slacktivism

You call this a hobby?

PNRJ book reviews, critique of neoclassical economics, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 9 JDN 2460989

A review of Politics is for Power by Eitan Hersch

This week, there was an election. It’s a minor midterm election—since it’s an odd-numbered year, many places don’t even have any candidates on the ballot—and as a result, turnout will surely be low. Eitan Hersch has written a book about why that’s a bad thing, and how it is symptomatic of greater problems in our civic culture as a whole.

Buried somewhere in this book, possible to find through committed, concerted effort, there is a book that could have had a large positive effect on our political system, our civic discourse, and our society as a whole. Sadly, Dr. Hersch buried it so well that most people will never find it.

In particular, he starts the book—not even on the first page, but on the cover—by actively alienating his core audience with what seems to be the very utmost effort he can muster.


Yes, even the subtitle is condescending and alienating:

How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change

And of course it’s not just there; on page after page he drives the dagger deeper and twists it as hard as he can, repeating the accusation over and over:

This is just a hobby for you. It doesn’t really mean anything.

Today’s hobbyists possess the negative qualities of the amateurs—hyperemotional engagement, obsession with national politics, an insatiable appetite for debate—and none of the amateur’s positive qualities—the neighborhood meetings, the concrete goals, the leadership.

– p.9

You hear that? You’re worse than an amateur. This is on page 9. Page 9.

[…] Much of the time we spend on politics is best described as an inward-focused leisure activity for people who like politics.

We may not easily concede that we are doing politics for fun.[…]

-p. 14

See? You may say it’s not really just for fun, but you’re lying. You’re failing to concede the truth.

To the political hobbyist, news is a form of entertainment and needs to be fun.

-p.19

You hear me? This is fun for you. You’re enjoying this. You’re doing it for yourself.

The real explanation for the dynamics of voter turnout is that we treat politics like a game and follow the spectacle. Turnout is high in presidential elections compared to other US elections in the same way that football viewership is high when the Super Bowl is on. Many people who do not like football or even know the rules of the game end up at a Super Bowl party. They’re there for the commercials, the guacamole, and to be part of a cultural moment. That’s why turnout is high in presidential elections. Without the spectacle, even people who say they care about voting don’t show up.

-p. 48

This is all a game. It’s not real. You don’t really care.

I could go on; he keeps repeating this message—this insult, this accusation—throughout the book. He tells you, over and over, that if you are not already participating in politics in the very particular way he wants you to (and he may even be right that it would be better!), you are a selfish liar, and you are treating what should be vitally important as just meaningless entertainment.

This made it honestly quite painful to get through the book. Several times, I was tempted to just give up and put it back on the shelf. But I’m glad I didn’t, because there are valuable insights about effective grassroots political activism buried within this barrage of personal accusations.

I guess Hersch must not see this as a personal accusation; at one point, he acknowledges that people might find it insulting, but (1) doesn’t seem to care and (2) makes no effort to inquire as to why we might feel that way; in fact, he manages to twist the knife just a little deeper in that very same passage:

For the non-self-identifying junkies, the term political hobbyist can be insulting. Given how important politics is, it doesn’t feel good to call one’s political activity a hobby. The term is also insulting, I have learned, to real hobbyists, who see hobbies as activities with much more depth than the online bickering or addictive news consumption I’m calling a hobby.

-p. 88

You think calling it a “hobby” is insulting? Yeah, well, it’s worse than that, so ha!

But let me tell you something about my own experience of politics. (Actually, one of Hersch’s central messages is that sharing personal experiences is one of the most powerful political tools I know.)

How do most people I know feel about politics, since, oh, say… November 2016?

ABSOLUTE HORROR AND DESPAIR.

For every queer person I know, every trans person, every immigrant, every woman, every person of color, and for plenty of White cishet liberal guys too, the election of President Donald Trump was traumatic. It felt like a physical injury. People who had recovered from depression were thrust back into it. People felt physically nauseated. And especially for immigrants and trans people, people literally feared for their lives and were right to do so.

WHATEVER THIS IS, IT IS NOT A HOBBY.

I’ve had to talk people down from psychotic episodes and suicidal ideation because of this, and you have the fucking audacity to tell me that we’re doing this for fun!?

