We live in an era of unprecedented passport checks, visa quotas, and detention centers, a world that regulates human movement more tightly than at any other point in history. Some scholars and activists think we’ve gone too far; they think that this hyper-restriction is neither just, nor economically rational.

One of these groups is Effective Altruism (EA), a social movement that aims to identify which interventions are the most promising in terms of overall social impact. This makes sense from a demographic perspective: open borders are championed by both progressives/leftists (who are more common among EA’s rank-and-file) and by a growing number of moderates/capitalists, who are more common among EA’s big funders/decision-makers.

There’s a tension between these two groups, but on open borders they can agree. For example, in my country the leftist Naima Charkaoui wrote Het opengrenzenmanifest (the open borders manifesto) and on the more liberal side, Stijn Bruers (head of EA-Belgium) wrote Open grenzen? De economie en ethiek van vrije migratie (open borders? The economics and ethics of free migration).

And it’s not just in my country that we see this agreement. Leftist authors who have written books on open borders include: John Washington, Harsha Walia, Teresa Hayter, Reece Jones, Rutger Bregman, Aviva Chomsky, and many more.

And while railing against borders has been a hobby of leftists since leftism was invented, we’ve recently seen more capitalists writing books on it too, such as: Bryan Caplan, Robert Guest, and Philippe Legrain.

I should make clear that “open borders” generally doesn’t mean totally uncontrolled migration (without registration and efforts to involve immigrants in society and so on), but rather the removal of the current strict restrictions on who is allowed to immigrate, and how many immigrants are allowed.

Common arguments for Open Borders

Which arguments people use, and where they put the emphasis, varies from author to author, but the three most common arguments are:

1. Global Justice
   Wealth is wildly uneven. When a nurse from a low-income country can quadruple her wage by crossing a border, barring her entry looks less like “protecting jobs” and more like denying her a fair slice of global prosperity. Higher earnings abroad translate into remittances that uplift whole communities back home.

2. Benefits to host countries
   Migrants often fill roles locals shun (care work, agriculture, cleaning…) while paying taxes that prop up ageing welfare systems. New jobs are also created to help newcomers settle; like language schools, NGOs and public-sector jobs.

3. Humanitarianism
   Safe, legal entry routes would end the lethal journeys, detention camps and asylum-processing backlogs that currently define global displacement.

Detractors worry about brain drain and cultural regression, but proponents point out that these work both ways:
The economic cost of a brain drain can be counteracted by having the immigrants send back remittances. On top of that, with open borders it’s also easier to return to your country of origin.
Similarly, even if immigrants hold more socially conservative views, immigration can make them become more egalitarian by putting them into contact with progressive views, making those ideals more common.

Taken together, these points give open-borders advocates both a moral and pragmatic case.

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EA’s foray into Migration Reform

In Doing Good Better, philosopher William MacAskill (one of EA’s founders) listed “international labour mobility” among seven high-impact causes. Four years later he repeated that call. It’s clear that Effective Altruists like open borders1, but what have they actually done to make them a reality?

In the past, Open Philanthropy (an EA organization) had listed ‘Immigration Policy’ as one of the focus areas they donated to. However, they only ever donated <1% of their funds to said area, and that was before they shut it down completely.
EAs have made a site about open borders, and they’ve written 26 posts tagged “immigration reform”, but for context, they’ve written more than a thousand posts on “AI governance” alone. It’s all very meager. What happened?

It might be that some high-profile figures in effective altruism changed their minds. Elon Musk was one of only a small number of people on the EA-people page (before I made the controversial decision to edit him off of it), who seems to have strongly turned against immigration recently. Maybe the same is true for others?
It might not even be because they’ve become more anti-social or even anti-immigration (like Musk), it might just be that they don’t want to focus on this cause in our increasingly anti-immigrant social environment.

I think this does play a role, but I also have an additional hypothesis.

Capitalist-skew

One of the “immigration policy” grant-recipients (receiving almost half a million dollars) was ImmigrationWorks, which disbanded in 2019. ImmigrationWorks was an organization meant to represent the interests of US businesses that sought to be able to more easily hire migrant workers.

This is a common concern among capitalist proponents of migration, whereas leftist proponents tend to be more focused on the well-being of the immigrants. It’s striking how prevalent capitalist grant-recipients and authors are in the EA-sphere2, given that open borders activism itself is so dominated by leftists. Since EA’s stated aim is to be pro-social, this skew towards capitalists carries some risks with it.

For example, ImmigrationWorks’ website had a bullet point list of six principles which they claimed to adhere to, with one of them being that ‘all workers should enjoy the same labor protections’. However, a review by GiveWell found that…

in practice, [ImmigrationWorks] focuses primarily on the first of these bullet points [i.e. ‘bringing America's annual legal intake of foreign workers more realistically into line with the country's labor needs’], and its advocacy efforts tend to be oriented towards Republicans.

It should be noted that they still gave funds to ImmigrationWorks after they had concluded this. If you’re donating to these kinds of capitalist organisations, you always run the risk that your pro-social intentions get turned into exploitative outcomes. The goal of open borders should obviously not be to allow businesses in high-income countries to more efficiently exploit immigrant workers, which seems to have been more or less the actual goal of ImmigrationWorks.

If EAs have largely abandoned funding open borders advocacy because their donations didn’t have the pro-social impact they had hoped for, perhaps they could consider removing/decreasing the pro-capitalist-skew by reading/promoting/funding more leftist advocacy.
 

Special thanks to Maxim Vandaele for his help. All opinions and mistakes are my own.

Introduction

In 2009, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo published Dead Aid, a scathing critique of Western development efforts in Africa. She argued that decades of well-meaning aid had failed not only to lift African countries out of poverty, but had actively undermined their institutions, encouraged corruption, and created a culture of dependence. Aid, she concluded, was not saving Africa, it was holding it back.

