Cross-posted from Otherwise. Most people in EA won't find these arguments new. Apologies for leaving out animal welfare entirely for the sake of simplicity.
Last month, Emma Goldberg wrote a NYT piece contrasting effective altruism with approaches that refuse to quantify meaningful experiences. The piece indicates that effective altruism is creepily numbers-focused. Goldberg asks “what if charity shouldn’t be optimized?”
The egalitarian answer
Dylan Matthews gives a try at answering a question in the piece: “How can anyone put a numerical value on a holy space” like Notre Dame cathedral? For the $760 million spent restoring the cathedral, he estimates you could prevent 47,500 deaths from malaria.
“47,500 people is about five times the population of the town I grew up in. . . . It’s useful to imagine walking down Main Street, stopping at each table at the diner Lou’s, shaking hands with as many people as you can, and telling them, ‘I think you need to die to make a cathedral pretty.’ And then going to the next town over and doing it again, and again, until you’ve told 47,500 people why they have to die.”
Who prefers magnificence?
Goldberg’s article draws a lot on author Amy Schiller’s plea to focus charity on “magnificence” rather than effectiveness. Some causes “make people’s lives feel meaningful, radiant, sacred. Think nature conservancies, cultural centers and places of worship. These are institutions that lend life its texture and color, and not just bare bones existence.”
But US arts funding goes disproportionately to the most expensive projects, with more than half of the funding going to the most expensive 2% of projects. These are typically museums, classical music groups, and performing arts centers.
When donors prioritize giving to communities they already have ties to, the money stays in richer communities. Some areas have way more rich people than others. New York City has 119 billionaires; most African countries have none. Unsurprisingly, Schiller and Goldberg both live in New York City and not in Burundi or Bangladesh.
Schiller’s book summary actively discourages philanthropy toward public health work: “Philanthropy has to get out of the business of saving lives if we are to save humanity.” As far as I know she doesn’t argue that poor people should just be left to die; just that governments should be in charge of that stuff, and philanthropy should aim for more beautiful things. “The money we use to build the common world communicates our belief in that world, and in all who inhabit it. It affirms the value of humanity beyond price.”
It’s hard to imagine saying that to someone whose toddler is dying because of contaminated water. “Sorry that your government wasn’t up to the job of providing basic services, and that its tax base is made up of very poor people. But please know that my support of my city’s art museums affirms the value of humanity in general.”
Inequality has its benefits
Michelangelo could do what he did because he had rich funders. A fully egalitarian Florence would have had them, and him, working on farms. A fully egalitarian world now wouldn’t have much funding available for “things whose value was hard to price: museums, libraries, parks” as Amy Schiller favors.
And I do love these things! I’m glad that Yo-Yo Ma isn’t a farmer, and that the Sagrada Familia cathedral isn’t an apartment block, and that Carnegie funded the building of my local library.

Is there enough for everybody to have access to the finer things?
Not currently.
A quick estimate is that global GDP divided by the world population would be about $13,000 per person. (Of course, actually dividing up all the money in the world would also break the economy, so it would soon be less.) That’s about the GDP of El Salvador or Sri Lanka. That doesn’t leave much room for funding museums, etc.
When the UN talks about “ending extreme poverty”, it means lifting people above an income $2.15 a day[1]. A more ambitious goal might be raising everyone’s income to at least $6.85 a day, the poverty line for upper-middle income countries. Almost half the world’s people live below that level.
A world where everyone had both bread and roses would require significantly cheaper roses than the rich are accustomed to, or a higher overall world GDP. Fortunately, GDP per person has been growing for centuries.
The balance of good and bad
In the short story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas, a beautiful and joyful city depends on the suffering of one of its citizens. Many readers feel that they couldn’t accept such an arrangement, that they’d be among those who walk away from the beautiful city. The story is based on a scenario by William James: “How hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”
Number-crunching types are more likely to say “Wait, only one person is living in torturous conditions? That’s much better than real life.”
Compare to our actual world, where more than two billion souls live in poverty. This is the world people are tacitly accepting when they fund concert halls in their own beautiful cities.
Both sides have ugly aspects
At its worst, Schiller’s focus on magnificence turns its back on some people’s ability to live at all, so that others can have a more beautiful life.
At its worst, a fully redistributionist global health focus pushes toward a repugnant-conclusion-type world where everyone has just enough for a life that’s barely worthwhile.
A sole focus on either of these neglects more critical needs: reducing the risk of disaster from pandemics, nuclear war, and AI. (And at its worst, existential-risk-focused effective altruism has gone too far on the crazy train and will end up working on things that don’t turn out to matter at all.)
These aren’t the only choices
Some variations on our current world that I think would be better:
- Philanthropy would continue in many areas. But more philanthropists would spread funding beyond their cultural and geographic bubble.
- Arts and culture funding would focus more on what’s accessible to more people:
- preservation of cultural treasures and landmarks around the world
- scalable cultural work like broadcasting, writing, and recorded music
- People who particularly want to fund things they have a connection to would consider a variety of ways they’re connected to others. These connections could be based on location, religion, or culture, but also other things they value like self-determination, or parenthood and family. Allan Saldanha: “As a father, I think the worst thing any parent can experience is to have to watch their child suffering or god forbid, dying. My children’s lives are priceless to me and so I find the opportunity to save someone else’s child’s life for less than £2,000 a compelling proposition.”
- People who favor markets over traditional philanthropy would be more open to funding things like the Market Shaping Accelerator or Emergent Ventures.
- More people would fund projects that reduce the chance of AI disaster, pandemics, and nuclear war. This isn’t just for people who want to affect the distant future; it’s for people who want to reduce risk in our own lifetimes.
