Capitalism, power and epistemology: a critique of EA

Matthew_Doran22 Aug 2022 14:20 UTC
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Summary:

There is an elephant in the room that the EA community rarely confronts head-on: capitalism. In this essay, I argue that Effective Altruism is a consequence, form, and facilitator of capitalism. After dissecting what I mean by capitalism, I explore how EA epistemologically and materially assists exploitative, racist, and destructive practices of capitalist accumulation. I propose that this undermines the EA movement’s claims to greater effectiveness compared to other social movements.

In the essay’s second half, I argue that EA has not interrogated how its capitalistic epistemology, wielded from elite settings in the Global North, limits the problems, solutions, and perspectives which it can see. I contend that EA suffers a serious paradox: it derives its power from claiming to identify the most effective allocation of scarce resources, but, given its capitalist epistemology, EA cannot integrate solutions outside capitalism which may be more effective. Either it definitionally short-circuits itself by choosing interventions it cannot confidently rank, or it co-opts these solutions as sites for capitalist accumulation. I use the example of tropical rainforest conservation to illustrate my argument. Throughout, I employ concepts from Marxist, postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist theory.

I structure the essay as follows:

  1. Summary

  2. Preliminary aside: Who I am, and why am I writing this?

  3. What do I mean by capitalism?

  4. EA as consequence, form, and facilitator of capitalist accumulation

  5. Positionality, and EA’s other epistemological blind-spots

  6. Tropical rainforest conservation example

  7. Conclusion

  8. References

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Julia Karbing for a helpful discussion about this essay.

2. Preliminary aside: Who I am, and why am I writing this?

Earlier this year, I graduated with a degree in Geography from Oxford University. Like many curious undergraduates, I first encountered EA through the 80k hours website and career guide, which I eagerly consumed, though it left me disappointed. Their suggested high-impact careers seemed unappetizingly narrow and hardly matched my skillset. I felt jettisoned and inadequate before I’d begun. Yet, EA’s core argument of using evidence to select the most tractable, neglected, and impactful issues strongly resonated with me. It still does.

As my Geography degree progressed, and I read more deeply about postcolonial and feminist Marxism, critical race theory and decolonial theory, I realised that my niggling frustrations with EA went much deeper than a missed global priority area or two. I realised that EA has neglected to theorize how its movement is imbricated in power and the geopolitics of knowledge (explained below). I feel that EA has not listened to critical social theory; as far as I am aware, this might be the first in-depth examination of EA through its lens (though see here). I believe the EA movement is surprisingly myopic when it comes to some of the most important challenges of our times and urgently needs to listen to external critiques, particularly those from the left.

My degree exposed me to numerous critical theorists from both the Global North and South, and I am grateful for tutors that encouraged me to explore diverse authors. These form the backbone of my argument here. That said, I’m a white, male, middle-class graduate from Oxford, and this positionality informs my interpretation of these texts, my argumentation, and my decision to address the EA community in the first place. I write unaffiliated with the EA movement and from outside it. I can’t know the full impact of my identity on my argument, but transparency and self-reflexivity about my positionality are nonetheless vital (Rose, 1997).

3. What do I mean by capitalism?

Left-leaning people often use the term ‘capitalism’ as shorthand without explaining the exploitative system that lies behind this innocent-sounding word. Before I can examine EA in relation to capitalism, my first task is to explain what I mean by capitalism.

Capitalism is a political system and ideology in which the means of production are held by private companies and operated for the accumulation of private profit. Capitalists try to maximize profit by exploiting the marginal difference between two or more ways of producing some commodity, or between selling different versions of a commodity. The difficulty capitalists face, however, is that this marginal difference is not constantly assured: the resources to produce the commodity will deplete, the commodity may saturate its market, or some externality (such as labour costs or pollution) will become too onerous for the commodity to maintain its advantage. When the original marginal difference evaporates, capitalism undergoes a crisis, and it must move elsewhere to recover an advantage: onto a new resource, a new place, or a new market. In the words of the Marxist geographer David Harvey (2003), capitalism seeks a ‘spatial fix’, a pattern of crisis-driven movement and temporary stabilization. In other words, capitalism survives by shifting the location of its crisis rather than by addressing how its need for perpetual growth – to maintain marginal advantages central to profit accumulation – is inconsistent with a finite planet. These spatial fixes leave climate and ecological breakdown, mass poverty and extreme income inequality in their wake.