Moyo was not the first to make such claims, and she wouldn't be the last. From economists (like William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden) to anthropologists (like ’s The Divide) a growing body of literature has criticized how foreign assistance, however generous in appearance, can replicate the very hierarchies and dependencies that colonialism once enforced through direct rule.

Today, a new form of philanthropy has emerged: Effective Altruism. EA, as it’s known, is a movement built around the idea that we should use reason and evidence to do the most good. Often this means funding highly cost-effective interventions like malaria prevention, deworming, or vaccination incentives in the world’s poorest countries, most often in sub-Saharan Africa. EA does not appeal to sentiment, loyalty, or proximity. Instead it seeks measurable impact, like how many lives the intervention saves per dollar, or how many “Quality Adjusted Life Years” it generates.

At first glance, this seems like a clear improvement over the failed aid of the past. But a new wave of critics, often informed by postcolonial theory, have begun to ask whether even these forms of giving can reproduce the same problems they aim to avoid. Could Effective Altruism be neocolonial?

What Is Neocolonialism?

Colonialism, as defined by political philosophers, is the reduction of one people’s sovereignty by another, typically through direct political and military domination.
Neocolonialism, by contrast, operates after formal independence. It sustains the same power dynamics through economic control, international institutions, and cultural influence.
As philosopher Oseni Taiwo Afisi writes, neocolonialism refers to “the actions and effects of certain remnant features and agents of the colonial era in a given society.” It’s colonialism without conquest.

This framing matters. Sub-Saharan Africa, the region where EA often focuses its efforts, continues to bear the scars of colonialism. According to the World Bank:

These numbers are not an accident. They reflect what economists Acemoglu and Robinson call “dysfunctional institutions” rooted in centuries of slavery, conquest, and extractive rule. Philanthropy has long played a role in managing these inequalities. It was often used to soften or sanitize imperial policy, providing humanitarian cover for strategic control. Could EA be doing the same?

I will split the neocolonial critique into three parts1: EA could replicate colonial power…

1. By keeping poor people poor (e.g. addressing symptoms rather than causes)

2. By making them dependent (e.g. undermining and displacing local institutions)

3. By not listening to them (e.g. excluding the voices of those it aims to help)

In this post I will give an overview of the arguments and counterarguments people have given for these three critiques.

1. Does Effective Altruism Keep Poor People Poor?

Critics argue that EA treats extreme poverty as a technical issue: something to be managed with bed nets, deworming pills, or vaccines, but without addressing the deeper political and economic systems that cause it in the first place. The result, they say, is a form of charity that may alleviate suffering, but risks reinforcing global inequality and disempowerment.

This concern hinges on a key ethical idea: that charity should be a temporary bridge toward self-sufficiency. But effective altruism, critics argue, sometimes treats it as a permanent solution.

One of the more forceful critiques comes from an aid worker writing under the pseudonym Carneades, who argues that EA charities “take jobs away from communities,” “do not allow for communities to decide what they need,” and “do the work for a community, instead of building capacity and increasing autonomy.” This model, they warn, is great for the charity since it “ensures that the community will need aid forever.”

The political theorist Cecelia Lynch sees similar dangers, warning that EA “does not counter the neocolonial and paternalistic practices of the aid industry” and may even “reinscribe them more forcefully.” In her view, new philanthropy in general —and EA in particular— may appear innovative but often repeats old power dynamics in more technocratic language.

We saw how development economists like Dambisa Moyo and William Easterly share this concern about the modern aid sector. But perhaps it’s put most bluntly by Nobel prize winning economist Angus Deaton in The Great Escape:

Development is neither a financial nor a technical problem but a political problem, and the aid industry often makes the politics worse.

This is the core of the critique: poverty isn’t just about lacking resources — it’s about lacking control. And if interventions don’t help restore that control, they risk being palliative rather than transformative.
From this perspective, EA’s most celebrated charities may save lives without empowering communities. Critics argue that this turns poverty into a permanent management problem, rather than a structural injustice to be dismantled.

Counterarguments

Anthropologist China Scherz complicates this picture. Based on fieldwork with Ugandan nonprofits, she found that many aid recipients actually prefer programs that give them tangible things —food, medicine, money— over less direct “capacity-building” efforts. This might support EA’s focus on cost-effective interventions, although it might also be that the recipients think “capacity-building” charities could be better, but that good ones simply aren’t being created.

More direct counterarguments come from Effective Altruists themselves. (co-founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy) and (co-founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism) respond that the kinds of charities favored by EA are deliberately chosen because they don’t repeat past mistakes. They’re carefully researched, tested for negative side effects, and focused on interventions with clear, measurable benefits — like preventing deaths or increasing school attendance.

EA-philosopher echoes this, but with a more practical focus. He argues that if charity hasn’t worked in the past, it’s mostly because we haven’t done enough of it, not because it’s inherently flawed. Most rich countries still give far below the UN target of 0.7% of GNI, and political motives often override impact. Singer claims that in recent decades, “we [spent] more than three times as much on beauty products as the governments we elect spend on ending extreme poverty.”

Organizations like Giving What We Can agree and go even further. They argue that well-designed aid can actually strengthen institutions and create opportunities for sustainable long-term growth, if deployed with care. Rather than abandoning charity, they say we should reform and scale up the kind that works.

Decolonial critics, by and large, acknowledge that the worst-case view —that EA keeps people poor— is too strong. A more modest but still pressing version of the critique holds that EA currently underestimates the long-term risks of dependency, and does too little to support local political development or economic growth.

