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 strongly agree with most of this, and also wanted to point out that Congress decides on the budget, so thanks for writing that better than I would've.
But on this particular point:
I'll say that I don't know how the American left works, but here in Israel the social-democratic left (which I vote for) is very good at saying "Here are some important and ignored problems, we have to spend money to solve them" but then very bad at saying "Here's where money needs to go to effectively solve the problems".
In 2021 my party became part of the government for the first time in ~20 years, and were very good in working to enact laws, but bad in setting economic policy or in spending money from their ministries' budgets.