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.
Yeah, I think the basic argument holds at surface-level considerations.
It's not just an argument against raising billionaire taxes, but also an argument for reducing them. It raises the question - what is the appropriate tax rate?
At one extreme is zero tax (or even subsidizing billionaires, which one could argue happens quite a bit). Would the world be better off with no billionaire tax and correspondingly much, much smaller U.S. government discretionary spending? Some people with certain political persuasions would say yes. But I think that undervalues the role of shared funding via government services. I'm skeptical billionaires would fill in the funding gap. Plus it ignores how wealth influences politics and wealth inequality influences well-being.