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Episode 196: Benevolent Billionaire Despotism and US Media's Softball Treatment of 'Effective Altruism'

Added 2024-01-31 15:50:14 +0000 UTC

"Join Wall Street. Save the world," The Washington Post urged in 2013. "How to Know Your Donations Are Doing the Most Good," The New York Times proclaimed in 2015. "I give 10 percent of my income to charity. You should, too," Vox advised last November.

Each of these headlines tops a piece that extols the virtues of Effective Altruism, a philanthropic philosophy, for lack of a better term, ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of the best ways to address large-scale, global ills like pandemics and factory farming, informed by “evidence and reason.” The school of thought, popularized by figures like the academic and author Peter Singer and disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, has been widely embraced – or at least uncritically boosted – in mainline media for years.

Superficially, this makes sense. Effective Altruism seems unimpeachably virtuous: It’s great if people want to solve the world’s problems, and so much the better if they’ve done their research. But beneath this surface lies a deeply reactionary movement, predicated on an age-old desire to characterize the wealthy as the solution to, rather than the cause of, the very problems they purport to want to solve.

On this episode, we parse the rise, motives, and influence of Effective Altruism. We look at how the doctrine gamifies wealth distribution, falsely portrays the rich as uniquely qualified to make decisions about public welfare, often provides cover for eugenics and racism, and masquerades as a groundbreaking ethos of data-driven compassion while it merely regurgitates a 100-year-old rich person ideology of supposedly benevolent control over the masses.

Our guest is Dr. Linsey McGoey.

Guest

Dr. Linsey McGoey (@LinseyMcGoey) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. Her writing has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian and Jacobin, and she is the author of two books, including, “No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy” (Verso, 2015) and “The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World” (Zed Books, 2019).

Show Notes

Elite Universities Gave Us Effective Altruism, the Dumbest Idea of the Century

Linsey McGoey | January 19, 2023 | Jacobin

Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion

Sophie McBain | November 3, 2023 | The New Statesman

The Trouble With Algorithmic Ethics

Emma Marris | May 16, 2023 | Sierra

Why Effective Altruism and “Longtermism” Are Toxic Ideologies

Émile P. Torre | May 7, 2023 | Current Affairs

The predictably grievous harms of Effective Altruism

Alice Crary, Lori Gruen and Carol J. Adams | December 12, 2022 | OUPBlog

Is the effective altruism movement in trouble?

Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò and Joshua Stein | November 16, 2022 | The Guardian

Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present

Rebecca Ackermann | October 17, 2022 | MIT Technology Review

The Rise of the Rational Do-Gooders

Zachary Pincus-Roth | September 23, 2020 | The Washington Post Magazine

The Billionaire Class Created Their Own Wealth Tax. It Failed.

Alexander Sammon | November 8, 2019 | The American Prospect

Now Peter Singer Argues That It Might Be Okay To Rape Disabled People

Nathan J. Robinson | April 4, 2017 | Current Affairs

Rockefeller Gifts Total $530,853,632

May 24, 1937 | The New York Times

The Gospel of Wealth

Andrew Carnegie | June 1889 | North American Review

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Transcript

For a full transcript of this episode, go here. You can find transcripts of past episodes and News Briefs here.

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