Quotable quote from our very dear friends:
“Put differently: US philanthropy is still much, much, much more about rich guys like David Geffen slapping their names on concert halls than it is about donating to help people dying from malaria, or animals being tortured in factory farms, or preventing deaths from pandemics and out-of-control AI, to name a few EA-associated causes.”
Anyways, where does buying 20 million dollar castles/crypto fraud/rampant sexual exploitation/and shrimp welfare fit into all of this chief?
I mean, I feel like the core problem with billionaire philanthropy isn’t that they aren’t effective enough at choosing causes; they’re supporting exactly what they want to, whether it’s saving lives and improving conditions in poor countries or making more classical music happen in rich countries. Rather the problem is that that much money can be thrown around by a single individual at all without public oversight. Like, EAs have a point in that philanthropic activities can mobilize a world-changing amount of resources. But then they do the libertarian thing of assuming that this is a necessary and inevitable fact of the world that must be worked around rather than considering the circumstances that created that ability and the degree to which the existence of billionaires requires African kids to die of malaria.
they don’t think it’s a messy and inevitable fact of the world that certain people have outsize wealth. they think it fucking rules
Getting Trump reelected should count as ‘billionaire philanthropy’.