Hi Jitse, 

Thanks for the positive feedback!! 

I couldn't agree more with your sentence: "making sure that effectiveness is ranked according to the worldview and needs of the people effected (instead of the people trying to ‘help’ them) is of utmost important to be truly effective".

I agree that for EA to claim to be truly effective, the EA community must thoughtfully consider feminist, decolonial and Indigenous critiques - though I fear that the epistemic architecture of EA (for reasons I try to unpick in my piece) may make it impossible for these to be voiced, heard and acted upon within EA.

Hi Toby, 

Thanks for flagging this, and apologies for the delayed reply (I've been on holiday since posting, and wanted to compose a full reply). 

I've double-checked the paper and I believe I am reporting it accurately. I trust this journal, but I'm not a specialist in economics. I'd encourage you to check out their paper and methodology, for more details.

Here's part of their abstract for clarification: 

"Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30." 

Here's the relevant explanation section on extreme poverty: 

"This drain represents a significant loss for the South. For perspective, $10.8 trillion would have been enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over in 2015; i.e., with reference to the poverty gap at $1.90 per day in 2011 PPP, which is expressed in roughly the equivalent of Northern prices (World Bank 2021). It is worth noting that this result is larger than previous estimates of drain through unequal exchange (e.g., five times larger than in Hickel et al., 2021). This is because the footprint data we use here captures not only traded goods but also the upstream resources and labour embodied in the production of traded goods, which results in a larger North-South price differential (d)."

Here's the section on aid:

"Our results show that net appropriation by DAC countries through unequal exchange from 1990 to 2015 outstripped their aid disbursements over the same period by a factor of almost 80 (Table 5, fourth column). In other words, for every dollar of aid that donors give, they appropriate resources worth 80 dollars through unequal exchange. From the perspective of aid recipients, for every dollar they receive in aid they lose resources worth 30 dollars through drain....the empirical evidence on unequal exchange demonstrates that poor countries are poor in large part because they are exploited within the global economy and are therefore in need of justice." 

Hi Wei, 

Thanks for your comment. I’m sorry for the delay in my response. I’ve been on holiday since posting, and wanted to wait until I could reply fully. 

There is an important distinction is between the terms ‘undeveloped’ and ‘underdeveloped’. Undeveloped is a normative contrast made between low-income, poorly socially provisioned areas and high-income, well-provisioned areas. In contrast, ‘underdeveloped’ is an activist term to refer to how an area’s level of development is actively reduced to facilitate development of an area elsewhere. 

You ask about East Asian countries in this context. I’m no expert, but it’s important to bear in mind that the US financed a massive economic recovery programme in Japan during its occupation and later relationship with Japan, which intersecting with growth via the military-industrial complex during the Korean War. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle#Overview 

In other words, it is not so much about teleology or whether a country was colonized in the past, but what the ongoing forms of extractivism look like. Typically, these have followed centre-periphery, colonizer-colonized relationships of neo-extraction, but they don't always. For instance, the US allowed Eastern Europe and Japan control over their own economies, governments and protectionist policies following WWII, leading to a rapid return to high income levels and social provisioning, whereas in the 1980s huge swathes of the newly ‘independent’ countries of the Global South were forced to accept Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) by the IMF and World Bank when they entered recessions. SAPs were massive free-market austerity programmes that eviscerated government civil services and social programmes, removed protectionist policies to develop domestic industry, burdened countries with massive infrastructure projects that indebted them to the Global North, and inflicted massive poverty. Simultaneously, socialist reformers such as Burkinabe president Thomas Sankara who threatened debt cancellations and reparations were assassinated or deposed through Western-backed coups. Good sources to learn more about this are: Dowden (2014) Africa - see chapter on Uganda; Slater (2004) Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations. 

So, what matters is the form of the extractive relationships, rather than past colonized status per se. 

Hope this clarification helps! 

Hi EcologyInterventions,

Many thanks for your engagement with my work. I apologise for the delay in replying; I've been on holiday since posting, and wanted to wait until I could compose a full response. 

Let me offer my thoughts to each of yours.

