Reid Hoffman, the founder of Linkedin, recently reviewed Will's book, Doing Good Better.
Overall, it was very positive. One difference, however, was that he thinks we should continue to give some portion of our resources locally rather than internationally, and he justifies this on the basis of having a greater long-run impact. I hadn't seen this argument made by someone who agrees with so much of effective altruism before (normally those in favor of local giving reject the idea that we should maximise our social impact at all, or seem to have misunderstood effective altruism). I'm not convinced, but I think we should take the argument seriously:
But we're also members of local communities, and we have a moral obligation to support philanthropic efforts in those communities too, even if they don't leverage our contributions as efficiently as they might somewhere else.
Local participation in philanthropy isn't just a moral obligation though. It also has its own utilitarian component through strong derivative impact. When you donate locally, you function as a tangible role model to others in your community. You help build networks for action. You form partnerships and alliances with other community members, and position philanthropy as a local norm, a tangible part of the culture that has a compounding effect over time by solidifying community ties, facilitating engagement and collaboration, and creating a tradition of mutual support.
See the full article.
Reminds me of this EA critique, which among other things argued that helping the wealthy Western countries the EA movement arose out of is high-impact from a long-run utilitarian perspective. I think there is a good argument in here somewhere. EAs already get the logic of why it makes sense to prioritize helping fellow EAs, e.g. with 80K, skillshare.im, etc. It also seems smart to create more of the sort of fertile soil that the EA movement has grown in (do things that will increase the number of wealthy altruistic critical thinkers in the world).
Concrete example: Let's say the EA movement causes software engineers in Silicon Valley to do less for poor people locally and more for poor people globally. This causes poor people locally to become fed up with Silicon Valley as an industry. Local backlash forces the industry to move elsewhere, destroying the wealth creation engine that was generating the donations in the first place.