Before the onset of capitalism and its feudal precursors, wealth was held in commons: shared resources owned collectively or by no-one from which people can subsist independent of a market. To turn common-pool resources into capital that can circulate within a market, capitalists must privatize an entity’s ownership and redefine its worth in fungible terms. Depriving the original custodians of a resource from self-determined access to it is called enclosure. In Capital, Karl Marx seminally described how capitalism redefined human labour into monetary wages by alienating the worker from the means of production. Theorists after Marx, like Rosa Luxemburg and David Harvey, have argued that capitalism must continually enclose resources to reproduce itself. Harvey (2004) calls this ‘accumulation by dispossession’.

Capitalism can also be understood as systematically racist, a concept arising from Black Radical thought (see Melamed, 2015). Here, racism refers not only to skin colour or phenotypic difference but to any intergroup difference, such as income or religion. Scholars like Cedric Robinson (1983) and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) argue that intergroup difference becomes the site of marginal advantage which one group then exploits. As the gap between the two group widens due to capital accumulation by the initially dominant group, this reifies racialized discourses, and makes continuing exploitation and inequality easier to justify.

Feminist critiques of capitalism highlight how capitalism is intertwined in this manner with patriarchy. Patriarchy allows (white, heterosexual, middle-/​upper-class) men to unevenly accumulate and intergenerationally transmit wealth on the basis of the unpaid or inadequately remunerated female domestic labour, which socially reproduces men and their descendants (e.g., Federici, 2004; Vergès, 2021). At a global scale, colonialism operated, and continues to operate, as a profit-accumulation strategy which was justified through the racial valuation of some bodies, land, and resources as empty (‘terra nullius’), rape-able, and exploitable (e.g., Wynter, 2003; McKittrick, 2006; Brynne Voyles, 2015; Simpson, 2017). Postcolonial theorists acknowledge that capitalism is far from seamless, full of resistance and frictions that make another world possible (see Gidwani, 2008), but viewing capitalism as a totalizing system is one way to understand its pernicious material and epistemic reach.

Decolonial theorists argue that the wealth accumulated through capitalism accrues in one place at the expense of another’s degradation, exhaustion, and eventual destruction. Similarly, one person accrues capital through the destruction of many other people’s capital. Viewed metabolically, as Marx pioneered (see Swyngedouw, 2006), economic growth requires continually ingesting, digesting, and excreting ever larger quantities of resources, which must be extracted from somewhere. Typically, these resources are located in land and people of the Global South. From the mid-1960s onwards, numerous Global-South scholars have advanced the term ‘underdevelopment’ to explain how colonizing powers and extractive corporations actively produce impoverished, so-called ‘undeveloped’ conditions through their extraction of materials, labour-power, and knowledge from the Global South (e.g., Frank, 1966; Rodney, 1972; Hickel, 2017). This body of theory highlights that the Global North’s development was never endogenous or teleological; it derived from negative externalities elsewhere.

Today, a major legacy of franchise colonialism is the unequal currency exchange between the Global North and Global South (i.e., the North has greater purchasing power). In a paper published this year, Eswatini-born economic anthropologist Jason Hickel and his team calculate that the Global North drained the South of $10.8 trillion per year (constant 2010 US dollars) between 1990 and 2015, extracted through these price differentials in international trade (Hickel et al., 2022). Outrageous, yet hardly known, unfairly exploited materials and labour from the Global South constituted 25% of the Global North’s GDP ($242 trillion) through this period. As Global-South scholars have decried for decades, the wealth of the Global North is literally built on the dead and enslaved bodies of people of colour, and the ravaged, toxified environments of the Global South (e.g., Williams, 1944; Mbembe, 2003; McKittrick, 2006; Brynne Voyles, 2015; Vasudevan and Smith, 2020).

