Check out this devastating critique of the so-called “effective altruism” movement (or EA, for short) by Sophie McBain (@SEMcBain), a writer for the New Statesmen who interviewed many EA leaders, including Larissa Hesketh-Rowe, the CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism from May of 2018 to February of 2019, i.e. before the downfall of EA’s prime pecuniary benefactor, Sam Bankman-Fried. Below is an extended excerpt from Ms McBain’s excellent essay, describing how so many effective altruists fell down a money-grubbing slippery slope of their own making:

… Hesketh-Rowe told me that “once the community got more money, there were more discussions of, ‘Well, if you can save time by spending money, maybe you should. Maybe you should take a taxi instead of taking the bus or the train. Get a nicer desk, spend more to move closer to work – if it’s going to make you more productive.’” It wasn’t a unique business philosophy, but how did it fit with EA’s principles? “The line of reasoning isn’t completely wrong, but that’s what makes it risky,” said Hesketh-Rowe. “You need strong character, a good culture and leadership to navigate it, otherwise it’s too easy to accidently drift in the direction of corruption.”

This is how the movement that once agonised over the benefits of distributing $1 de-worming pills to African children ended up owning two large estates: the $3.5m Chateau Hostačov in the Czech Republic, purchased in 2022 by the small EA-affiliated European Summer Program on Rationality with a donation from Bankman-Fried’s FTX Foundation; and Wytham Abbey, a 15th-century manor house near Oxford, bought for £15m to host EA retreats and conferences. Wytham Abbey, which is undergoing restoration, was purchased by the Effective Ventures Foundation (the UK umbrella group for EA) using a £17m grant from Open Philanthropy (the US EA foundation set up by Moskovitz and Tuna).

On the EA forum, several people have questioned the “optics” of this purchase: “You’ve underestimated the damage this will do to the EA brand,” wrote one in late 2022. “The hummus and baguettes signal earnestness. Abbey signals scam.”

For what it’s worth, I presented my own classical liberal critique of these obnoxious elite do-gooders in a previous post, which I am reblogging below.