Sam Bankman-Fried has laid bare that effective altruism commodifies giving and undermines the sense of community that gives meaning to life.
Sam Bankman-Fried has laid bare that effective altruism commodifies giving and undermines the sense of community that gives meaning to life.
S am Bankman-Fried, the face of effective altruism, has made headlines following the calamitous implosion of FTX Trading Limited, a cryptocurrency trading and investment company he founded and led as CEO. In what was likely one of “one of history’s greatest-ever destructions of wealth,” Bankman-Fried’s fortune, his company, and over 100 companies underneath the FTX umbrella evaporated overnight.
The Atlantic reports that John Ray III, the lawyer who oversaw the liquidation of Enron, was just brought on as FTX’s newly minted CEO in order to manage its bankruptcy. “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” Ray said of FTX. As you can tell, all is going swimmingly for Bankman-Fried and his associates.
While most coverage of this episode has rightly surrounded the market implications of this news, what has yet to be understood is how much this scandal will affect effective altruism (EA), a budding movement that has been all the rage among a new wave of entrepreneurs.
The FTX Future Fund, a subsidiary of the larger company that represents the spearhead of the EA movement, is now all but bound for the boneyard. Its core team resigned last week, announcing that “there are many committed grants that the Future Fund will be unable to honor.” Without the financial support of its parent company, the Fund is unlikely to survive, at least at its current scale.
Bankman-Fried took to Twitter following the collapse, speaking about the situation with reporters and former supporters through direct messages. In response to a comment that he was “really good at talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers,” he wrote bluntly, “I had to be. . . . It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent.”
He went further: “I feel bad for those who get f****ed by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.” EA was part of the game he played. It is a movement among philanthropists, investors, and social entrepreneurs who seek to maximize the utility of charitable giving. The Centre for Effective Altruism defines the movement as intellectual in nature, seeking to use “evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible.” And it’s international: Unconstrained by borders, it aims to solve problems on a global scale.
The front page of the FTX Future Fund website says that they “support ambitious projects to improve humanity’s long-term prospects.”
“Some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources,” according to an essay introducing the movement. “This means that by thinking carefully about the best ways to help, we can do far more to tackle the world’s biggest problems.” In many ways, the intent of EA is to introduce the concept of ROI — return on investment — to charitable giving.
The hyper-rationalization of giving leads to some pretty outlandish, even irrational conclusions. One Twitter user snarkily compared such calculations to an attempt to determine how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
Whereas individual philanthropists and donors give money to charities of choice and various community organizations, EA enables those with extra cash to engage in “high impact” giving. Sure, it may be kind of you to donate to your local synagogue or Rotary club, but wouldn’t it be more rational to give it to the World Health Organization for vaccine research and pandemic prevention? Or to whatever organization deals with wild-fish suffering?
But should charity be fully rationalized? Should caritas (the Latin root of “charity,” meaning “love of mankind”) be reduced to bisigness (the old English root of “business,” meaning “anxiety”)?
On its surface, EA seems all well and good. After all, shouldn’t one’s money be stewarded and directed toward the most effective outcomes? The problem arises when those with the most wealth direct it primarily toward large bureaucracies instead of toward human-scale communities — that is, when they prioritize utilitarian formulas over the human needs we witness with our own eyes.
Effective altruism is an outgrowth of our contemporary “anti-culture.” Culture is defined by rootedness in a particular community. It is made distinct by its particularity. Anti-culture is embodied by pop culture and mass media, which valorize the universal and hyper-individualism. It is made distinct by its lack of distinctness. Rather than helping to form an individual, anti-culture serves as a platform for individual self-expression and performance. But what sort of person can express their own identity without the context that culture provides? As it turns out, only those with the wealth and affluence to maintain cultural affinities, and to engage in endeavors like EA.
It is far easier to write a check to an international aid organization dedicated to preventing the next pandemic than to spend your Saturday delivering food packages to poor people in your vicinity. Surely both are important tasks, but one mustn’t be prioritized over the other.
Just look at Bankman-Fried’s frank acknowledgment of what he did over the course of his career: “We say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us.” Unmoored from a particular community or cultural context, accountability is transformed into risk management (note that the former chief operating officer of FTX was a risk-management analyst at Credit Suisse before she came to FTX), and charity is reduced to business.
Without cultural context and human-level accountability, the world becomes but a stage, “and all the men and women merely players.” Rootless and existing outside any place or time, EA commodifies giving and undermines the sense of community that gives meaning to life.
But what should multimillionaires and billionaires do with their money? Surely they shouldn’t just keep it all to themselves. And that’s where EA does have some truth: With great wealth comes great responsibility. It ought to be stewarded and spent wisely. It is ripe with potential. However, rather than donating exclusively to bloated international charities, the wealthy would be wise to reinvest in their own communities.
If the communities they live in are super-affluent, they should consider giving back to the community they grew up in, or helping a left-behind community that lacks the social and economic capital to thrive. These are the places in deep need of restoration. These are the places where the generous will be able to see and interact with, on a human scale, those they’re helping to supporting.
Money can be a force for good. Saint Augustine viewed it as a moral danger, it’s also clear that even he saw some value in it, as Brent Orrell of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out to me. Seen as porters to heaven, the poor serve as depositories for excess wealth: Money is good for something. But it is most effective when it is employed in the context of communities and human-scale relationships, which the ancients took for granted.
Get up and go outside. Go to the grocery store, buy some snacks, and keep them in your car when you go driving. Next time you see someone begging for food or change on the side of the road, give them a helping hand. Charity on the human scale — not a check from a faceless bureaucrat, or a donation from a wealthy philanthropist who wouldn’t dare step foot in a community with an average per capita income under $200,000 — is not only personally rewarding. It is the leaven that lifts people and communities upward.
It’s easy to reduce the world to utilitarian formulas. But they fall apart when you take a moment to hold a conversation with the homeless guy on the street corner you have refused to make eye contact with for months, for fear that he would come up to your car window and — God forbid — strike up a conversation. A truly effective altruism is a restoration of the ancient notion of charity.
We live in a world of flesh and blood, of real people and (still) real communities. We are embedded social creatures, no matter the lies we tell ourselves. It’s time to start telling the truth about what it means to be human, and to stop feeding ourselves the lie that all problems will be solved by money and metrics.