4. EA as consequence, form, and facilitator of capitalist accumulation:

With this dissection of capitalism in place, I now explore how EA participates in capitalist accumulation. I build out from Michael Nielsen’s recent definition of EA as “Using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis”.

i) EA as a consequence of capitalism:

Firstly, without the underdevelopment, high income inequality, enclosure, militarism, incarceration and financial rigging in favour of the Global North that undergird capitalism, EA probably would not need to exist. Without impoverishment, alienation from custodial resources, and reliance on the market, people in the Global South would probably not need much outside aid. For instance, Hickel et al. (2022) calculate that, each year, the Global North extracts from the South enough money to end extreme poverty 70x over. The monetary value extracted from the Global South from 1990 to 2015 - in terms of embodied labour value and material resources—outstripped aid given to the Global South by a factor of 30.

Please let these statistics sink in.

Almost all of EA’s occupations are attempts to plug gaps that are the consequence of capitalism. These include extreme poverty and income inequality; escalating warfare (which is intimately tied to securitizing profit accumulation); factory farming; climate change; and the short-termism induced by capitalism’s race-to-the-bottom. In other words, EA never actually tries to solve capitalism’s fundamental crisis, its quest for infinite growth on a finite planet. Instead, EA abets the reproduction of capital by making the system seem just a little less rapacious, a little less short-term, a little less brutal.

ii) EA as a form of capitalism:

Simultaneously, EA is also a form of capitalism because it is founded on a need to maximize what a unit of resources like time, money, and labour can achieve (the ‘as much as possible’ aspect of EA). EA practitioners then execute an action based on evidentiary identification of marginal difference. Like capitalism, EA might never achieve maximum efficiency, but what matters is that EA has maximization as its goal and tendency. EA shares an economistic epistemology with capitalism: it makes decisions based on comparing two or more quantified entities and executing the more efficient option. EA may identify massive margins, but what matters epistemologically is that it is propelled forward by the constant search for any margin.

On the surface, given EA focuses on maximizing social good, such as lives saved, rather than profit, it might seem opposed to capitalism. However, critical theorists have long viewed capital in extra-monetary terms. Capital is simply value made fungible and exchangeable, whatever that value is, human life, bitcoin, or livestock. Depending on your inclination, you could view EA’s maximization of good-quality human life as maximized future labour supply or as maximized productivity through healthfulness. EA is as easily about monetary efficiency as maximal good.

I’m not trying to be cynical or conspiratorial here. Of course, humans all deserve to be healthier and happier. Nonetheless, because EA’s route towards greater healthiness and happiness operates through identifying and reifying marginal difference, EA renders the action of making people healthier and safer a site for capital to accumulate. EA is a form and technology of capitalist accumulation.

The rest of the essay deals with this argument.

iii) EA as a facilitator of capitalism:

According to the Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar (1998), the concept of ‘development’, as promulgated by the Global North, operates as a discursive blindfold on how centuries of pillage, colonialism, and neo-colonialist extractivism have underdeveloped – and continue to underdevelop – the Global South. The North-sponsored global aid movement therefore acts as a legitimizing project to prop up the racial capitalist order, to whitewash capitalists as benevolent profit-makers and value-adders, without addressing the root causes of exploitation that led to the Global South’s underdevelopment in the first place, including South-North debt, unequal currency differentials, neo-colonial extraction, brain drain, and civil wars instigated or abetted by colonial-capitalist governments. Hence, Escobar argues that discourses of developmentalism reinforce and entrench advanced capitalism as the norm towards which ‘undeveloped’ countries must teleologically strive (see also Fabian, 1983). Moreover, they quietly operate as strategies to open up new markets that will later secure capitalism’s next spatial fix through mass consumerism. Although well-meaning people within the Global North truly care about reducing extreme poverty, developmentalism is an ideological project with the goal of protecting capital accumulation.

