Cross-posted from Otherwise. Most people in EA won't find these arguments new. Apologies for leaving out animal welfare entirely for the sake of simplicity.
Last month, Emma Goldberg wrote a NYT piece contrasting effective altruism with approaches that refuse to quantify meaningful experiences. The piece indicates that effective altruism is creepily numbers-focused. Goldberg asks “what if charity shouldn’t be optimized?”
The egalitarian answer
Dylan Matthews gives a try at answering a question in the piece: “How can anyone put a numerical value on a holy space” like Notre Dame cathedral? For the $760 million spent restoring the cathedral, he estimates you could prevent 47,500 deaths from malaria.
“47,500 people is about five times the population of the town I grew up in. . . . It’s useful to imagine walking down Main Street, stopping at each table at the diner Lou’s, shaking hands with as many people as you can, and telling them, ‘I think you need to die to make a cathedral pretty.’ And then going to the next town over and doing it again, and again, until you’ve told 47,500 people why they have to die.”
Who prefers magnificence?
Goldberg’s article draws a lot on author Amy Schiller’s plea to focus charity on “magnificence” rather than effectiveness. Some causes “make people’s lives feel meaningful, radiant, sacred. Think nature conservancies, cultural centers and places of worship. These are institutions that lend life its texture and color, and not just bare bones existence.”
But US arts funding goes disproportionately to the most expensive projects, with more than half of the funding going to the most expensive 2% of projects. These are typically museums, classical music groups, and performing arts centers.
When donors prioritize giving to communities they already have ties to, the money stays in richer communities. Some areas have way more rich people than others. New York City has 119 billionaires; most African countries have none. Unsurprisingly, Schiller and Goldberg both live in New York City and not in Burundi or Bangladesh.
Schiller’s book summary actively discourages philanthropy toward public health work: “Philanthropy has to get out of the business of saving lives if we are to save humanity.” As far as I know she doesn’t argue that poor people should just be left to die; just that governments should be in charge of that stuff, and philanthropy should aim for more beautiful things. “The money we use to build the common world communicates our belief in that world, and in all who inhabit it. It affirms the value of humanity beyond price.”
It’s hard to imagine saying that to someone whose toddler is dying because of contaminated water. “Sorry that your government wasn’t up to the job of providing basic services, and that its tax base is made up of very poor people. But please know that my support of my city’s art museums affirms the value of humanity in general.”
Inequality has its benefits
Michelangelo could do what he did because he had rich funders. A fully egalitarian Florence would have had them, and him, working on farms. A fully egalitarian world now wouldn’t have much funding available for “things whose value was hard to price: museums, libraries, parks” as Amy Schiller favors.
And I do love these things! I’m glad that Yo-Yo Ma isn’t a farmer, and that the Sagrada Familia cathedral isn’t an apartment block, and that Carnegie funded the building of my local library.
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Is there enough for everybody to have access to the finer things?
Not currently.
A quick estimate is that global GDP divided by the world population would be about $13,000 per person. (Of course, actually dividing up all the money in the world would also break the economy, so it would soon be less.) That’s about the GDP of El Salvador or Sri Lanka. That doesn’t leave much room for funding museums, etc.
When the UN talks about “ending extreme poverty”, it means lifting people above an income $2.15 a day[1]. A more ambitious goal might be raising everyone’s income to at least $6.85 a day, the poverty line for upper-middle income countries. Almost half the world’s people live below that level.
A world where everyone had both bread and roses would require significantly cheaper roses than the rich are accustomed to, or a higher overall world GDP. Fortunately, GDP per person has been growing for centuries.
The balance of good and bad
In the short story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas, a beautiful and joyful city depends on the suffering of one of its citizens. Many readers feel that they couldn’t accept such an arrangement, that they’d be among those who walk away from the beautiful city. The story is based on a scenario by William James: “How hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”
Number-crunching types are more likely to say “Wait, only one person is living in torturous conditions? That’s much better than real life.”