If someone feared for their life because their team lost the Super Bowl, we would rightfully recognize that as an utterly pathological response. But I know a whole bunch of folks on student visas that are constantly afraid of being kidnapped and taken away by masked men with guns, because that is a thing that has actually happened to other people who were in this country on student visas. I know a whole bunch of trans folks who are afraid of assaulted or even killed for using the wrong bathroom, because that is a thing that actually happens to trans people in this country.

I wish I could tell these people—many of them dear friends of mine—that they are wrong to fear, that they are safe, that everything will be all right. But as long as Donald Trump is in power and the Republicans in Congress and the right-wing Supreme Court continue to enable him, I can’t tell them that, because I would be lying; the danger is real. All I can do is tell them that it is probably not as great a danger as they fear, and that if there is any way I can help them, I am willing to do so.

Indeed, politics for me and those closest to me is so obviously so much not a hobby that repeatedly insisting that I admit that it is starts to feel like gaslighting. I feel like I’m in a struggle session or something: “Admit you are a hobbyist! Repent!”

I don’t know; maybe there are people for whom politics is just a hobby. Maybe the privileged cishet White kids at Tufts that Dr. Hersch lectures to are genuinely so removed from the consequences of public policy that they can engage with politics at their leisure and for their own entertainment. (A lot of the studies he cites are specifically about undergrads; I know this is a thing in pretty much all social science… but maybe undergrads are in fact not a very representative sample of political behavior?) But even so, some of the international students in those lecture halls (11% of Tufts undergrads and 17% of Tufts grads) probably feel pretty differently, I have to imagine.

In fact, maybe genuine political hobbyism is a widespread phenomenon, and its existence explains a lot of otherwise really baffling things about the behavior of our electorate (like how the same districts could vote for both Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). I don’t find that especially plausible given my own experience, but I’m an economist, not a political scientist, so I do feel like I should offer some deference to the experts on this matter. (And I’m well aware that my own social network is nothing like a representative sample of the American electorate.)

But I can say this for sure:

The target audience of this book is not doing this as a hobby.

Someone who picks up a book by a political scientist hoping for guidance as to how to make their own political engagement more effective is not someone who thinks this is all a game. They are not someone who is engaging with politics as a fun leisure activity. They are someone who cares. They are someone who thinks this stuff matters.

By construction, the person who reads this book to learn about how to make change wants to make change.

So maybe you should acknowledge that at some point in your 200 pages of text? Maybe after spending all these words talking about how having empathy is such an important trait in political activism, you should have some empathy for your audience?

Hersch does have some useful advice to give, buried in all this.

His core message is basically that we need more grassroots activism: Small groups of committed people, acting in their communities. Not regular canvassing, which he acknowledges as terrible (and as well he should; I’ve done it, and it is), but deep canvassing, which also involves going door to door but is really a fundamentally different process.

Actually, he seems to love grassroots organizing so much that he’s weirdly nostalgic for the old days of party bosses. Several times, he acknowledges that these party bosses were corrupt, racist, and utterly unaccountable, but after every such acknowledgment he always follows it up with some variation on “but at least they got things done”.

He’s honestly weirdly dismissive of other forms of engagement, though. Like, I expected him to be dismissive of “slacktivism” (though I am not), if for no other reason than the usual generational curmudgeonry. But he’s also weirdly dismissive of donations and even… honestly… voting? He doesn’t even seem interested in encouraging people to vote more. He doesn’t seem to think that get-out-the-vote campaigns are valuable.

I guess as a political scientist, he’s probably very familiar with the phenomenon of “low information voters”, who frequently swing elections despite being either clueless or actively misled. And okay, maybe turning out those people isn’t all that useful, at least if it’s not coupled with also educating them and correcting their misconceptions. But surely it’s not hobbyism to vote? Surely doing the one most important thing in a democratic system isn’t treating this like a game?

In his section on donations, he takes two tacks against them:

The first is to say that rich donors who pay $10,000 a plate for fancy dinners really just want access to politicians for photo ops. I don’t think that’s right, but the truth is admittedly not much better: I think they want access to politicians to buy influence. This is “political engagement” in some sense—you’re acting to exert power—but it’s corrupt, and it’s the source of an enormous amount of damage to our society—indeed to our planet itself. But I think Hersch has to deny that the goal is influence, because that would in fact be “politics for power”, and in order to remain fiercely non-partisan throughout (which, honestly, probably is a good strategic move), he carefully avoids ever saying that anyone exerting political power is bad.

