Young Idealism is Still Not Misguided

The unfortunate truth about the Haiti earthquake is that we can't just throw money at these problems and expect them to get fixed. Aid money went mostly "to bandages," writes Jonathan Katz, author of the new book The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. A friend of mine working as part of the State Department's ongoing effort to rebuild Haitian government tells me that the aid dollars have been in many ways the opposite of helpful. Aid money pays for free food and clothing for the people of Port au Prince. This makes it impossible for Haitians to sell clothing or open restaurants, as the people there have no incentive to pay for what the foreign aid buys them for free. Thus, small businesses fail, local tax revenue drops, and people become increasingly dependent on the foreign aid.

There are a million examples of "throwing money at the problem" being the opposite of helpful. The general consensus - or so I thought - was that what many not-for-profit (NFP) charities need isn't necessarily bigger coffers (though they'd never refuse it), rather what they need are brighter people figuring out how to actually solve problems, and cooperative government entities not impeding their efforts at actual quality change.

Some of you might remember my back and forth with Robin Hanson. His thesis, if I may be so bold as to summarize, was that 'young people' would be better off saving their money and investing it in order to accrue interest and have larger sums later in life than they would to donate smaller sums while they are young. My response was that young people are perfectly suited to participate in NFP work due to their energy and enthusiasm and especially due to the fact that "throwing their lives away" on NFP charity work was low risk...they didn't have a house, a mortgage, two kids in college, a fat 401k, etc. to gamble.
And, ultimately, the idea that we need to wait to be charitable is cynical. I want the world to be a better place now. I don't want to get to work improving it when I'm fat and old and rich.

Enter Will MacAskill (or Will Crouch, not sure what prompted the recent name change). Will contributes at Quartz, which is a spinoff of The Atlantic and he argues that:
1) If you become a banker or investor, you'll make potentially 4 times as much over your lifetime than a schmuck who did something else, like engineering or teaching or plumbing or owning a bakery. You can use all this extra money to finance charities when you are rich and successful.
2) If you go to Wall Street, you can take someone else's job, and because they might have been a greedy bastard but you're altruistic, you'll end up doing better for the world because of 1).
3) If you work at a NFP but need to change jobs, that's tough. But if you're a rich banker making donations, moving your donation stream from one charity to the other based on the charities' efficacy and quality is much easier than changing NFP jobs.

MacAskill's thesis is simply this: if you want to change the world, go become Warren Buffett. Go make huge piles of money through whatever means necessary, then when you're rich you can donate (some of) it and make the world a better place via your increased buying power. This is fundamentally the same argument Hanson made back in November.

The way I see it, there are three problems with the MacAskill/Hanson Theory of Change:
1) The first problem is that the current capitalist system in America is broken. While the bottom 50% of Americans have seen nothing but stagnation and despair the last 40 years, the 1% has seen runaway growth. The whole system has basically become gamed to concentrate ever increasing wealth on a smaller and smaller group of people. The people that are accruing this wealth are using every means necessary to evade the law, evade taxation, and destroy those who want to equalize the playing field.
Until this changes, we live in a world where charity by the rich becomes entrenched because everything of value is owned by them and everyone else is dependent on them. As Andrew Sullivan (surprisingly) put it: "Capitalism destroys the very structure of the society it enriches."

2) It's extremely plausible that the traits required to become the "$500,000/year" Wall street success story are mutually exclusive to the traits of a person who is charitable. Isn't it likely that those with good hearts are combed out of the system by the greedy hucksters that created the system?
It's true in other career fields. The traits that make me a really good engineer would make me a really bad public school teacher. The traits that make a person a great surgeon are typically ones that would make them an absolutely horrid team player. And so it goes. If someone is uniquely suited to concentrating wealth on his or herself, then he or she is probably not going to be very adept at giving money away. And taken to the Nth degree, the better you are at getting rich, the worse you probably are at giving away your riches.
MacAskill seems to think that some altruistic do-gooder could swipe the job of a greedy Wall Street huckster and thereby implant themselves into the capitalist machine (like a wooden shoe). But it seems painfully obvious (forgive my cynicism) that the conniving Puck would be so much better at swiping jobs than the altruist.

3) The idea that investment banking is a viable career path for the next 30 years is hilariously flawed. The idea that everyone can get rich on Wall Street is hilariously naive. Wall Street produces few winners. The idea that wealth can be easily accrued is sadly false. How many thousands of Wall Street types had their jobs disappear in the last recession? How many people had their retirement accounts severely truncated?

People sometimes accuse me of being naive, that my advocacy for young whippersnappers to get out and do good is childish and immature. But I have to say that MacAskill's argument is if anything, immature and half-baked.
MacAskill purports, under the banner of his company "80,000 hours" to provide career guidance to people. If he wants to guide young people to careers in investment and/or banking that is fine. But doing it under the banner of charity and altruism is not...it just isn't helpful at all.

But here's the heart of the matter: everyone is obsessing over how we can each do "the most good" and that is not the question we should be asking. Hanson thinks young people could do the most good by investing and then using later wealth to target charities. MacAskill thinks young people could do the most good by becoming a Wall Street type and making Godzillions of dollars and then donating it as an endgame.
But truly I tell you, the question is not how we can do the most good, but rather how we can simply do good. MacAskill is catering to the incredibly arrogant folks who seem to think that their deeds must be essential in order to have any value. As though the charitable donations of Warren Buffet are to be lauded, but the charitable donations of some Joe Average who tithes 10% are inconsequential.

People need to realize that the measurement of a person's contribution to human progress isn't in the number of commas in their donations, but rather whether throughout the course of their life they participated in individual acts and a larger meta-act that provided a net gain to human progress! If you go join the ranks of Wall Street, leeching and conniving every dollar of profit you can, you may indeed end up donating billions, like Warren Buffet, to charities. And that money will certainly do some good. But in the process, you have aided and abetted a system that crushes the weak, cons the naive, and segregates the unluckily-born so that a fortunate few can amass wealth and power the likes of which humanity has never before seen. You would have been part of the system that is shamelessly destroying our society.
Let's look at another industry. What if MacAskill advised young people to take up corporate farming. A young person, following MacAskill's advice, would farm the bejeezus out of the land, pushing every possible fertilizer and pesticide into it, irrigating where he could, buying up neighboring properties when available. The young person-turned-farmer would amass a huge area of land that was absolutely abused and eventually poor. But by raping and abusing that land for its very last drop of water and soil, the corporate farmer would have amassed a lot of wealth that they could then donate to wildlife restoration charities! Think of the good they could do for damaged wetlands and lost timber!
OR they could go into farming and rotate small sized, highly varied crops. They could work with a local suburban/urban co-op and produce vegetables and a plethora of nutritious foods. They could aggressively reject monoculture. And while their farm might never expand into the tens of thousands of acres, they ultimately would have both succeeded in their small business as well as provided a net good to nature and to the neighboring community.

So please: don't take Will MacAskill's advice. Go work at a NFP. Or become an engineer. Or a teacher. Or a plumber. Open a bakery. Do some good. Give what you can, help others when you can. You might not singlehandedly save the world, but at least after 80,000 hours of working you won't question whether your path was righteous.


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