On effective altruism

A critique of a movement that tries to do good, but mostly spends time on itself.

In the wake of the collapse of FTX, there is renewed focus on effective altruism — a philosophy of charitable giving developed by Peter Singer and enthusiastically embraced by countless tech entrepreneurs, including FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried.

One of the core tenets of effective altruism predates Singer’s writings by a wide margin and isn’t particularly controversial. It posits that if you want to support a particular cause, you should find a charity that makes the best use of donated funds. The organization should be pursuing approaches shown to make a difference — and should be spending as little as possible on administrative overhead.

That said, effective altruists usually don’t stop there; in fact, they place more emphasis on another idea: cause prioritization. It’s the belief that the most moral way to give is to seek the highest net reduction in global suffering — or the highest improvement in global happiness — per dollar spent. In other words, a donation to a local library is misguided at best, and driven by vanity at worst. Instead, you should probably donate to massive-scale health or economic development initiatives in some of the most impoverished regions in the world. Heck, you might even be absolved for causing lesser harms — perhaps collecting your paycheck at a tobacco company? — if it brings about that quantitively greater good.

My first objection to this philosophy has to do with the word “altruism” itself. Altruism is a fairly specific moral concept: it’s not a judgment of outcomes, but of one’s motives and of the sacrifices they make. Effective altruists posit that it’s OK to be a selfish jerk if it leaves the world better off — and I just wish they picked another term for that. But semantics aside: even from a simple benefit maximization angle, does more good arise from encouraging millions to give inefficiently, or from seeking optimal resource allocation among a (necessarily smaller) group of devotees willing to put faith in an algorithm?

My other worry is the mushiness of the underlying math. Effective altruists often speak of lives saved per dollar spent, but the formulas are dubious and the returns are not linear; if your donation increases the number of vaccinated individuals from 80% to 80.001%, it might be making no practical impact on the spread of disease or the associated death rates. In contrast, your support for a local library or a domestic abuse shelter can make a simple qualitative difference. There are only so many local donors — and without your help, the organization might not survive another year.

My final objection has to do with the ability to objectively prioritize causes and measure outcomes on a global scale. It’s the same siren song that leads the proponents of central planning astray. Therein lies another perk of local giving: you don’t need to rely on layers upon layers of self-serving bureaucracies to understand how things really are.

Even in the SF Bay Area, where many mainstream charitable organizations get millions from corporate donors, there’s plenty of neglect. The Santa Clara County Search and Rescue is a great example. They’re saving lives every year on a budget of about $30,000 — and receive no public funds.

Last year, my wife and I donated about a quarter of a million to various causes of this sort. I don’t have a catchy name for this philosophy, but I don’t think it’s any worse than the “index fund approach” of effective altruists.