Fresh-faced William MacAskill occupies page 3 of The Times newspaper today, Saturday, October 8, 2022. And I’m pleased. He is an associate Prof at Oxford and the founder of the effective altruism (EA) movement. He became the youngest associate Prof of philosophy in the world when he was 28. He has caught the eye of Elon Musk with whom he has exchanged text messages. Musk said: “This is a close match for my philosophy”. He was referring to MacAskill’s new book, What We Owe the Future.
MacAskill wants us and the superrich to think of the future. He believes in ‘longtermism’ and my God, it’s about time somebody in authority or whose voice can be heard promotes the concept of longtermism because it is so desperately needed in this world which almost completely operates under the philosophy of short-termism which is partly why we’re in such a mess. “Short-termism” is mortgaging the future to the detriment of today’s children in my view. It is immoral, actually, and it is time that today’s adults took a hit and lived more frugally in order to, for example, reduce national debt as a percentage of GDP.
I am pessimistic but Mr MacAskill is generally optimistic about the future. He’s a half full person and said “I’ve got to say it’s half full. I think the future is going to be good, on balance. I think more likely than not things will actually keep getting better.”
He wants 10% of billionaires’ income funnelled towards pandemic preparedness and bringing an end to factory farming. In fact, he wants billionaires to give away all their money and he wants them to be vegetarians. He believes that people should be vegetarians but not necessarily vegans as veganism only brings a negligible extra impact on carbon emissions or animal welfare over vegetarianism.
He also believes that cancer research is not the best way to spend money because benefits from curing the disease are “smaller than one might think”. Comment: in any case, cancer charities are big business, and they don’t want to cure the disease! If they do, it would be the end of their business.
What I like about William MacAskill is that he has the voice and apparently the status, and the powers of persuasion to achieve some real progress in animal welfare by using the wealth of billionaires. It’s about time actually. Billionaires can do a lot with their money and a lot needs to be done on animal welfare.
Arguably, the most animal cruelty on the planet probably takes place in factory farming and therefore to target it as MacAskill appears to have done will produce the most benefit in terms of improvements in animal welfare.
MacAskill’s first book, Doing Good Better, brought him to the public’s attention but after Musk tweeted about MacAskill’s philosophy being in line with his, his audience expanded dramatically. Musk has 107 million followers.
When you bring philosophy, philanthropy and billionaires together it is a heady combination. Why has it taken so long for billionaires to start thinking about giving their money away to improve animal welfare?
MacAskill has used his powers of persuasion to convince some billionaires to walk the walk. For example, he convinced the Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskowitz, with a net worth of $13.8 billion, to give away his fortune to the EA movement with nearly $1 billion in grants pledged through Open Philanthropy over the past two years.
MacAskill said:
“I see a major path to impact is convincing rich people to give away most of their wealth, or ideally all of their wealth”.
He warned Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first Minister, over dinner, to prepare for a global pandemic. That was in 2017! At that time people were laughing about global pandemics. It was too theoretical but then suddenly it became actual and a horrible reality.
MacAskill also believes that not enough people were paying attention to the possibility of nuclear war. They are now thanks to Putin. And he also believes that humankind should be very cautious about artificial intelligence and the possibility of robots dominating humankind in the future.
Update: when it went all wrong
MacAskill spoke with Bankman-Fried who was a US crypto-trader once worth $24 billion. His crypto currency business was called FT X. You may have heard about it. It’s gone bankrupt because allegedly Sam Bankman-Fried stole clients’ money. He basically screwed up (no he stole allegedly) and he admits it. He fried his bank (get the pun?)
But MacAskill convinced Bankman-Fried to give away his money under the Effective Altruism Movement.
And he gave away a lot of money. However, because of his business is bankrupt there is no money available, and the news headline is that his cryptocurrency firm’s collapse could cost UK charities £35 million.
At one stage MacAskill said that Bankman-Fried would be the world’s biggest philanthropist and he had intended to give away all his money which has all disappeared!
Bankman-Fried set up a charitable foundation which had allegedly given away $140 million. Among those donations were grants to British charities linked to Oxford: $15 million to Longview philanthropy and $13.94 million to the Centre for Effective Altruism, which recently bought Wytham Abbey, an Estate near Oxford.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink accused of abusing monkeys in animal testing experiments