1. EA missing and ignoring knowledge: I agree, the current geopolitics of knowledge production and consumption represents a terrible state of affairs – and a systemic one, not limited to EA. The core question is whether EA’s epistemic architecture (in terms of what perspectives and evidence-sources it admits) allow EA to see the most urgent problems and effective solutions? I’m arguing that the EA community needs to do some serious soul-searching on this point, and discuss the systemic blind-spots that follow from its epistemic architecture around maximization and efficiency.
2. 'Overcoming' power/knowledge: Glad we agree on this! The challenge, nevertheless, is that power/knowledge is not something that can be overcome per se. Whilst positionality can be recognised, mitigated against to some extent, and the most egregious cases of bias within scientific research must be called out (see Caroline Criado Perez's work, for instance), power/knowledge will always persist, simply in a mutated form. Attempting to strive for objectivity is like striving to become a god (Donna Haraway [1988] calls it a ‘god-trick’). Perhaps what I'm asking from EA is a little more humility and self-reflection?
3. & 5. Coloniality: You summarise the issue I’m raising really well with your clause: “we may be unqualified to determine the extent of the harm”. An EA policy intervention in the Global South may be the least harmful available, but an EA researcher in the Global North cannot know this. In response to your point #5, this is what makes EA epistemologically colonial: even if EA does consult with the Global South, because the ranking of interventions takes place via the global North, it remains suffused with coloniality. Let's celebrate that EA gives cash directly; I’m not disputing that this is a really important, effective way to assist people and materially address some of the injustices of extractivism. However, what I want to highlight as potentially colonial is that EA only backs this intervention because it performs well in peer-reviewed ‘measured outcomes’. In other words, it’s the difference between giving a community $1000 in solidarity with them and their own struggles, to spend as they see fit, versus giving the community $1000 because several scientific papers tell us that is most effective. They might achieve the same thing, but there is a major epistemic difference between the two.
4.  Prioritization: I agree that we need to prioritize actions, to ensure we do not further imbalance the world. Thank you for acknowledging that EA may miss unquantifiable unknowns. However, I am concerned by your statement: “This is because we are acting for the world, and all its cultures”. I find the paternalism and omniscience here disquieting, because it sets up a kind of god complex through which the EA community can believe it has a duty to know on behalf of everyone, and apply its methods universally, forgetting the positionality of the comparatively tiny community that developed its moral code. Why can’t methods of comparison be plural - different methods of comparison for different situations, depending on what is most important to protect or maximize in a given context (e.g., life, happiness, long-term health etc.)?

6.  Ultrawealthy philanthropy: I’m saying that, firstly, massive donations are a major way through which extreme wealth inequality is normalized as a benevolent thing, and secondly, that we need to consider the net good of any EA intervention, adjusted on the basis of the negative externalities contained within that money. (Net good may remain positive, of course - though not as effective, perhaps, as never having that inequality in the first place. Some data here would be useful, I agree). I may have laboured my point about social capital deflecting attention, but I stand behind the argument that philanthropy is an accumulation strategy and justification against policy interventions to end extreme wealth inequality. I’d argue that the most effective thing here would be a wealth gap to more evenly distribute wealth across society.

Thanks again for your comments; I hope my remarks clarify some areas of misunderstanding.

Hi tcelferact, 

Thank you for taking the time to engage so deeply with my essay. I apologise for the delay in replying. I’ve been on holiday since I posted, and unfortunately I’ve been unable to reply as fully as I wanted until now. I’ll offer some thoughts and responses I have after reading your valuable comments. 

EA as a form of capitalism:

I agree that EA does not try to hold onto the material resources that pass through its actors. I also agree that all social movements must accumulate extra-monetary forms of capital, such as knowledge, social capital and political buy-in. 

What I want to question, however, is how the EA movement processes its resources in ways that facilitate and mimic capitalism. You state that incentivising for public goods is the core problem under capitalism. I concur, but my argument is that EA makes it easier for their disincentivization because it tries to make the process of addressing externalities as efficient as possible, conducted privately. EA plugs the gaps caused by structural economic inequality (like unequal currency exchange or the lack of reparations for centuries of slavery), rather than centring these as the fundamental issues at stake. System-wide problems cannot be fixed overnight, and I agree there is a moral duty to alleviate suffering most efficiently. Yet, my concern is that EA becomes myopic because of its intense focus on the latter. 

EA as a facilitator of capitalism:

The major thrust of my piece is to argue that the aid movement is structurally embedded within capitalist priorities of the Global North, even if it aims to be as effective as possible within this paradigm. I do not argue that aid is being used to disingenuously manipulate public opinion or that EA is a better vehicle than any other for hoodwinking the public. Critical theory is not about conspiracy, but about providing tools to unpick the naturalization of power.

Throughout my piece, I am also clear that we should never neglect people in need. I argued that we still need EA’s insights, just as people in food poverty need food banks in the Global North, but this should not neglect us from trying to work towards identifying the structures underpinning suffering. Nor do I suggest that deprivation would somehow prod people in the Global South into action. Indeed, my argument is the converse: people in the Global South are full of ideas and solutions – yet the EA community needs prodding towards creating the epistemic architecture to listen to more of these. 

