When people talk about ineffective altruism, they're generally talking about organizations like the American Heart Association, which spends over half of annual donations on payroll (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135...). I don't think many people in the effective altruist movement would complain about a targeted trust that successfully and reliably achieves some niche goal.
No, but they're too busy to notice stuff like that because they're so focused on trying to prevent a 0.01% chance of human extinction with error bars of +/- 0.01%.
Imagine you have a charitable organization that receives funds and then pays its staff of doctors to provide free treatment to the poor. All of their donations would be spent on payroll and overhead. But this would not demonstrate that the organization is wasteful.
While that's true, the AHA does not perform medical treatments or have an in-house research lab.
If someone's really passionate about putting up healthy living posters and shifting the cost of CPR education from healthcare providers, more power to them! But my guess is that most AHA donors don't know or ask what exactly their donations are accomplishing.
A lot of what the AHA does runs via payroll: advocacy, training, writing guidelines, etc. The implication of "payroll" is that the money is all going to administration, but their programs involve a lot of staff time.
(I have a generally EA view of the world and I don't think the AHA is an especially valuable donation opportunity.)
That's fair. I personally was a bit put out when I discovered this, I had assumed most of the donations were going to research, but advocacy and training have some value and I could believe that other people fully expect that's what the AHA does.
If you want a better understanding of what the AHA spends their money on I'd recommend checking their financial reports.
29% of their expenses go to paying education/training staff and the expenses involved with operating that but about the same amount comes back from their trainings in revenue. And that amount that comes back is actually near equal to all the donations they get.
Another ~31% goes to public health education staff.
~5% goes to operating various community services.
~18% goes to research.
and then overall management is ~8% with fundraising expenses making up the remaining ~9%.
For a group split between running various emergency training and certification programs (ex CPR), general public health awareness and education, advocacy, and research, those are pretty reasonable numbers.
https://www.heart.org/en/about-us/american-heart-association...
https://www.heart.org/en/-/media/Annual-Report/2024-2025-Ann...
When effective altruists talk about ineffective altruism, they talk about AHA. When I talk about ineffective altruism, I talk about things like a targeted trust.
It's the EA people who generalize from AHA to make grand ethical claims that lead to absurdity.
When I talk about ineffective altruism I talk about accumulating capital and shutting everyone out of innovation in the name of regulatory protection. Nothing like a daddy to protect us sounds like altruism.
So.. government?
That too… are they building a government? Because that would be a much more honest name in that case.