Thoughts on Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman
I can’t recall the last time I read a book in one sitting, but that’s what happened with Moral Ambition by bestselling author Rutger Bregman. I read the German edition, though it’s also available in Dutch (see James Herbert’s Quick Take). An English release is slated for May.
The book opens with the statement: “The greatest waste of our times is the waste of talent.” From there, Bregman builds a compelling case for privileged individuals to leave their “bullshit jobs” and tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. He weaves together narratives spanning historical movements like abolitionism, suffrage, and civil rights through to contemporary initiatives such as Against Malaria Foundation, Charity Entrepreneurship, LEEP, and the Shrimp Welfare Project.
If you’ve been engaged with EA ideas, much of this will sound familiar, but I initially didn’t expect to enjoy the book as much as I did. However, Bregman’s skill as a storyteller and his knack for balancing theory and narrative make Moral Ambition a fascinating read. He reframes EA concepts in a more accessible way, such as replacing “counterfactuals” with the sports acronym “VORP” (Value Over Replacement Player). His use of stories and examples, paired with over 500 footnotes for details, makes the book approachable without sacrificing depth.
I had some initial reservations. The book draws heavily on examples from the EA community but rarely engages directly with the movement, mentioning EA mainly in the context of FTX. The final chapter also promotes Bregman’s own initiative, The School for Moral Ambition. However, the school’s values closely align with core EA principles. The ITN framework and pitches for major EA cause areas are in the book, albeit with varying levels of depth.
Having finished the book, I can appreciate its approach. Moral Ambition feels like a more pragmatic, less theory-heavy version of EA. The School for Moral Ambition has attracted better-known figures in Germany, such as the political economist Maja Göpel and social entrepreneur Waldemar Zeiler, who haven’t previously been associated with EA. I’ve started recommending the book to people I’d like to introduce to career-impact ideas, especially those who might prefer a story-driven, lighter entry point over something like 80,000 Hours.
It will be interesting to see how the book fares in the U.S., where Bregman recently relocated and has already received some press. Perhaps Moral Ambition can help preserve and propagate EA ideals in a post-FTX era or complement existing brands like Charity Entrepreneurship, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours.
That said, there’s a notable difference in approach. While Moral Ambition incorporates many EA principles, it steers readers toward its own School of Moral Ambition rather than EA organizations. For instance, 80,000 Hours—a natural fit for this topic—gets just a single footnote. This contrasts with EA’s collaborative spirit, where mutual recommendation and shared resources are the norm.
The School of Moral Ambition adds value by broadening the reach of EA-inspired ideas. However, if the EA movement were to shift toward a model with more independent entities and less collaboration, it could risk losing some of its unique strengths.
Thanks for writing this Patrick!
While working on EA Netherlands’ annual report I wrote a small section about Rutger Bregman, the School for Moral Ambition, and how I now see EAN’s role in the Netherlands.
It’s been shared with other national organisers and with a few people in CEA, but I thought I’d post an edited version here in case it’s helpful to more people.
TL;DR: SMA is a more mainstream, career-focused offshoot: ~20 staff, three programs (outreach, community, fellowships), and an expanding audience. EA Netherlands is the nerdier cousin.
I’ve been in touch with some of the School for Moral Ambition (SMA) co-founders and the DACH director, and my sense is that all of them are very collaborative and interested in EA or even members of the community. I think SMA and EA have quite a lot of synergies, if they keep in touch with each other and don’t see each other as competition.
I see SMA as a unique chance to reach more people and more senior professionals, and get them excited about doing the most good. They might also be able to unlock additional funding for effective charities. I’m very excited to see them grow.
This makes sense to me, though, based on what Bregman is likely trying to accomplish here. [Caveat: I haven’t read the book as I only read English.]
In the world of doing good effectively (“DGE”), we can think of EA as something like a planet. It metaphorically has enough mass to create a round shape due to its gravity, and has cleared its orbit of smaller objects. It’s big enough, and too dependent on outside forces for its funding or other critical elements. The cynical rough analogy—which I do not fully endorse—would be that Open Phil is the planet, and various other orgs are—in a gravitational sense—satellites of Open Phil to a considerable extent. By that I mean that they lack practical independence from their predominant funder and are rather suspectable to changes in its thinking.
Assuming Bregman has important philosophical differences from Open Phil and/or the EA ecosystem, he probably doesn’t want to create a satellite of the EA / Open Phil planetary system. That could be for philosophical reasons (e.g., a more neartermist approach vs. believing Open Phil is likely to move increasingly longtermist over time) or for practical reasons (e.g., trying to reach people and tap resources not practically available to EA for optics or cultural reasons). When and if SMA gets larger, it may be in a position to interface with EA on a planet-to-planet basis the way GiveWell can now. I doubt it could do so now.
