During EA Global San Francisco 2017, there was a panel discussion called "Celebrating Failed Projects." At one point, Nathan Labenz, the moderator, asks, "What are some projects that you guys are harboring in the backs of your respective minds that you'd love to see people undertake even if, and maybe especially where, the chance of ultimate success might be pretty low?" In response, Anna Salamon says, "There's a set of books that pretty often change people's lives, especially 18 year old type people's lives, hopefully in good directions. I think it would be lovely to make a list of five of those books and make a list of all the smart kids and mail the books to the smart kids. This has been on the list of obvious things to do for the last ten years but somehow nobody has ever done it. I didn't do it. I don't know. I really wish someone would do it. I think it would be really high impact."
It seems that the following five books are popular in the EA community:
1. Doing Good Better by William MacAskill
2. 80,000 Hours by Benjamin Todd and the 80,000 Hours Team
3. The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer
4. Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
5. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
However, I doubt that Salamon meant to limit the selection to books related to effective altruism. If you could choose five books on any topic, which five would you choose?
I meant socialist in broad terms. One can be a socialist and not think much of a project for change based on the 'voluntaristic' exchange of money without demolishing capitalist social relations. It pushes back to your philosophy of society, and whether you think capitalism operates as a systemic whole to generate those things which you think need to be changed.
I'm not sure that you're not building a strawman, either. The defining problem of anti-capitalist thought since the failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to spread to Germany has been why it isn't obvious. And it's worth saying that no one wants to abolish private property altogether, just the historically specific property relations that emerged in the early modern period and made it such that peasants could not earn a living except by selling themselves to those who owned the means of production. Even more ambitious forms of social anarchism allow for usufruct.
Sorry I should've been clearer. I meant the socialist argument as used in criticisms of EAs by Leiter and Srinivasan etc. They talk as though EAs are missing something painfully obvious by not advocating for the destruction of extensive private property ownership. This shows a lack of epistemic awareness.