Compare to our actual world, where more than two billion souls live in poverty. This is the world people are tacitly accepting when they fund concert halls in their own beautiful cities.
Both sides have ugly aspects
At its worst, Schiller’s focus on magnificence turns its back on some people’s ability to live at all, so that others can have a more beautiful life.
At its worst, a fully redistributionist global health focus pushes toward a repugnant-conclusion-type world where everyone has just enough for a life that’s barely worthwhile.
A sole focus on either of these neglects more critical needs: reducing the risk of disaster from pandemics, nuclear war, and AI. (And at its worst, existential-risk-focused effective altruism has gone too far on the crazy train and will end up working on things that don’t turn out to matter at all.)
These aren’t the only choices
Some variations on our current world that I think would be better:
- Philanthropy would continue in many areas. But more philanthropists would spread funding beyond their cultural and geographic bubble.
- Arts and culture funding would focus more on what’s accessible to more people:
- preservation of cultural treasures and landmarks around the world
- scalable cultural work like broadcasting, writing, and recorded music
- People who particularly want to fund things they have a connection to would consider a variety of ways they’re connected to others. These connections could be based on location, religion, or culture, but also other things they value like self-determination, or parenthood and family. Allan Saldanha: “As a father, I think the worst thing any parent can experience is to have to watch their child suffering or god forbid, dying. My children’s lives are priceless to me and so I find the opportunity to save someone else’s child’s life for less than £2,000 a compelling proposition.”
- People who favor markets over traditional philanthropy would be more open to funding things like the Market Shaping Accelerator or Emergent Ventures.
- More people would fund projects that reduce the chance of AI disaster, pandemics, and nuclear war. This isn’t just for people who want to affect the distant future; it’s for people who want to reduce risk in our own lifetimes.
- If people still want to fund more opera productions and so on, it’s their money. But nobody would be holding this up as superior to saving lives.
- I hope we can get to a future where all, not only people born into the right circumstances, have access to both bread and roses.
Related:
- Crying in museums
- The magic washing machine, Hans Rosling: “Grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life, she had been heating water with firewood, and she had hand-washed laundry for seven children. And now, she was going to watch electricity do that work.”
- How rich am I? calculator for how you compare to a median person in the world.
- ^
These are adjusted for the local cost of goods and services; it’s not just that things are cheaper in some countries.
For what it's worth, I believe that many people can live pretty great lives for $13k/year. I think that healthy-ish Americans today can do this, with a bit of prep and being willing to live in the right places.
I'd expect that if a magic wand were raised and everyone had their incomes changed to $13k/yr, it would go much better than many people here might imagine. In the US, services would quickly change to cater to less expensive needs. That said, there is a major question of how this would actually work in practice. It's hard to imagine, as this would have profound implications for real estate prices, salaries, living costs, etc.
Happiness is currently correlated with well-being in the US, but (A) it's not clear how much causation there is, in which way, (B) it includes a lot of zero-sum comparisons, and (C), even the low ends aren't too catastrophic.
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/as-incomes-rise-variability-in-happiness-shrinks
Related, incomes in the US have gone up a ton in the last hundred years, but happiness levels have moved surprisingly little.
Lastly, I'd flag that in this world, I'd expect there would likely be more culture (i.e. museum-like experiences) generated yearly in total. The extra people with income would offset the losses we get at the top.
I'm not saying that I don't prefer the extra wealth - just that I don't see a need to feel bad about a picture of the world where everyone has $13k/yr. I think this would be much better than what we have now, in total (as those elevated would gain more than those who lose would lose).
"Feeling good" or "Feeling bad" about the current state of such a complex world is a hard thing to be objectively correct or incorrect about.
Thanks Julia for writing this. It’s correct all the way around.