Actually the closest he gets to admitting his own political beliefs (surprise, the Massachusetts social science professor is a center-left liberal!) comes in a passage where he bemoans the fact that… uh… Democrats… aren’t… corrupt enough? If you don’t believe me, read it for yourself:

The hobbyist motivation among wealthy donors is also problematic for a reason that doesn’t have a parallel in the nonprofit world: Partisan asymmetry. Unlike Democratic donors, Republican donors typically support politicians whose policy priorities align with a wealthy person’s financial interests. The donors can view donations as an investment. When Schaffner and I asked max-out donors why they made their contribution, many more Republicans than Democrats said that a very or extremely important reason for their gift was that the politician could affect the donor’s own industry (37 percent of Republicans versus 22 percent of Democrats).

This asymmetry puts Democrats at a disadvantage. Not motivated by their own bottom line, Democratic donors instead have to be motivated by ideology, issues, or even by the entertainment value that a donation provides.

-p.80

Yes, God forbid they be motivated by issues or ideology. That would involve caring about other people. Clearly only naked self-interest and the profit motive could ever be a good reason for political engagement! (Quick question: You haven’t been, uh, reading a lot of… neoclassical economists lately, have you? Why? Oh, no reason.) Oh why can’t Democrats just be more like Republicans, and use their appallingly vast hoards of money to make sure that we cut social services and deregulate everything until the polluted oceans flood the world!?

The second is to say that the much broader population who makes small donations of $25 or $50 is “ideologically extreme” compared to the rest of the population, which is true, but seems to me utterly unsurprising. The further the world is from how you’d like to see it, the greater the value is to you of changing the world, and therefore the more you should be willing to invest into making that change—or even into a small probability of possibly making that change. If you think things are basically okay, why would you pay money to try to make them different? (I guess maybe you’d try to pay money to keep them the same? But even so-called “conservatives” never actually seem to campaign on that.)

I also don’t really see “ideologically extreme” as inherently a bad thing.

Sure, some extremists are very bad: Nazis are extreme and bad (weird that this seems controversial these days), Islamists are extreme and bad, Christian nationalists are extreme and bad, tankie leftists are extreme and bad.

But vegetarians—especially vegans—are also “ideologically extreme”, but quite frankly we are objectively correct, and maybe don’t even go far enough (I only hope that future generations will forgive me for my cheese). Everyone knows that animals can suffer, and everyone who is at all informed knows that factory farms make them suffer severely. The “moderate” view that all this horrible suffering is justifiable in the name of cheap ground beef and chicken nuggets is a fundamentally immoral one. (Maybe I could countenance a view that free-range humane meat farming is acceptable, but even that is far removed from our current political center.)

Trans activism is in some sense “ideologically extreme”—and frequently characterized as such—but it basically amounts to saying that the human rights of free expression, bodily autonomy, and even just personal safety outweigh other people’s narrow, blinkered beliefs about sex and gender. Okay, maybe we can make some sort of compromise on trans kids in sports (because why should I care about sports?), and I’m okay with gender-neutral bathrooms instead of letting trans women in women’s rooms (because gender-neutral bathrooms give more privacy and safety anyway!), and the evidence on the effects of puberty blockers and hormones is complicated (which is why it should be decided by doctors and scientists, not by legislators!), but in our current state, trans people die to murder and suicide at incredibly alarming rates. The only “moderate” position here is to demand, at minimum, enforced laws against discrimination and hate crimes. (Also, calling someone by the name and pronouns they ask you to costs you basically nothing. Failing to do that is not a brave ideological stand; it’s just you being rude and obnoxious. Indeed, since it can trigger dysphoria, it’s basically like finding out someone’s an arachnophobe and immediately putting a spider in their hair.)

Open borders is regarded as so “ideologically extreme” that even the progressive Democrats won’t touch it, despite the fact that I literally am not aware of a single ethical philosopher in the 21st century who believes that our current system of immigration control is morally justifiable. Even the ones who favor “closed borders” in principle are almost unanimous that our current system is cruel and racist. The Lifeboat Theory is ridiculous; allowing immigrants in wouldn’t kill us, it would just maybe—maybe—make us a little worse off. Their lives may be at stake, but ours are not. We are not keeping people out of a lifeboat so it doesn’t sink; we are keeping them out of a luxury cruise liner so it doesn’t get dirty and crowded.

