Hi Wei,
Thanks for your comment. I’m sorry for the delay in my response. I’ve been on holiday since posting, and wanted to wait until I could reply fully.
There is an important distinction is between the terms ‘undeveloped’ and ‘underdeveloped’. Undeveloped is a normative contrast made between low-income, poorly socially provisioned areas and high-income, well-provisioned areas. In contrast, ‘underdeveloped’ is an activist term to refer to how an area’s level of development is actively reduced to facilitate development of an area elsewhere.
You ask about East Asian countries in this context. I’m no expert, but it’s important to bear in mind that the US financed a massive economic recovery programme in Japan during its occupation and later relationship with Japan, which intersecting with growth via the military-industrial complex during the Korean War. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle#Overview
In other words, it is not so much about teleology or whether a country was colonized in the past, but what the ongoing forms of extractivism look like. Typically, these have followed centre-periphery, colonizer-colonized relationships of neo-extraction, but they don’t always. For instance, the US allowed Eastern Europe and Japan control over their own economies, governments and protectionist policies following WWII, leading to a rapid return to high income levels and social provisioning, whereas in the 1980s huge swathes of the newly ‘independent’ countries of the Global South were forced to accept Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) by the IMF and World Bank when they entered recessions. SAPs were massive free-market austerity programmes that eviscerated government civil services and social programmes, removed protectionist policies to develop domestic industry, burdened countries with massive infrastructure projects that indebted them to the Global North, and inflicted massive poverty. Simultaneously, socialist reformers such as Burkinabe president Thomas Sankara who threatened debt cancellations and reparations were assassinated or deposed through Western-backed coups. Good sources to learn more about this are: Dowden (2014) Africa—see chapter on Uganda; Slater (2004) Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations.
So, what matters is the form of the extractive relationships, rather than past colonized status per se.
Hope this clarification helps!
Hi tcelferact,
Thank you for taking the time to engage so deeply with my essay. I apologise for the delay in replying. I’ve been on holiday since I posted, and unfortunately I’ve been unable to reply as fully as I wanted until now. I’ll offer some thoughts and responses I have after reading your valuable comments.
EA as a form of capitalism:
I agree that EA does not try to hold onto the material resources that pass through its actors. I also agree that all social movements must accumulate extra-monetary forms of capital, such as knowledge, social capital and political buy-in.
What I want to question, however, is how the EA movement processes its resources in ways that facilitate and mimic capitalism. You state that incentivising for public goods is the core problem under capitalism. I concur, but my argument is that EA makes it easier for their disincentivization because it tries to make the process of addressing externalities as efficient as possible, conducted privately. EA plugs the gaps caused by structural economic inequality (like unequal currency exchange or the lack of reparations for centuries of slavery), rather than centring these as the fundamental issues at stake. System-wide problems cannot be fixed overnight, and I agree there is a moral duty to alleviate suffering most efficiently. Yet, my concern is that EA becomes myopic because of its intense focus on the latter.
EA as a facilitator of capitalism:
The major thrust of my piece is to argue that the aid movement is structurally embedded within capitalist priorities of the Global North, even if it aims to be as effective as possible within this paradigm. I do not argue that aid is being used to disingenuously manipulate public opinion or that EA is a better vehicle than any other for hoodwinking the public. Critical theory is not about conspiracy, but about providing tools to unpick the naturalization of power.
Throughout my piece, I am also clear that we should never neglect people in need. I argued that we still need EA’s insights, just as people in food poverty need food banks in the Global North, but this should not neglect us from trying to work towards identifying the structures underpinning suffering. Nor do I suggest that deprivation would somehow prod people in the Global South into action. Indeed, my argument is the converse: people in the Global South are full of ideas and solutions – yet the EA community needs prodding towards creating the epistemic architecture to listen to more of these.
Unfortunately, concrete sociological examples of the behaviour of ultrawealthy people are rare. It is a highly under-researched field, due to difficulties accessing this secretive, exclusive population and researcher biases towards studying more oppressed groups. One example I am aware of is Justin Farrell’s (2021) book Billionaire Wilderness, which is an ethnographic and quantitative study of philanthropocapitalism in Teton Country, Wyoming, the richest county in the US. Farrell quantitatively traced how his contacts socialized with each other, donated to local environmental and educational charities, as well as examining their attitudes through in-depth interviews. Farrell found clear evidence that philanthropy acted as “a valuable form of social currency in the community” with an emergent status market. He documents how the influx of great wealth created a greater need for this local charity, due to its inflation of the local real estate market. He argues, on the basis of this data, that there was a “strong tendency towards politically safe projects that reinforce the status quo” and preserve social philanthropic networks (p.g.160). This philanthropic field is very different to EA’s global, evidence-backed philanthropy. However, I’m inclined to agree with Farrell’s conclusion that “most rich philanthropists are neither entirely good Samaritans, giving altruistically for the purity of a cause, nor are they entirely evil colonialists with hidden self-interest or ideas of self-aggrandizement”.
