I think you’re right that influence/control by megadonors is a thing. But I think almost all ways of funding charitable work have funding-source problems, so I would be interested in seeing more about whether (and if so, why) you thought the funding-source problem from billionaires are worse for a charitable movement than the alternatives.
At the outset, I should note I am not a longtermist, and so criticisms that apply to all EA cause areas will be more salient/interesting to me as a reader than ones that depend on your assessment of current longtermist initiatives.
Perhaps something like earning to give, from a small army of mid-size donors (e.g., mid-six to low-seven figures a year) is the best funding source. There’s a strong argument that EA should not diminished the value of EtG as a role. But—the fact remains that that Moskovitz funneled more to charities through GiveWell recommendations than everyone else combined per the 2021 metrics report. Another 18 donors were about half the remainder, averaging about $7MM each. As a strong believer in GiveWell-type work, that’s a lot of impact to give up by foreswearing Big Money. Also, if your movement only has a limited supply of foot soliders, nudging a number of your best and brightest into working on the supply/logistics chain—no matter how critical that role is—necessarily trims the number you can deploy to the front lines doing direct work.
Relying on governments for funding has its own set of problems, and relying on hundreds of thousands of low-engagement, small-dollar donors requires you to target your efforts to what the general public will give toward—which often has nothing to do with effectiveness. The Cynic’s Golden Rule—he who has the gold, makes the rules—has nearly universal application to charity work. But as a whole, are there good reasons to think megadonors are worse taskmasters than the alternatives?
I am less convinced than many people here that EA can regularly create billionaires, but am open to changing my mind. So I’m personally less interested in the “EA helped create SBF” angle unless it can be tied to some warning or lesson for the future. Absent that, it sounds like a story about a few EA-aligned individuals who made an error in judging character (or perhaps turned a blind eye to yellow or even red flags) on a specific individual, rather than a particularly important story about the nature of the EA community itself.
I think the “special obligations” discussion is interesting. On the intellectual side (but slipping into theological metaphors), it’s not entirely clear to me why—for instance, the penance for one’s sins against the climate have to be repaid in climate-related donations, if some other form of penance would be more useful to humanity (especially to the most disadvantaged). Of course, you might feel climate work is the best use of charitable money, but each billionaire’s trail of collateral damage will be different. And there’s no a priori reason to think that the specific penance for the damage caused by a specific billionaire will ordinarily have greater-than-average socially utility as a place to send donations. I can apprehend why there might be an obligation to pay the penance to the benefit of the group of people the billionaire harmed, but am having a hard time understanding why it must be repaid to ameliorate the specific way in which the billionaire harmed those people as opposed to meeting their other interests. Moreover, from a distributional perspective, a billionaire’s collateral damage may tend to be more localized to his/her high-privilege geographical area, and I worry about a principle that would often imply that one must first meet a moral duty toward relatively privileged people in the U.S. before they should care about the global poor.
But the more practical question about “special obligations” is what the idea means for a charitable movement—I don’t think any of your readers are likely to be billionaires. A movement doesn’t really have any real leverage over the megadonor, and I don’t think there are any good ways to fix that. Are all the charities in the world supposed to refuse to take money from Polluter Paul until he first donates a suitable amount of money for pollution remediation? If you really believe your charitable movement does a lot of good for the world, it’s morally costly to tell Polluter Paul to go give to the opera houses instead to get his reputational boost because they will take his money without asking any questions.
Even worse (using a GiveWell-type framework because that’s my cause area), that moral cost is not borne by me. It’s mostly borne by small children in Africa—perhaps hundreds of thousands of them if the donation is big enough—who will die because I told Polluter Paul his money was too dirty for me. While I don’t cleanly identify as a utilitarian, that is a bitter pill to swallow.
Finally, you write about “rewriting the rules to make sure that philanthropic influence is used fairly, effectively, and in a way that does not disempower ordinary citizens.” I am interested in hearing more about that, but particularly in why you think that can be done in a way that doesn’t disincentivize would-be billionaire philantropists and push them toward just buying a mega-yacht and a professional sports team instead. Unless, of course, you feel billionaire philantrophy is a net negative for the world and should be discouraged, even though it will mean considerably less philantrophy overall.