2. Does EA Keep Poor People Dependent?

Many critics don’t claim that effective altruism is inherently neocolonial. Rather, they argue that its current practice fails to take seriously enough the risks of keeping poor countries dependent. Even if the interventions are effective on paper, their broader political consequences may be corrosive.

Political scientist Emily Clough, for example, has argued that when an EA-aligned charity provides high-quality public services (like education or healthcare) in a given region, it can cause the state to scale back its own efforts. Rather than serving as a supplement, the NGO becomes a replacement, and people who aren’t reached by the charity lose access to services that might once have been theirs by right.

Philosopher Jeff McMahan, drawing on Clough’s critique, writes that:

“[Foreign aid] may enable dictators to [...] resist pressures to change the practices and institutions that perpetuate extreme poverty.”

When philanthropists work through NGOs, their efforts may conflict with and partly undermine the activities of more legitimate —and potentially more longterm effective— actors, such as local or national governments. In bypassing states, NGOs remove the incentive for those states to improve, weakening long-term accountability and capacity.

Nobel prize winning economist Daron Acemoglu raises a similar concern. Even when EA-funded services are well-intentioned and evidence-based, they may still erode institutional legitimacy:

“When key services we expect from states are taken over by other entities, building trust in the state and developing state capacity in other crucial areas may become harder.”

Philosopher Larry Temkin adds another layer to the critique: outside actors can pull highly qualified locals out of the public sector to work for NGOs, shift national priorities to align with foreign interests, and reduce governments’ responsiveness to their citizens. In his words, these interventions risk “negatively impacting local authority and autonomy.”2

In other words, even if EA-style aid helps individuals survive, it might do so in ways that damage the very systems needed to support people sustainably.
This leads to a broader point made by Angus Deaton: the problem is not simply lack of money. It’s politics:

“Development is neither a financial nor a technical problem but a political problem, and the aid industry often makes the politics worse. […]
Lack of money is not killing people. The true villains are the chronically disorganized and underfunded health care systems about which governments care little, along with well-founded distrust of those governments and foreigners, even when their advice is correct.”

If foreign charities become the main providers of essential services, governments may stop investing in their own systems, and citizens may stop expecting them to. In this scenario, what appears as humanitarian relief may end up as a long-term governance failure, one that mimics —and in some cases reinforces— colonial dynamics.3

Whether framed as a short-term displacement of public institutions or a long-term erosion of democratic self-governance, the critique is clear: the more people rely on aid from outside actors, the harder it becomes to demand lasting solutions from inside.

Counterarguments

Effective altruists acknowledge that aid can have unintended consequences. But they argue that critics often overlook the positive, long-term effects that even simple interventions can produce, effects that go beyond survival and into the realm of empowerment.

Holden Karnofsky argues that aid shouldn’t just be measured by how many lives it saves, but also by the indirect ripple effects it creates. A child who survives malaria can go to school. A family that receives a cash transfer can invest in a small business. These kinds of material improvements, over time, can create the conditions for political engagement and social transformation. Karnofsky writes:

“A substantial part of the good that one does may be indirect: the people that one helps directly [...] become more empowered to contribute to society, and this in turn may empower others.”

He even suggests that the long-term political and social gains might outweigh the immediate health or income gains EA charities typically measure.

This view is supported by historical analysis. As sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have argued, it is precisely when material insecurity decreases that movements for justice and reform tend to grow stronger. When people are no longer consumed by the daily struggle to survive, they can begin to organize, protest, and build alternatives. In this sense, interventions that reduce suffering might be a prerequisite for grassroots resistance.

Another counterargument is that some EAs have looked at ways to make structural improvements. For example, and wrote a popular essay on the EA Forum arguing that typical EA interventions do little to promote sustained economic growth, and EAs should look at more systemic interventions instead. The essay was very well received and even won an EA Forum prize. It may be that EA is already in the process of changing, but it just takes a while to set in.

3. Does EA Fail To Listen To Poor People?

The final, and perhaps most foundational critique, is that EA interventions are too often designed from the outside —based on what donors or researchers believe is effective— without meaningful consultation with the people these interventions are supposed to help.
The result, critics say, is not just technocratic or impersonal, but paternalistic: a form of help that is imposed, rather than co-created. If poor people are experts in their own needs, who is in a better position to know what would help them? And if effective altruists genuinely want to improve lives, why not begin by amplifying the voices of those they aim to support?

Philosopher highlights the political stakes of this. She warns that some forms of aid can “actively undermine grassroots efforts to bring about transformative social change by diverting resources and short-circuiting community-led development processes.” The problem isn't only that EA misses certain voices, it's that its presence may actually make local organizing harder.

The aid worker “Carneades” adds a sharper critique:

[EA] promotes organizations that [...] focus on projects which apply across communities regardless of need. They do not build projects from the bottom up, they drop things from the top down. This harms developing democracies, and it does not allow for communities to decide what they need. Yes, systematically bottom up work is harder to do, but the effects are worth it.

Political theorist Jennifer Rubenstein offers a similar warning. She argues that while EA works well when the “low-hanging fruit” of health and cash interventions are available, deeper progress —especially when it requires systemic change or global reform— will demand far more collaboration with local activists. She writes:

“The effective altruism movement as Singer describes it does not cultivate the expectations, attitudes, or relationships necessary for this kind of work.”

Her suggestion? EA donors should begin supporting existing movements, especially those based in the global South, that are already fighting for inclusion, equality, and justice. She proposes the creation of a “database of effective social movements” to help donors direct attention toward local organizations with the power to shape change from within.

Geographer goes even further, arguing that EA does not just fail to listen, it may be structurally incapable of hearing certain perspectives. He writes:

“EA’s interventions are only the most effective options according to the priorities and epistemology of its gatekeepers. They are not necessarily the most effective interventions according to the people who receive them.”