I argue that the EA movement offers a new fig-leaf for developmentalism through the discourse of efficiency. EA makes it easier for the capitalist system to obscure the real causes of its crises. It is the new, cleaner face of developmentalism, with shiny credentials and metrics displayed in places like Our World in Data that quantify progress.

This progress has saved millions of lives, but ultimately the EA community must face up to its role in creating a tool through which capitalism can apply the most efficient sticking plasters to its wounds. The situation recalls the tragic expansion of food banks across Britain: foodbanks may efficiently give people much-needed food, but this doesn’t address why people need the food bank in the place (e.g., see here). It should be little surprise that some of the richest people in the world, having accumulated vast fortunes but left vast externalities in their wake, laud a community that allocates the most minimal amount of money per unit externality to clear it all up. Indeed, applying the feminist critique of social reproduction, the volunteer, grassroots, and public-funded elements of EA can be understood as free sites from which billionaires can source marginal gains in clear-up efficiency.

We must also analyse how pledging money to EA allows ultrawealthy individuals to consolidate and grow their wealth over time. Here, it is helpful to turn to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1979), who influentially argued that extra-monetary forms of capital, like social and cultural capital, exist, which enable further monetary accumulation. Prosaically, consider how someone might spend money on a coffee with a work colleague to increase their social capital and career prospects, despite an initial financial expense. The same idea applies to ultrawealthy philanthropists.

Through anticipatory philanthropic pledges, the ultrawealthy gain social capital. For instance, philanthropy allows the ultrawealthy to socialize in new business circles. They and their companies get more media screentime and headlines, which is free marketing. They gain public respect and trust, boosting their sales. They get tax breaks. Thus, by accruing social capital through philanthropy, the ultrawealthy secure and growth their fortunes. (For a rare quantitative and ethnographic study of this phenomenon, see Farrell, 2021). Sociologists argue that this ‘philanthrocapitalism’ perpetuates inequality, concentrates power in the hands of mega-foundations and charities (something EA is rather guilty of), and encourages familial dynasties to cohere around a trust fund, leading to greater intergenerational wealth retention (see Harvey et al., 2011; MacIean et al., 2021; Sklair and Gluksberg, 2021).

Most problematically, philanthropic pledges justify the benevolent existence of billionaires. A wealth cap would be one of the most important pieces of progressive legislation for reducing income inequality and climate breakdown, because it removes the incentive and ability of the ultra-wealthy to pollute and accumulate (see Monbiot, 2021). In contrast, EA provides the ultrawealthy with an ideologically compatible shield to deflect critiques of private wealth, thus sanctioning the existence of massive income inequality. (See, for instance, 80k hours’ ‘earning to give’ career option.) Ben Todd estimated in July 2021 that the EA movement has amassed some $46.1 billion, mainly through Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, and Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook. Add to this total Bill Gates’ fortune, Mark Zuckerberg’s, and the other signatories of The Giving Pledge, whose money the EA community would like to access. The EA community must ask whether it is happy to perpetuate greenwashing and whitewashing environmentally and socially destructive capitalists.

So far, I have outlined how EA is a consequence, form, and facilitator of capitalist accumulation. If the EA community is serious about self-critique, it must therefore ask the following questions:

  • What forms of oppression, destruction, and violence does EA participate in by abetting capitalism?

  • How much potential for good does EA ignore and suppress by not challenging the exploitative foundations of capitalism?

  • How does quantifying the negative externalities embedded within the money given to EA-backed philanthropy, such as greenhouse-gas emissions and high income inequality, alter the net effectiveness and net good of an EA intervention?

***

5. Positionality, and EA’s other epistemological blind-spots

A reasonable response to my argument so far might run a bit like this: ‘Your utopian impulses are all very well, but we live in a capitalist world system, and we therefore cannot escape capitalist accumulation. We must be pragmatic. Given resources are scarce, surely EA still offers the most effective, tried-and-tested route to reducing suffering and existential risk?’