I can’t help but feel though that there is something a little mean-spirited in targeting those donating to Notre Dame, the opera, etc. There is a common and (in my opinion) somewhat toxic pattern where if someone spends their money on yachts, mansions, etc., then nobody complains but as soon as they do something even a little bit public spirited then all of a sudden everyone feels free to criticize. Like, we can have plenty of objections to MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropic choices, but shouldn’t Jeff Bezos get at least as much commentary for his non-philanthropic choices?
I directionally agree with the second paragraph but there are some relevant differences in my mind. First, to the extent that a large donor chose to have their donation advertised (as opposed to remaining anonymous / confidential), they can be seen as making some implied assertions (which they may or may not be consciously intending to make!):
This is particularly true if they get the concert hall named after them or something. I think we need to be somewhat gentle, but I think we're entitled to get our viewpoint out on those claims.
In contrast, I don't think anyone who spends all their money on yachts and mansions can be reasonably seen as making these kinds of assertions. The stronger response to the ineffective donor can be seen as a means of combatting these implied messages; there is little risk of anyone misunderstanding the moral value of Jeff Bezos' non-philanthropic choices.
There's also the practical reality that the tax breaks for charitable donations in the US mean that the taxpayers (including myself) -- as a functional matter -- pay for a meaningful fraction of almost any significant charitable donation to a 501(c)(3).At some point, that gives me somewhat more of an interest in criticizing what the rich donor is claiming the tax writeoff for than in what someone is buying without a subsidy from me.
Everyone can afford roses and bread, the western world just is not ready for that because then you would actually need to pay the fair price for your garments/goods/services and everything else we do for you.
My opinion on this is, do charity in systemic solutions, rather than providing anti-virals for malaria and that's all, help the affected regions drain their wetlands, eliminate the populations of mosquitos, help them with spraying equipment and pesticides, introduce predators etc.
Food-insecure places should get food yes, but help their agriculture as well, give them mechanization and the know-how, help them out with money. A tractor costs the same everywhere, but a farmer earning 10-15k$ per year will never afford a 20-30k$ tractor, therefore he will be stuck doing manual labor on a small field with small inputs and very underperforming outputs.
Poverty is a cycle, and to break cycles we need to do big changes in infrastructure, education and personal engagement.
Another field that is gatekept by westerners is knowledge, we really can't afford your libraries of published articles, hell I live on an income that would pay for 10 articles from Elsevier, god forbid if I have to buy everything (Thank you Alexandra Elbakyan).
I suspect many of us would directional agree with the need for structural / systemic / developmental / etc. changes to effect more durable change. But this is a movement whose human nearterm wellbeing arm has a couple hundred million per year to spend and maybe a few hundred to thousand people to utilize (depending on who counts). So the solution space does have to take account of that.
Hey Jason, I was thinking about this today, I also visited GiveDirectly's website and read some stories, and now I will make a post, I believe there is a way to make an impact, and I'll elaborate more on that RIGHT NOW. Thanks for the feedback.
Thanks for this great post.
My first reaction to the original article (which I saw scrolling through the NY Times online, without any realisation that it was about EA or Effective Giving), it made me really angry. It still makes me angry, and I'm not normally the type to get angry.
First, given that I had just co-founded an Effective Giving organisation in Ireland, following a @Charity Entrepreneurship Incubator, I found it very sad that people were sharing such ill-informed articles, which would potentially discourage many donors from using their donations to help many more people. I cannot help but wonder how many more children will die because of this article? How many more animals will suffer in factory farms because of this article?
Because this article is wrong in a very bad way. It doesn't just focus on the benefits of giving to charities that are close to your heart - it also actively criticises effective giving as if it were something that only truly insensitive people would do, as if EA's as a species were somehow less than human because we dare care more about the people we want to help than about the warm fuzzy glow we get when we donate.
Because that is what effective giving is. It is saying "When I donate, I am going to decide how to donate not based on what feels good to me, but rather on what will help the most people or animals."