For Doran, the problem isn’t just one of bias, it’s one of “epistemic exclusion”. Many Global South perspectives on what matters, what works, and what counts as valid evidence may be “inadmissible or even un-hearable within EA” because they clash with what he calls “capitalist epistemology”; a framework that values quantifiable impact over political or cultural context.

Perhaps the most personal expression of this critique comes from Anthony Kalulu, a Ugandan farmer and activist. Kalulu argues that effective altruism is even worse than traditional philanthropy in how it excludes the poor. In his experience, even large Western foundations like the Gates Foundation occasionally support small grassroots initiatives, but not EA.

Counterarguments

If you look at survey-data of EA demographics, it would be hard to argue that people from the Global South are sufficiently represented:

However, there is one notable EA endorsed charity that does rely on the expertise of poor people. Direct Cash Transfers (DCTs) do what the name implies, they send money directly to people in need, allowing them to spend it however they like, without any strings attached. I’ve previously talked about how similar cash transfers are to reparations, a quintessential decolonial project. So even if this third critique does apply to some, or even most EA interventions, I’d argue DCTs show that it doesn’t apply to all EA interventions.

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Conclusion

So, is effective altruism neocolonial?

The first critique (that it keeps people poor) doesn’t really hold. EA interventions do improve lives, and there’s no evidence they’re increasing poverty.
The second (that it makes people dependent) is more complicated. Some interventions risk weakening local institutions, but others may lay the groundwork for autonomy.
The third (that it doesn’t listen) has real force. EA often excludes the voices of those it aims to help, though cash transfers show that it doesn’t have to be an inherent part of the movement.

In short: Effective Altruism may be an improvement over traditional philanthropy of the past, but it’s not yet entirely free of neocolonial dynamics either.

A huge thanks to Maxim Vandaele for helping write this post. All opinions and mistakes are my own.

In recent years, philanthropy has taken on a new kind of visibility. Billionaires pledge to give away fortunes, headlines celebrate massive donations, and movements like “Effective Altruism” encourage giving not just generously, but strategically.

At first glance, it’s hard to argue with any of this. Private donations can fund vaccines, support education, fight climate change, or reduce suffering in ways governments sometimes don’t.

But as private giving grows, so do the questions. Who decides which causes matter most? How much influence should a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals have over global priorities? And does the current system of philanthropy help fix inequality, or quietly reinforce it?

This post looks at those questions, and at the tensions that arise when private wealth is used to shape public outcomes.

Billionaire Philanthropy

Let’s say you’re not intrinsically opposed to billionaires. Maybe you even like a few of them. Maybe you admire the ones who seem to care about big problems: climate change, poverty, criminal justice. Maybe you think philanthropy can do real good in the world.

Still, even if you’re not out to “eat the rich”, there’s a nagging question that’s hard to shake: should billionaires have this much power over how the world changes?

Even when their intentions are good, the structure of billionaire philanthropy raises serious red flags. As philosopher David Thorstad points out, back in the 19th century, some governments were so wary of the influence of the super-rich that they actively restricted the creation of philanthropic foundations. Why? Because these institutions weren’t democratically accountable. They allowed a handful of people to wield enormous influence behind the scenes; without elections, without public scrutiny, and without limits.

Today, those fears seem increasingly relevant. Thorstad warns that without any expiration date, philanthropic foundations can quietly accumulate power for decades. And since these foundations aren't answerable to the public, they can divert attention from systemic issues like tax avoidance or the fact that wealth taxes remain embarrassingly low. In effect, they let billionaires shape public life while sidestepping the responsibilities of democratic oversight.

Defenders of billionaire giving, like popular ‘Effective Altruist’ blogger Scott Alexander, offer a different perspective. They argue that the worry is overstated. After all, billionaire giving is tiny compared to government budgets.1 In 2024 the US federal budget was almost $7 trillion, while the top 50 donors clocked in at $16 billion: a 400x difference.2

Furthermore, the argument goes, private philanthropy can help where government policy fails. If a billionaire donates to highly impactful charities (e.g. animal welfare or global poverty), that can actually be way better than having their money taxed and channeled into less impactful (or even harmful) government programs.

The Problems with Private Power

But even if we accept that some billionaire donations do genuine good, the structural concerns don’t go away.

First of all, philanthropy can act as a social pressure valve. It can help relieve the rich of the moral and political pressure to support higher taxes, better labor conditions, or more climate-friendly policies. It’s an easy out to say “I’m already giving millions to charity, what more do you want?”
In the US, where over a quarter of the world’s billionaires live, tax deductions for charitable giving already help the wealthy reduce their tax burdens, effectively giving them public subsidies to pick their own favorite causes.

Also, while billionaire giving may be small compared to the US federal budget, it’s still enormous in absolute terms, especially considering how few people are making those decisions. Around 900 American billionaires (mostly older, white men) control billions of dollars in philanthropic capital every year — money that can shape public life in ways most citizens will never be able to match. The 10 richest alone have more than $1,700,000,000,000, with the wealth (and number) of billionaires growing rapidly:

One could object that the total wealth is also growing. So maybe this is the wrong metric, maybe we should instead examine what percentage of total wealth the billionaires control, and whether that’s increasing:

• In 2024, US billionaires held $6.72 trillion out of $160 trillion in total US household wealth, so about 4%

• In 2010, US billionaires held $1.4 trillion out of $56 trillion, so about 2%

• In 2000, they held about half a trillion out of $44 trillion, so about 1%3

This aligns with broader trends of the ultra-wealthy capturing an ever-larger share of income and wealth:

Implications

We’ve seen billionaires use this wealth to buy politicians and votes and social media platforms, which is all pretty bad for our political landscape. But if we restrict our view to just philanthropy, is it still bad?
Well, think about the power dynamics here. The vast majority of Americans, if they donate at all, can maybe give a few hundred dollars a year without getting into financial problems. In a nation of 342 million people, having about 900 individuals hold such a huge influence over the nonprofit sector is hardly a recipe for fairness. And as wealth inequality grows and non-profits become more reliant on big donors, the power imbalance could get even more extreme. It’s not just that these billionaires have more money, it’s that their money buys them a louder voice in shaping what problems matter and how they should be solved.

