Against Charity

Mathew Snow in Jacobin:

Effective Altruists calculate where expendable income is best spent and encourage the relatively affluent to channel their capital accordingly. Among their most highly favored causes are the Against Malaria Foundation (which distributes insecticide-treated bed nets), the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (which works to establish school-based deworming programs), and GiveDirectly (which gives unconditional cash transfers to people in extreme poverty).

Over 17,000 people have pledged to give at least 1 percent of their income annually to such endorsed causes, and over 1,000 have pledged to give at least 10 percent. It is particularly popular among millennials, leading some to laud it as “the new social movement of our generation.”

Although the argument is over forty years old, most of the movement’s growth has taken place in the past half decade, and this year saw the publication of numerous books on the subject — How to Be Great at Doing Good, Doing Good Better, Strangers Drowning, and Singer’s latest, The Most Good You Can Do — along with extensive,positive coverage in popular media.

Not everyone is convinced.

More here.