I agree that pragmatism is a virtue. I’ll praise EA for helping make dents in extreme poverty and mortality, and for operating more effectively than many other developmentalist charities. I also recognise that I am a hypocrite. I’ll still be consulting EA advice on how to give money well. The definition of a totalizing system is that we must live within it.

However, the problem with a rebuttal based on pragmatism is that it exculpates EA from soul-searching questions about power dynamics, questions about who has a voice to suggest what truly counts as effective. The invocation of dying children becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card. As I explore below, I believe EA’s lack of attention to its epistemology (‘how it knows what it knows’) leads the community to be dangerously disingenuous about the efficacy of its movement, dismissive of what it cannot quantify, and colonial in its epistemology. Whilst the EA community widely interrogates epistemic certainty (i.e., the confidence weighting to attribute to a piece of EA-admissible evidence), it rarely interrogates which evidence it admits in the first place.

EA is grounded in using “evidence and reason” to establish the most effective use of scarce resources. This seems straightforward and sensible. However, one of the most important contributions of critical theory has been to dismantle the idea that objective evidence exists. The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1970, 1980) developed the enormously influential theory that truth is not something that exists in the world, but is instead a product of power – specifically, the power to control discourse (the way that words have interpersonal meaning by virtue of their societally agreed reference points). Foucault argued that truth is actually normative discourse: ‘power/​knowledge’ that everybody within a society has been socialized within, internalizes, and reproduces. As much as any other part of society, power/​knowledge shapes academic research. Through repeated citation, certain truths are sedimented whilst other, viable, alternative knowledges are side-lined or erased.

For example, Foucauldian analysis unpicks how EA’s notion of resources as scarce is not a self-evident truth about reality, but instead a discursive norm made hegemonic and real by capitalist power. Scarcity is reproduced when capitalists search for an ephemeral margin. In contrast, in worldviews where value lies outside growth and accumulation, in things like joy, community, and non-human life, the world is full of radical abundance (see Hickel, 2018). Foucauldian theory highlights that EA accesses its own power/​knowledge by enmeshing itself within discourses like scarcity, meaning EA thus has a role in reifying scarcity as something that actually exists in the world.

Feminist philosophers of science have extended Foucault’s work to argue that the location of a researcher—in terms of the epistemic culture in which they work; their identity, including gender, race, religion, sexuality etc.; their funding, or lack thereof; their professional status, and other intersecting factors – always shapes the knowledge they are able to produce, consume and promote (Harding, 1986; Haraway, 1988). No piece of knowledge can escape the positionality of its producer(s), whether published in Nature or on a blog. Positionality does not undermine the validity of a given piece of research per se, and it is not about being anti-data. Instead, feminist philosophers of science are emphasizing that all research design and conduct contains non-objective influences. For instance, the choice of research question in the first place follows the researcher’s passion and/​or their funders’ priorities. Research methodologies choose certain field locations over others and only admit certain research subjects (e.g., many clinical drug trials only involve men; see Criado Perez, 2019), which determines research outcomes. In short, acknowledging partiality embedded in all research undermines the normative ‘truth’ of the Western scientific method, showing it, and the evidence it produces, to be specific choices normalized by powerful gatekeepers and reproduced by legions of schools, universities, and academic journals.

Given the situatedness of knowledge, it therefore makes sense to talk about knowledge-production having a geopolitics—a concept proposed by the Argentinian decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo (2002). The geopolitics of knowledge describes how certain knowledges are conferred greater epistemic value as a result of where they were produced. For example, research from elite universities tends to be trusted more than that from an activist NGO, even if both were to publish the same document. Research from the Global South is often seen as more parochial than Global-North-produced knowledge. Likewise, non-English-language research is less cited than English publications on similar topics (Di Bitetti and Ferreras, 2017; Neimann Rasmussen and Montgomery, 2018). The key point is that plenty of knowledge and data will be dismissed, never published, and/​or never encountered by the people with funding to effect change (such as EA grant-makers) simply because of its producers’ position within the geopolitics of knowledge.