Okay, but if billionaires donate to less corrupt and more impactful charities, this might actually be a good thing, right? Well unfortunately, a lot of that money goes to things like: elite universities, personal art galleries, vanity projects, and other less than stellar causes. People who analyze the impact of various charities, like the “Effective Altruists”, don’t have a structural way to ensure money flows to the most impactful/least corrupt ones. They are, by and large, at the mercy of the people who hold the purse strings.

Defenders of billionaire philanthropy might point out that there are also billionaires that do donate to effective charities. As journalist Dylan Matthews put it in his article “If you’re such an effective altruist, how come you’re so rich?”:

we will live in a world of extreme wealth inequality for the foreseeable future, and the best we can likely hope for is that the winners in that rigged game donate their winnings justly.

I think that even if we accept the premise that Effective Altruists are uniquely good at picking out important causes, this argument doesn’t work…

Effective Giving in Practice

Some of you might believe that billionaire philanthropy can be a force for good. But ask yourself: is it currently? Are ultra-wealthy donors really committing to “effective charities”?

As of now, there are around 3,028 billionaires in the world. Of those, only four have publicly committed to donating their wealth according to Effective Altruist (EA) principles. Yes, four. Despite all the media attention and philosophical arguments, EA-style giving hasn’t exactly taken the billionaire world by storm.
Defenders might counter that this number will likely grow. One effective altruist estimates that we’ll have two more EA billionaires by 2027. That’s a lot of extra money, but still only a teeny tiny percentage of billionaires.

Of course, philanthropy isn’t limited to billionaires. There are also plenty of wealthy individuals who haven’t hit the ten-figure mark but still want to give meaningfully. The wealthy that want to direct their accumulated capital toward effective giving could make use of one of the most prominent EA-aligned platforms: Founders Pledge.

Founders Pledge encourages entrepreneurs to commit a portion of the money they make (when selling their financial assets or businesses) to charity. It’s legally binding and grounded in EA values. But despite its intentions, the numbers aren’t as bold as you might expect. The minimum pledge is only 5%, and the Founders Pledge claims the average is around 10%. There is, however, a catch: if the entrepreneur never exits their business or liquidates their shares, the pledge doesn’t kick in. In that case, nothing is owed. Hmmm.

Also, “The pledge is a commitment to give to any nonprofit(s) of your choice, anywhere in the world”, which includes your own nonprofits. Founders Pledge does actively advise donors on where to give, which they use to promote “effective charities”, but this is just advisement and may be ignored.

So far, Founders Pledge claims to have secured about $10.8 billion in pledged donations, of which $1.5 billion has already been disbursed. That’s no small feat. But to put it in perspective: the top 50 US donors alone gave more than $16 billion to charity in 2024. So, a portion of the billionaire giving, of one country in one year, outstrips the entire amount ever pledged through Founders Pledge.

And perhaps more strikingly, Founders Pledge hasn’t attracted the world’s richest. That title belongs to a different initiative: The Giving Pledge, founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Giving Pledge

At first glance, this seems like an EA dream. In fact, EA philosopher Peter Singer once called Gates, Buffett, and Melinda Gates “the most effective altruists in history.” But a closer look reveals some big differences.

Unlike Founders Pledge, The Giving Pledge isn’t legally binding. There’s no enforcement mechanism, no guarantee that the promised money will ever be donated. And while Founders Pledge provides recommendations grounded in impact research, The Giving Pledge doesn’t advise donors on how to be effective. It simply encourages donors to support causes that “inspire them personally” and “benefit society” (however they choose to interpret that).

Yes, the bar is higher in terms of scale, pledgers commit to giving at least 50% of their wealth. But they can do that in any way they like. EA principles —like cost-effectiveness, transparency, and long-term impact— are nowhere to be found in the official guidance.

While the Founders Pledge has about 2000 signatories, most of them are far less wealthy than the 240 signatories of The Giving Pledge, who include names like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett. Combined, these individuals control trillions of dollars.4 That’s the kind of capital that could change the world if it were used wisely.
Unfortunately, we don’t know much about how it’s being used. The Giving Pledge doesn’t disclose where signatories donate, what causes they prioritize, or whether they’ve followed through. Instead, it hosts private annual gatherings and smaller events for donors, their families, and staff.

Even Peter Singer expressed concern about how vague the pledge was, pointing out that it could easily include things like building opera houses named after donors. When he asked why the pledge didn’t focus more on helping the global poor, he was told that adding such requirements might reduce the number of people willing to join. Singer accepted that explanation and praised the effort for “changing the culture of giving.”
Pardon? Singer, I thought we were supposed to care about transparency and, you know, effectiveness? Imagine if EA dropped the “effective” part of its philosophy just to be more popular. Isn’t this defeating the whole point? As philosopher Maxim Vandaele put it:

the fact that The Giving Pledge – which is not legally binding, gives signatories near unlimited control over their donations, and appears to care little about ensuring the transparency or effectiveness of donations – has apparently convinced a far greater number of far richer philanthropists than the more clearly effective altruist Founders Pledge has, should have us strongly question the feasibility and desirability of billionaire philanthropy, even from an effective altruist point of view.

So What’s the Alternative?

