How Capitalism Ensured the Con of Effective Altruism

I am reading More Everything Forever. It is an excellent book, and I will do a fuller review when I am done, but the section on effective Altruism and Longtermism, a strong form of effective altruism, is infuriating. It sums up pretty much everything wrong with our world today.

First, a lot of the people involved in these movements are flat out bad people. They have no trouble stating that is much better to save the life of a rich person than a poor person, because allegedly people in rich countries can have more impact on the future. They have no trouble creating a culture of sexism and abuse in their spaces. That alone should disqualify this as a serious movement, but it did not, of course. Why? Capitalism.

Effective altruism and its cousin longetermism are supposed philosophies that claim that you should do the most good for the most people even if those people are not alive today. It sells itself to young people looking for meaning, but it does so in a way that allows said young people to do whatever they want as a career and still think they are helping. EA encourages people to go into high renumeration fields like finance and donate as much as they can to causes that EA supports.

First, EA evangelicals tend to not require people to give away almost everything. No one encourages these suddenly rich people to live austere lives, donating all their spare funds to charity. Instead, the emphasis is on donating what you can, because even if you spend most of your money on you, the amount you can donate will still dwarf the good you can do as, say, a doctor. That contention is bullshit for a lot of reasons, and we will get to some of them, but note how easy it makes it for people to participate in EA life. (And make no mistake, most of the charity money is expected to go into EA organizations.)

Doing good as a career, in our world, is hard. It generally means making much less money than your similarly situated peers. And in modern capitalism, that can very much be a disaster. There is no meaningful safety net in the United Sates, so if you lose your job, your health, your home, your wellbeing are all immediately threatened. That pay discrepancy makes it harder to live in a good home, to have the best health care, and to save for a rainy day. Telling people that they don’t have to do actual good, that they can do harm that pays well (and, yes, finance is not a force for good in the world today, generally speaking), is a relief. It immediately makes their path look safer and thus more attractive.

Capitalism did that. Capitalism of the devil take the hindmost variety, which is the capitalism we have in the United Sates and much of the world, encourages people to be subservient, to look out for themselves rather than the common good. And EA takes clear advantage of that.

EA’s corruption of the press is also based on capitalism. EA organizations gave a lot of money, by journalism standards, to press organizations such as Vox, which then published stories that presented effective altruism in a good light. Effective altruism and longetermism are predicated on the idea that doing the most good for the most people is worth whatever needs be done today. They toss around ridiculous probabilities - if X has a one in a million chance to help bring about a future where ten to the power of 40 humans are alive, then you have to do X, regardless of the consequences today. The problem is, as one of the researchers in the book points out, the numbers are generally made up of bullshit. When asked to make an argument for why something is one in a million, or why they think there will be ten to the power of 40 humans in the far future, their answers range from silly to non-existent. But if you read the coverage of EA, you would find very little of that kind of common-sense pushback. Why? Capitalism.

Journalism has been destroyed by the control of the add market by Google and Facebook. A significant number of journalism jobs have disappeared, and whole swaths of the country have no local news. In that environment, is easy to take the money, hire credulous or supportive journalists, and keep your organization alive for a few more years. You can even convince yourself that it is a positive good — after all, EA is a serious philosophy supported by a lot of money. Surely it deserves the benefit of the doubt?

EA has been bad for society. I think that is pretty clear — it has diverted money and people away from meaningful work, and it has been used to launder the reputations of terrible people. Such damage was largely possible because of modern capitalism. By making a world in which everyone not filthy rich lives in uncertainty and precarity, we create an environment where an obvious scam like EA can flourish simply by handing out money, and thus protection, to people. If I cannot convince you that a robust safety net is the moral thing to do, perhaps you can be persuaded by the fact that only a robust safety net allows us to create a world in which the people who predict tornados and research cancer cures can flourish.