Is effective altruism taking over British politics?

From APPGs to think tanks and lobby groups, EA is becoming part of the political mainstream. But is this a doomsday cult? A front for Silicon Valley money? Or something else entirely?

A shorter version of this piece was published at Novara Media.

Hubris

2022 was a rollercoaster year for Effective Altruism. The highpoint was the summer, when the movement’s philosopher king, Will MacAskill, went on a $10m book tour that produced fawning profiles in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and pretty much everywhere else. At the same time, the movement’s sugar daddy, the crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, was bankrolling an unprecedented expansion of their work and spending $40m to become the second largest donor to the Democratic Party.

But hitching their cart to the crypto train proved to be a disastrous gamble. On November 8, it was revealed that most of the money held in Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda, wasn’t real money at all. It was just “tokens” printed by his other company, FTX. By early December, he’d been arrested in the Bahamas and extradited to New York to face charges for wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering. Many of his political donations are now being investigated for campaign finance violations, with large sums apparently being channelled through the polling organisation Data For Progress, whose founder, the White House insider Sean McElwee, has been dismissed in the fallout. Bankman-Fried subsequently told Vox that “the ethics stuff” was nothing more than a convenient fig leaf for his fraud. But the exploitation seems to have run both ways, with Time magazine reporting that several key figures in EA, including MacAskill, had been warned about Bankman-Fried years earlier.

For a movement which defines itself by the relentless commitment to doing the most good possible, this was an embarrassing and potentially catastrophic chain of events. But it’s far too early to be writing obituaries. Over the last five years, EA has become deeply rooted in elite politics on both sides of the Atlantic and, as resurgent centrists cast around for new ideas in the midst of endless crises, its reach and influence are only likely to grow.

The turn to politics

EA is an unusual movement. Emerging out of Oxford’s ivory towers with a genuine ambition to change the world, it combines­­ data-driven utilitarianism – using evidence to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people – with the idea that we have a moral duty not only to people living thousands of miles away but also to people living thousands of years into the future. This philosophy has produced two practical tendencies. The first iteration of the movement called for people in the global north to give up their wealth and hand it over to global health initiatives or as no-questions-asked cash to people living in developing countries. It was a movement that was openly critical of what one early adherent described to me as “the woolly do-goodism of the left” and that asked tough questions about how you could justify personal luxuries amidst global poverty (most adherents pledged to give away 10% of their earnings each year, but some gave everything over £18k, a figure far below the UK median of £27k for full time workers).

But more recently, EA has turned away from the billions of people currently alive and towards the trillions who might exist in the future. Longtermism, as this philosophical perspective is known, means shifting away from malaria nets and onto the existential risks to the survival of our species: nuclear war, pandemics, takeover by super-intelligent AI, meteors and more.

With this newfound responsibility for the longterm future of humanity, effective altruists have also started to venture into mainstream politics, learning the vocabulary of collective action, movement building, and systemic change along the way. At first, they focussed on criminal justice reform and jobs-first economic policies. But they soon started funding election campaigns and even running for office. Last year in Oregon, Carrick Flynn, an effective altruist with no political experience ran in a Democratic primary on a platform almost entirely devoted to pandemic prevention. In the end, he lost badly to Andrea Salinas, a well-known local politician. But Flynn still managed to spend more than $12m in the process, making it the most expensive House primary in history.

In many ways, Flynn’s campaign was a perfect synecdoche for the EA movement: the Silicon Valley millions, the endless optimism, the narrow focus on discrete issues, and the gut feelings dressed up as mathematics. During the race, effective altruists guessed that every $1m in donations “would free up over 250 hours of [campaign] work… which would increase the chances of winning the election by more than 2%”. In its aftermath, the most highly voted response to Flynn’s loss on EA Forum argued that “as a silver lining, I think the value of information from this race was quite high… My personal best guess is that >30% of American effective altruists would have at least a decent shot (say, >20%) of making it into Congress”.

Nothing on this scale has happened in the UK, and people at the heart of the movement told me that there were no significant or centralised plans to do so in the near future (“why bother?” was one telling response). But in many ways, EA is already here, having quietly laid down deep roots in the British state and the Labour Party.

In parliament, there is now an APPG for Future Generations, which is chaired by the Labour MP Bambos Charalambous and aims to “raise awareness of long-term issues [and] explore ways to internalise longer-term considerations into decision-making processes”. In the last three years, they have received £242,000 in donations from three EA groups (which are themselves largely funded by Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, and Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook – you will see the same few names cropping up again and again in what follows).