Indeed, even so-called “eco-terrorists”, who are not just ideologically extreme but behaviorally extreme as well, don’t even really seem that bad. They are really mostly eco-vandals; they destroy property, they don’t kill people. There is some risk to life and limb involved in tree spiking or blowing up a pipeline, but the goal is clearly not to terrorize people; it’s to get them to stop doing a particular thing—a particular thing that they in fact probably should stop doing. I guess I understand why this behavior has to be illegal and punished as such; but morally, I’m not even sure it’s wrong. We may not be able to name or even precisely count the children saved who would have died if that pipeline had been allowed to continue pumping oil and thus spewing carbon emissions, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

So really, if anything, the problem is not “extremism” in some abstract sense, but particular beliefs and ideologies, some of which are not even regarded as extreme. A stronger vegan lobby would not be harmful to America, however “extreme” they might be, and a strong Republican lobby, however “mainstream” it is perceived to be, is rapidly destroying our nation on a number of different levels.

Indeed, in parts of the book, it almost seems like Hersch is advocating in some Nietzschean sense for power for its own sake. I don’t think that’s really his intention; I think he means to empower the currently disempowered, for the betterment of society as a whole. But his unwillingness to condemn rich Republicans who donate the maximum allowed in order to get their own industry deregulated is at least… problematic, as both political activists and social scientists are wont to say.

I’m honestly not even sure that empowering the disempowered is what we need right now. I think a lot of the disempowered are also terribly misinformed, and empowering them might actually make things worse. In fact, I think the problem with the political effect of social media isn’t that it has failed to represent the choices of the electorate, but that it has represented them all too well and most people are really, really bad—just, absolutely, shockingly, appallingly bad—at making good political choices. They have wildly wrong beliefs about really basic policy questions, and often think that politicians’ platforms are completely different from what they actually are. I don’t go quite as far as this article by Dan Williams in Conspicuous Cognition, but it makes some really good points I can’t ignore. Democracy is currently failing to represent the interests of a great many Americans, but a disturbingly large proportion of this failure must be blamed on a certain—all too large—segment of the American populace itself.

I wish this book had been better.

More grassroots organizing does seem like a good thing! And there is some advice in this book about how to do it better—though in my opinion, not nearly enough. A lot of what Hersch wants to see happen would require tremendous coordination between huge numbers of people, which almost seems like saying “politics would be better if enough people were better about politics”. What I wanted to hear more about was what I can do; if voting and donating and protesting and blogging isn’t enough, what should I be doing? How do I make it actually work? It feels like Hersch spent so long trying to berate me for being a “hobbyist” that he forgot to tell me what he actually thinks I should be doing.

I am fully prepared to believe that online petitions and social media posts don’t accomplish much politically. (Indeed, I am fully prepared to believe that blogging doesn’t accomplish much politically.) I am open to hearing what other options are available, and eager for guidance about how to have the most effective impact.

But could you please, please not spend half the conversation repeatedly accusing me of not caring!?

Updating your moral software

PNRJ core principles, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 23 JDN 2459876

I’ve noticed an odd tendency among politically active people, particular social media slacktivists (a term I do not use pejoratively: slacktivism is highly cost-effective). They adopt new ideas very rapidly, trying to stay on the cutting edge of moral and political discourse—and then they denigrate and disparage anyone who fails to do the same as an irredeemable monster.

This can take many forms, such as “if you don’t buy into my specific take on Critical Race Theory, you are a racist”, “if you have any uncertainty about the widespread use of puberty blockers you are a transphobic bigot”, “if you give any credence to the medical consensus on risks of obesity you are fatphobic“, “if you think disabilities should be cured you’re an ableist”, and “if you don’t support legalizing abortion in all circumstances you are a misogynist”.

My intention here is not to evaluate any particular moral belief, though I’ll say the following: I am skeptical of Critical Race Theory, especially the 1619 project which seems to be to include substantial distortions of history. I am cautiously supportive of puberty blockers, because the medical data on their risks are ambiguous—while the sociological data on how much happier trans kids are when accepted are totally unambiguous. I am well aware of the medical data saying that the risks of obesity are overblown (but also not negligible, particular for those who are very obese). Speaking as someone with a disability that causes me frequent, agonizing pain, yes, I want disabilities to be cured, thank you very much; accommodations are nice in the meantime, but the best long-term solution is to not need accommodations. (I’ll admit to some grey areas regarding certain neurodivergences such as autism and ADHD, and I would never want to force cures on people who don’t want them; but paralysis, deafness, blindness, diabetes, depression, and migraine are all absolutely worth finding cures for—the QALY at stake here are massive—and it’s silly to say otherwise.) I think abortion should generally be legal and readily available in the first trimester (which is when most abortions happen anyway), but much more strictly regulated thereafter—but denying it to children and rape victims is a human rights violation.

