Against ‘Effective Altruism’

Against ‘Effective Altruism’(radicalphilosophy.com)

10 points by acenes 4 years ago | 2 comments

lacker 4 years ago |

My concerns about Effective Altruism are different. One is that by routing money to locations with corrupt governments or dictatorships, you are essentially funding these governments. A lot of NGO money just replaces the budget of the local government and thus is essentially equivalent to giving money to whoever is in political power there. The EA movement seems to completely ignore this issue. Everyone involved has an incentive to pretend like these charities in corrupt countries are effective - the EA donors get to feel good, and the local dictators get to invest more of their budget in whatever they want. (I thought the book Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters had a very convincing section about this, if people are curious to hear more of this line of reasoning.)

My second concern is doing an accurate marginal analysis. The most popular EA charities pretend like they constantly cannot get enough money to fully fund their expenditures. This isn't really true. If you look at the dollar amounts involved, the richest GiveWell donors could easily fund all of the need for, say, malaria nets. Instead, the most promising charities are kept "in need" in order to encourage other people to donate, and money that could go to the most popular causes is routed to more controversial things like US politics or AI safety. A marginal dollar given to malaria nets isn't really causing the funding of malaria nets to go up, it's enabling richer, more connected donors to change their allocations.

At the same time I do think that the principles behind EA make sense. Altruism should be effective. I just don't think the EA groups are executing on this promise. Unfortunately I don't have a great answer. The best strategy I can come with is to look for charitable opportunities of smaller scope, essentially cases where there is a "market failure". I'm not sure if this would be scalable though. If anyone has good ideas about how to do this whole thing better then I would be interested to chat because I do think it would be great to have an "EA that works".

larksimian 4 years ago | |

This was a vastly better critique of EA as it exists than the article, which I just found infuriating. Paraphrasing 'EA perpetuates factory farming' ... well, at least EA wasn't around when factory farming got introduced to the world, whereas all the author's alternative movements were.

In my opinion, which I think is somewhat EA compatible, just give money to poor people. Directly to them, in as much as possible, avoiding corrupt intermediaries that might steal it. Send money straight to their phones if that's the main form of 'banking' they use.

The other, in my opinion, very effective form of assisting poor countries is allowing labour movement from them. I'm from Romania, allowing rural workers access to Western Europe's labour market was the biggest poverty uplift in the history of our country. This has the welfare downside of harming the labour power of poor/working class people in Western Europe. Not sure any Western European country has handled that part of the equation correctly, any maybe there is no great solution. But it definitely worked for us immigrants.