The APPG for Future Generations is staffed by researchers from Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, which was founded in 2012 by Tallinn (with additional funds from Elon Musk and Moskovitz). Together with Oxford’s Global Priorities and Future of Humanity institutes (the latter recently received a $13m donation from Moskovitz), these research centres have given longtermist speculation about future catastrophes an academic home.

But these research centres have also, according to a source in the Cabinet Office, built a “revolving door” between themselves and the civil service. Indeed, across Whitehall there are now a number of informal staff networks dedicated to longtermism, many of them incubated by Impactful Government Careers, a mentoring service run by a civil servant on a career break paid for by the Centre for Effective Altruism.

EA is also making its presence felt in the world of think tanks. The director of research at the Social Market Foundation is affiliated with EA, as are several new hires at the Tony Blair Institute. Then there’s the Centre for Long Term Resilience, set up in 2020 by two former civil servants to examine the risks associated with AI and future pandemics. So far, the Centre for Long Term Resilience has received over £2m-a-year in funding, with a substantial proportion coming from Tallinn’s Survival and Flourishing Fund and Sam Harris’s Waking Up Foundation.

It’s important to put all of this in perspective. The APPG for Future Generations is in the top twenty richest APPGs, but it has less than half of the finances available to the Fair Business Banking or Left Behind Neighbourhoods groups. The revolving door between government and EA still spins far more slowly that those leading to the worlds of management consultancy and finance. And while the money raised by the Centre for Long Term Resilience is only marginally lower than left-wing think tank IPPR (which raised £2.7m in 2021), it falls far short of larger institutions like the health-focussed Kings Fund, which raised nearly £12m that same year.

But a recent EA foray into the Labour Party has raised eyebrows. At the end of 2022, the shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, was given a £30k-a-year policy advisor paid for by a brand-new organisation called Labour for the Long Term (LTT). LLT then went on to hire a £50k-a-year Policy and Operations Manager. These might not be huge sums, but they represent far more money that equivalent groups like Labour for a Green New Deal could ever dream of. And, so far, LLT has kept the identity of its donors secret, telling me only that “donors are all Labour Party supporters who are donating to LLT in a personal capacity”.

This has led to some controversy, with Morgan Jones and David Klemperer writing in Renewal that “both financially and ideologically, longtermism comes from places that are far removed from social democracy” and even suggesting that LLT could be proscribed as an “entryist organisation”.

In response to these allegations, LLT told me that

While we campaign for long-term thinking in policymaking, we do not campaign for or align ourselves with ‘longtermism’… nor the movement and set of organisations known as ‘effective altruism’. … [Instead, we see ourselves as acting] in line with Keir Starmer’s recent writing for the New Statesman, where he argues ‘there is no greater cause for our generation, than to make our world safer for the next’.

It stretches credulity to suggest that LLT is not aligned with EA, and we should be suspicious of any organisation that refuses to disclose where the money comes from. But the Renewal critique also misses the significance of this new organisation. Jones and Klemperer lean quite heavily on their analogy with left-wing sects like the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. But this comparison is deeply misleading. EA has no members, no formal internal discipline, no overarching organisational structure, and many adherents that I spoke to even questioned whether it still made sense to see EA as one coherent entity.

What LLT represents is not an infiltration, but rather the crystallisation of a new philosophy inside the Labour Party – a philosophy that has quickly reached the upper echelons of the British establishment: Dominic Cummings seems to have absorbed EA through his infatuation with Silicon Valley, and described himself as an “advocate” of their ideas in 2016; there are unconfirmed rumours that Boris Johnson read a key EA text about existential risk when he was Prime Minister; and a number of frontbench Labour MPs have endorsed LLT.

This tendency for EA to seep into the British state is only likely to increase. In the last few years, EA has put more and more energy into movement building and there are now EA Chapters in virtually all Russell Group universities. And these chapters offer far more than the Socialist Students ever have, from funded fellowships and sponsored conference trips, to research opportunities, new curricula, and a profound sense of moral purpose. Spreading your ideas through elite universities is a well-established tactic – pursued by Fabian socialists at the turn of the twentieth century and by neoliberals since Lewis Powell’s infamous 1971 memorandum – and it would be naïve to imagine that it will fail now that Bankman-Fried’s billions have evaporated.

A new philosophy

All of this makes understanding EA essential for a serious account of contemporary politics. But so far, most critiques have focussed on abstract academic questions or on the extreme fringes of the movement, particularly those toying with “race science”, eugenics, and Naziism. To get at the core of EA, at what the average adherent thinks and where most of the money goes, we need a more empirical approach.

