Notebook: (2) Thought Plutocrats

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

A volunteer serves a plate of food to a homeless man during the traditional Thanksgiving meal served by the nonprofit Midnight Mission to nearly two thousand homeless people in the Skid Row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, November 25, 2021. Followers of Effective Altruism argue that responding with caring to those suffering close to you may give you a “warm fuzzy feeling,” but it’s more effective to use that time and money where it could produce the most demonstrable benefit (Photo by APU GOMES/AFP via Getty Images)

Read Part One of this post here!
Meanwhile the other big story of hubris and oversized ego in tech these days, the implosion of Samuel Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX, also has an intellectual layer. Bankman-Fried got his start as a protégé of philosopher William McAskill, one of the founders of “Effective Altruism” (recent book here). Effective Altruism began as a utilitarian-based movement in Oxford whose adherents committed to spending a significant share of their income on those causes that could be shown maximally to benefit the most people. They soon adopted an “earn to give” paradigm—encouraging young people to go into lucrative fields in order to maximize their giving potential, hence Samuel Bankman-Fried, who met MacAskill as an animal-rights activist undergraduate, finds cryptocurrency.