The Good "The Good It Promises And The Harm It Does" Promises And The Harm It Does

"I realized that judging the effectiveness of my work based on a “return on investment” model was, at its core, based on a white-centric view of activism."

This is not a book review. This is a first three chapters review.

Gavin Newsom described, during the first Trump Biden debate, trying to write down every time Trump told a lie. He said he quickly ran out of paper.

I had a similar experience reading The Good It Promises And The Harm It Does.

I only got about three chapters in before I had to stop, for such a vast mount of bullshit had accumulated that addressing it all would take a much longer review (Richard provided such a review on his blog and it’s excellent). Like in a Trump speech, pettiness and wholesale indifference to truth was on quite prominent display. As Richard devastatingly notes, in a book ostensibly designed towards making the case that EA is a force for bad, the benefits of EA are never considered—the word tradeoff is never used.

Reading this book was quite a dispiriting experience. It’s touted by many critics of effective altruism as a deeply serious work—an incisive critique of effective altruism. However, when reading it, one finds such a staggering quantity of bullshit that it’s hard to know where to begin. Every new page has something false or confused or misleading; the book does not meet basic academic standards like “don’t grossly misrepresent those you are critiquing,” and “don’t call the people you don’t like names.” One will find more intellectual merit in a Rush Limbaugh radio screed or a Trump speech than in this book.

Now, it’s one thing to write a bad book. Plenty of people write bad books. A sizeable segment of academia seems to be devoted to churning out hundreds of pages of elaborate ways of saying nothing. But what’s so putrid about this book is that its sole function is to smear those who have prevented hundreds of millions of chickens from languishing in tiny cages and caused hundreds of thousands fewer children to be killed by malaria. If one is going to write an incoherent screed, they should not do it with the intent of discouraging people from donating effectively. When kids are dying preventable deaths, the target of your ire shouldn’t be the movement that made hundreds of thousands fewer kids die preventable deaths. It would be as if one wrote a book with the sole aim of smearing the aid workers providing food to starving Gazan children.

The book is written in the strange social justice speak that seeped into the broader consciousness around 2020. It was reminiscent of the sorts of things woke high school debaters with minimal familiarity with effective altruism said about EA. Reading it is, in some way, a blast from the past: one gets to reread people saying egregiously stupid things in poorly-written inane woke-speak. For instance, on the first page of the book, one comes across the following powerful line:

"I realized that judging the effectiveness of my work based on a “return on investment” model was, at its core, based on a white-centric view of activism."

Got it? If you think that when doing good, one should look carefully at the amount of good done, that’s a “white-centric view of activism.” An optimist might hope for such a charge being justified—for the author to give reasons why one might agree with their spurious charge, other than the mere fact that they assert it. Such a person would be left disappointed.