Effective Altruism, wealth inequality, and bad graphs
This article is essentially a review of the first chapter of William MacAskill’s Effective Altruism. The ideas here are still being developed.
There’s a graph of the “long-term history of world GDP” that I keep running into variations of. Nick Bostrom likes to use it to illustrate the rapid rate of technological development that has occurred in the last few hundred years, going on to argue that this trend could be just the beginning of the explosion of growth that artificial superintelligence — the “Singularity” — will drastically exacerbate.
The top version, pictured below, in particular always struck me as a bit reductive. I’m unsure of how meaningfully we can deploy a modern term such as GDP into the distant past. Bostrom uses the graph as an aside, to try and highlight just how much more capacity we have for doing stuff now and how our capacities grew so rapidly in such a relatively short amount of time. That’s something difficult to dispute.
But the problem with such uncritical projections into the past is what they carry of the present. This graph takes a concept from the capitalist era — one which only makes sense when understanding the world via capitalism — and attempts to give it universality. In doing so, we lose a finer resolution for understanding the world. We possibly even start to obscure ways of life and measures of achievement that do not fit the model of capitalist accumulation.
Nonetheless, I don’t have that much of a problem with how Bostrom uses the graph here. He’s not trying to make a wholly economic argument (although I think there is an ever-present capitalist realism at the heart of his writing, but that’s a topic for another day). He’s just trying to illustrate the rapid change the world has undergone in the past few centuries.
William MacAskill deploys a similar graph in the first chapter of his book, Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference (2016). The book details MacAskill’s vision for effective altruism, a philosophy and way of doing charity that emphasises the need for an evidence-based, data-driven approach. The core logic is: Giving to charity is a good way to change the world for the better and to make sure you maximise the amount of positive change you can make you should do research into the most effective charities.
Effective altruism has found particular support among rich techies, computer scientists, and Oxbridge philosophers, including our boy Nick Bostrom. However, MacAskill hopes that the movement can spread further. He co-founded an organisation, Giving What We Can, that advocates individuals give 10% of their income away to effective causes and the purpose of his book is to get the word out about effective altruism. Which brings us back to the graph.
In a chapter titled ‘You are the 1%’, MacAskill begins by noting the gross scale of wealth inequality in the US, even referencing Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. A sobering start. But then he spends the rest of the chapter attempting to downplay this claim by citing figures on global wealth inequality. Again, a very sobering point which should not be dismissed. Where MacAskill takes the argument is to say that because people in the Global North have so much more access to wealth than many in the South, we have the ability to do good and alleviate suffering. Even, he claims, “someone living below the US poverty line, earning just $11,000 (£7,000) per year, is still richer than 85% of people in the world” (21–22). (He claims the figures he uses in the chapter have been adjusted to account for how much x amount of currency will get you in a given locale.)
Much of this is difficult to dispute on the terms upon which it is presented, and one would be very wrong to respond to this by either arguing that the poor of the world haven’t actually got it that bad or that we should only worry about poverty in our vicinity. The issue here goes deeper to some of the core assumptions about the world that are at the base of this effective altruist approach:
MacAskill’s argument bulldozes over so much of the nuance of poverty and power and looks at history through the lense of contemporary capitalism. Take his above graph which claims to chart the GDP of the US and India from 0 AD to 2000 AD (the book he cites goes to 2030). Bostrom used his similar graph to make the more general argument that the productive capacities of humanity have radically developed in the past few centuries. MacAskill is using the graph to argue that people living within the Global North have access to more wealth than the rest of the world (this is the second time he singles out India, for some reason), with the extension of this argument being that some of this money — 10% of it, according to MacAskill elsewhere — should be donated to effective causes in the South. (Perhaps elsewhere he notes the importance of also addressing poverty and suffering closer to home, but the whole framing of this argument appears to focus efforts exclusively on the South.)
Bostrom’s use of the graph was already shakey, since it took the very contemporary concept of GDP and extrapolated it into the distant past. Of course, I doubt he nor MacAskill would claim the concept of GDP properly existed until recently, but, still, deploying it as a retrospective measurement exercises a very narrow view of human activity. This is the same sort of logic that claims ‘capitalism has existed since the first two people traded goods’ and attempts to revise all of history through a capitalist lense. This ignores the specific character of capitalism, the way it relates to private property, work, and the commodification of life (nevermind the evolutions capitalism has gone through over the centuries — in an age of global capitalism, is a country’s GDP as important of a measure?). This is beyond this article but the important point it: GDP is a concept that only fully makes sense within capitalism, and capitalism represents a set of social relations (e.g. working 8+ hours a day for a wage) and beliefs (e.g. that the market can autonomously solve social issues) that are specific to a historical period, not eternalities.
MacAskill takes the historical revisionism one step further, however by apparently claiming that the United States and India have existed since 0 AD. Of course the GDP of the United States will appear near zero if you look back far enough because the concept of GDP bore no relevance to the lives of the native populations of North America before a bunch of white dudes showed up with guns and flu infected rags. And India, in anything like its current conception, owes a lot, again, to imperialism.