As the Bengali postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) has influentially argued, the epistemic problem runs deeper than merely a lack of translators or too much stuff to read. Spivak highlights that in order for non-hegemonic knowledge to pass the first hurdle of being legible to academic gatekeepers, it must be phrased within the terms of the dominant epistemic culture. The issue, however, is that many arguments cannot even be recognised as meaningful utterances when expressed or translated into the terms of the dominant epistemology. For instance, if an Indigenous claimant in a settler-governed country wants to assert their ancestral land-rights, they must use settler legal constructs like ‘sovereignty’ and ‘ownership’, which inflict violence on Indigenous cosmologies and judicial systems which do not contain notions of ownership. Spivak calls this process ‘epistemic violence’: non-hegemonic knowledges and the lifeworlds they sustain are marginalized, silenced and/​or rendered unthinkable within, and by, the hegemonic epistemic culture. Thus, whilst assimilating together diverse knowledges and sources of data might sound like a wonderful solution, decolonial theorists stress that assimilation is always on the terms of the dominant epistemic community. Assimilation operates as a technology of epistemic violence and appropriation – of accumulation, in other words.

Let’s apply this to EA.

EA’s elite location within the current geopolitics of knowledge inevitably sets criteria on the evidence it admits, as described by words like: quantitative, peer-reviewed, stress-tested, red-teamed, meta-analysis, randomized control trial. EA-admissible data therefore only captures a small fraction of total ideas, and may often be misled (see Gabriel, 2016, for examples of this in relation to EA). This seriously limits EA’s ability to know what intervention will be most effective from the theoretical buffet of all possible interventions.

Of course, all epistemic communities have boundaries and necessarily only admit certain voices and certain evidence. This is not a problem in itself. The problem is when an epistemic community located in the upper echelons of the geopolitics of knowledge does not recognise its positionality, when it cites data to legitimize itself, and when its actions are administered on people lower down the current geopolitics of knowledge.

Put differently, EA’s interventions are only the most effective options according to the priorities and epistemology of its gatekeepers. They are not necessarily the most effective interventions according to the people who receive them. Effectiveness is fundamentally relative to positionality. I do not believe that EA has recognised this, nor that maximal effectiveness is not universally desired. Yes, the people receiving EA’s interventions may agree they are most effective and exactly what they want too, but the crux of my argument is that EA lacks guarantee that they are.

To be clear, I am not criticizing the importance of using evidence within EA. Instead, I’m asking: Whose “evidence and reason” counts? Who arbitrates? Whose voices get to contribute to the list of most urgent problems and solutions?

Without recognising that effectiveness depends on positionality, EA thus ignores the following set of blindspots:

  1. Many Global South perspectives on problems, solutions, and sources of evidence will be inadmissible or even un-hearable within EA because they conflict with capitalist epistemology. Global South perspectives are the global majority.

  2. Issues and solutions unamenable to quantitative, capitalistic comparison are dismissed, regardless of where they are produced.

  3. To become recognisable and admissible within EA, knowledge which does not share a capitalistic epistemology may be forced to undergo epistemic violence or some form of distortion.

  4. By not consulting these knowledges, EA may be inflicting epistemic violence, imperialism, and coloniality (colonial knowledge-structures and ways of living; see Quijano, 2000) through the solutions it funds and research design it undertakes.

  5. Collectively, these issues mean that the EA community cannot know whether the interventions they advocate are most effective from the perspectives of the people they are trying to help, or the interventions that the recipients would choose.

EA’s refusal to contend with its positionality is a serious concern because the gulf between the lived experiences, epistemic practices, and power of these communities is especially large. Impoverished people in the Global South are located at the bottom of the current geopolitics of knowledge and future generations have no epistemological sovereignty whatsoever, whilst EA’s gatekeepers, advocates and researchers who arbitrate effectiveness are located in high-income, Anglophone, often elite university settings.