But also, almost nobody in the effective giving movement discourages "non-effective" charity. First, because most of us arrived there not because we were super-logicians, but rather because we've been donating all our lives to causes we care deeply about, and started to realise that some of these donations weren't helping people in desperate need as much as they might. But we still kept donating - and then when we discovered Effective Giving, it was like opening our eyes to a world of people who thought just like us, but had taken it a step further and devoted their lives to it.
It sickens me to see how these people, some of the most sensitive, generous and caring people I've ever encountered, have been mischaracterised in this article as unfeeling cynics who were in it for the joy of the math.
There are benefits to giving to all charitable causes* and that it is absolutely great when a person donates to a charitable cause close to their heart, or with which they have a personal connection to it. Effective Giving organisations want to help raise their awareness that there is also the option to give some of their money to very effective causes. We don't ask that they stop giving to causes they already support. Indeed, there is a famous "3 pots" thinking (I first heard this from @Bram Schaper, the inspiring leader of the Dutch effective giving organisation, Doneer Effectief) that we often share: If you have some money available after all your costs have been paid, why not share it out into 3 pots:
I really wanted someone with some credibility to reply to this article and call it out for what it was, which is just nonsense, low-quality, one-sided journalism. But apparently it's OK to display bias as long as the people you're biased against are mostly well off white males, which is unfortunately the stereotype of EA's. The problem was that it wasn't the well off white male EA's who were the victims of the article, but rather the people that we are all trying to help, the people who desperately need help.
But, I decided to reflect a while before posting an angry comment on here, and I actually read some other comments about the article. Calm, measured, accepting that people have a right to their opinions. They focused on the fact that the journalist probably meant well and was probably a good person - and kind of glossed over the minor detail that that same journalist had shockingly and intentionally mis-characterised the entire EA and Effective Giving movements in a very harmful way.
Can you imagine how any other group would feel if they were treated like that?
Where was the anger? Where was the passion to stand up for what we believe in?
It's very easy to sit comfortably in our chairs and debate the subtle details of arguments. But that's not how we're going to change the world. If we're willing to let people attack the EA movement and Effective Giving and not defend ourselves, how can we expect to convince others?
We may be mostly in the 99th percentile for calm, logical reasoning, but the vast majority of people** are not. History shows that great movements require not just great thinkers and strategies, but also passionate advocates, and even sometimes stubborn, pig-headed supporters who do not back down.
And if we want to be scientific about it, we can. There is a huge amount of science related to effective ways to communicate with and convince the general public. Writing precise, detailed arguments is one of the least effective parts of this - although it is still vital that someone does this.
The world right now is utterly broken. In a world with the technology and capacity to feed and clothe and nourish and educate and care for everyone, we have billions of people who literally do not have the most basic necessities like clean water or enough food to avoid starvation. We have wars started because individual Sudanese generals or national leaders decide they want more power or a stronger image - and so hundreds of thousands die. We have an out of control AI development program led by a group of immature men with no history of responsible behaviour. We have a growing risk of nuclear war. We have a climate crisis that we're effectively ignoring and denying even as the evidence grows more incontrovertible every day.
EA's are among the few groups who really care about this. But if we remain a niche group and let ourselves be defeated by inaccurate stereotypes and biased communicators, we're not going to have the impact that the world desperately needs us to have.
We have great thinkers and wonderful, good people within the EA movement. But we could use more overt passion - many of us are deeply passionate about EA, but too many of us do not want to share that passion with the world, to shout out our demands and lead others towards our ideas, without them necessarily having to go through the same deep thought process that brought many of us here.
Many people just want to be part of a movement - why not let that movement be one that will make the world better. Instead, we are literally being out-thought by people like Donald Trump, who understands people's need to be part of a movement and is more than happy to cynically exploit it.
Imagine how much better off we'd be if people were chanting "no more factory-farms" and "stop the wars" rather than anti-immigrant slogans. But we won't get there by just imagining it.
*although, especially in the US, some tax-exempt causes like extremely rich universities attended by some of the richest students, are IMHO pushing the definition of "charity" a bit too far.
