In honor of Steven Pinker being “offically” full of shit, I am writing a sneerquence sequel to my previous one, we haven’t noticed the skulls.

Following from the last sneerquence, this story will begin closer to the present. As I mentioned earlier, current development schemes are ideologically extensions of the old Improvement ideology. This is based on a few premises, but perhaps most importantly that more goods and services necessarily equals more “wealth” (regardless of the characteristics of said goods and services), so wealth must be increasing over time when you compare today’s goods and services to those in the past. This is due to the fundamental axiom of neo-classical economics: Wants are unlimited while means (i.e., resources) are limited (a dubious assumption). Therefore, the earliest humans lived in a state of what I will call “primitive poverty.” This is summarized by Pinker himself in a hamfisted comparison to the second law of thermodynamics (akin to claiming the theory of relativity implies moral relativism). In line with the principles of legibility and Improvement then, any “value” added to this state of primitive poverty must be good. In other words, line must go up.

In terms of the modern development industry, this also rehashes the tenets of cultural evolutionism found in works like Walt Rostow’s modernization theory. Effective altruism, as part of the development industry, imports this view and in line with the principle of legibility, attempts to quantify development down to the tiniest utilon. What looks the most “developed” of course, always ends up being the modern Euro-American state. One LessWrong blogger puts it in its bluntest form: “Unfortunately, no-one knows how to turn poor African countries into productive Western ones, short of colonization.” (This is not an extremely fringe position held by a random blogger as Paul Romer, former World Bank president and economics Nobel winner, proposed building neo-colonial “charter cities” in the third world and Bruce Gilley has cited this idea in his pro-colonialism piece.)

This effectively covers up the historical relations of colonialism and imperialism, or, in the case of the above blogger, just is openly pro-colonialism. As Walter Rodney and others have argued, the causality is backward – it is the “periphery” which has developed the “metropole” in the sense that it enabled mass resource extraction, a base of free/cheap labor, and a dumping ground for exports in times of overproduction.

Legibility creates a number of constraints for EA. As James Ferguson wrote of development in general, the development discourse or “dev-speak” makes “blatantly political decisions about the allocation of resources appear to be”technical solutions to technical problems.” Besides the difficulty of quantifying issues that cannot be reduced to QALYs, this leads to a depoliticized approach because the EA approach is meant to be legible to a specific type of person, that is, the philanthrocapitalist. This is evident in Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save, which endlessly fellates businesses like Goldman Sachs for throwing a few crumbs back to the proles. Ferguson asks us to think about who the “we” is when the question is asked “what should we do.” In this case, the “we” is tech entrepreneurs who want legibility, i.e. transparency and efficiency, in their choice of charities and NGOs, which puts a hard limit on their activities. Jason Hickel relates this anecdote in The Divide,

The deeper I dug, the more I realised that the reason poverty persisted in Swaziland had quite a lot to do with matters that lay beyond Swaziland’s borders. It gradually became clear that the global economic system was organised in such a way as to make meaningful development nearly impossible. These findings troubled me. But when I pointed them out to World Vision’s managers, who parachuted in from the US and Australia from time to time, I was told that they were too ‘political’; it wasn’t World Vision’s job tothink about things like pharmaceutical patents or international trade rules or debt. If we started to raise those issues, I was told, we would lose our funding before the year was over; after all, the global system of patents, trade and debt was what made some of our donors rich enough to give to charity in the first place. Better to shut up about it: stick with the sponsor-a-child programme and don’t rock the boat.

Further sneering:

Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development

Jason Hickel, A Letter to Steven Pinker (and Bill Gates for that Matter) About Global Poverty

Amia Srinivansan, Stop the Robot Apocalypse

The Neoliberal Optimism Industry