What is it about effective altruism and offshoots like longtermism that make them so appealing to tech billionaires who flood MacAskill and his pals with grants, book endorsements, and invitations to California retreats?
The short answer is that effective altruism, for all the hype about being a novel, game-changing approach, is at heart a conservative movement, which attempts to present billionaires as a solution to global poverty rather than its cause. The effective altruism movement has parasitically latched onto the back of the billionaire class, providing the ultrarich with a moral justification of their position.
In a 2015 conference hosted by Google, organizers enthused that “effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need.” A deeply implausible statement, of course, but one that has managed somehow to serve as a rallying cry for the idealistic rich.
Rooted in a worldview that stretches from philosopher Peter Singer to the grandaddy of consequentialism, Jeremy Bentham (“Bentham’s bulldog” is the title of one effective altruism fan’s Substack), proponents of effective altruism champion the belief that measurable effects in terms of lives saved is the only rational way to make decisions about philanthropic expenditures.
In many ways, their interest in measurement is not particularly objectionable, nor new. Gilded Age robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller drew upon Taylorist management principles to insist that their giving was more scientific than earlier philanthropists. In every age, we see apologetics for extreme, concentrated wealth, and while the charitable causes shift, the rationales tend to be pretty much the same: my extreme wealth is good — no matter how concentrated and disproportionate — because others will inevitably benefit from it — if not today, then certainly tomorrow.
“Earn to give” is the most recent instantiation of the supposedly rational justification of inequality. It’s the idea that people are morally beholden to maximize wealth however possible so they have more to give, leading in its most extreme interpretation to the insistence there may be no moral “good” after all in trying to save poor lives, because rich people are more “innovative” and thus more worthy.
“It now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal,” wrote Nick Beckstead in his 2013 Rutgers PhD, which he completed before joining the Future of Humanity Institute as a research fellow and then going on to work as CEO of the FTX Foundation before leaving in the wake of Sam Bankman-Fried’s recent disgrace.