I think you’re right that influence/control by megadonors is a thing. But I think almost all ways of funding charitable work have funding-source problems, so I would be interested in seeing more about whether (and if so, why) you thought the funding-source problem from billionaires are worse for a charitable movement than the alternatives.
At the outset, I should note I am not a longtermist, and so criticisms that apply to all EA cause areas will be more salient/interesting to me as a reader than ones that depend on your assessment of current longtermist initiatives.
Perhaps something like earning to give, from a small army of mid-size donors (e.g., mid-six to low-seven figures a year) is the best funding source. There’s a strong argument that EA should not diminished the value of EtG as a role. But—the fact remains that that Moskovitz funneled more to charities through GiveWell recommendations than everyone else combined per the 2021 metrics report. Another 18 donors were about half the remainder, averaging about $7MM each. As a strong believer in GiveWell-type work, that’s a lot of impact to give up by foreswearing Big Money. Also, if your movement only has a limited supply of foot soliders, nudging a number of your best and brightest into working on the supply/logistics chain—no matter how critical that role is—necessarily trims the number you can deploy to the front lines doing direct work.
Relying on governments for funding has its own set of problems, and relying on hundreds of thousands of low-engagement, small-dollar donors requires you to target your efforts to what the general public will give toward—which often has nothing to do with effectiveness. The Cynic’s Golden Rule—he who has the gold, makes the rules—has nearly universal application to charity work. But as a whole, are there good reasons to think megadonors are worse taskmasters than the alternatives?
I am less convinced than many people here that EA can regularly create billionaires, but am open to changing my mind. So I’m personally less interested in the “EA helped create SBF” angle unless it can be tied to some warning or lesson for the future. Absent that, it sounds like a story about a few EA-aligned individuals who made an error in judging character (or perhaps turned a blind eye to yellow or even red flags) on a specific individual, rather than a particularly important story about the nature of the EA community itself.
I think the “special obligations” discussion is interesting. On the intellectual side (but slipping into theological metaphors), it’s not entirely clear to me why—for instance, the penance for one’s sins against the climate have to be repaid in climate-related donations, if some other form of penance would be more useful to humanity (especially to the most disadvantaged). Of course, you might feel climate work is the best use of charitable money, but each billionaire’s trail of collateral damage will be different. And there’s no a priori reason to think that the specific penance for the damage caused by a specific billionaire will ordinarily have greater-than-average socially utility as a place to send donations. I can apprehend why there might be an obligation to pay the penance to the benefit of the group of people the billionaire harmed, but am having a hard time understanding why it must be repaid to ameliorate the specific way in which the billionaire harmed those people as opposed to meeting their other interests. Moreover, from a distributional perspective, a billionaire’s collateral damage may tend to be more localized to his/her high-privilege geographical area, and I worry about a principle that would often imply that one must first meet a moral duty toward relatively privileged people in the U.S. before they should care about the global poor.
But the more practical question about “special obligations” is what the idea means for a charitable movement—I don’t think any of your readers are likely to be billionaires. A movement doesn’t really have any real leverage over the megadonor, and I don’t think there are any good ways to fix that. Are all the charities in the world supposed to refuse to take money from Polluter Paul until he first donates a suitable amount of money for pollution remediation? If you really believe your charitable movement does a lot of good for the world, it’s morally costly to tell Polluter Paul to go give to the opera houses instead to get his reputational boost because they will take his money without asking any questions.
Even worse (using a GiveWell-type framework because that’s my cause area), that moral cost is not borne by me. It’s mostly borne by small children in Africa—perhaps hundreds of thousands of them if the donation is big enough—who will die because I told Polluter Paul his money was too dirty for me. While I don’t cleanly identify as a utilitarian, that is a bitter pill to swallow.
Finally, you write about “rewriting the rules to make sure that philanthropic influence is used fairly, effectively, and in a way that does not disempower ordinary citizens.” I am interested in hearing more about that, but particularly in why you think that can be done in a way that doesn’t disincentivize would-be billionaire philantropists and push them toward just buying a mega-yacht and a professional sports team instead. Unless, of course, you feel billionaire philantrophy is a net negative for the world and should be discouraged, even though it will mean considerably less philantrophy overall.