Annie Lowrey
The Atlantic, Nov. 17, 2022
“The irony is rich: A movement devoted to addressing poverty encouraged its adherents to become as wealthy as possible.”
The spectacular collapse of the cryptocurrency trading firm FTX has raised a number of urgent questions. Why did the founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, get such fawning media coverage? Will his customers get their crypto back? Oh, and should wealthy philanthropists in the United States spend their money on buildings at their alma mater, mosquito nets halfway around the world, or the prevention of global catastrophes in the distant future?
That last question is relevant because Bankman-Fried was one of the biggest financial supporters and media promoters of effective altruism, in its own words, “a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.” EA involves studying various charitable endeavors, figuring out which ones do the most good, and directing money to them. It has also become an influential subculture in the Bay Area, where devotees commonly refer to themselves as effective altruists in the same way they might describe themselves as leftists or psychonauts.
The fact that the public face of EA was the leader of a clique of Millennial super-nerds seemingly running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme from a penthouse in the Bahamas has, understandably, tainted the movement. Any number of charities are out hundreds of millions of dollars of expected donations. Some donors are questioning whether to be involved with EA at all. “Effective altruism posits that making money by (almost) any means necessary is OK because you … are so brilliant that you absolutely should have all the power implied by billions of dollars in the bank,” the CoinDesk columnist David Z. Morris argues, a sentiment echoed over and over online.
Yet this crisis also creates an opportunity. Effective altruism, the movement, is not the same thing as effective altruism, the practice of financially maximalist and rigorously data-driven philanthropy. Divorcing the latter from the former would benefit everyone on the planet. SOURCE