The first thing to note is that around three quarters of effective altruists consider themselves on the left or centre-left; unsurprising for a movement that is disproportionately young and highly educated and that has concentrated most of its political activity on progressive parties. Most of the money also goes to centre-left causes. Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy – by far the largest and most established funding body in EA – has directed nearly half of its $2.3 billion in grants to global health and development initiatives. The next two biggest chunks of funding are the $280m spent on AI ethics and $210m on “ending mass incarceration and building the autonomous political power of the communities most impacted”. (The proportions are similar if you look at the donations of individual effective altruists.)

While people might disagree about how seriously we should take the risks of AI, ending malaria and mass incarceration are surely worthy goals. What is more troubling is that effective altruists seem to be consistently drawn towards neoliberal policy-solutions. It’s hard to know precisely why this is. It seems to have something to do with demographics (the movement is overwhelmingly white, middle-class, male, and clustered around the most elite anglophone universities). Other sources suggested that it is simply because neoliberals have taken EA more seriously and so have won themselves an audience inside the community. But it is also true that many effective altruists share a basically neoliberal vision of history - history as the endless march of progress, driven forward by technological innovation and rational, benevolent elites.

Whatever the cause, the effects are clear to see. Longtermists are concerned about nuclear war, and so am I. But I’ve never seen them encourage people to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. They’ve been admirably supportive of direct redistribution from rich to poor people around the world, but they continue to frame this as a question of philanthropy rather than a meaningful global tax system. (A partial exception is their work on animal rights, a key plank of EA and one where they do seem to think that building a movement is an effective tool.)

The most interesting domestic example is how effective altruists have approached the housing crisis. This has been a priority issue for EA for several years and LLT list “street votes” as one of their six key campaigns. This policy – where streets would be given powers to vote on local development initiatives – is associated with an organisation called London YIMBY (yes-in-my-backyard), which was founded by former hedge fund analyst John Myers and acclaimed by effective altruists as the most “effective” organisation working on the housing crisis.

London YIMBY’s analysis is simple: we haven’t built enough homes, and decentralisation and deregulation will help us to build more. But this approach has often led them to side with developers who want more opportunities for profit. Over the last few years, they have campaigned alongside Priced Out UK (which argued that post-Grenfell safety requirements are too burdensome for developers) and been associated with fake community campaigns backing unpopular regeneration schemes. But most importantly, London YIMBY’s analysis seems to be empirically wrong. The evidence suggests that the housing crisis has not been caused by a shortage of overall construction, but by monetary policy and by building the wrong type of homes. Which implies that the most effective solution would be building more low-cost social housing, something effective altruists seem not to have thought too much about.

There are two other things which define EA’s way of thinking. The first is that, like all consequentialists, for them the ends always justify the means. That is why effective altruists seem to have such a cavalier attitude to the truth, why Bankman-Fried committed fraud for philanthropic purposes, and why the movement was happy to take his money.

The second is their quantitative, scientific mindset. At an individual level, this is sometimes amusing (effective altruists trying to quantify the “expected utility” of an after work pint). But it has also fuelled their symbiotic relationship with Silicon Valley, creating a movement of people who see themselves as rational engineers solving the world’s problems through technocratic means. In political terms, this has led them to campaign to shift policymaking in a more “scientific” direction: using randomised controlled trials to evaluate policies in the global north, not just in developing countries. Although this is already happening in small ways, what it means for democracy is not clear. Analogies between voting and scientific experimentation are at least a hundred years old (both do after all involve trying out new ideas and rejecting those that don’t work). But EA’s proposed form of experimental statecraft is one where a small scientific elite has enormous power over what gets trialled, what “working” looks like, and who the guinea pig is.

Coda

In all of this, the socialist left needs to consider how it will relate to EA. So far, the reaction has been overwhelmingly hostile, and it is easy to see why. But there have been other voices calling for a more constructive dialogue. Aveek Bhattacharya, research director at the Social Market Foundation and one of the most thoughtful commentators on EA, told me that there was a missed opportunity here for the left, both in terms of what we could learn from them (they were talking about pandemic prevention long before Covid-19) and the opportunity to build a global coalition around healthcare and climate resilience (unlike some on the left, effective altruists are implacably internationalist).

But while we might share some short-term interests, EA’s affinity with neoliberalism and technocracy should give us pause for thought. We could perhaps persuade EAs to think more systematically about these issues, but ultimately there is a fundamental tension between socialists pursuing the total democratisation of society and technocrats who imagine a rational solution to each individual problem.

None of these challenges mean the left should shy away from EA. But neither should we subordinate ourselves to their particular way of doing the greatest good for the greatest number. As Engels said of the original utilitarian reformer, Jeremy Bentham, “though he has a school within the radical bourgeoisie, it is only the proletariat and the socialists who have succeeded in carrying his teachings a step forward”.