The ugly sides of two approaches to charity

Last month, Emma Goldberg wrote a NYT piece contrasting effective altruism with approaches that refuse to quantify meaningful experiences. The piece indicates that effective altruism is creepily numbers-focused. Goldberg asks “What if charity shouldn’t be optimized?”

The egalitarian answer

Dylan Matthews gives a try at answering a question in the piece: “How can anyone put a numerical value on a holy space” like Notre Dame cathedral? For the $760 million spent restoring the cathedral, he estimates you could prevent 47,500 deaths from malaria.

“47,500 people is about five times the population of the town I grew up in. . . . It’s useful to imagine walking down Main Street, stopping at each table at the diner Lou’s, shaking hands with as many people as you can, and telling them, ‘I think you need to die to make a cathedral pretty.’ And then going to the next town over and doing it again, and again, until you’ve told 47,500 people why they have to die.”

Who prefers magnificence?

Goldberg’s article draws a lot on author Amy Schiller’s plea to focus charity on “magnificence” rather than effectiveness. Some causes “make people’s lives feel meaningful, radiant, sacred. Think nature conservancies, cultural centers and places of worship. These are institutions that lend life its texture and color, and not just bare bones existence.”

But US arts funding goes disproportionately to the most expensive projects, with more than half of the funding going to the most expensive 2% of projects. These are typically museums, classical music groups, and performing arts centers.

When donors prioritize giving to communities they already have ties to, the money stays in richer communities. Some areas have way more rich people than others. New York City has 119 billionaires; most African countries have none. Unsurprisingly, Schiller and Goldberg both live in New York City and not in Burundi or Bangladesh.

Schiller’s book summary actively discourages philanthropy toward public health work: “Philanthropy has to get out of the business of saving lives if we are to save humanity.”  As far as I know she doesn’t argue that poor people should just be left to die; just that governments should be in charge of that stuff, and philanthropy should aim for more beautiful things. “The money we use to build the common world communicates our belief in that world, and in all who inhabit it. It affirms the value of humanity beyond price.”

It’s hard to imagine saying that to someone whose toddler is dying because of contaminated water. “Sorry that your government wasn’t up to the job of providing basic services, and that its tax base is made up of very poor people. But please know that my support of my city’s art museums affirms the value of humanity in general.”

Inequality has its benefits

Michelangelo could do what he did because he had rich funders. A fully egalitarian Florence would have had them, and him, working on farms. A fully egalitarian world now wouldn’t have much funding available for “things whose value was hard to price: museums, libraries, parks” as Amy Schiller favors.

And I do love these things! I’m glad that Yo-Yo Ma isn’t a farmer, and that the Sagrada Familia cathedral isn’t an apartment block, and that Carnegie funded the building of my local library.

I like Sagrada Familia much more than Notre Dame. I have cathedral opinions because I’m in the small fraction of the world who had money to visit Europe; most people will never get to see either cathedral. Photo: Forbes Johnston

Is there enough for everybody to have access to the finer things?

Not currently. 

A quick estimate is that global GDP divided by the world population would be about $13,000 per person. (Of course, actually dividing up all the money in the world would also break the economy, so it would soon be less.) That’s about the GDP of El Salvador or Sri Lanka. That doesn’t leave much room for funding museums, etc.

When the UN talks about “ending extreme poverty”, it means lifting people above an income $2.15 a day¹. A more ambitious goal might be raising everyone’s income to at least $6.85 a day, the poverty line for upper-middle income countries. Almost half the world’s people live below that level.

A world where everyone had both bread and roses would require significantly cheaper roses than the rich are accustomed to, or a higher overall world GDP. Fortunately, GDP per person has been growing for centuries.

The balance of good and bad

In the short story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas, a beautiful and joyful city depends on the suffering of one of its citizens. Many readers feel that they couldn’t accept such an arrangement, that they’d be among those who walk away from the beautiful city. The story is based on a scenario by William James: “How hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”

Number-crunching types are more likely to say “Wait, only one person is living in torturous conditions? That’s much better than real life.”

Compare to our actual world, where more than two billion souls live in poverty. This is the world people are tacitly accepting when they fund concert halls in their own beautiful cities.

Both sides have ugly aspects

At its worst, Schiller’s focus on magnificence turns its back on some people’s ability to live at all, so that others can have a more beautiful life.

At its worst, a fully redistributionist global health focus pushes toward a repugnant-conclusion-type world where everyone has just enough for a life that’s barely worthwhile.

A sole focus on either of these neglects more critical needs: reducing the risk of disaster from pandemics, nuclear war, and AI. (And at its worst, existential-risk-focused effective altruism has gone too far on the crazy train and will end up working on things that don’t turn out to matter at all.)

These aren’t the only choices

Some variations on our current world that I think would be better:

• Philanthropy would continue in many areas. But more philanthropists would spread funding around beyond their cultural and geographic bubble.
• Arts and culture funding would focus on what’s accessible to more people:
  • preservation of cultural treasures and landmarks around the world
  • scalable cultural work like broadcasting, writing, and recorded music
• People who particularly want to fund things they have a connection to would consider a wider range of ways they’re connected to others. These connections could be based on location, religion, or culture, but also other things they value like self-determination, or parenthood and family. Allan Saldanha: “As a father, I think the worst thing any parent can experience is to have to watch their child suffering or god forbid, dying. My children’s lives are priceless to me and so I find the opportunity to save someone else’s child’s life for less than £2,000 a compelling proposition.”
• People who favor markets over traditional philanthropy would be more open to funding things like the Market Shaping Accelerator or Emergent Ventures.
• More people would fund projects that reduce the chance of AI disaster, pandemics, and nuclear war. This isn’t just for people who want to affect the distant future; it’s for people who want to reduce those risks in our own lifetimes.
• If people still want to fund more opera productions and so on, it’s their money. But nobody would be holding this up as superior to saving lives.
• I hope we can get to a future where all, not only people born into the right circumstances, have access to both bread and roses.

Related:

• Crying in museums
• The magic washing machine, Hans Rosling: “Grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life, she had been heating water with firewood, and she had hand-washed laundry for seven children. And now, she was going to watch electricity do that work.”
• How rich am I? calculator for how you compare to a median person in the world
  

1. These are adjusted for the local cost of goods and services; it’s not just that things are cheaper in some countries. ↩︎