What I really want to talk about today is not the details of the moral belief, but the attitude toward those who don’t share it. There are genuine racists, transphobes, fatphobes, ableists, and misogynists in the world. There are also structural institutions that can lead to discrimination despite most of the people involved having no particular intention to discriminate. It’s worthwhile to talk about these things, and to try to find ways to fix them. But does calling anyone who disagrees with you a monster accomplish that goal?

This seems particularly bad precisely when your own beliefs are so cutting-edge. If you have a really basic, well-established sort of progressive belief like “hiring based on race should be illegal”, “women should be allowed to work outside the home” or “sodomy should be legal”, then people who disagree with you pretty much are bigots. But when you’re talking about new, controversial ideas, there is bound to be some lag; people who adopted the last generation’s—or even the last year’s—progressive beliefs may not yet be ready to accept the new beliefs, and that doesn’t make them bigots.

Consider this: Were you born believing in your current moral and political beliefs?

I contend that you were not. You may have been born intelligent, open-minded, and empathetic. You may have been born into a progressive, politically-savvy family. But the fact remains that any particular belief you hold about race, or gender, or ethics was something you had to learn. And if you learned it, that means that at some point you didn’t already know it. How would you have felt back then, if, instead of calmly explaining it to you, people called you names for not believing in it?

Now, perhaps it is true that as soon as you heard your current ideas, you immediately adopted them. But that may not be the case—it may have taken you some time to learn or change your mind—and even if it was, it’s still not fair to denigrate anyone who takes a bit longer to come around. There are many reasons why someone might not be willing to change their beliefs immediately, and most of them are not indicative of bigotry or deep moral failings.

It may be helpful to think about this in terms of updating your moral software. You were born with a very minimal moral operating system (emotions such as love and guilt, the capacity for empathy), and over time you have gradually installed more and more sophisticated software on top of that OS. If someone literally wasn’t born with the right OS—we call these people psychopaths—then, yes, you have every right to hate, fear, and denigrate them. But most of the people we’re talking about do have that underlying operating system, they just haven’t updated all their software to the same version as yours. It’s both unfair and counterproductive to treat them as irredeemably defective simply because they haven’t updated to the newest version yet. They have the hardware, they have the operating system; maybe their download is just a little slower than yours.

In fact, if you are very fast to adopt new, trendy moral beliefs, you may in fact be adopting them too quickly—they haven’t been properly vetted by human experience just yet. You can think of this as like a beta version: The newest update has some great new features, but it’s also buggy and unstable. It may need to be fixed before it is really ready for widespread release. If that’s the case, then people aren’t even wrong not to adopt them yet! It isn’t necessarily bad that you have adopted the new beliefs; we need beta testers. But you should be aware of your status as a beta tester and be prepared both to revise your own beliefs if needed, and also to cut other people slack if they disagree with you.

I understand that it can be immensely frustrating to be thoroughly convinced that something is true and important and yet see so many people disagreeing with it. (I am an atheist activist after all, so I absolutely know what that feels like.) I understand that it can be immensely painful to watch innocent people suffer because they have to live in a world where other people have harmful beliefs. But you aren’t changing anyone’s mind or saving anyone from harm by calling people names. Patience, tact, and persuasion will win the long game, and the long game is really all we have.

And if it makes you feel any better, the long game may not be as long as it seems. The arc of history may have tighter curvature than we imagine. We certainly managed a complete flip of the First World consensus on gay marriage in just a single generation. We may be able to achieve similarly fast social changes in other areas too. But we haven’t accomplished the progress we have so far by being uncharitable or aggressive toward those who disagree.

I am emphatically not saying you should stop arguing for your beliefs. We need you to argue for your beliefs. We need you to argue forcefully and passionately. But when doing so, try not to attack the people who don’t yet agree with you—for they are precisely the people we need to listen to you.

