Against ‘Effective Altruism’

My concerns about Effective Altruism are different. One is that by routing money to locations with corrupt governments or dictatorships, you are essentially funding these governments. A lot of NGO money just replaces the budget of the local government and thus is essentially equivalent to giving money to whoever is in political power there. The EA movement seems to completely ignore this issue. Everyone involved has an incentive to pretend like these charities in corrupt countries are effective - the EA donors get to feel good, and the local dictators get to invest more of their budget in whatever they want. (I thought the book Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters had a very convincing section about this, if people are curious to hear more of this line of reasoning.)

My second concern is doing an accurate marginal analysis. The most popular EA charities pretend like they constantly cannot get enough money to fully fund their expenditures. This isn't really true. If you look at the dollar amounts involved, the richest GiveWell donors could easily fund all of the need for, say, malaria nets. Instead, the most promising charities are kept "in need" in order to encourage other people to donate, and money that could go to the most popular causes is routed to more controversial things like US politics or AI safety. A marginal dollar given to malaria nets isn't really causing the funding of malaria nets to go up, it's enabling richer, more connected donors to change their allocations.

At the same time I do think that the principles behind EA make sense. Altruism should be effective. I just don't think the EA groups are executing on this promise. Unfortunately I don't have a great answer. The best strategy I can come with is to look for charitable opportunities of smaller scope, essentially cases where there is a "market failure". I'm not sure if this would be scalable though. If anyone has good ideas about how to do this whole thing better then I would be interested to chat because I do think it would be great to have an "EA that works".