On Effective Altruism

The Musk Foundation, and how to give back

This week the Wall Street Journal published an article about the power struggles in Elon Musk’s inner circle and the row over how to give his money away. Musk’s current wealth manager Jared Birchall comes from a straight-laced Mormon background and has proved his loyalty through undertakings ranging from serving as the CEO of Neurolink to hilariously registering www.justballs.com, which Musk mused he might want someday. His background was contrasted to former poker player Igor Kurganov, who was given a mandate to allocate $5.7 billion in pledged donations through Musk’s charity.

There is a lot more drama in the WSJ article, but what caught my interest was the mention of effective altruism as the guiding philanthropic strategy that Igor Kurganov advocated for. I have been thinking through my own conflicted position on effective altruism for a long time – here’s where I’m at.

“Many attempts to do good fail, but the best are exceptional”

Effective altruism website

Effective altruism (EA) is a movement that mobilizes those who give to do so to the most effective charities solving the highest impact problems (preventable malaria deaths, for example). At the movement’s core is: 

• An approach to picking the right problems, evaluating the evidence to pick the right solutions, and identifying charities who can execute in a cost effective manner. So, donate to the right charities applying the right solutions to the right problems.

• A community of people who are thinking about how to do as much good as possible with their time and money. There are free online courses, meetups, and you can even get a free book on EA through their website.

The movement is an important counterweight for the incredible amount of waste in charity and development. I’ve seen so much money spent poorly in my decade working on health access, social innovation and international development in East Africa. There are many deep rooted causes to why those smiling children on charity websites are not telling the full story of philanthropic effectiveness.

Some charities are, intentionally or not, counting those kids three times. Some focus so much on helping as many kids as possible that the quality of the food / education etc. that they give each kid is actually not that great. Some feed children by crushing local markets for food production. Some charity leaders are so busy speaking at Davos, they don’t even know what’s happening with those kids.

So I should love effective altruism. How could you even begin to argue with a name like that? The best possible outcomes. A rigorous and data-driven approach. Cut the hype.

But I don’t. Because I believe:

• Getting to effectiveness takes a lot of testing and risk. Finding “proven ideas” (often this now means interventions with randomized controlled trials showing significantly better outcomes) requires testing out ideas that are not yet proven. Seeing what uptake looks like in a new diabetes management program or marketplace for small scale farmers. Making sure people need and want the thing, consistently, before spending money on the type of expensive research that makes you a “proven bet.” This is a great job for philanthropists and foundations with deep subject matter expertise – people who can recognize and back the potential next great ideas. 

• Blitzscaling things in international development rarely works the way we think it will. Like the now famous (in the circles I run in) PlayPumps. These merry-go-round style water pumps were a truly good model to improve access to fresh drinking water in communities. Then they got a lot of money quickly and couldn’t consistently replicate those great results (and produced some pretty adverse results along the way).

• It’s fine if some people follow this approach, but bad if most people do. I’ll show you what I mean:

This chart, from the effective altruism website, presents data on various interventions to save lives in the fight against HIV/AIDS (DALYs = Disability Adjusted Life Years, a standard measure of lives lost to disease, disability and early death across populations):

This chart is meant to evoke an “a-ha” sensation in the viewer. It’s the “gotcha” slide at conferences where presenters wait for audience members to smile and nod, acknowledging that simpler solutions are right in front of us sometimes.

Want to make a difference in the fight against HIV/AIDS? Who would have thought that education could save twice as many lives per dollar donated than the next best option.

If this research motivated some funders to put more money into education, that probably saved more than a few lives. But eventually, we’ll need to do more than educate.

Once you create demand for safer sex and condoms through these educational programs, won’t we also want donors and governments investing in those, too? Where will these newly educated “high risk” groups turn for ARTs and condoms if funds have been diverted away from those interventions?

What about things like funding for primary healthcare systems, which cost more than condoms but form essential healthcare infrastructure for patients living with HIV/AIDS and their full range of healthcare needs? It’s not even on the chart. 

Effective Altruism can drive scarce capital towards the simplest and cheapest options, but miss the essential systems. 

And, by the time the right level of data comes in, the right level of analysis applied, the publication complete, the Effective Altruists mobilized, and the word spread to the average person, are the insights that we are making decisions on even true anymore? The above graph, still on the effective altruism website illustrating their approach, is taken from a book written in 2006.

Don’t get me wrong. I really like the effective altruists. I’ve got crazy amounts of respect for Will MacAskill, Sam Harris and other EA enthusiasts. They are doing more than I have to get people motivated to make the world a better and more equitable place, and they are getting a lot of people excited to talk about difficult and important decisions. The biggest decision. How do I give back? I just don’t want our new obsession with cost effectiveness to cause us to shun the creativity and risk-taking that has created some of the best ideas in international development and beyond.

And it’s hard to make a philosophical argument for this, but also, I would just rather live in a world where we are supporting the next generation of African or Afghan children to learn creativity and lead movements in the future themselves, not one where we are just buying bednets, vaccines and dewormers.

Stepping out of the realm of effective altruism puts you on a slippery slope that winds past pet projects and sexy ideas with minimal uptake, and leads all the way down to charities that do more harm than good.

An individual might not have the time, access to information, or interest to develop a systems change approach to their philanthropy. EA can help them.

But this in-between space is where well-resourced and powerful players like the Musk Foundation should be playing. It can build deep sector expertise, scout for great ideas and new approaches that need capital to grow, and take risks that others won’t take. I’m in the Venture Philanthropy camp. I like a focus on the inputs that are essential in making a difference, namely the grit and authenticity of the leader, and strong organizational operations. Organizations that are effective not because they are doing “the big idea” a million times on repeat, but because they listen, continuously generate data they can learn from, and evolve their approach over time.

What do you think of effective altruism? How would you give away $5.7 billion? 

Thanks for reading!

Melissa

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PS if you’d like an extended reading list on the ideas that went into this note, I’m keeping one over on my website.