For people who worry about whether effective altruism is a competitive tussle between a few cause areas, with some gaining at the expense of others, I think this chart ought to be enormously reassuring.
The picture it paints instead is that as effective altruism has gotten big – and as effective altruist-aligned institutions have broadly oriented themselves more towards long-term and existential-risk priorities – the movement has also gotten stronger and healthier in terms of the money focused on global health and development as well.
Of course, it’s impossible to rule out that EA would be growing even faster if not for longtermist “weird stuff.” But I think that’s a hard-to-demonstrate claim, and one I don’t totally buy.
MacAskill’s book has put weird stuff front and center, but the reception has been remarkably positive, introducing tons of people to effective altruism, including to the more direct work on today’s concrete problems.
A symbiotic relationship
My main takeaway from the GiveWell chart is that it’s a mistake to believe that global health and development charities have to fight with AI and biosecurity charities for a limited budget of resources.
The vast majority of Americans don’t donate much to charity at all, nor do they choose their careers on the basis of making progress on critical global issues. But as effective altruism has become more prominent, it has gotten more people on board, each of whom decides for themselves which EA priorities persuade them — and then works on those topics.
You could imagine the EA movement growing to the point where further growth is mostly about persuading people of intra-movement priority changes, but that day is very far in the future.
This is not to say that I think effective altruism should just be about whatever EAs want to do or fund. Prioritization of causes is at the heart of the movement — it’s the “effective” in effective altruism.
But the recent funding data does incline me toward worrying less that new focuses for effective altruism will come at the direct expense of existing ones, or that we must sacrifice the welfare of the present for the possibilities of the future.
In a growing, energized, and increasingly powerful movement, there is plenty of passion — and money — to go around.
—Kelsey Piper
Questions? Comments? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com or find me on Twitter at @kelseytuoc. And if you want to recommend this newsletter to your friends or colleagues, tell them to sign up at vox.com/future-perfect-newsletter.