In defense of slacktivism

PNRJ cognitive science, ethics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 22, JDN 2457776

It’s one of those awkward portmanteaus that people often make to try to express a concept in fewer syllables, while also implicitly saying that the phenomenon is specific enough to deserve its own word: “Slacktivism”, made of “slacker” and “activism”, not unlike “mansplain” is made of “man” and “explain” or “edutainment” was made of “education” and “entertainment”—or indeed “gerrymander” was made of “Elbridge Gerry” and “salamander”. The term seems to be particularly popular on Huffington Post, which has a whole category on slacktivism. There is a particular subcategory of slacktivism that is ironically against other slacktivism, which has been dubbed “snarktivism”.

It’s almost always used as a pejorative; very few people self-identify as “slacktivists” (though once I get through this post, you may see why I’m considering it myself). “Slacktivism” is activism that “isn’t real” somehow, activism that “doesn’t count”.

Of course, that raises the question: What “counts” as legitimate activism? Is it only protest marches and sit-ins? Then very few people have ever been or will ever be activists. Surely donations should count, at least? Those have a direct, measurable impact. What about calling your Congressman, or letter-writing campaigns? These have been staples of activism for decades.
If the term “slacktivism” means anything at all, it seems to point to activities surrounding raising awareness, where the goal is not to enact a particular policy or support a particular NGO but to simply get as much public attention to a topic as possible. It seems to be particularly targeted at blogging and social media—and that’s important, for reasons I’ll get to shortly. If you gather a group of people in your community and give a speech about LGBT rights, you’re an activist. If you send out the exact same speech on Facebook, you’re a slacktivist.

One of the arguments against “slacktivism” is that it can be used to funnel resources at the wrong things; this blog post makes a good point that the Kony 2012 campaign doesn’t appear to have actually accomplished anything except profits for the filmmakers behind it. (Then again: A blog post against slacktivism? Are you sure you’re not doing right now the thing you think you are against?) But is this problem unique to slacktivism, or is it a more general phenomenon that people simply aren’t all that informed about how to have the most impact? There are an awful lot of inefficient charities out there, and in fact the most important waste of charitable funds involves people giving to their local churches. Fortunately, this is changing, as people become more secularized; churches used to account for over half of US donations, and now they only account for less than a third. (Naturally, Christian organizations are pulling out their hair over this.) The 60 million Americans who voted for Trump made a horrible mistake and will cause enormous global damage; but they weren’t slacktivists, were they?

Studies do suggest that traditionally “slacktivist” activities like Facebook likes aren’t a very strong predictor of future, larger actions, and more private modes of support (like donations and calling your Congressman) tend to be stronger predictors. But so what? In order for slacktivism to be a bad thing, they would have to be a negative predictor. They would have to substitute for more effective activism, and there’s no evidence that this happens.

In fact, there’s even some evidence that slacktivism has a positive effect (normally I wouldn’t cite Fox News, but I think in this case we should expect a bias in the opposite direction, and you can read the full Georgetown study if you want):

A study from Georgetown University in November entitled “Dynamics of Cause Engagement” looked how Americans learned about and interacted with causes and other social issues, and discovered some surprising findings on Slacktivism.

While the traditional forms of activism like donating money or volunteering far outpaces slacktivism, those who engage in social issues online are twice as likely as their traditional counterparts to volunteer and participate in events. In other words, slacktivists often graduate to full-blown activism.

At worst, most slacktivists are doing nothing for positive social change, and that’s what the vast majority of people have been doing for the entirety of human history. We can bemoan this fact, but that won’t change it. Most people are simply too uniformed to know what’s going on in the world, and too broke and too busy to do anything about it.

Indeed, slacktivism may be the one thing they can do—which is why I think it’s worth defending.

From an economist’s perspective, there’s something quite odd about how people’s objections to slacktivism are almost always formulated. The rational, sensible objection would be to their small benefits—this isn’t accomplishing enough, you should do something more effective. But in fact, almost all the objections to slacktivism I have ever read focus on their small costs—you’re not a “real activist” because you don’t make sacrifices like I do.

Yet it is a basic principle of economic rationality that, all other things equal, lower cost is better. Indeed, this is one of the few principles of economic rationality that I really do think is unassailable; perfect information is unrealistic and total selfishness makes no sense at all. But cost minimization is really very hard to argue with—why pay more, when you can pay less and get the same benefit?

From an economist’s perspective, the most important thing about an activity is its cost-effectiveness, measured either by net benefit—benefit minus cost—or rate of return—benefit divided by cost. But in both cases, a lower cost is always better; and in fact slacktivism has an astonishing rate of return, precisely because its cost is so small.

