My Concerns about Effective Altruism

How a focus on easily measured success may miss the point

In 2015 I co-founded a nonprofit to combat food insecurity. Since then we’ve grown into a full 501c 3, we’ve fed a lot of food insecure people within our community, and we’ve figured out ways to sustainably build food pharmacies and food cooperatives. We have supported the health of thousands of members and we’ve saved them thousands of dollars.

Yet…one article by the effective altruism organization givewell has made me not only reconsider the entire mission of organization, but also whether we have really accomplished anything.

For those unfamiliar with effective altruism, it is a philosophical approach to philanthropy that emphasizes the critical examination of the impacts of charities. Effective altruism based organizations have created a full-on attack on many of our assumptions about doing good. They’ve shown us that many of our charities are ineffective, and they’ve pushed many people to redirect their giving towards the most effective NGOs in the developed world.

The basic idea of effective altruism is very easy. If you wanted to do the most good with $1,000,000 what would you do and how would you determine how good your donations were? Their methodology is conceptually straightforward, you should look to support charities that save the greatest number of lives for the money you’ve donated.

It’d be difficult to argue that donating $1,000,000 to save one life is better than donating $1,000,000 to save a thousand lives. But in many cases that is exactly the type of choice we are given when deciding how to both spend money on charity and spend our time on the charities we build and advocate for.

In almost every circumstance in the United States, your money can arguably be better spent to save many more lives in developing countries rather than supporting charities within your own community. They don’t make that argument to trivialize the suffering of the impoverished within the United States, they make that argument because by almost every metric the most impoverished people in the US are still considerably better off than billions of the most impoverished people in the developing world.

For the most part, I’m convinced. If massive amounts of people seriously took the advice of effective altruism, I have absolutely no doubt that the world would be a better place. But, on the…