- If people still want to fund more opera productions and so on, it’s their money. But nobody would be holding this up as superior to saving lives.
- I hope we can get to a future where all, not only people born into the right circumstances, have access to both bread and roses.
Related:
- Crying in museums
- The magic washing machine, Hans Rosling: “Grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life, she had been heating water with firewood, and she had hand-washed laundry for seven children. And now, she was going to watch electricity do that work.”
- How rich am I? calculator for how you compare to a median person in the world.
- ^
These are adjusted for the local cost of goods and services; it’s not just that things are cheaper in some countries.
Thanks for this great post.
My first reaction to the original article (which I saw scrolling through the NY Times online, without any realisation that it was about EA or Effective Giving), it made me really angry. It still makes me angry, and I'm not normally the type to get angry.
First, given that I had just co-founded an Effective Giving organisation in Ireland, following a @Charity Entrepreneurship Incubator, I found it very sad that people were sharing such ill-informed articles, which would potentially discourage many donors from using their donations to help many more people. I cannot help but wonder how many more children will die because of this article? How many more animals will suffer in factory farms because of this article?
Because this article is wrong in a very bad way. It doesn't just focus on the benefits of giving to charities that are close to your heart - it also actively criticises effective giving as if it were something that only truly insensitive people would do, as if EA's as a species were somehow less than human because we dare care more about the people we want to help than about the warm fuzzy glow we get when we donate.
Because that is what effective giving is. It is saying "When I donate, I am going to decide how to donate not based on what feels good to me, but rather on what will help the most people or animals."
But also, almost nobody in the effective giving movement discourages "non-effective" charity. First, because most of us arrived there not because we were super-logicians, but rather because we've been donating all our lives to causes we care deeply about, and started to realise that some of these donations weren't helping people in desperate need as much as they might. But we still kept donating - and then when we discovered Effective Giving, it was like opening our eyes to a world of people who thought just like us, but had taken it a step further and devoted their lives to it.
It sickens me to see how these people, some of the most sensitive, generous and caring people I've ever encountered, have been mischaracterised in this article as unfeeling cynics who were in it for the joy of the math.
There are benefits to giving to all charitable causes* and that it is absolutely great when a person donates to a charitable cause close to their heart, or with which they have a personal connection to it. Effective Giving organisations want to help raise their awareness that there is also the option to give some of their money to very effective causes. We don't ask that they stop giving to causes they already support. Indeed, there is a famous "3 pots" thinking (I first heard this from @Bram Schaper, the inspiring leader of the Dutch effective giving organisation, Doneer Effectief) that we often share: If you have some money available after all your costs have been paid, why not share it out into 3 pots:
I really wanted someone with some credibility to reply to this article and call it out for what it was, which is just nonsense, low-quality, one-sided journalism. But apparently it's OK to display bias as long as the people you're biased against are mostly well off white males, which is unfortunately the stereotype of EA's. The problem was that it wasn't the well off white male EA's who were the victims of the article, but rather the people that we are all trying to help, the people who desperately need help.
But, I decided to reflect a while before posting an angry comment on here, and I actually read some other comments about the article. Calm, measured, accepting that people have a right to their opinions. They focused on the fact that the journalist probably meant well and was probably a good person - and kind of glossed over the minor detail that that same journalist had shockingly and intentionally mis-characterised the entire EA and Effective Giving movements in a very harmful way.
Can you imagine how any other group would feel if they were treated like that?
Where was the anger? Where was the passion to stand up for what we believe in?
It's very easy to sit comfortably in our chairs and debate the subtle details of arguments. But that's not how we're going to change the world. If we're willing to let people attack the EA movement and Effective Giving and not defend ourselves, how can we expect to convince others?
We may be mostly in the 99th percentile for calm, logical reasoning, but the vast majority of people** are not. History shows that great movements require not just great thinkers and strategies, but also passionate advocates, and even sometimes stubborn, pig-headed supporters who do not back down.
And if we want to be scientific about it, we can. There is a huge amount of science related to effective ways to communicate with and convince the general public. Writing precise, detailed arguments is one of the least effective parts of this - although it is still vital that someone does this.
The world right now is utterly broken. In a world with the technology and capacity to feed and clothe and nourish and educate and care for everyone, we have billions of people who literally do not have the most basic necessities like clean water or enough food to avoid starvation. We have wars started because individual Sudanese generals or national leaders decide they want more power or a stronger image - and so hundreds of thousands die. We have an out of control AI development program led by a group of immature men with no history of responsible behaviour. We have a growing risk of nuclear war. We have a climate crisis that we're effectively ignoring and denying even as the evidence grows more incontrovertible every day.
EA's are among the few groups who really care about this. But if we remain a niche group and let ourselves be defeated by inaccurate stereotypes and biased communicators, we're not going to have the impact that the world desperately needs us to have.
We have great thinkers and wonderful, good people within the EA movement. But we could use more overt passion - many of us are deeply passionate about EA, but too many of us do not want to share that passion with the world, to shout out our demands and lead others towards our ideas, without them necessarily having to go through the same deep thought process that brought many of us here.
Many people just want to be part of a movement - why not let that movement be one that will make the world better. Instead, we are literally being out-thought by people like Donald Trump, who understands people's need to be part of a movement and is more than happy to cynically exploit it.
Imagine how much better off we'd be if people were chanting "no more factory-farms" and "stop the wars" rather than anti-immigrant slogans. But we won't get there by just imagining it.
*although, especially in the US, some tax-exempt causes like extremely rich universities attended by some of the richest students, are IMHO pushing the definition of "charity" a bit too far.
**more than 98% of people, to be exact!