Soon after, MacAskill co-founded 80,000 Hours, an effective altruism non-profit that conducts research on which careers have the largest positive social impact. It advocates for ‘earning to give’, the philosophy in which people purposely choose careers with higher earning potential in order to maximise charitable giving.
“When thinking of how to make the world a better place, many people may choose to work for a charity or in political activism,” says Joshua Hobbs, lecturer and consultant in applied ethics at the University of Leeds, UK. “However, many effective altruists believe that rather than slog away in a soup kitchen, you can create a greater impact by working in say, investment banking, earn higher wages and donate greater sums to charity.”
This approach stuck with a young, enterprising Bankman-Fried, who met MacAskill in 2013 while he was still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MacAskill reportedly convinced the prodigious mathematician to maximise his impact by taking a high-paying finance job and giving his money away.
Bankman-Fried did. After graduating with a physics degree, he joined Wall Street high-frequency trading firm Jane Street Capital and began donating half his estimated $300,000 salary to charitable causes that included animal welfare organisations. In 2019, Bankman-Fried founded FTX, which quickly became one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. As the company’s value climbed into the billions, its charity arm committed more than $160m to at least 110 non-profits by September 2022, including biotech start-ups, Covid-19 vaccine research and effective altruist-affiliated groups.
‘A good PR win’
Bankman-Fried isn’t the only tech billionaire who has backed effective altruism, whether financially or philosophically: Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is part of the community, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to effective charities. Hobbs says the movement is a natural partner for Silicon Valley, given its long had a philanthropic streak – notably the Gates Foundation, which has self-reported charitable donations of more than $79bn (£64.7bn) since 2000.
“Effective altruism focuses on utility – maximising earning potential and giving huge sums away – and tech is the sphere of smart graduates who can genuinely earn boundless incomes,” adds Hobbs. “For tech billionaires, effective altruism is a good PR win: it’s a philosophy that says very smart, wealthy individuals are best placed to work out how their money is best spent, rather than radically redistributing their funds through progressive taxation.”
Hobbs says EA’s popularity in the tech industry can sometimes further billionaires’ individual interests instead of the greater good. “The most high-profile effective altruists tend to be reasonably privileged white men, who aren’t necessarily funnelling funds into political change or addressing power imbalances. It’s not necessarily an accident that the effective-altruist approach has appealed to people like Bankman-Fried.”