Suppose that a campaign of 10 million Facebook likes actually does have a 1% chance of changing a policy in a way that would save 10,000 lives, with a life expectancy of 50 years each. Surely this is conservative, right? I’m only giving it a 1% chance of success, on a policy with a relatively small impact (10,000 lives could be a single clause in an EPA regulatory standard), with a large number of slacktivist participants (10 million is more people than the entire population of Switzerland). Yet because clicking “like” and “share” only costs you maybe 10 seconds, we’re talking about an expected cost of (10 million)(10/86,400/365) = 0.32 QALY for an expected benefit of (10,000)(0.01)(50) = 5000 QALY. That is a rate of return of 1,500,000%—that’s 1.5 million percent.

Let’s compare this to the rate of return on donating to a top charity like UNICEF, Oxfam, the Against Malaria Foundation, or the Schistomoniasis Control Initiative, for which donating about $300 would save the life of 1 child, adding about 50 QALY. That $300 most likely cost you about 0.01 QALY (assuming an annual income of $30,000), so we’re looking at a return of 500,000%. Now, keep in mind that this is a huge rate of return, far beyond what you can ordinarily achieve, that donating $300 to UNICEF is probably one of the best things you could possibly be doing with that money—and yet slacktivism may still exceed it in efficiency. Maybe slacktivism doesn’t sound so bad after all?

Of course, the net benefit of your participation is higher in the case of donation; you yourself contribute 50 QALY instead of only contributing 0.0005 QALY. Ultimately net benefit is what matters; rate of return is a way of estimating what the net benefit would be when comparing different ways of spending the same amount of time or money. But from the figures I just calculated, it begins to seem like maybe the very best thing you could do with your time is clicking “like” and “share” on Facebook posts that will raise awareness of policies of global importance. Now, you have to include all that extra time spent poring through other Facebook posts, and consider that you may not be qualified to assess the most important issues, and there’s a lot of uncertainty involved in what sort of impact you yourself will have… but it’s almost certainly not the worst thing you could be doing with your time, and frankly running these numbers has made me feel a lot better about all the hours I have actually spent doing this sort of thing. It’s a small benefit, yes—but it’s an even smaller cost.

Indeed, the fact that so many people treat low cost as bad, when it is almost by definition good, and the fact that they also target their ire so heavily at blogging and social media, says to me that what they are really trying to accomplish here has nothing to do with actually helping people in the most efficient way possible.

Rather, it’s two things.

The obvious one is generational—it’s yet another chorus in the unending refrain that is “kids these days”. Facebook is new, therefore it is suspicious. Adults have been complaining about their descendants since time immemorial; some of the oldest written works we have are of ancient Babylonians complaining that their kids are lazy and selfish. Either human beings have been getting lazier and more selfish for thousands of years, or, you know, kids are always a bit more lazy and selfish than their parents or at least seem so from afar.

The one that’s more interesting for an economist is signaling. By complaining that other people aren’t paying enough cost for something, what you’re really doing is complaining that they aren’t signaling like you are. The costly signal has been made too cheap, so now it’s no good as a signal anymore.

“Anyone can click a button!” you say. Yes, and? Isn’t it wonderful that now anyone with a smartphone (and there are more people with access to smartphones than toilets, because #WeLiveInTheFuture) can contribute, at least in some small way, to improving the world? But if anyone can do it, then you can’t signal your status by doing it. If your goal was to make yourself look better, I can see why this would bother you; all these other people doing things that look just as good as what you do! How will you ever distinguish yourself from the riffraff now?

This is also likely what’s going on as people fret that “a college degree’s not worth anything anymore” because so many people are getting them now; well, as a signal, maybe not. But if it’s just a signal, why are we spending so much money on it? Surely we can find a more efficient way to rank people by their intellect. I thought it was supposed to be an education—in which case the meteoric rise in global college enrollments should be cause for celebration. (In reality of course a college degree can serve both roles, and it remains an open question among labor economists as to which effect is stronger and by how much. But the signaling role is almost pure waste from the perspective of social welfare; we should be trying to maximize the proportion of real value added.)

For this reason, I think I’m actually prepared to call myself a slacktivist. I aim for cost-effective awareness-raising; I want to spread the best ideas to the most people for the lowest cost. Why, would you prefer I waste more effort, to signal my own righteousness?