Furthermore, Gregory Clark, an economics professor at UC Davis, in a review of the book MacAskill uses as a source for this graph, writes the following, with his central claim being that the book deploys way too much guesswork in its extrapolations into the past:
[A]ny economist with enough street savvy to resist fabulous riches offered by unknown Nigerians over the internet will equally want to steer clear of these estimates.
http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Book_Reviews/Maddison.pdf
Through this lense, the world is seen as not quite flat but, instead, with only sharp and broad inclines and declines. There is Us over here who have wealth and power and therefore can change the world — completely ignoring, despite acknowledging, the wealth inequality that exists within the West which severely limits the power of many people whilst overestimating the average wealth individuals have once you agregate everyone together in a GDP calculation. Does MacAskill mean to insinuate that someone earning $11,000 should give $1,100 (10%) of their income to charity? What about if that individual is already behind on rent, struggling to pay their bills, feed their kids, get an education, etc.?
Then there is Them, over there. Poverty abstracted, Live Aid style. In his analysis of global wealth distribution there is no reference to how we got here. No reference to the inequalities which capitalism produces or how other political factors have built this world. In fact, as the effective altruist argument is taken further elsewhere, it is precisely capitalism which is posited as a solution: the more money you earn the more money you can donate, so we should pursue professions which make us richer; which align with the wishes of capitalism. On the website for Giving What We Can either MacAskill or one of his colleagues write,
We are not saying that donating is all that can be done. Political change could have an incredible effect, but it will take a long time to shift attitudes, meaning that change will take a while to come. In the meantime, there is vital work to be done.
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/frequently-asked-questions/#23-but-dont-we-have-to-do-more-than-just-throw-money-at-the-problem
But this nuance is absent from this chapter. I do not want to poo-poo the efforts of people who want to give to charities and make sure that their money is making the most impact. And there is an urgency with many issues that needs to be tackled sooner than systemic change is able to address. But in avoiding the topic of why people are poor in the first place; by abstracting away structural issues within the global economy which we all co-create into the opaque ailment of Poverty we do little to break the cycles that keep the poor where they are.
When deployed as a social movement, which includes conferences, books, and prominent spokespeople espousing the benefits, effective altruism is a false solution. But one that is nonetheless appealing to rich techies and Oxbridge educated academics because it does not challenge their positions within the world. If a wealthy philanthrocapitalist can use their wealth as a tool to tackle global inequality then there need be no debate on whether their accumulation of that wealth contributed to global and local inequality. Capitalism is posited as the solution to crises that, if not created by capitalism, are often exacerbated by it. MacAskill writes,
[I]f you’re reading this book then, like me, you’re probably lucky enough to be earning $16,000 (£10,500) per year or more, putting you in the richest 10% of the world’s population. That’s a remarkable situation to be in. (28)
No wonder effective altruism finds its support in the heart of Silicon Valley and Oxbridge; among the rich. It’s a philosophy that, rather than challenging their power, tells those who, if working full-time would be earning below the UK minimum wage, that they are the ones who have the power. It’s a philosophy, a method which twists numbers and uses large, sweeping generalisations to separate out the rich and poor into Us and Them when it suits the argument, obscuring the structural inequalities of capitalism at a finer resolution. Yes, global inequality is at crisis level, but it is not as simple as comparing the incomes of someone in the UK and someone in India. What about the super-rich who severely inflate the GDP statistics in the Global North? What about the super-rich of the South who profit off of being able to pay their employees awful wages in hideous conditions?
This is not to deny that anyone in the Global North could be doing more, and this is not to paint everyone earning £10k as powerless, but to highlight the topsy-turvy nature of framing poverty and reactions to it in this way, and show how it leaves power and structural inequalities unchallenged. Those earning around £10k and below are not powerless: the world rests upon their shoulders. But their “radical new way to make a difference” won’t be that they give 10% of their income to charity.
A final miscellaneous point: MacAskill uses the below graph to argue that
a doubling of income will always increase reported subjective wellbeing by the same amount (note that the $ amount doubles at each division). For someone earning $1,000 per year, a $1,000 pay rise generates the same increase in happiness as a $2,000 pay rise for someone earning $2,000 per year, or an $80,000 pay rise for someone already earning $80,000 per year. And so on. (27)
He goes on to claim that, because we are in the 1% — meaning we earn around 100x as much, on average, as the poorest person (he uses the example of an Indian farmer earning $220 a year — why always India?) — whatever we give is worth 100x more to the world’s poorest than it is to us.
This idea is imporant enough that I’ve given it a name. I call it The 100x Multiplier. For those of us living in rich countries, you should expect to be able to do at least one hundred times as much to benefit other people as you can to benefit yourself. (28)
Again, I don’t fault the intention. However, the underlying logic seems flawed. Does someone who earns $2,800,000 have one hundred times more life satisfaction than someone who earns $28,000? Or one thousand times more life satisfaction than someone who earns $2,800? This appears absurd, chaining something as abstract as life satisfaction to income. Does Bill Gates live in a constant state of ecstacy? Do individuals living in the remaining hunter gatherer tribes exist in perpetual melancholy? This is where you get to when you only consult with numbers and attempt to quantify the cacophany of human experience so that it fits neatly into your mathematical models and conscience soothing literature for the rich.
