Dylan Matthews just posted a Vox article "If you’re such an effective altruist, how come you’re so rich?" which addresses critics of effective altruism's billionaires.
My TL;DR
- A lot of recent criticism of EA seems to come from the fact that it has a couple of billionaires now as supporters
- These billionaires however are some of the biggest donors to US candidates that would increase taxes on them
- Open support for raising taxes, e.g. Moskovitz tweeted the other day: "I’m for raising taxes and help elect Dems to do it"
- The broader EA community skews heavily left-of-center (typically supportive of higher taxes and social welfare)
- Effective altruism was founded explicitly on voluntary redistribution of income from people in high-income countries to low-income countries (e.g. Giving What We Can) and most of the communities founders give a significant portion of their incomes
- Given that the billionaires do exist, what else would you rather they spend money on?
That's just my TL;DR – feel free to put in your own summaries, comments and critiques below.
I disagree with Moskovitz that raising taxes on American billionaires would be a good thing, and I think most EAs should also disagree.
Individuals who value the lives of all people equally, regardless of nationality, should prefer a system that does not increase taxes on EA billionaires , because the American government only spends its resources a bit more democratically and in a way that is far less efficient at improving wellbeing or reducing inequality, and in many cases has negative expected value.
95% of the world's people, including all of the world's poorest people, do not get a say in the American government's spending through voting.
If they did, it is likely that they would vote to radically distribute USA's wealth to poorer countries, rather than having close to 99% American GDP spent primarily on Americans.
The 5% who do get a say in the American government's spending get a very indirect say via representative democracy.
And this group (and electorates in other rich democratic countries), have time and time again failed to elect leaders who are willing to enact policies which value the lives of all people equally.
And not only does the American government place less value on the lives of most of the world's poorest people, the American government has time and time again actively spent its money on harming other countries for its own benefit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change
So I feel comfortable saying I would rather Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Bankman Fried decide how to spend their wealth, than have someone like Donald Trump decide how to spend it.
I do think it's possible that billionaires in general spend their money in a way that is even less efficient than the American government at improving wellbeing and equality, but I'd say with something like 80% confidence that this is not true.
The way I'd phrase this more succinctly, is: "sure Elon Musk is spending his money in badly, but why do you think Donald Trump will spend it in a better way?"
(By the way, I think this is a great example of a bias resulting from EA not being diverse enough. If EA was more international, we wouldn't have so many EAs essentially endorsing American nationalism, which is very much antithetical to the idea of impartiality!)
EDIT: One idea I’d be interested in reading more about, is the idea of EA billionaires donating money directly to the governments of the poorest democracies.
EDIT 2: Based on discussion in replies, I realised I ignored a key consideration - how the taxes would be raised. I’d support massively raising a land value tax or other (successfully enforced) property taxes on US billionaires, because it wouldn’t affect EA associated billionaires that much.
EDIT 3: I was wrong to say that US government spending is only a bit more democratic than billionaire spending. Although US government spending is extremely undemocratic, it’s much more democratic than billionaire spending.
I want to write a detailed response to this, but usually that means I end up not writing anything, so I'll just
state my main pointquickly write a jumbled mess:You can (and should) support the democratic process while also acknowledging that it currently works badly in regards for effectiveness, and wanting to improve it.
Your view seems to me to assume everything is static, and the quality of democratic decision making cannot change. I, on the other hand, think we can influence the public and democratic institutions to learn to analyze, compare numbers, a... (read more)