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 think this is a misleading title. The tl;dr you posted, or indeed the linked article itself, does not really argue that taxes are too low. At times it implicitly assumes it, or vibes with it, but there's nothing in the article that would persuade someone who didn't already believe it. In general I think linkposts should use the same title as the linked article, or else a title that describes its contents faithfully, rather than adding additional editorialising. Both the original title or subtitle would be better.
I totally agree both that the article doesn't make the case that taxes are too low; and that linkposts should use the title.
I just used this title because it is the page title. However, the heading tag on the page is different to the page title. I also included the heading tag in the body of the post.