Here, a helpful analogy is to the discipline of anthropology, which realised in the 1980s that its supposedly dispassionate tool of observation told its ethnographers more about Western priorities and biases than it disclosed accurate about people under study in the Global South. Anthropological ethnography supported the colonial project and further disenfranchised its research subjects; Indigenous peoples’ knowledges only counted when mediated by a white ethnographer. EA research is not quite this extreme, but neither is it an unhelpful analogy when we consider how population-health research and long-termist research define and bring into being the populations they advocate interventions over (another of Foucault’s insights; Foucault, 1978). In defining research subjects, researchers foreclose participants from sovereignty over their own affiliations and over what would best address their needs. Even when research is fully participatory, the research write-up and dissemination lie in the hands of epistemically elite researchers in the Global North, who have funders to convince and satisfy. In short, EA’s coloniality is dangerously undertheorized.

6. Tropical rainforest conservation example:

To draw the strands of my argument together, let’s imagine that a billionaire philanthropist contacts a grant-maker in the EA community and says, “I want to conserve a patch of rainforest as efficiently as possible.” Pause to consider how the EA grant-maker should respond.

I’d surmise that grant-maker might try to redirect the billionaire to a more neglected, higher impact, more tractable problem, such as micronutrient deficiency in low-income countries. This is consistent with EA trying to identify marginal gain in terms of where to commit resources. Quantifying the benefit of micronutrient deficiency may be difficult, but in comparison to quantifying the benefit of saving 1000 hectares (ha) of tropical forest, it is far simpler.

Difficulties in quantifying the value of conserving 1000 ha of rainforest are manifold. Firstly, there is the question of biodiversity (genetic and species-level) and what economic value to attach to the ecological services, like the air purification, cloud production, water absorption, flood control and medical provisioning, that biodiversity provides. Next, there are spatial questions: forest patches are non-fungible due to the varying importance of certain species in habitat connectivity and ecosystem integrity (see idea of keystone species). Given ecological communities are structured nonlinearly (Meron, 2015) and tipping points in complex systems are difficult to predict, the value of conserving one particular 1000 ha patch is practically unevaluable without a major scientific fieldwork and modelling campaign. (For forests as complex adaptive systems, see Chazdon et al., 2013; Simard et al., 2013; Ibarra et al., 2020). Likewise, how should we downscale the basin-scale and global-scale consequences of deforestation (e.g., in terms of carbon budget) to quantify the value of protecting this 1000 ha of forest? Finally, perhaps the most important limit to quantification is that, for the Indigenous community living within it, this forest patch is part of their cosmology, lifeway, and cultural heritage. Trying to quantify ancestral land-rights would inflict huge epistemic violence on Indigenous people.

Together, these reasons help explain why the EA community appear to have largely ignored the problem of biosphere collapse. For instance, the 80k hours website does not mentions ecological collapse as a major risk or challenge in its own right. In contrast, a paper published in Nature Climate Change this year estimates that the Amazon rainforest is approaching a tipping point in terms of vegetation dieback (Boulton et al., 2022), which could lead to its conversion into savannah, massive forest fires adding billions of tons of carbon emissions to the atmosphere, mass extinctions, and a possible climate-system tipping cascade (see Wunderling et al., 2021). Yet, preventing the Amazon’s collapse hardly seems on EA’s agenda because it is hard to quantify, hard to know what will be effective, and therefore hard to identify all-important marginal gains.

When the grant-maker and the billionaire meet, the grant-maker explains how they have examined the literature on carbon offsetting and rainforest conservation. “The deforestation would probably just move elsewhere,” the grant-maker states (see Schwarze et al., 2002; Delacote et al., 2016). “You’ll probably have far more impact elsewhere”. The billionaire philanthropist is insistent, however. “I have climate goals within my business portfolio, I want to be seen to be doing my bit, and I genuinely want to help,” they reply. “Find me the most effective action”. The grant-maker concedes, begins to explore the literature on ecological service valuation, and makes the calculations as best as possible from the English-language, quantitative, scientific literature.

