to how much an individual could donate to GiveDirectly if they worked a normal job instead of doing activism. That gives us the expected value of a communist revolutionary relative to a GiveDirectly donor.

Is this model perfectly accurate? No. I spent half an hour on it. I can immediately think of several ways it could be better.3 But the model is still informative—it provides a basic case that working for a communist revolution could be more cost-effective than GiveWell top charities. And it shows that, contrary to what many people say, it’s possible in principle to calculate the expected utility of a communist revolution.

The numbers in my model are mostly made up. But if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with made-up statistics.

Notes

  1. Using GiveWell’s 2023 numbers. The 2024 numbers are considerably more optimistic about GiveDirectly, which makes the multiplier smaller, but a communist revolution still compares favorably to GiveWell top charities. ↩

  2. I don’t actually believe this; this is me wearing my leftism hat. ↩

  3. Some obvious improvements:

    1. Look at a variety of historical revolutions instead of just one.
    2. Account for the skill of the activist in question. Presumably, some people are more skilled than others at garnering support.
    3. Instead of treating all activists as equally responsible, estimate the probability that a marginal activist causes a revolution to occur. Or estimate how much sooner a revolution occurs thanks to a marginal activist.

    ↩