Overview

Effective altruism is part of the utilitarian tradition. Like the utilitarians, effective altruists focus on social reform, believe in expanding our responsibilities beyond not harming others, and advocate for a highly rational ethical system modeled on economics.

There are two main effective altruist ideas.

1. Individuals should seek to do the most good they can; they should “earn to give.” The chief example of this is Matt Wage, who took a job in finance so he could give lots of money to charities.¹

2. We should quantify the effects of efforts to do good. In particular, charities should be ranked according to how much good they do and preference should be given to those that are ranked highest.

In both cases, there is some looseness in what, exactly, is being claimed.

Singer starts by saying that individuals should do “the most good we can,” which is straight utilitarianism. But he backs off of that elsewhere in the piece by saying that we do not have to be saints, you can give special weight to your kids, and so on. There is also some slippage between “do what would, in fact, do the most good” and “do what has been shown to produce good.” Singer, for example, focuses on charitable initiatives whose good results have been documented by empirical studies, but there might well be better ways of spending your resources whose efficacy cannot be proven by those kinds of studies.

Criticisms

We have critical commentary from two economists and one philosopher. Daron Acemoğlu and Angus Deaton are the economists. They think that charitable giving is, generally speaking, bad. The evidence of its effectiveness is poor. Furthermore, the money props up bad governments, impeding the political reforms that, they maintain, would truly address the problems that the charities are concerned with.

Acemoğlu’s analogy with vigilantes replacing a police force illustrates his point of view pretty nicely, I think.

Deaton adds that the most effective groups working on development projects are the governmental ones like the World Bank and USAID rather than the non-governmental charities that the effective altruists would give to. (Maybe an effective altruist should work for a governmental organization, then,)

Wenar, the philosopher, used to be a believer. Now he is very much not. His criticisms are wide ranging, but the ones I most remember concern the quality of evidence that effective altruists employ. On his telling, it is not great.

Evidence that most studies of charities are worthless

In a nutshell, the studies suggesting interventions by charities are effective are rarely replicated and so the interventions are quite unlikely to work on a large scale.

Last year, Eva Vivalt of the Australian National University wrote a paper analyzing the results of international development programs like microloans, deworming, cash transfers, and so forth. … There are two things to notice. First, there’s not a lot of clustering. For nearly all these programs, the results are pretty widely dispersed. Second, where there is clustering, it’s right around zero, where the results are the least meaningful.

I hear Angus Deaton and Leif Wenar saying “I told you so.” OK, I don’t really hear that. But you know what I mean.