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 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, and set priorities.
They won't necessarily arrive at our priorities or solutions, but that might be because we're a small group and we're missing a lot of important things. I think I'm a smart person and I think you're a smart person too, and we've learnt to employ some important tools in our thought process. The humility here doesn't mean thinking "my contribution is comparable worthless", but rather "small groups have very bad failure modes, I should use my contributions and synthesize them with the existing processes".
Also as freedomandutility pointed out, most people aren't represented by the American democracy specifically, and worrying about their welfare isn't in the consensus. So I'm not saying "stop giving to developing countries and animal welfare because everyone doesn't agree". When I talk about democracy here I usually mean the recipients of aid should be part of the decision making, as well as most EAs together and not just boards of some non profits. The only part I really want the American democracy specifically to deal with is Americans' tax money, because I feel it naturally belongs to the American people and not to the specific taxpayer.