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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

> Effective altruism seems to be a sort of cult that’s way for elites (that is, the upper class) to both make themselves feel better and to give them yet another vector of superiority over people.

Setting aside the case of this crypto conman, is being holier-than-though the valid criticism it feels like - or is that just my instinct to protect my ego, when the guy sitting next to me and earning the same salary donates 100x more much to charity than I do?

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most of the good done in the world thee days is paradoxically perhaps achieved through commerce, not charity per se. and even charities are mostly effective in the sense that they get money flowing into the economy, where people can trade value for value and attend to their material needs, etc etc. most charity is not as effective as simply achieving some equity in income distribution, or barring that just overall higher levels of income and lower costs for the inputs that go into the economy.

dont get fooled by people who think they can put good-ness into a box labelled "giving", I dont believe its that simple.

Doesn't that imply an EA enthusiast earning to give at a wall street hedge fund is doubly good, because they're charitably giving mosquito nets to developing nations while engaging in commerce and making money flow around the economy?

I think charitable giving has mostly secondary or tertiary benefits and those are mostly "trickle down" or just velocity of money effects. it gets some hoarded wealth into circulation which was a big issue the last 20 years with lower rates and quantitative easing etc, creating so much hoarded cash (look at corporate cash balances and hedge fund / VC / PE assets the last 10 years as a clue)

like the covid vaccines weren't possible because charity, but because science, the two are in no way equivalent. and there is evidence (not proof) from the last 150 years that capitalism enables science at a much higher multiple than charitable giving.

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