I’ve talked a lot about the drawbacks of billionaire philanthropy, but I haven’t spent any time defending government programs. It could be that billionaire donors are still better because state institutions are even worse. But even if we grant that, it’s still worth asking: how realistic is it to expect the ultra-wealthy to consistently act in everyone’s best interest — especially without any democratic oversight?

Effective Altruism prides itself on being open to any means that can do the most good. That should include rethinking the basic structures through which we distribute wealth and make collective decisions.5 For example, even if government programs do turn out to be worse, why should we assume our only options are either philanthropy or traditional government programs? There are other models too: citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, or referendums on major spending priorities. Those approaches give ordinary people a voice in decisions about shared resources.

The idea of significantly raising taxes on billionaires to fund these kinds of redistribution programs may seem politically far-fetched. But relying on a handful of billionaires to voluntarily give away their fortunes wisely and fairly? That’s even less probable. We have many, many options before us, and we can do so much better than billionaire philanthropy.

A huge thanks to Maxim Vandaele for helping with this post. All opinions and mistakes are my own.

Effective Altruism (EA) is a social movement that aims to use reason and evidence to help others as much as possible. It encourages people to ask not just “how to do good”, but how to do the most good. This has led members to support things like global health interventions, existential risk reduction, and animal welfare.

I used to be closely involved in the movement, and I still think many of its ideas are worth defending. But as the movement has grown, so have certain structural problems: increasing reliance on large donors, pushback on dissent, and systems that concentrate influence in subtle but significant ways. This post is about those concerns — not to denigrate the movement, but to explore how it might better live up to its own stated values.

EA and conformity

One of the clearest places where these structural issues show up is in how the movement handles conformity and internal disagreement. Carla Zoe Cremer, a former EA insider, has become an outspoken critic of how EA functions internally. Back in 2020, she warned about “value-alignment”, her term for extreme intellectual conformity within EA:

value-alignment means to agree on a fundamental level. It means to agree with the most broadly accepted values, methodologies, axioms, diet, donation schemes, memes and prioritisations of EA.

Her concerns deepened in 2021, when she co-authored a peer-reviewed paper with Luke Kemp on existential risk studies — one of EA’s flagship cause areas. The paper argued for more diverse voices and warned that the field had become overly “techno-utopian” and was in need of democratic reform.

The reception was… rough. According to her:

It has been the most emotionally draining paper we have ever written. We lost sleep, time, friends, collaborators, and mentors because we disagreed on: whether this work should be published, whether potential EA funders would decide against funding us and the institutions we're affiliated with, and whether the authors whose work we critique would be upset.

While many in the community responded constructively, others reportedly sought to suppress the paper — not on academic grounds, but out of fear that it might alienate funders.1 The clear implication here is that critique is encouraged, as long as it doesn’t threaten the financial or ideological foundations of the movement. In response, Cremer laid out a series of concrete reforms to tackle this problem:

diversify funding sources by breaking up big funding bodies and by reducing each orgs’ reliance on EA funding and tech billionaire funding, it needs to produce academically credible work, set up whistle-blower protection, actively fund critical work, allow for bottom-up control over how funding is distributed, diversify academic fields represented in EA, make the leaders' forum and funding decisions transparent, stop glorifying individual thought-leaders, stop classifying everything as info hazards...amongst other structural changes.

She reached out to MacAskill and other high profile Effective Altruists (EAs) with these concerns. While they acknowledged the issues, Cremer didn’t think talking to them achieved much:

I was entirely unsuccessful in inspiring EAs to implement any of my suggestions. EAs patted themselves on the back for running an essay competition on critiques against EA, left 253 comments on my and Luke Kemp’s paper, and kept everything that actually could have made a difference just as it was.

EA and criticism

This story might surprise you if you’ve heard that EA is great at receiving criticisms. I think this reputation is partially earned, since the EA community does indeed engage with a large number of them. The EA Forum, for example, has given “Criticism of effective altruism” its own tag. At the moment of writing, this tag has 490 posts on it. Not bad.

Not only does EA allow criticisms, it sometimes monetarily rewards them. In 2022 there was the EA criticism contest, where people could send in their criticisms of EA and the best ones would receive prize money. A total of $120,000 was awarded to 31 of the contest’s 341 entries. At first glance, this seems like strong evidence that EA rewards critiques, but things become a little bit more complicated when we look at who the winners and losers were.

At the time, several voices — myself included — raised concerns about EA’s increasing dependence on billionaire donors, especially crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried. FTX, his company, was bankrolling much of the EA movement at the time.
There was skepticism of crypto, yes — but the deeper concern was about how much influence was being concentrated in the hands of the ultra-wealthy.

Those critiques didn’t win the contest. Instead, winning entries focused on comparatively minor problems within the movement. And then, just weeks later, FTX collapsed and Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested for fraud. Whoops!

So it seems like EA encourages criticisms, but mostly of a certain kind. Critiques that question technical assumptions or offer marginal suggestions are welcomed — even rewarded. But those that challenge the movement’s power structures, funding models, or social norms? Those are more often ignored, sidelined, or quietly punished.

Consider the 2022 contest again. Four of the winners chose to remain anonymous. One went even further, requesting that the entry be hidden from public view entirely. As Cremer put it a year before the contest:

If you believe EA is epistemically healthy, you must ask yourself why your fellow members are unwilling to express criticism publicly

She’s not alone. In 2023, a group writing under the name ‘ConcernedEAs’ published the now-infamous essay “Doing EA Better”. This essay critiqued the power structures in EA, and subsequently made both the “top 10 most valuable posts of 2023” and “the top 10 most underrated posts of 2023” on the EA forum. The authors explained their anonymity bluntly:

Experience indicates that it is likely many EAs will agree with significant proportions of what we say, but have not said as much publicly due to the significant risk doing so would pose to their careers, access to EA spaces, and likelihood of ever getting funded again. Naturally the above considerations also apply to us: we are anonymous for a reason.

