The Rapid Growth of Effective Altruism
[I originally wrote this piece in January, 2022 for a wall magazine my friend Subhajit Sengupta (co-founder of the education nonprofit Bidyang Dehi) was putting together for the occasion of Saraswati Puja (a holiday to celebrate the Hindu goddess of arts and education).]
Technological changes tend to coincide with new intellectual and cultural movements. With the printing press came the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment philosophy. With telecommunications came ideas such as humanism, environmentalism, and existentialism. Now, in the digital age, we’ve witnessed the beginning of a new philosophical movement: effective altruism.
Effective altruism uses evidence and reason to try to answer the question “What is the best way to do good in the world?” Since the movement began a little over 10 years ago, it has helped save thousands of lives, has spawned a whole ecosystem of new institutions, and has begun to permeate intellectual culture globally. In the coming decades, perhaps this new philosophy has the potential to transform society dramatically.
GiveWell, a charity evaluator affiliated with the effective altruism movement, aims to identity the world’s most effective charities addressing health and poverty. Influenced by Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist Abhijit Banerjee’s work using randomized controlled trials to evaluate anti-poverty programs, GiveWell conducts rigorous research comparing impact and cost-effectiveness, and currently recommends nine top charities, such as Against Malaria Foundation, an organization that distributes free bed nets in malaria-prone areas. Donors use GiveWell’s website to donate to individual charities or to GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund, which redistributes the money based on where and when it’s needed most.
One of GiveWell’s top charities is an organization called GiveDirectly that distributes money directly to people living in extreme poverty. Instead of sending food or supplies, GiveDirectly sends cash, trusting poor people themselves to decide what they need the most. Hundreds of studies have been conducted on cash transfers and they’ve been shown to improve quality of life significantly.
Relatively few charities can surpass the per-dollar impact simply sending money to people in extreme poverty, but, according to GiveWell’s metrics, some public health charities can, and by a significant amount. GiveWell uses GiveDirectly’s cash transfers as a baseline to evaluate other charities. GiveWell’s other top charities do things like providing children in poor countries with treatments for parasitic worms, vitamin A supplements, or anti-malarial medications. GiveWell estimates that the majority of such programs have 8–12x the impact of cash transfers on human well-being.
For programs like that, on average, each additional $4,500 of funding prevents the death of a child (or has a positive impact comparable to that), according to GiveWell. By comparison, the average cost of a nursing home (with a shared room) in the U.S. state of Illinois is $6,235 a month. The state of global inequality is such that the cost of three weeks of nursing home care in a wealthy country is enough to save a child’s life in a poor country.
According to Our World in Data, over 500 million people still live on less than $1.90 per day (adjusted for purchasing price parity — so roughly on what $1.90 could buy in a wealthy country). Anyone who makes $30 a day (or about $11,000 a year, below the poverty line in the U.S.) is among the richest 15% globally.
With this big-picture awareness of global inequality, a key insight of effective altruism is that you don’t have to be rich, or even from a wealthy country, to make a major difference through your donations, your career, or your personal projects.
In the spring of 2021, during the height of the covid crisis in India, Manya Gupta and Tejas Subramaniam, 19-year-old effective altruists from India studying as undergraduates at U.S. universities, did a research project identifying some of the most impactful relief efforts. Their project — promoted by Vox — helped connect international donors to the most effective programs providing oxygen to Indian covid patients, and likely resulted in many saved lives.
In the past decade or so, effective altruism has grown at an extraordinary pace. In the year 2010, GiveWell helped distribute $1.5 million to its top charities; in 2021 alone, it moved about $450 million — saving tens of thousands of lives — and aims to move over $1 billion annually by 2025. GiveWell now employs a team of 22 full time researchers (and is hiring more). Additional effective altruist charity evaluators have also emerged for causes outside of global health and poverty, such as Animal Charity Evaluators and Giving Green.