No community can be all things to all people, and besides redundancy limits the risks of single points of failure. SMA may be intended as a somewhat more populist / accessible, somewhat more “vanilla” flavor of DGE than the EA community, and I don’t think it could accomplish those ends very well as an EA satellite. Although there are tradeoffs, I think it’s probably good on balance to have a few more planetary systems in the DGE star system.
I gifted the book to a student and got the following feedback:
“Hi Felix! Greetings from the Eifel! I hope you have a wonderful time between the years! I’m already past page 200! Your book is enormously helpful! Thank you for this gift! I’m working through it carefully. Much of it holds enormous potential! [...]” (translated with deepl)
I also gave the book to a colleague who’s changing jobs (~50 years old) as a departing gift because of the tips on how to avoid being a ‘noble loser’ who sacrifices his impact because he cannot compromise.
I listened to the audiobook and liked it for the accurate reminder of the basic principles, but also for the broader perspective. I had never thought about the founder of AMF before. It was really interesting to learn more about the person behind the organisation.
Can recommend.
I read the Dutch version earlier last year and really enjoyed it! Interesting stories (e.g. how Ralph Nader established car safety) and fun to read. Reminded me of What We Owe The Future in some ways.
AIM (Charity Entrepreneurship) gets an entire chapter, and is the main EA org he writes about.
Curious that 80k is hardly mentioned at all. I wonder if that’s a conscious choice because he did not want to recommend 80k, or it simply did not fit in his story. Maybe Rutger resonates more with neartermist EA and therefore left out longtermist orgs like 80k. The cause areas the School for Moral Ambition (SMA) prioritzed so far in their fellowship were also more neartermist: alternative protein & tobacco control.
If your bent is neartermist EA, it would sadly make some sense to almost completely leave out 80k due to their longtermist bent at the moment.
I used to think the same, but now I see that many GWWC pledgers and donors mention 80k as the reason why they’re pledging or donating, often to neartermist causes.
I’ve also heard several stories like this one of people being able to do more good in a neartermist cause thanks to 80k.
I think we tend to overestimate how common it is to consider “consequentialist cosmopolitanism” when thinking about doing good in the world. The vast majority of people don’t consider important things like counterfactuals, or that they can help many more people abroad.
See for example Part 2 and Part 3 of the 80k career guide: I think they can definitely be valuable for an introduction to neartermist EA.
You could maybe say that Probably Good’s career guide is better, so it makes sense to omit 80k, but I don’t know if they cover all the neartermist-valuable topics covered by 80k.
The 80k job board also has a lot of non-longtermist roles (but maybe it’s a subset of the Probably Good job board, I’m not sure)
How many of them have made that choice recently though? I know 80k still talks about earning to give (which IIRC it was once the major proponent of) and Givewell recommended charities in its intro and hosts all sorts on its podcasts and job boards, but its “recommended careers” is basically all longtermism (or EA community/research stuff) and 80k are explicit on what their priorities are and that this doesn’t include “neartermist” causes.
So I don’t think it’s surprising that Rutger doesn’t recommend them if he doesn’t share (or even actively disagrees with?) those priorities even if his current focus on persuading mid-career professionals to look into alternative proteins and tobacco prevention sounds very EA-ish in other respects. I’m curious whether he mentioned ProbablyGood or if he’s even aware of them?
A lot![1]
80k seems to mostly care about x-risk, but (perhaps surprisingly) their messaging is not just “Holy Shit, X-Risk” or “CEOs are playing Russian roulette with you and your children”.
They instead also cover a lot of cause-neutral EA arguments (e.g. scope sensitivity and the importance of effectiveness)
Yeah agree with this, but I still think that 80k is more than useless for altruists who don’t value the long-term future, or are skeptical of 80k’s approach to trying to influence it.
My understanding is that the SMA team knows much more about the space than I do, so I’m sure they are aware of them if I’m aware of them.
I don’t have an exact number, but I would conservatively guess more than 100 people and more than $100k in total donations for 2024
80k has made important contributions to our thinking about career choice, as seen e.g. in their work on replaceability, career capital, personal fit, and the ITN framework. This work does not assume a position on the neartermism vs. longtermism debate, so I think the author’s neartermist sympathies can’t fully explain or justify the omission.
Thanks pablo I completely agree with the amazing contributions and work thinking about all those important career related things.
Although like your say the work doesn’t assume a position, the current website and materials kind of do.
And if you take the snapshot in time now of 80k and send a more naive EA interested person to their website, you still get a longtermist bent feel even though I agree that’s not what’s behind it.