**more than 98% of people, to be exact!
Thank you for this beautiful post, Julia. Your writing always really resonates with me.
Great piece! I noticed that you wrote "Goldstein" a few times.
Thanks, fixed!
Thanks for sharing this, wonderful writing! Have you thought about sending this to Emma Goldberg? :-)
Really nicely written and interesting post. I have one part I'd like to question.
Often defences of inequality take the form "You can either have rich and poor, or you can just have poor". Which on the face of it is not just a zero-sum frame, but actually a negative-sum frame, which seems an unfair representation until you add the claim that it is inequality itself that allows for the sort of dynamic wealth generation needed to create the rich. The point about Michelangelo and Yo-Yo Ma makes an argument of the same type but regarding cultural riches. But I think this misses the point that cultural dynamism transcends wealth distribution. Take the idea of genius for instance.
I don't doubt that Yo-Yo Ma is a genius, and that Michelangelo may have been one too, though I think Leonardo is a better candidate for genius. The framing goes if there wasn't inequality that allowed for funding a life of contemplation for such geniuses they never would have arisen. I think the opposite is more likely.
Let's assume that Leonardo is a genuine 1 in 10,000 genius. Let's put him in a population of 1,000,000, where 1% of the population have the capacity to fully reach their potential, while the other 99% live in an agricultural or later industrial state of perpetual labour, and never get to reach their potential. Lucky Leonardo, he's the one genius who arises in this situation 1,000,000 x 1% = 10,000 and one in 10,000 people are geniuses so, that's one genius reaching their potential.
So, now let's allow for a more egalitarian society, where everyone works, but not for ever hour of the day, they get some time to contemplate the world, and be creative. Now out of your population of 1,000,000 you have 100 genuine 1 in 10,000 geniuses, each with a chance of being discovered.
What world is more likely to create the greatest art and have the greatest progress? I think it's obvious: the latter. You see, it's important to recognise that we don't necessarily live in the best of all possible worlds, the past isn't by definition the best it might have been, so the depictions of old biblical stories by Michelangelo aren't necessarily the best artworks that might have been created.
I don't find the decision about Notre Dame difficult in the slightest. It's a building, it's not lives, lives have value, buildings only have value in as much as the serve lives, and it's difficult to make the case that the pleasure or national income that Notre Dame generates gets even close to the benefit of saving the lives that the equivalent funds could save.
There are other interesting points in the post, but this is one I feel could be pushed back against. At the same time I completely agree with @Ian Turner when he points out that criticism of charitable choices is often more prevalent than criticism of not giving to charity at all. So, I think it's advisable to use positive terminology when assessing efficacy, as "in which of these two good options is better" rather than the zero-sum framing that not effectively giving is tantamount to taking away from a more effective charity.
Thanks, this changed how I was thinking about this!
Executive summary: While both effectiveness-focused and magnificence-focused approaches to charity have flaws, the best path forward combines multiple approaches while prioritizing basic needs and existential risks, with cultural funding focused on accessibility and preservation.
Key points:
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Thank you for sharing these reflections, Julia! I absolutely agree with the points you raise—this is a topic that comes up regularly in discussions about effective giving for me as well. As you point out, neither extreme approach is feasible in real life, and finding a balance is key.
One aspect I sometimes overlook is the role of rich countries as cultural role models. If we entirely neglect or avoid funding areas like the arts, we risk depriving the richer world of the additional meaning and inspiration these areas provide. At the same time, I agree that focusing on interventions where the majority will benefit is a stronger guiding principle. Striving for a world where everyone can have both bread and roses feels like an ideal worth working towards!
Executive Summary:
The post critiques two contrasting approaches to charity—emphasizing either effectiveness or cultural "magnificence"—and advocates for a balanced model that addresses global inequality, prioritizes critical risks, and makes cultural treasures accessible to a wider population.
Key Points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.