Unfortunately, concrete sociological examples of the behaviour of ultrawealthy people are rare. It is a highly under-researched field, due to difficulties accessing this secretive, exclusive population and researcher biases towards studying more oppressed groups. One example I am aware of is Justin Farrell’s (2021) book Billionaire Wilderness, which is an ethnographic and quantitative study of philanthropocapitalism in Teton Country, Wyoming, the richest county in the US. Farrell quantitatively traced how his contacts socialized with each other, donated to local environmental and educational charities, as well as examining their attitudes through in-depth interviews. Farrell found clear evidence that philanthropy acted as “a valuable form of social currency in the community” with an emergent status market. He documents how the influx of great wealth created a greater need for this local charity, due to its inflation of the local real estate market. He argues, on the basis of this data, that there was a “strong tendency towards politically safe projects that reinforce the status quo” and preserve social philanthropic networks (p.g.160). This philanthropic field is very different to EA’s global, evidence-backed philanthropy. However, I’m inclined to agree with Farrell’s conclusion that “most rich philanthropists are neither entirely good Samaritans, giving altruistically for the purity of a cause, nor are they entirely evil colonialists with hidden self-interest or ideas of self-aggrandizement”. 

Foucault, critical theory, etc. 

I think critical theory can often appear “problematically navel-gazey” because it asks that people with greater privilege interrogate the way in which they participate in structures of power, which is something they are unaccustomed to, even if they are inclined to scrutinize evidence. Social scientists call this ‘reflexivity’, and it can be unsettling and difficult. For instance, it can be uncomfortable to appreciate how Western science facilitated colonialism and how it remains suffused with coloniality (see: Livingstone [2003] Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge; Saini [2019] Superior: The Return of Race Science; Poskett [2022] Horizons: A Global History of Science; Raja et al. [2022] Nat. Ecol. & Evol. 6, pp.145-154). 

Talking about privilege in ways that foment white fragility, guilt or paralysis doesn’t help anyone. However, if people can recognise and then steward their privilege – for instance, as a grantmaker, admitting non-normative perspectives and problems – then I think this is how communities work towards undoing racism and inequity. It is also worth remembering that Foucault’s understanding of power is as much generative as disciplinary. EA wields power productively, by defining a population over which health interventions can be administered, to improve overall wellbeing.

On scarcity:

Without a question, not everyone has the resources they need to live a healthy, happy, fulfilled life. However, my point is that what the most powerful epistemic actors discursively label as scarcity creates what we perceive as scarcity in society (Althusser called this ‘interpellation’). Therefore, the first step to overcoming how capitalism exacerbates inequality and interpellates scarcity is to disentangle what constitutes a lack of resources that 8 billion humans genuinely need from what resources are scarce because capitalism convinces us we need them to get ahead. So, whilst I entirely agree that many people lack the bare necessities of life (i.e., they are scarce), I want EA to realise how it participates in the discourse of scarcity that forecloses the possibility of other economic frameworks, built on the wealth found in community, joy and other non-material forms abundance. 

Quantitative approaches:

I’ll be sure to read Superforecasting by Tetlock - thanks for the recommendation. Quantitative approaches have brought big strides in progress; all I’m asking is that EA does not neglect what cannot be quantified accurately, or what, if quantified, might pave a road towards commodification. 

Methods’ track records:

I think your comment about critical theory not having a good track record misunderstands the systemic nature of the geopolitics of knowledge. We need to listen to diverse viewpoints and include diverse voices, but that alone is insufficient to challenge how non-hegemonic knowledge can only be admitted, heard, and acted upon if it submits to the terms of the dominant epistemic culture. So, yes, we can get to work and update our perspectives, but the most valuable work is to challenge the knowledge architecture of the movement in the first place. This is what social movements and unions try to do. Critical theory is merely the route that admits this into the academy via continental philosophy and citation patterns – aka, expressed within the dominant epistemic culture.

General comment on the idea that EA is opposed to social change:

Thanks for flagging these charities and movements to me. 

EA can question the dynamics of power, and I agree that it does; my essay is focused, however, on the structures of power that EA may not realise it is participating within, such as its sanctioning of massive private wealth by encouraging billionaires to join EA-backed philanthropy. I’m arguing that this may be an impediment to EA seeing what is most effective or engaging other social movements, which dislike EA’s lack of attention to power and oppression.

You’ve phrased this very nicely: “Some people like doing good with statistics, some people like doing good with organizing, those preferences lend themselves to different cause areas, and I am very grateful to both groups of people.” Both areas should cross-fertilize each other, and accept different epistemic norms, and this requires engaging non-antagonistically with different admissibility criteria for evidence. 

Tropical rainforest example:

My argument is not that EA would commodify the Amazon per se, but that it may be impossible for EA to identify the most effective strategy from the perspective of Amazonian residents. EA’s quantification process may participate within forms of carbon colonialism, even if this is never intended. Again, the power of critical theory is to unpick mechanism of power/knowledge which are otherwise naturalized. 

Thanks again for your engagement, and I hope my comments are useful.