And no, despite what people think, I wasn’t one of the authors. I’ve published basically all my criticisms of EA under my real name. For what it’s worth, I’ve never gotten any money from any EA,2 or gotten invited to give a talk,3 or anything similar,4 despite being heavily involved with EA for half a decade.5 In hindsight, I probably should’ve posted anonymously too.6

EA and centralization

Concerns about centralization in Effective Altruism aren’t new. Back in 2020, Cremer already warned that EA had quietly become a hierarchical ecosystem dominated by a small set of tightly interlinked institutions. In her words:

EA is hierarchically organised via central institutions. They donate funds, coordinate local groups, outline research agenda, prioritise cause areas and give donation advice. These include the Centre for Effective Altruism, Open Philanthropy Project, Future of Humanity Institute, Future of Life Institute, Giving What We Can, 80.000 Hours, the Effective Altruism Foundation and others. Earning a job at these institutions comes with earning a higher reputation. [...]

I’m not aware of data about job traffic in EA, but it would be useful both for understanding the situation and to spot conflicts of interest. Naturally, EA organisations will tend towards intellectual homogeneity if the same people move in-between institutions.

Since then, things haven’t improved much. In 2023, the Future of Humanity Institute was shut down by Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy. No official reason was given, but the move followed a major public scandal involving FHI’s director, Nick Bostrom. It’s probably fair to assume Oxford just didn’t want to be associated with FHI anymore.

Meanwhile, several prominent EA orgs — including the Center for Effective Altruism, Giving What We Can, and 80.000 Hours — were brought under a new umbrella organization called “Effective Ventures”, which isn’t a great name if you want to avoid the impression that it’s all run by big funders. Maybe that’s partially why they decided to spin off the latter two again.

Job mobility data across these organizations is still unavailable, but a quick scan of LinkedIn seems to show what many insiders already suspect: EA is basically operating as a closed network. EAs often rotate between the same set of institutions, with reputational capital flowing through a handful of elite hubs in the US and UK. Take, for example, where EAs move to:

Despite EA’s claim to be a global movement, much of its leadership, funding, and research continues to originate from the US and the UK. And more specifically, a small number of cities, including London, Oxford, San Francisco, and Boston.

While this is slowly improving, the imbalance remains striking:

These charts don’t just illustrate where people work or move. They hint at where decisions are made, who has access to influence, and which perspectives are structurally overrepresented. In a movement that aspires to global impact, this kind of centralization isn’t just a practical concern — it’s an epistemic one.

EA and democracy

Effective Altruism presents itself as a pro-democracy, globally-minded movement for empowering the most amount of people. In practice, much of its influence rests in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy donors — most notably those from Silicon Valley.

Take Open Philanthropy, co-founded by Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz. In 2022 alone, it donated $350 million to GiveWell-recommended charities — covering 58% of their total funding. The EA organization 80,000 Hours has received over £20 million from Open Phil, making up nearly two-thirds of its budget. They’ve also given millions to the Effective Altruism Fund, the Center for Effective Altruism, and to the Effective Altruism Foundation.
And that’s just Open Philanthropy, there are other big donors too.7

While there have been incremental efforts to diversify funding sources, the reality is that EA remains deeply reliant on a handful of individuals whose fortunes were made through systems of capital accumulation — systems that many of EA’s core institutions are hesitant to critique. As philosopher David Thorstad writes:

If there is one thing that wealthy philanthropists almost never do, it is to challenge the institutions that create and sustain their wealth. This is not to say that philanthropists are driven primarily by selfish motives, but rather that even the best of us find it hard to conclude that the institutions which created and sustained our wealth could be bad.

This reluctance becomes especially problematic when those very institutions — tech monopolies, deregulated markets, investor-driven innovation — are key contributors to the very problems EA claims to solve.
Thorstad continues:

In an age of rapid and devastating climate change, Silicon Valley is becoming an increasingly large contributor to global emissions. Most of the wealthiest contributors to effective altruist causes have been quite hesitant to take steps to address climate change, despite their own contributions to the problem.

More broadly, I think that the difficulty which philanthropists have in critiquing the systems that create and sustain them may explain much of the difficulty in conversations around what is often called the institutional critique of effective altruism.

This “institutional critique of EA” is the idea that EAs too often focus on alleviating symptoms rather than challenging the systems that produce harm in the first place.8 There’s a hesitancy to step into the realm of the political, perhaps because doing so would risk alienating the very donors who fund the movement.

And it’s not just a matter of self-censorship. Funding biases people towards the position of the funders — yes, even intelligent researchers.9 It’s rarely about outright bribery, it’s about distorting the beliefs themselves.10 As Upton Sinclair once put it:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

This is precisely why so many people — myself included — have called for democratizing EA institutions. Ideas have ranged from participatory funding, to mutual aid structures, and of course, I’ve always advocated for turning EA organizations into worker cooperatives. However, whenever I’ve suggested this I’ve always gotten strong pushback from the EA community.

To this day, none of the central effective altruists organization are organized democratically.

EA and voting power

The Effective Altruism Forum doesn’t use “likes” or “hearts”, it uses “votes”. Posts and comments with more votes appear higher, and those with fewer votes sink — a common feature in many online platforms. But here’s the twist: on the EA Forum, your voting power scales with your reputation, quantified as “karma” (the number of “votes” you have received).

At first, this might seem like a clever way to reward quality contributions. New users start with modest influence, namely ±2 points per vote11. But as others upvote your content, your karma increases, and so does your power. At 1,000 karma, you can cast ±6 votes. At 10,000 karma, you can apply nine votes at once. The theoretical cap? Sixteen!

