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.
That’s a good point, I did think about the “reversal test” after I posted this comment and about whether I’d support lowering taxes on US billionaires, and I think I would.
But I think I excluded a key consideration - how the tax is raised. I’d support massively raising land value taxes or other property taxes (if they could successfully be enforced) on US billionaires.
But I think I’d support lowering other types of taxes on US billionaires to close to 0, depending on what proportion of the US government budget comes from taxing billionaires.