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 EAs should spend more time engaging with how to more evenly distribute power between different agents, but I think the best thinking on this is in the tradition of internationalist libertarian socialism, not in the mainstream American left.
I don't think EAs should adopt the idea popular amongst American liberals, that giving more money to the US government, which is probably the world's most powerful agent with a strong history of interfering with democracy in other countries, and was until recently run by Donald Trump, is an improvement on the status quo of billionaires having more power than they ideally should.
I'll do a post on "what EA can learn from libertarian socialism" at some point.
EDIT: I do think there's a case to be made that "evenly distributing power to reduce risks from reckless profit maximisation and authoritarianism" isn't neglected, and is why EA doesn't have much writing on it.