The Political Economy of Effective Altruism
The Political Economy of Effective Altruism
by Peter Dorman @ EconoSpeak
Back in the day, I used to give talks on child labor. I would always begin by saying that boycotts and shaming of corporations, while understandable as an emotional response, were unlikely to do much for the world’s children. This was because very little child labor is employed in making internationally tradeable products. Moreover, simple prohibitions don’t get at the root causes, which need to be identified and addressed with national and international policies. Most of the talk would be about those causes, and I would end with a call for people in the audience to get involved politically, so that US policy would at least not reinforce the conditions that impose poverty and insecurity on much of the world’s population. I would give a list of specific demands.
Feeling like I had communicated a complex topic persuasively and provided a motivating political spin at the end, I would ask for questions. Inevitably, the first would be some variation on “What should(n’t) I buy?” People were so enclosed in a worldview in which only individuals could take action, and “collective action” meant lots of individuals were doing the same thing, that my argument simply couldn’t get through.
Effective altruism is a variation on the same theme, only substitute philanthropy for shopping. If “what should I buy?” springs from the consumption portion of income, “how should I give?” pertains to the portion not dedicated to current or future consumption. The first question would be asked by a citizen of the 99%, the second by a one-percenter.
But it’s worse than that. Conscious consumerism’s only fault is that it occupies the ethical place that should be the seat of politics; conscious philanthropy adds the additional problem that the surplus income it channels is itself the consequence of choices that can make the world a better or worse place. To put it bluntly, effective altruism allows people to exploit or even defraud others to become rich, so long as they expiate themselves by giving away the surplus portion of their riches in accordance with an approved set of criteria. Its ideological function is cemented by the criteria themselves, which call for discrete interventions with measurable outcomes; these can be applied to philanthropic donations but not to the more systemic interventions addressable by politics.
So we come to the fact that Samuel Bankman-Fried gave enormous sums of money to politicians, think tanks and other receptacles whose purpose was to enable him to make yet more money, for instance by expanding the pool of potential investors in his crypto exchange to pension funds. He gave more or less equally to Democrats and Republicans. (The official donations to the Dems were slightly greater, but by his own admission Bankman-Fried channeled more of the dark money to Republicans.) The favored Dems were, not surprisingly, corporate-friendly third-wayists, like the Center for American Progress. Objectively, no matter how brilliantly he might divide his philanthropy between malaria bednets and techie projects to avert an AI singularity, his contribution to world betterment was more than offset by shoring up the global order via the political arm of his investments. Effective Altruism exists to foreground the first and obscure the second.
The prominence of both consumerist and philanthropic strategies to fix what’s wrong with the world are reflections of an immense political vacuum. Somehow, and quickly, politics needs to be rebuilt from the ground up: a vision of genuine change that can grapple with the extreme challenges that face us, political movements organized around elements of that vision, and a few victories along the way to give us strength and spirit. The goal would be to live in a world in which “what should I buy?” and “how should I give?” were no longer regarded as important political questions.
Excellent. Thnaks
apppreciate the thought
but you contradict yourself…”politicl action instead of boycotts” “politics needs to be rebilt from the ground up.”
boycotts don’t work, if they don’t, because people don’t give a damn. politics don’t work because the people don’t give a damn…except of course what they are whipped up about by the professional politicians.
speaking of which, the Garland DOJ is continuing the Trump prosecution/persecution of Assange. So add to “people don’t give a damn” note above: “it doesn’t matter who gets elected: politics has nothing to do with how we are governed.”
What is Effective Altruism? – EA Guides The Top Donors
‘EA’ is for those who have (say) $10M or better (say) $10B to philanthropise with, and for those who advise them. Also, those who advise those advisors.
Yes, but. I struggle to think of a single time in the history of our species when the political change you discuss occurred, in a truly lasting way, without the prerequisite of cataclysmic events to shock the more intelligent members of our species into action.
Occasionally, single leaders and/or movements have been able to ‘rebuild’ politics without a prior catastrophe – e.g. Ahkenaten, or Ashoka perhaps – but I can’t think of any examples from modernity, let alone from a modern democracy. All such movements have died shortly after their leaders did; any lasting changes were religious or philosophical in nature, not really political.
The changes in Britain may be an example; but even there, the initial Magna Carta involved a relatively small group of barons using force to initiate change. Many lasting incremental changes occurred after that, but the full history of those changes included much armed violence and required regicide. A similar point pertains to the French Revolution – even without the Reign of Terror, the Revolution was a bloody affair. And it didn’t really last, as the pendulum swung back and forth for decades.
Those major changes which have occurred in a democracy (e.g. the American Revolution, FDR) have occurred only within the context of war or other events that caused the mass of the electorate, as individuals, to radically rethink and overcome their a priori inclinations toward indolence and the status quo.
