I think that many Marxists have thought of themselves as effective or scientific and altruistic. Marxism is a rather muddled intellectual tradition, but I think that because it used to have both altruistic and scientific connotations, lots of people who could have become effective altruists became Marxists instead. Influential ideologies have a tendency to "suck in" anyone in the vicinitiy in the logical space of ideas. Hence I think that the fall of Marxism did facilitate the birth of effective altruism.

Another reason why effective altruism is spreading now rather than, say, thirty years ago, is that the public debate and society at large is becoming ever more empirically minded. Watch, e.g., the development in journalism, where datajournalists such as Nate Silver are gradually replacing armchair pundits. Effective altruism is thus part of a larger trend that is making all parts of society ever more evidence-based (of course, this trend started a very long time ago - it goes back at least to the Scientific Revolution - though it perhaps is steeper now than before).

Some other potential reasons:

• The people with high amounts of disposable income who also are philosophically minded enough to notice and care about altruism and effectiveness tend to be computer programmers. Such careers are relatively recent.

• The rise of high-quality evidence for what works in aid is relatively recent.

• I don't know how strong the connection is, but the growth of the EA movement seems to be strongly connected to the rise in atheism. Any common cause for both is probably relatively recent.

• The growth of the movement probably depends on the internet in some large part, and the internet is relatively recent.

I agree with your points about there being disagreement about EA, but I don't think that they fully explain why people didn't come up with it earlier.

I think that there are two things going on here -- one is that the idea of thinking critically about how to improve other people's lives without much consideration of who they are or where they live and then doing the result of that thinking isn't actually new, and the other is that the particular style in which the EA community pursues that idea (looking for interventions with robust academic evidence of efficacy, and then supporting organizations implementing those interventions that accountably have a high amount of intervention per marginal dollar) is novel, but mostly because the cultural background for it seeming possible as an option at all is new.

To the first point, I'll just list Ethical Culture, the Methodists, John Stuart Mill's involvement with the East India Company, communists, Jesuits, and maybe some empires. I could go into more detail, but doing so would require more research than I want to do tonight.

To the second point, I don't think that anything resembling modern academic social science existed until relatively recently (around the 1890s?), and so prior to that there was nothing resembling peer-reviewed academic evidence about the efficacy of an intervention.

Giving them time to develop methods and be interrupted by two world wars, we would find that "evidence" was not actually developed until fairly recently, and that prior to that people had reasons for thinking that their ideas are likely to work (and maybe even be the most effective plans), but that those reasons would not constitute well-supported evidence in the sense used by the current EA community.

Also the internet makes it much easier for people with relatively rare opinions to find each other, and enables much more transparency much more easily than was possible prior to it.

I think you're quite right about this, and I would identify one of the key points of disagreement as cosmopolitanism. I think that post resonated with a lot of people precisely because it highlighted something that everyone kind of knew was an unusual feature of EA arguments, but nobody had quite put their finger on.

(And you yourself say something similar in your comment on that post.)

Cosmopolitanism is quite unconventional, but it's also difficult to tackle head on, because it often involves a conflict between people's stated moral views and their behaviour. Lots of people have views that, on the face of it, would make them cosmopolitan, but they rarely act in such a way. That's partly because the implications can seem very demanding. So paying more attention to cosmopolitan arguments confronts people with a double threat - that of having an increased moral obligation, and that of being shown to be a hypocrite for not having accepted it before.

I could see this aversion just quietly diverting people away from really thinking about cosmopolitan ideas.

I'm unsure whether these are the reasons why effective altruism started, or simply a compelling narrative, but I often think of EA as having come about as a result of advances in three different disciplines:

1. The rise in evidence-based development aid, with the use of randomized controlled trials led by economists such as those at the Poverty Action Lab. These provide high-quality research about what works and what doesn’t in development aid.

2. The development of the heuristics and biases literature by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. This literature shows the failures of human rationality, and thereby opens up the possibility of increasing one’s impact by deliberately countering these biases.

3. The development of moral arguments, by Peter Singer and others, in favor of there being a duty to use a proportion of one’s resources to fight global poverty, and in favor of an ‘expanded moral circle‘ that gives moral weight to distant strangers, future people and non-human animals.

This gave rise to three communities: the rationalist (e.g. LessWrong), the philosophical (e.g. Giving What We Can), and the randomistas as they are often referred to (e.g. J-PAL and GiveWell)). These three communities merged to form effective altruism.

I wrote this up based on William MacAskill's arguments at http://effectivealtruism.org/history/ but I would be interested to hear how much people think this explains.

In practice, Effective Altruism advocates for measurement and comparison.

I think I'm mostly convinced that the contentious claim is not about effectiveness and altruism, but I don't think this is the only contentious claim that we do make! At least for some people, I think another contentious claim is that there is any normative force to e.g. the observation that the average American adult could likely save several lives a year if they spent less money on completely inessential things.

Wow this is a great post - thanks Katja!

