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Earn to Give and the Ethics of Mediocrity - David Z. Morris
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Mixed(2)Mixed quality. Some useful content but inconsistent editorial standards. Claims should be verified.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Substack
Published after the FTX collapse, this piece offers a critical outside perspective on EA's 'Earn to Give' philosophy and its role in enabling SBF's actions, relevant to discussions of AI safety community governance and incentive structures.
Metadata
Importance: 42/100opinion piececommentary
Summary
Morris critiques EA's 'Earn to Give' strategy as ethically flawed, arguing it enabled Sam Bankman-Fried's rise by providing moral cover for accumulating personal wealth and power under the guise of altruism. He contends that EA's emphasis on quantification and measurability created a framework where financial accumulation could be rationalized as maximizing human benefit, with disastrous results in the FTX collapse.
Key Points
- •EA's 'Earn to Give' philosophy encourages talented people to pursue high-earning finance careers and donate wealth, rather than pursuing direct service roles.
- •Will MacAskill's promotion of this strategy appealed to Bankman-Fried's utilitarian upbringing and gave him both moral authority and financial ambition simultaneously.
- •SBF funneled stolen FTX customer funds back into EA organizations, creating a circular moral laundering dynamic enabled by EA's framework.
- •EA's focus on measurability and quantification made accumulating personal power appear justified as an optimization strategy for human benefit.
- •Morris argues the strategy is inherently prone to perverse outcomes by treating wealth accumulation as a morally neutral or positive instrument.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Earning to Give: The EA Strategy and Its Limits | -- | 63.0 |
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“Earn to Give” and the Ethics of Mediocrity (The Future as an Emergency, Pt. 2)
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David Z. Morris May 04, 2025 4 2 3 Share 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
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