Foucault, critical theory, etc.
I think critical theory can often appear “problematically navel-gazey” because it asks that people with greater privilege interrogate the way in which they participate in structures of power, which is something they are unaccustomed to, even if they are inclined to scrutinize evidence. Social scientists call this ‘reflexivity’, and it can be unsettling and difficult. For instance, it can be uncomfortable to appreciate how Western science facilitated colonialism and how it remains suffused with coloniality (see: Livingstone [2003] Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge; Saini [2019] Superior: The Return of Race Science; Poskett [2022] Horizons: A Global History of Science; Raja et al. [2022] Nat. Ecol. & Evol. 6, pp.145-154).
Talking about privilege in ways that foment white fragility, guilt or paralysis doesn’t help anyone. However, if people can recognise and then steward their privilege – for instance, as a grantmaker, admitting non-normative perspectives and problems – then I think this is how communities work towards undoing racism and inequity. It is also worth remembering that Foucault’s understanding of power is as much generative as disciplinary. EA wields power productively, by defining a population over which health interventions can be administered, to improve overall wellbeing.
On scarcity:
Without a question, not everyone has the resources they need to live a healthy, happy, fulfilled life. However, my point is that what the most powerful epistemic actors discursively label as scarcity creates what we perceive as scarcity in society (Althusser called this ‘interpellation’). Therefore, the first step to overcoming how capitalism exacerbates inequality and interpellates scarcity is to disentangle what constitutes a lack of resources that 8 billion humans genuinely need from what resources are scarce because capitalism convinces us we need them to get ahead. So, whilst I entirely agree that many people lack the bare necessities of life (i.e., they are scarce), I want EA to realise how it participates in the discourse of scarcity that forecloses the possibility of other economic frameworks, built on the wealth found in community, joy and other non-material forms abundance.
Quantitative approaches:
I’ll be sure to read Superforecasting by Tetlock—thanks for the recommendation. Quantitative approaches have brought big strides in progress; all I’m asking is that EA does not neglect what cannot be quantified accurately, or what, if quantified, might pave a road towards commodification.
Methods’ track records:
I think your comment about critical theory not having a good track record misunderstands the systemic nature of the geopolitics of knowledge. We need to listen to diverse viewpoints and include diverse voices, but that alone is insufficient to challenge how non-hegemonic knowledge can only be admitted, heard, and acted upon if it submits to the terms of the dominant epistemic culture. So, yes, we can get to work and update our perspectives, but the most valuable work is to challenge the knowledge architecture of the movement in the first place. This is what social movements and unions try to do. Critical theory is merely the route that admits this into the academy via continental philosophy and citation patterns – aka, expressed within the dominant epistemic culture.
General comment on the idea that EA is opposed to social change:
Thanks for flagging these charities and movements to me.
EA can question the dynamics of power, and I agree that it does; my essay is focused, however, on the structures of power that EA may not realise it is participating within, such as its sanctioning of massive private wealth by encouraging billionaires to join EA-backed philanthropy. I’m arguing that this may be an impediment to EA seeing what is most effective or engaging other social movements, which dislike EA’s lack of attention to power and oppression.
You’ve phrased this very nicely: “Some people like doing good with statistics, some people like doing good with organizing, those preferences lend themselves to different cause areas, and I am very grateful to both groups of people.” Both areas should cross-fertilize each other, and accept different epistemic norms, and this requires engaging non-antagonistically with different admissibility criteria for evidence.
Tropical rainforest example:
My argument is not that EA would commodify the Amazon per se, but that it may be impossible for EA to identify the most effective strategy from the perspective of Amazonian residents. EA’s quantification process may participate within forms of carbon colonialism, even if this is never intended. Again, the power of critical theory is to unpick mechanism of power/knowledge which are otherwise naturalized.
Thanks again for your engagement, and I hope my comments are useful.