Since 2009, over five thousand people have signed the Giving What We Can Pledge, promising to donate at least 10% of their lifetime income to effective charities. Since 2011, the career counseling organization 80,000 Hours has helped over a thousand people enter careers focused on solving some of the world’s most pressing problems. There are now effective altruism student groups at major universities, and there have been college courses about effective altruism at universities like Stanford, Princeton, and MIT. At the University of Oxford, effective altruists have founded two entire research centers: the Global Priorities Institute and the Future of Humanity Institute.
This year, in 2022, there have already been major developments in effective altruism. At the beginning of January, the effective altruist grant-making foundation Open Philanthropy announced that it has taken steps toward exploring a new cause: air pollution in South Asia, currently responsible for the loss of 71.4 million years of healthy life each year (measured as “disability adjusted life-years,” or DALYs). Open Philanthropy hired Indian researcher Santosh Harish to lead their new South Asian Air Quality program, which will direct funding to organizations working to improve air quality in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
In mid-January, an effective altruism-inspired think tank was established in Washington, D.C.: Institute for Progress is a non-partisan research and advocacy organization trying to advance neglected areas of policy that are important for human progress. Major areas of focus for the new organization include advocating for better preparedness for future pandemics; advocating for new funding and organizational models for scientific research (whereas with the current model, U.S. researchers report spending 44% of their time on grant-related paperwork); and advocating for less restrictive immigration policy to help attract talented applicants, for example through green-card reforms or through reducing over-reliance on restrictive H-1B visa instead of more flexible O-1 visas.
For all its emphasis on science and mathematics, effective altruism is at its core a philosophy. Rooted in the works of contemporary philosophers such as Peter Singer and William MacAskill, effective altruism is built on a foundation of two key moral-philosophical ideas: impartiality, the idea that all suffering is equally important, regardless of whether it takes place in one’s own neighborhood or on the other side of the world, now or in the distant future; and consequentialism, the idea that important decisions should be made based on expected outcomes rather than intuitive value judgments.
One way effective altruists practice consequentialism is by evaluating causes based on a framework of three criteria: importance, neglectedness, and tractability. Cancer is more important than malaria because cancer kills 10 million people each year and malaria kills 400,000. However, malaria is more neglected, because malaria occurs mostly in poor countries usually ignored by those with power and money, and the problem of malaria is also more tractable, because malaria deaths (mostly children under five years old) are easily preventable through inexpensive medications and bed nets. Therefore, according to an effective altruist framework, even though cancer is a bigger problem, malaria is currently a higher priority.
Some common critiques of effective altruism are that effective altruism overvalues projects that produce measurable outcomes while undervaluing projects whose outcomes are difficult to measure, and that effective altruism focuses too much on incremental improvements to society over structural changes. Regardless of how valid those criticisms may be, Julia Wise — an effective altruist who contributes around half her annual income to effective charities — points out on her blog, Giving Gladly, that narrow interventions can pave the way for structural change. Malaria was eradicated from the U.S. in 1951, the same decade that the Civil Rights Movement blossomed. The reduced disease burden in southern states, she argues, was likely a factor that helped facilitate the difficult organizing that led to important structural changes that made progress toward reducing oppression against Black Americans:
Obviously there was a lot more to the Civil Rights movement than a lack of malaria. But it was one of the factors that helped. How likely is someone with “body aches, headache and nausea, general weakness, and prostration” to make it to the polls, to school, or to work? How likely are they to march on Washington?
Perhaps, continued progress by GiveWell’s top charities in preventing unnecessary illness and death in poor countries will similarly help facilitate movements for political change within those countries. Also, once the low hanging fruits of cheap healthcare interventions are fully funded, organizations like GiveWell will have to pivot towards a new strategy, perhaps targeting ways to address structural and institutional factors that perpetuate global poverty.
After a little over a decade, effective altruism has grown from an idea amongst a few philosophers into an international movement of thousands of people, creating new institutions, pressuring governments, and leveraging billions of dollars to save lives. Imagine what could be accomplished after 50 years! Effective altruism is a clear demonstration of how philosophy can have concrete impacts in the real world, showing us beyond a doubt that philosophical ideas matter.