Here, we are watching epistemic violence unfold. Quantifying the value of something currently unalienated and held in commons (like a tropical rainforest species) is often the precursor to commodifying it. When common pool resources are attributed monetary value, they become ontologically fungible and enclosable. Many of today’s commons remains uncommodified because their value is difficult to quantify, financialize and speculate on. Even if EA does not act upon its research, the act of bringing the rainforest in line with capitalism is likely to inflict further colonial violence and dispossession on its Indigenous custodians.

All the while, the EA researcher is probably likely to miss what the people living in the rainforest are advocating for, either because their solutions are unquantifiable or incomparable, or because they are intersectional and indirectly addresses deforestation among other forms of oppression. For instance, one effective solution to deforestation involves ensuring Indigenous people have legal recognition and sovereignty over their land rights (see Garnett et al., 2018; Fa et al., 2020). Another might involve reducing poverty, and providing clean energy technology to address subsistence charcoal burning. Another might involve campaigning for a degrowth agenda that tackles capitalism head-on. Another might involve helping re-install socialist governments that can protect Indigenous rights. These solutions would involve EA giving money to Indigenous people, to left-wing political lobby groups, and to female-run clean energy cooperatives to spend as they see fit.

As a white, English, armchair commentator, I cannot know which of these solutions will be most effective – and that is precisely my point. Different solutions will work most effectively in different places. It is colonial for EA to believe that it can know what will be most the effective solution for people in the Global South, without even consulting them, especially when EA does not recognise the power/​knowledge and artificial scarcity wielded within its capitalistic epistemology.

Consequently, I suggest that EA is trapped within a paradox. On the one hand, EA misses some of the most urgent problems it should be tackling, which are tractable, but their tractability is not expressible or rank-able within capitalist epistemology. In my example, this corresponds to biosphere collapse not being a major EA priority. Secondly, EA may miss the most long-term impactful solutions because these are either unquantifiable, operate indirectly, or conflict with capitalist epistemology and funders’ priorities. This corresponds to solutions like degrowth (see Schmelzer et al., 2021) or Indigenous-rights advocacy. Assisting social movements that stand against capitalist exploitation may exert a greater net good per unit of resources than the currently most effective EA-advocated solutions. On the other hand – and this is the bind – EA cannot apply its epistemology to find these solutions, either because the effectiveness of these solutions is impossible to quantify or know ante facto, or because ranking effectiveness would inflict epistemic violence on the solution itself (e.g., quantifying the environmental benefit of Indigenous sovereignty).

7. Conclusion:

Put bluntly, I argue that EA cannot claim to offer the most effectively altruistic solutions. Either EA attempts to explore terrains beyond capitalism and ends up undercutting their radical potential by making them a site of capitalist accumulation; or EA doesn’t examine their marginal difference, thus definitionally short-circuiting itself (because it is no longer a maximizing epistemology). This is why the charge of pragmatism with which I opened the second half of the essay falters. EA’s claim that it offers the most pragmatic solutions so far identified only makes sense when we ignore that effectiveness depends on positionality. EA only has a guarantee of effectiveness from the perspective of a narrow elite group of people in the Global North. They, and their donors, can accumulate capital through EA and have not yet interrogated how EA’s solutions participate in oppression and colonialism.

We still need EA in the same way that, sadly, we need foodbanks in Britain: to give relatively efficient, vital support to people eaten up and spat out by capitalism. But the urgent task for the EA community is to see how EA, like foodbanks, does not challenge capitalism itself. EA instead is a consequence, form, and facilitator of capitalism. The profound challenge for the EA community is that it must work towards its own extinguishment. EA practitioners must widely reflect upon and interrogate their own positionality, whilst accepting that they will never be able to know its full impact, and therefore acting with caution and humility (Rose, 1997). The skills, ideas, and research capabilities of the EA community could enrich intersectional, decolonial, and degrowth social movements, bringing an important quantitative lens. However, until EA recognises its intimate imbrication with capitalism, it will remain myopic, colonial, and disingenuous about its effectiveness.

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