And here I was thinking hardly a soul read my suggesting this framing …
AFAIK, the fact that SMA takes a different stance on ‘distancing’ or differentiating itself from the EA community compared to, say, Ambitious Impact, is because the reputation of EA is just really very different in the US than in Europe. A lot more toxic, that is.
If they only had plans to launch in NL, Germany and other European countries, I think they would have been a bit less careful to set up their own separate brand / community and maintain some distance.
Nevertheless, they’ve generally expressed the desire to not be branded an ‘ea-organisation’ by people in or outside the community (stressing they take inspiration from other groups and schools of thougt too*) so I think people should respect that :)
*Including the Nader’s Raiders which I guess is also not the most uncontroversial in the US but old enough that people don’t get upset about it lol
Does he explicitely reject some EA ideas (e.g. longtermism) and does he give arguments against them? If not, it seems a bit odd to me to promote a new school that is like EA in most other important respects. It might be good to have this school additionally anyway, but it feels like its relation to EA and what its additional value might be are obvious questions that should be addressed.
Reminds me of when an article about Rutger popped up on the Forum a while back (my comments here)
I expect SMA people probably think something along the lines of:
EA funding and hard power is fairly centralised. SMA want more control over what they do/fund/associate with and so want to start their own movement.
EA has become AI-pilled and longtermist. Those who disagree need a new movement, and SMA can be that movement.
EA’s brand is terminally tarnished after the FTX collapse. Even though SMA agrees a lot with EA, it needs to market itself as ‘not EA’ as much as possible to avoid negative social contagion.
Not making a claim myself about whether and to what extent those claims are true.
I don’t have any insider information, but my speculation would be that they just think that they counterfactually reach more people by having a very separate brand.
i.e. SMA closely related to the EA brand/flavor/way of communicating would counterfactually help X more people do more good than EA by itself, while SMA as a separate movement with its own ideas/style on how to do the most good would counterfactually help Y extra people, and Y > X.
I also think it’s likely that SMA believes that for their target audience it would be more valuable to interact with AIM than with 80k or CEA, not necessarily for the 3 reasons you mention.
I mean the reasoning behind this seems very close to #2 no? The target audience they’re looking at is probably more interested in neartermism than AI/longtermism and they don’t think they can get much tractability working with the current EA ecosystem?
I think 2 and especially 3 are very likely, but I think it’s also likely that Bregman was very impressed with AIM, and possibly found it more inspiring than 80k/CEA, and/or more pragmatic, or a better fit for the kind of people he wanted to reach regardless of their views on AI.
Thanks for sharing, Patrick.
I have not read the book. However, it is unclear to me whether privileged individuals should leave their jobs to increase their social impact via direct work. Earning to give can be pretty powerful, and people’s “bullshit jobs” may have significantly higher earnings. I also think the most cost-effective organisations in areas related to effective altruism are way more cost-effective than the median one. I would say the best animal welfare organisations are at least 100 times as cost-effective as the best in global health and development and AI safety[1]. So I believe optimising for donating more to the best animal welfare organisations can very easily be bette than transioning to a career in global health and development and AI safety.
I estimate cage-free campaigns are 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, and that the Shrimp Welfare Project has been 64.3 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
Yeah they’re definitely not (currently) promoting E2G. In fact, IIRC, the chapter that explicitly discusses EA is quite negative about E2G-flavoured EA (primarily because of FTX).
Do they mention effective giving or collaborate with Doneer Effectief/the Tien Procent Club?
Bregman is still listed as an ambassador for Doneer Effectief. He used to be heavily involved in the Tien Procent Club, but that’s no longer the case. Of course, you’re likely aware of the GWWC video he participated in. But these are all things that happened in the past.
As for SMA, the only thing they’ve done regarding EG was their collaboration with Doneer Effectief, us, and the Tien Procent Club for the recent sponsored walk. That was quite a big event, and several SMA staff members attended, but SMA didn’t make a particularly large contribution. I don’t think they’ll be involved this year. Beyond that, I don’t believe they engage with EG at all—though perhaps that will change.
Regarding the book, frustratingly, I can’t find my copy at the moment. The only part I recall is the section I mentioned previously on the Forum. That said, I hesitate to say it’s the only reference, as I might simply be more attuned to remembering the negatives.
EDIT: I forgot something! SMA did a podcast episode with the Director of Doneer Effectief, Bram. And whilst googling for that I came across this edition of their newsletter, which talks about EG.
None of the organizations are mentioned in the book, except for a footnote about GWWC. However, Rob Mather and AMF get a whole chapter, which includes fundraising for bednets.