Some might say that this is meritocratic: the most respected contributors get the most influence. In reality, it creates a feedback loop of reputational inequality. Popular users accumulate more power, which they can use to further amplify allies, bury dissent, and shape what others see, or don’t see.

That influence is invisible but immense. For instance, once a comment drops below –5, it’s hidden behind a “click to view” barrier and pushed to the bottom of the thread. On top of that, once your comment gets negative karma, it’s deleted from the frontpage.
A few downvotes — especially from high-karma users — can effectively hide a perspective from public visibility. And because the forum doesn’t display how much each vote changes a score, observers can’t tell whether a –10 represents broad community disagreement or a few power users disagreeing with you. The effect is the same: disappearance.

In theory, this design helps surface high-quality content and suppress spam. In reality, it fosters a subtle but persistent form of soft censorship.

• Dissenting views vanish before gaining traction.

• Authors self-censor for fear of reputational loss.

• Karma becomes not just a signal of contribution, but a gatekeeping mechanism.

And this system has only become more prominent over time.
It used to be that when you hovered over a user it showed you their contributions: wiki edits, comments, sequences… but not karma. Today, most of these are gone and karma has taken their place: with a bigger font, with more color weight, and shown before any other metric. Even the subtle UI changes reinforce the message: karma is who you are here. There’s even a new icon that flags users with low karma, nudging readers to take their posts and comments less seriously.12

This isn’t just a technical issue. This is a design philosophy — one that rewards orthodoxy, punishes dissent, and enforces existing hierarchies. You can downvote someone into silence. You can upvote someone into authority. And over time, that shapes the information landscape.13

The EA Forum is the movement’s central discussion space. Its architecture shapes what ideas emerge, which critiques survive, and who gets heard.14 As long as voting power remains unequally distributed, opaque, and weaponizable, intellectual pluralism will remain an illusion.

Conclusion

Effective Altruism began with a bold goal: to use reason and evidence to help others as effectively as possible. But the way the movement has grown — structurally, culturally, and financially — risks undermining that very mission.

Today, a small group of donors and institutions hold outsized influence over what counts as “effective”, who gets funded, and which ideas gain traction. Criticism is welcomed in theory but often filtered in practice — especially when it challenges core power dynamics. Systems like the karma-based voting structure reward reputational conformity and make it easy to suppress dissent without ever having to engage it.

If EA wants to improve its impact, it must also improve its internal structures. That means more democratic governance, more funding independence, and more systems designed for power sharing.

The question isn’t just how much good we can do, but also who gets to decide what good looks like.

A huge thanks to Maxim Vandaele for helping with this post. All opinions and mistakes are my own.

14

Things have slightly improved since the splitting up of “votes” and “agreement votes” but it’s still not great. Worse, anytime you suggest the system should change, people with a lot of voting power downvote you. I’ve made this obvious mistake.
Since we aren’t allowed see the distribution I actually decided to document it for a while to see it for myself. When the suggestion had three votes it had positive agreement karma, but when I returned at five votes it had negative:

Here’s how the karma evolved:

Observe that the downvotes contain a lot more voting weight than the upvotes. It seems like people with more voting power use that power to make sure they don't lose it. The system protects itself.

Now I really like economics and I love economic analyses, but I think it’s very surprising how little presence the other social sciences have. The Social science tag only has 27 posts and there is no tag for sociology, anthropology, gender studies, geography, political science, or many other social sciences.

When you look at the People page of the EA forum, you’ll find lots of economists (and entrepreneurs) but almost no other social scientists. You will also notice that the vast majority of the people on this page are white men. This has been this way for a long time; this is what the page looked like a year ago:

I myself removed Elon Musk and SBF from this page, but don’t worry, this post will focus on the dangers of overrelying on economics, not on overrelying on capitalists (although they are related).

So what might those dangers be, and why is EA so stringent in its use of other disciplines? Well, those things are related too; economics is extremely insular. Other social studies make a lot of attempts to integrate themselves with all the other social sciences. This makes it so that learning about one discipline also teaches you about the other disciplines. Economists, meanwhile, have a tendency to see their discipline as better than the others, starting papers with things like:

Economics is not only a social science, it is a genuine science. Like the physical sciences, economics uses a methodology that produces refutable implications and tests these implications using solid statistical techniques.

In the paper "The Superiority of Economists" by Fourcade et al, economists were found to be the only group that thought interdisciplinary research was worse than research from a singular field:

Furthermore, they looked at top papers from political science, economics and sociology. They found that political science and sociology cited economics papers many times more than the other way around:

This lack of citing other social sciences was later confirmed by Angrist et al:

Given the complex interdisciplinary nature of societal issues, studying the basics of economics might make you overconfident that you can solve societal problems.
Take, for example, supply and demand. The standard supply and demand model will tell you that having/increasing the minimum wage will automatically increase unemployment. But if we look at actual empirical evidence it shows us that it doesn't. Overrelying on simple economic models might mislead us about which policies will actually help people, while a more holistic look at the social sciences as a whole may counter that.

Furthermore, by focusing our recruitment on only a couple disciplines, we inherit the demographic problems of those disciplines. It is no wonder then that, just like the EA community, economics is also very homogeneous. Only 29% of the EA community are women:

While 76% are white:

Bayer and Rouse show us that minorities are given fewer degrees in economics than other disciplines:

As are women:

They also get only 13.7% of the authorship of economics papers, are less likely to get tenure in their first academic job compared to men, and face a lot of discrimination in general. An AEA survey found that half of women say they were treated unfairly because of their sex and almost half say they've avoided conferences/seminars out of fear of harassment.
If we look at the other two popular disciplines in EA, philosophy and computer science, we’ll see that they have similar issues with underrepresentation and discrimination.

If we want to avoid these issues, I suggest we start reading and recruiting more from other disciplines too.