Effective altruism and Donald Trump - the case against
A myopic viewpoint from a myopic methodology
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Donald Trump has been having something of a moment in Silicon Valley, gaining endorsements and donations from several high-profile figures. In truth, these figures are still the exception rather than the rule, and there’s little sign that the overall culture of the tech industry is shifting in a pro-Trump direction. People like PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have long been in the tank for Trump, but they’ve been joined recently by a few other figures like David Sacks and the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
What I find interesting about this clique of Trump backers is that their politics is so familiar. “Rich guy who wants lower taxes and engages in reactionary cultural politics to get the masses to support them” is a long-standing archetype in American politics. It shouldn’t really surprise us to find this type of politics in any large concentration of wealth, and only the intense liberalism of the Bay Area and the extreme repulsiveness of the current incarnation of the Republican Party prevents it from being more widespread.
What I haven’t seen much of, though, is an attempt to intellectualize this shift. Sure, I’ve read plenty of arguments about how raising capital gains tax will inevitably lead to Communism, or how importing too many brown people will doom American civilization. The former come from earnestly-written articles, and the latter from the comment sections beneath them. But again, this is a deeply familiar pattern.
That’s why I read with interest a recent post on
’s newsletter Second Best which makes “The effective altruist case for Trump 2024”. Effective altruism is a methodology for “doing good” which advocates a cluster of ideas, including impartially weighing up pros and cons, paying attention to the number of people affected by any given bit of do-gooding, and keeping in mind the ways in which the unborn may be affected by our actions. Its advocates say that we should try to seek out fairly easy interventions which will affect large numbers of people and increase their quality of life, for instance by reducing disease and lengthening life spans.Effective altruism is very popular in the tech industry, so I was intrigued to see an attempt to do what few other people seemed to be doing - making a Silicon Valley-adjacent case for Trump from an intellectual standpoint. (I should note that I don’t know Hammond, and Hammond seems to not identify as an effective altruist exactly, so nothing in this post is personal - it’s about the ideas in the post. Whether they represent Hammond’s actual views or a thought experiment, I’m not quite sure. Nor does Hammond’s cold economic analysis necessarily reflect all effective altruist thought, and so not all of these arguments are transferable). Below I’ll summarize the argument, although I encourage you to read the entire thing, as obviously any summary is reductive:
Trump would allow the pharmaceutical industry to make larger profits and operate with less regulation, hence more drugs would be discovered;
Trump would possibly make some smart reforms to Medicare to improve treatment, as his administration did for kidney disease in his first term;
Trump would cut corporate taxes, which is good for innovation, GDP and productivity. He may also make a particular tax change related to R&D which would be good for the tech industry;
Vance would be a “pro-technology” VP and also one who would push “natalism” (the idea that the birth rate is unacceptably low and American women should have more babies);
Because he is so virulently anti-immigrant, only Trump would be able to “fix” America’s immigration system, under “Nixon goes to China” logic;
The next president may be in office when a superintelligent AI comes online and starts transforming the world, and Trump would deal with that better because his ideology is more suited to it.
Needless to say, I have some pretty big problems with all of this.
What to value?
My problems begin with what this list leaves out, and what that says in turn about what it values. It effectively reduces any debate over what the “good” is for America to taxes, regulation and what’s good for the tech industry.1 Insofar as there is any direct reflection on how everyday Americans actually experience their lives now or in the future, it is reduced to the idea that medical innovation is good and that continued technology-driven growth will produce other unspecified goods.
A skeptic looking at this list might have some questions about the other things that Trump has done or has promised to do, and whether these have any bearing on the “good”. For instance, they might point to mass deportation, cuts to the welfare state, cultural and political polarization, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, 10% tariffs, corruption, mainstreaming racism, sexual assault and misogyny, attempts to end democracy, driving high inflation, trying to end childhood vaccinations, politicization of the justice system and targeting political enemies, radicalization of the judiciary, and the polarization of every single issue around its impact on the personage of Donald Trump.
Some of these relate to economic issues which are strangely left out of Hammond’s analysis. Are blanket 10% tariffs really good for productivity, innovation, and growth? No, they are not. But the narrow materialist focus is itself also a problem. Hammond’s list - with is near-exclusive focus on economic issues - seems to be exactly what I would expect from any generic pro-business Republican and to ignore all other areas of life.
Now, don’t get me wrong - economics is a very important part of running a country, and I am in favor of an appropriately-regulated capitalism. I like growth, productivity, and technology. But I also don’t think they’re the only things that matter.
Take medical innovation. It’s a good thing! And if there are policies that, all other things considered, will lead to new drug discovery, count me in. But how exactly are we calculating trade-offs here? How do we weigh the emotional benefits brought about by a better dementia drug against the emotional pain and psychological trauma experienced by several million sons and daughters as their parents and grandparents are herded into deportation camps? Does it count for nothing that my daughter might have to grow up seeing a rapist in the Oval Office and being told by the Vice President that she ought to be ashamed for not having more babies? Are these somehow mere examples of “blame, just deserts, personal character, and other ethical or aesthetic variables” which we are told ought to have no place in our “cold analysis of means and ends” and are somehow irrelevant to human flourishing?
