Perhaps we’ll never know why New York Times columnist Peter Coy decided that last week was the time to muse about the glories of Effective Altruism, a philosophy of hyper-rational, super-long-term-oriented charitable giving that has become especially popular in Silicon Valley. Perhaps he was planning to file the piece a few months ago, but then had to hold his column after the nation’s most prominent backer of Effective Altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced to jail for financial fraud after his crypto empire collapsed.

Regardless of the reason, Coy took precious space in the nation’s newspaper of record to reflect with a high degree of sympathy on the logic these extremely wealthy self-appointed defenders of humanity use when disposing of their excess cash. The title of the column gives away his perspective: “Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative?” In fact, the piece never even indulges in a discussion of the alternative, because said alternative is unthinkable to the egomaniacal heroes of this story, and apparently also to a columnist who spends far too much time sympathizing with them. To the rest of us, that alternative is pretty obvious: instead of rich people coming up with algorithms to determine which lives are worth helping in which locations, they could pay their @#$#$%! taxes, and we could as a public, democratically decide on our human priorities. But somehow, the word “tax” never appears in this piece about how rich people want to spend their money to feel like heroes. (Nor, ironically, does the word “alternative” appear outside of the title.) 

Make it make sense.

A lot of the time, media coverage of what’s “good for business” seems to derive primarily from the vibes of CEOs. And of course, CEOs are always very certain that public policies which make them feel richer and more appreciated are good for business, while policies which cost them anything in time, money, or self-regard are bad for business.

But the reality looks quite different, largely because most businesses aren’t giant enterprises, and most business owners don’t imagine themselves to be kings of the world — we just don’t hear that much from early-stage entrepreneurs. So a look at the numbers is helpful, and as the graph below of new business formations each month shows, dramatically more people have been starting businesses over the past few years. (Pro-tip: the orange “high-propensity” applications on the graph are those new businesses considered highly likely to hire employees, rather than simply being individual self-employed people.) In fact, the rate of new business formations is a remarkable 90% higher than pre-pandemic averages, with a particularly strong increase in the number of new Black-owned businesses. In other words: President Biden’s middle-out economic policies are good for business, good for jobs, and good for economic growth.

There’s no shortage of people out there talking up the looming power of AI to eliminate millions of jobs — but there’s not nearly enough assessments of the past predictions of tech boosters. And particularly not enough people asking if these predictions are actually about the power of technology… or actually more about finding new ways to devalue certain groups of human workers and erode their bargaining power by declaring that they will inevitably be replaced by machines.

So, some follow-up is instructive. For years, McDonald’s has been promoting their embrace of AI, announcing back in 2019 that they were deploying an AI capable of “voice-based… complex, multilingual, multi-accent, and multi-item conversational ordering,” which they would shortly roll out to more than 10,000 locations. When the system was first deployed in 2021, the company itself admitted it got things wrong 15% of the time, and they never even rolled it out at more than a couple hundred stores. And now, a few years later, McDonald’s has announced they’re killing the program altogether after numerous ridiculous malfunctions. Perhaps low-status service jobs are tougher than the tech boosters think — and maybe the random hype cycles produced by tech writers can actually more easily be replaced by ChatGPT than actual productive jobs can.

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