My answer to the narrow question is that the idea has only recently emerged because of the recent emergence of social networks, allowing communities with a set of values outside the societal norm to emerge. As you describe it you thought deeply on your own about why people behaved the way they did, but on your own in a society with very particular values, effectively reinforced by marketing and group pressure you would have most likely simply conformed to your community norms over time (thinking about the meaning of life is not widely encouraged past university). Given that it requires an unusual level of "why" type thinking to focus on the issue this level of intellectual thinking was unlikely to achieve critical mass in any one particular physical location. That the movement is struggling to engage older mainstream groups is a demonstration of how deep conformance to social norms becomes, which only deepens I think the longer you are exposed to it, and makes the movement's emergence online in a young intellectual community (which would be the first place to see critical mass) only to be expected.

Why the societal norm is to give so little and relatively so ineffectively despite the minimal "happiness" utility to an individual of the incremental dollar as incomes rise above a modest level in Western society (despite the prevalence of Christian values requiring a particular focus on caring for those in extreme poverty) is a deeper question. In my view it is probably due to slow steady evolutionary change of society, with no particular shock to the system to cause a widespread re-evaluation.

Until perhaps the 1960s rising incomes in developed economies were generally well aligned to rising happiness in a very real sense - cars, washing machines, TVs, central heating all improved peoples lives in very measurable ways. At this point it would have been very hard to argue in a coherent way that it was better to give to those you have never seen and knew nothing about (if you could meaningfully give to them at all) than to those you knew and loved close at hand.

The rising incomes that increased happiness created a strong almost pavlovian link between efficiency, profit and "a good thing". With the introduction of the television powerful mass marketing became possible, increasingly playing at a sub-conscious level to our deep desires and motivations (fear, status, happiness) to create a need to consume more in order to allow profits to continue to grow as any capitalist organisation requires if it is to continue to flourish (which might otherwise have stalled). That, according to the World Happiness Report (page 3 http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs%20Writing/2012/World%20Happiness%20Report.pdf) US GNP per capita has tripled since 1960 whilst happiness has remained relatively unchanged is an indication of the tenuous link that now exists in developed economies between growth and life improvement, but it is this key aspect that has allowed a "life improvement arbitrage" to be created that is now accurately observed and acted on by the effective altruism movement.

Now the concept has been created, and is to some extent obvious, it can be relatively easily understood by a very large group of people who with persuasion will wish to effectively invest in creating a better world. In selling the concepts to them though, and given the level of norming to societal benchmarks that has occurred I believe it will be necessary to use the same powerful marketing focussed on deep motivations to shift people's behaviour as was necessary to allow the life improvement arbitrage to be created in the first place. There is no reason that this cannot be carried out with the same rigour of comparison as effective altruism would bring to any other activity - a commercial enterprise is rigorous in its assessment of the return on the marketing dollar, and there is no reason for the EA movement to be any different. There are many more things that EAs can examine now that the concept has been created.

There have always been some effective altruists “discarded” around the world. But only in the 21st century, thanks to the advancement of the internet and skyrocketing existential threats, such people have ways to connect into a cohesive viable group, thus making a kernel of the world to come.

Here's a slightly different angle from which to approach Ben's challenge. Instead of focusing on possible vindicating explanations of why the EA movement is so recent, we may consider other recent intellectual developments which we find plausible. Personally, I find myself endorsing many ideas that I would have antecedently expected to have been discovered much earlier, conditional on their being true. Each of these ideas, if considered individually, might be vulnerable to a critique of the sort Ben raises against EA. When these ideas are considered collectively, however, they seem to provide enough reason to question the "efficient market in ideas hypothesis" that Ben's argument assumes.

Another possible explanation: people tried something similar, the scientific charity movement.

Somewhat echoing atucker: the moral ideas behind effective altruism have been around for a long time, but are also quite contrarian and have never been widely embraced. But the moral ideas—even in a form pretty damn close to their current one, like Peter Singer's writings in the 70s—aren't enough to give you EA as we know it. You also need a fair amount of expertise to come up with a strong game plan for putting them into practice. Singer couldn't have founded GiveWell, for example.

(One odd thing: as far as I know, Singer has never been involved in the nuclear disarmament movement. That would've seemed like the obvious existential risk to care about in the 70s or 80s.)

They care more about the people around them than those far away, or they care more about some kinds of problems than others, and they care about how things are done, not just the outcome.

It seems to me that part of effective altruism has been not just increasing the effectiveness of altruism by recommending people change their actions, or where their philanthropic dollars go, to interventions with higher leverage, but also pointing out that people would be more effective if they changed their values. For example, Peter Singer's 'expanding circle', meat-free diet advocacy, etc.

People don't like to be told they need to change their values, or that they should change their values, or that the world would be a better place if they had some values that they didn't have already. Really, one's values tend to be near the core of one's social identity, so an attack on values can be perceived as an the attack on the self. The obvious example of this is the friend you know who doesn't like vegetarians for pointing out how bad eating meat is, while that friend doesn't bring up any particular philosophical objections, but just doesn't like being called out for doing something they've always been raised to think of as normal.