The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. Please note that I am not advocating for catastrophe or armed insurrection; I am merely observing that we are by nature lazy, selfish, cowardly creatures more likely to run and hide than to stand up to the powerful guardians of the established system. (That is, after all, how we managed to evolve from small and insignificant mammals into the species capable of misnaming ourselves ‘sapiens’).
The question for those who support the classical liberal concept of an open society, particularly those who actually have political authority, remains: at what point can you justify armed violence (or decisive state action such as major prosecutions) in defense of liberal concepts?
Because IMHO there is a fundamental and inescapable cognitive dissonance between the idea of an open liberal society with broad civil freedom for all, and the need to protect that society from those who would overthrow it by force.
What am I missing here?
Good talk. Reminds me of –
“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” – Lin Chi
I very much agree that most of the issues flagged by effective altruists need to be addressed by politics, not individual behavior or charitable giving.
I’m not sure about this: “Effective Altruism exists to foreground the first and obscure the second.” This sounds like a claim that effective altruists are engaged in intentional misdirection, or like a doubtful functional explanation for the existence of EA. I’m more inclined to think EA has some limited value (it flags real issues, make people think about effective charities – and there are lots of poorly run charities!) and its proponents are just mistaken when they fail to see the importance of politics. An excessive focus on individual behavior and the moral wrongness of states of affairs and a neglect of politics and policy is an easy enough error to make. I’m not sure if this is really a point of disagreement.
It is likely that among the Top 1% of wealthy families (not just the Top 0.1%) there are those who want to band together and do more than just fund entire new seasons of Masterpiece Theater. This is where the EA consultants come in, surely.
In totally unrelated economic news, there is this…
Trust the Models? In This Economy?
NY Times – just in
Years into the pandemic, it is still difficult to get a handle on what comes next for the economy by looking at examples from the past.
Historical data has always been critical to those who make economic predictions. But three years into the pandemic, America is suffering through an economic whiplash of sorts — and the past is proving anything but a reliable guide.
Forecasts have been upended repeatedly. The economy’s rebound from the hit it incurred at the onset of the coronavirus was faster and stronger than expected. Shortages of goods then collided with strong demand to fuel a burst in inflation, one that has been both more extreme and more stubborn than anticipated.
Now, after a year in which the Federal Reserve raised interest rates at the fastest pace since the 1980s to slow growth and bring those rapid price increases back under control, central bankers, Wall Street economists and Biden administration officials are all trying to guess what might lie ahead for the economy in 2023. Will the Fed’s policies spur a recession? Or will the economy gently cool down, taming high inflation in the process?
With typical patterns still out of whack across big parts of the economy — including housing, cars and the labor market — the answer is far from certain, and past experience is almost sure to serve as a poor map. …
Perhaps the most critical economic mystery is what will happen next in America’s labor market — and that is hard to game out.
Part of the problem is that it’s not entirely clear what is happening in the labor market right now. Most signs suggest that hiring has been strong, job openings are plentiful, and wages are climbing at the fastest pace in decades. But there is a huge divergence between different data series: The Labor Department’s survey of households shows much weaker hiring growth than its survey of employers. Adding to the confusion, recent research has suggested that revisions could make today’s labor growth look much more lackluster. …
Yes, indeed. I had this argument with one of its founders after I wrote this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html
Thank you
That’s an interesting op-ed in the NYT.
EA mainly seems to be about helping the super wealthy spread huge piles of funding around a needy world which can use a LOT of help, and that is not hot necessarily an easy task. It just isn’t of much practical use or interest to the 99%, IMO.
err, ‘not necessarily’
I feel somewhat frustrated by this post, while I can totally understand this view of EA due to SBF’s fraud, I think EA as a project goes further than what should I buy or where can I give.
Historically EA came from a selection of moral philosophy academics trying to work out how to do the most good they could given their limited salaries. However now that it is a pretty large community of thousands of people trying to “use reason and evidence to work out how to help others and put this research into action.”
It can feel overwhelming to people how many problems and how much suffering there is in the world – EA as a community has done a lot of great work in helping people work out where they can make a difference (either through donating more strategically (some charities are 100x more effective than others), finding jobs or founding charities in neglected cause areas or by teaching people where they might be able to use their votes to make a difference in neglected areas (pandemic prevention policy or animal welfare regulation))
I think effective altruism has its flaws but I don’t think it is fair to reduce it to simply telling people where to donate
Some years ago, I though I might get involved with the Boston Foundation, which is something of an EA organization in this region. I was quickly turned off when I realized that I was really a very small fish in the pond. No offense to them; there are a LOT of very wealthy people & families in this neck of the woods.
I think this is related to the notion that I share that people who ‘feel charitable’ are inclined to donate to entities where they feel they are making a personal difference. People with vast sums at hand are not necessarily welcome in some places, but they may appreciate letting outfits like the BF do the heavy lifting.