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.
Thanks for your comment!
Actually, I think my argument is weaker than this. My reasoning is that I think the average dollar spent by billionaires in general is more effective than the average dollar spent by the US government, but obviously this is disproportionately affected by the effectiveness of spending by EA-associated billionaires. I'd say this is the part of my argument I'm least confident about.
I think this is true, but I also think nationalism is a relatively larger constraint on the effectiveness than billionaire selfishness.
I agree with you, but I think it would still be less effective than if that money was spent by billionaires, because the political group here (progressive Democrats) still place much less value on foreign lives and prioritise global issues less than the average billionaire (again, the effectiveness of the average billionaire dollar is massively skewed by EA associated billionaires).
I don't think we should be super confident in Piketty's claims. However, I am strongly pro land value tax anyway, which could be a way to raise taxes on American billionaires, and would also spare most EA money, so I would support this particular approach to raising taxes on American billionaires.
But that being said, I'm not disregarding the importance of reducing inequality. Part of my argument is that "raising taxes on American billionaires will have a net effect of reducing inequality inside America, but of increasing global inequality", unless the taxes are raised via land value tax, or perhaps another form of property tax.
I'm not entirely sure whether I want better growth in the USA or not because of climate concerns, but on balance I'd say that this is a downside. But I think less growth in the USA is outweighed by wellbeing gains from not raising taxes on billionaires.
This is an important point, but I expect the effect of relative income on wellbeing is driven primarily by income relative to people around you, and is not affected by distant billionaires.
Personally, I see reducing income inequality as a terminal goal too, but I think global wealth inequality matters far more than wealth inequality inside one country, and I think taxing American billionaires more (except for via land value taxes or other property taxes) will worsen global wealth inequality.