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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

"Effective Altruism" ultimately fails because money is mischievous and has a mind of its own. That is, if you devote your life to making as much money as possible you've already given up your agency and it's almost inevitable that you'll do more harm making the money than you can possibly do good spending it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

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GiveWell no longer commonly recommends earning to give, or so I'm told. The amount of money sloshing around in causes they consider as the most impactful outweighs the human talent available so they now more commonly recommend going into a role in a charitable organization.

Creating value via seeking work at effective charities strikes me as harder than earning-to-give and then donating the proceeds. So GiveWell's advice might be relevant to those who are already doing things in effective altruism, but not very much to the average charity donor (who would be most reliant on GiveWell's and others' advice).

There was a woman who had worked as a non-profit manager that we joked looked like

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Lusamine

although she was of better moral character than that. I thought the story of Pokémon Sun and Moon does the "evil NGO" trope pretty well, complete with a Very Large Floating Structure!

Yeah I only meant they don't recommend earning to give as your career path if you are going to devote your career to altruism. Giving money is still highly beneficial, just not as beneficial as giving top charities your mind full-time.

> it's almost inevitable that you'll do more harm making the money than you can possibly do good spending it.

levels.fyi claims a Google 'Senior SWE' earns $358,000 a year, while [1] estimates some of the most cost-effective charities can save a life for $4500. If that Googler donates a mere 10% of their salary, that's 8 lives saved a year.

So I'm kinda sceptical of what you call 'almost inevitable' here.

[1] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

One general counter is that groups like the Gates Foundation that work in countries with sub-functioning governments do a certain amount of good in the short term by bypassing the government... But they are complicit in keeping governments sub-functioning, corrupt, not accountable to people, etc.

For governments to be truly accountable to the people, you need some form of stable civil society which requires some wealth. So bypassing the corrupt government is exactly what you want to begin with.

Spending money on charities effectively does not necessitate maximizing income at any cost. But in the first place, generating high income does not necessitate imposing harm. A marxist would construe that it would by virtue that they believe all enterprise is exploitation, not by measuring harm.

What I infer (but is left unsaid) of the denigration of EA on the part of far-left ideologues is that they think charity is a joke. They will not promote it, on the conceit that it would undermine the Socialist mission. The outcomes for beneficiaries are irrelevant.

Specifically, profit made selling goods at their equilibrium price is made by exploiting workers. If you introduce a new good, you will have a monopoly on it for a time, meaning you could turn a profit selling it without exploiting your workers, theoretically. That's my understanding, at least.

At first order in macroeconomics, "capital" as an abstract thing, the money itself, exploits everybody. With perfect competition it is impossible for a business to make a profit because if I can make something for $1 and sell it for $2 another business can enter and sell it for $1.99.

That same force would make it impossible for employees to get ahead, investors to make money, etc.

Profit, surplus for workers, investment return are all dependent on there being some kind of "friction" -- which abounds in the real economy.

For instance you want a "moat" for your business such a patent, trade secrets, being at the center of a two-sided market, etc. The labor union quite literally extracts "dues" from workers to sustain the value it helps get for them. Numerous practical problems, such as agency problems, turn up in employing people and it is really not in your best interest to try too hard at paying people as little as possible.

The original Marxian eschatology (before Lenin and the Bolsheviks) was that capitalism was going to eliminate all the friction, there would be no surplus for workers, no profits for business owners, capitalists would be unable to continue the game even if they wanted to.

I think the orthodox Marxist position is that prices gravitate around labor values in a competitive market. The main reason for profit is that people can produce more value than is necessary to sustain themselves, so capitalists don't need to pay them for the all the value they produce. Some of the value produced becomes profit. It is true that the rate of profit falls over time, but I think this is because of increasing automation in the economy, increasing the proportion of dead labor to living labor. Capitalists have less and less living labor to profit from relative to their costs of production.

That's what

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Harman

would say. Harman wrote a number of great books on the subject and was buried next to Marx in London.

Harman himself would admit, though, the the problem of "the tendency of the rate of profit to decline" isn't completely understood or even established (e.g. the basic 'science of civilization' answer is that 'everything fluctuates'.)

I don't buy the idea of "dead" labor though in that capital investment does wear out. You could get a certain bit of infrastructure with 100 person-years or 10 person-years of effort with more or less bungling and the value is the same. You can't just add up the inputs, at the very least you have to apply a discount rate.

I don't think that changes the thesis, because the problem that capitalist has is that he has to put more capital in over time to be competitive and to scale.

Just like a worker would resent working harder and longer to get paid the same, the capitalist resents having to make larger capital investments to get the same return.

The increasing prevalence of "dead labor" (maybe another term for it is "fixed capital"?) depends on the changing processes of production. An example of the process is the switch from human-powered hoeing to animal-powered ploughing in agriculture (animals count as dead in this case, I guess.) Ploughing is more efficient, but requires more investment.

"Total Factor Productivity" is one way economists struggle with it. To maximize prosperity we need to be efficient with social capital, financial capital, labor and other factors of production: it is now a multiple-objective optimization problem for which there is no longer an equilibrium solution and thus it evades assigning a specific number to "Total Factor Productivity".

An alternate thesis to Karl Marx:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing

Considering how little funding local journalism non-profits tend to have (even in big cities!), donating to a high-impact local journalist org is a great way to make a considerable impact to your communities.

Yes, if you have private knowledge of unfunded, high-impact opportunities, these can beat even the most efficient EA charities. Though the social benefit of improved local journalism is speculative, and best compared to the EA funding choices of the Open Philanthropy Project.

I like that better than charity.

The profit motive motivates Boeing to make the 777, motivates Microsoft to make Windows, etc.

In non-profits, frequently, money works its mischief unopposed, but the motive of "you can make a huge amount of money for yourself and your investors by satisfying a need" is a force for good.

...you're mixing a straw man with a red-herring with a couple non-sequiturs ...then dumping a Marx quote at the end.

Congrats for creating an argument that is un-atackable because it blocks attempts of rational criticism by means of inducing choice paralysis of where to even begin criticizing it from :)

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