“Earn to Give” and the Ethics of Mediocrity (The Future as an Emergency, Pt. 2)

We’re very close to the end, folks. This the second of three planned excerpts from the last chapter I’m wrapping up in the book - one that will actually become Chapter 2, in which I aim to create a broad preview of the book’s core arguments.

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Effective Altruism’s focus on measurability and quantification led inexorably from Peter Singer’s subtly financialized allegory to the “Earn to Give” concept Will MacAskill sold Bankman-Fried in their first meeting.

“Earn to Give,” as an approach to making the world a better place, is intuitively perverse. MacAskill convinced Bankman-Fried that, especially for certain people with altruistic intentions and very high earning potential, it is not maximally “effective” to simply go into professions that directly benefited people, such as becoming a doctor or teacher. Instead, all across the EA and Rationalist ecosystems, those with a knack for finance, banking, or entrepreneurship were encouraged to pursue them, then donate their earnings generously.

This pitch hit Bankman-Fried like a bolt of lightning - it comported with his background, and his shortcomings, in an almost uncanny way. Bankman-Fried had been steeped in the logic of “effectiveness” his entire life, most of all by extended conversations with his mother Barbara about utilitarianism, an ethos that pioneered the idea of maximizing fungible units of human benefit. But meeting MacAskill gave him a novel way to apply those deep principles, within a then-growing movement that offered a simultaneous path to material power and moral authority through the accumulation of wealth.

The ethos also helps fuel the EA movement’s own growth and power. In the exceptional case of Bankman-Fried, the earn-to-give injunction resulted by mid-2022 in $36.5 million in donations to Effective Altruism organizations, dedicated to developing EA itself rather than directly helping anyone else, and in several cases led by MacAskill himself (and unfortunately, effectively consisting of a high proportion of stolen FTX user money). This included millions for the Center for Effective Altruism; for a group called Longview Philanthropy, a kind of philantrhopy-investment advisor for wealthy individuals; for scholarships, writing contests, and fellowships aimed at developing EA ideas and spreading them among young people. Investing in EA itself, by its own logic of leverage and maximization, would produce more net benefit for humanity over time than trying to directly “do good.”

Earn to Give also suited Bankman-Fried’s combination of vast ambition, and a near-total lack of direction - a common psychological profile of EAs. The absence of any native sense of purpose was combined, in Sam’s case, with a surprisingly limited skill set for such a supposed genius.

“I grew up in in Stanford, California, went to MIT after that, and really had no clue what i was gonna do with my life,” he told New Atheist figurehead Sam Harris in a December, 2021 interview.

“I sort of like half-heartedly thought maybe I'd be a physics professor, for kind of no good reason, and and quickly at MIT learned that I didn't really like research, and I probably wasn't really built for it, and that that was not gonna happen.”

“Around the same time [I],” Bankman-Fried continued, “I started thinking for the first time about what I should do with my life … coming from a utilitarian standpoint of, what would maximize ultimate well-being of the world? I hadn't thought about it very carefully, but when I like finally confronted this … it quickly became clear that at least there can be some things I could do that would have real impact, and one of those was going to be earning to give… trying to make what I can so I can donate.”

“At the time I was most involved with animal welfare organizations and went to them and said, Hey, would you prefer my time or my money? And they said definitely your money. You're not very good at leaflets.”

While offered as sardonic self-deprecation, it’s not hard to detect pain as Bankman-Fried recounts this story: not good at physics research or making xeroxed leaflets, he is shunted into the role of breadwinning workhorse, where he could make the most of his one true set of gifts - not even mathematics per se, but oddsmaking, like some shady Vegas bookie. Bankman-Fried was a born gambler, and not much else, preoccupied with winning, and with scale.

In a vacuum, this interest in money is gauche - but Effective Altruism and Earning to Give imbued it with virtue.

“There’s just this classic decreasing marginal utility of money to [individual] people,” Bankman-Fried said on the FTX Podcast in 2020. “The more money you have, the less the marginal [extra] dollar matters.” In other words, there’s no actual reason for any human to have a billion dollars. Unless …

“But that’s a lot less true of donating. If you think about the scale of problems in the world, you kind of get to multiply everything by $7 billion. So instead of asking questions like, how much money do I need to eat, you’re asking questions like, how much money does the world need to eat?[ FTX Podcast Episode #3, Sam Bankman-Fried origins]”

“More is always better. Better is always better. Whenever you’re doing something that can increase the amount that you can give, that’s sort of always good.”

What remained studiously unasked in EA was why Sam Bankman-Fried or any other individual should be the one gathering and then re-distributing this ever-expanding trove of resources. The movement implicitly positions the Altruist as the one who knows how to do the right thing, against other kinds of power - including democratic governance.

But the argument for earning-to-give is also quietly premised on a deep anxiety of failure. MacAskill warned Bankman-Fried of the risk of making a big bet on your own ability to directly change the world - even, perhaps especially, for Harvard and MIT students who would in fact be best positioned to actually shape reality. While framed as something akin to heroism, earn-to-give is in fact a hedge against the terror of mediocrity, and a radical submission to a system EA has no ambition to change. Sam and other children of Palo Alto, as we’ll see, are rigorously trained to fear failure, or even averageness - and he wasn’t even good at making flyers.

The Effective Altruist need not face that anxiety. Like the venture capitalist or asset trader, they are remote from the success or failure of any single intervention. This insulation from responsibility is mirrored in the expanding abstraction of the financial system itself, and would be reiterated in Bankman-Fried’s delusions of his own innocence. As with a diversified financial portfolio, no deep commitments or beliefs are required - only models and projections.

Effective Altruism is ideal for those to whom, as Kierkegaard put it, “the lack of possibility is like being dumb.”

When Effectiveness Meets Rationalism: FTX and CFAR

Sam Bankman-Fried took the maximum-leverage logic of Earning to Give several steps further - he Gave money he hadn’t Earned.

As detailed during Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial by Notre Dame accounting professor Peter Easton, the FTX Group’s extensive philanthropic donations were consistently funded in part or in full from money that it had agreed to custody on behalf of customers. $5 million of those commingled funds - a tiny drop in the flood - went to the Center for Applied Rationality, or CFAR. CFAR was the primary outpost of a movement known as “Rationalism,” which substantially melded with Effective Altruism by the mid-2010s.