Strangely blind to politics
Another issue that I have with this piece is that it is strangely blind to politics.
Take the discussion of Vance. There is, quite simply, little reason to believe that Vance will influence anything that happens in a future Trump administration. This is inherent in the nature of the American vice presidency, but it’s even more inherent in the personage of Donald Trump. Trump has never accepted a strong policy steer from anyone nor stuck consistently to actually implementing any ideological program beyond immigration restrictionism and pro-business tax/regulatory policies. It’s one reason he burns through advisors so quickly. Mike Pence was a person of singular unimportance in the last Trump administration, which ended with Trump egging on a mob which was trying to hang him. Trump might not try to hang Vance, but there’s little reason to think that he will be any more powerful - particularly as he proves to be politically toxic and Trump is reduced to promising that he will have “virtually no impact” on the outcome of the election.
Then there’s the post’s discussion of immigration. The bulk of the argument here fits in neatly with the “generic rich guy” framing. Trump, Hammond argues, would be good for skilled immigration, which he supposedly likes, which would be good for (you guessed it) the tech industry. I actually don’t think there’s much reason to think this is true - Trump cut skilled immigration drastically in his first term, and there’s a general pattern whereby right-wing politicians fail to control illegal immigration and so cut down on legal immigration, which they can control.
But much bolder is Hammond’s claim that only Trump can “fix America’s broken immigration system”, because only he as a virulently anti-immigrant politician will have the clout with the right wing to make them support necessary changes. Given that Trump personally killed the most substantive immigration reform which has come close to passing Congress in decades earlier this year, this requires quite some suspension of disbelief. It also requires ignoring the fact that immigration has always been for Trump not a problem to be solved, but the most important source of his political power. His focus in his first term on “the wall” prioritized symbolism over concrete results, because everything in his career tells us that it’s the symbolism that really matters to him.
But let’s ignore that, and take seriously for a second the ideas that Trump has floated to “fix America’s broken immigration system” in his second term. Most notable, of course, is his call to use the military to rip families apart, crowd the unfortunate detainees into deportation camps, and then ship them back to countries that some of them have not visited in decades or, in many cases, may not even remember ever having been in. Put aside for the moment the issue of what precise value of “good” or “utility” we ought to place on this, and consider its impact on political and cultural polarization around the issue of immigration. Politics requires a majority in the House and two-thirds of the Senate to pass a major immigration reform. That will require the votes of Democrats and moderate Republicans. Is Trump going to be the one to get them?
The democracy deficit
The final area I want to focus on is Hammond’s piece’s strange disregard for democracy and the rule of law.
I am a great believer in the fact that democracy, liberty, and the rule of law are what makes America great. America has been poor and America has been rich, America has been at war and at peace, and America has engaged in both great acts of moral courage and great acts of moral cowardice. But so long as it possessed this trifecta of good things, it could eventually muddle through. It could find its way back to prosperity, peace, and courage. It could also stay stronger and more nimble than its authoritarian enemies, whose systems are inflexible, personalistic and corrupt.
One of the most profound problems that Trump poses to the United States is that he takes aim at this trifecta. He admires dictators, engages in personal corruption, and is so intensely personalistic that he is willing to destroy democracy, the rule of law and liberty in pursuit of the most base of personal ends. He does it in matters high and low. This isn’t just about January 6th and the attempt to use lawfare to overturn the 2020 election result, as obviously disqualifying as that was. It’s also about mundane things. Like the fact that his position on key policy questions is openly for sale. Like the fact that he proposes sets of policies, like tariffs, which are rife with opportunities for corruption.
It’s hard for me to accept that even in some “cold analysis of [economic] means and ends”, the United States would be better off if it was no longer a democracy, or no longer had the rule of law, or no longer had numerous personal liberties. A United States ruled by a personalistic authoritarian figure would be one in which markets rose and fell based on personal whims and unmarked bags of graft money. It would be one in which the delicate dance of regulation, law, and interest groups didn’t just produce temporary perverse outcomes which could be overturned after the next election, but fundamentally ended. It would also be one inappropriate to advance human flourishing, whatever the profit margin or R&D budget of pharmaceutical companies was.
In fact, you might say it would be neither effective, nor altruistic.
P.S. I have much more I could say here - I’ve barely touched on abortion, foreign policy or the environment, for instance - but this is already one of my longest posts. Subscribe and let me know if you’re interested in me continuing the discussion in a future post.
I’m not going to discuss the possibility of the emergence of super-intelligence in this post, because I think any rational analysis places the chances of this happening before 2028 as extremely low. But it ought to be clear from the post that I’m extremely skeptical of the idea that Trump would be the best person to handle this.