All moral arguments are either politicized or have the potential to be.
Your complaint was about moral assumptions rather than moral arguments. I would say the same about moral assumptions as you do about moral arguments, and suggest that therefore calling someone's moral assumptions "politicized" is not a cogent criticism unless you go further and explain why their politicitization is worse than every other assumption's.
Better moral arguments would involve taking a broader look at the future of humanity, [...]
I think there may be two different issues here that are at risk of getting mixed up. (1) If your aim is to make things better for the world's poorest people, or to optimize net utility (which at least superficially looks like calling for very similar actions), you need to consider the long as well as the short term, and it might turn out that those goals are best achieved by actions whose short-term consequences look bad for poor people or bad for net utility. (2) You might care more about other things than net utility or the plight of the least fortunate.
Of these, it seems to me that #1 is the one it's more helpful to discuss (because pure disagreements on values tend not to make for fruitful discussions) and is, at least ostensibly, the focus of most of the actual discussion here -- but unlike #2 is isn't actually a moral argument.
I do, for the avoidance of doubt, agree with #1. And it's not impossible that putting money into the US stock market does more expected long-term good for the world's poorest people than giving them money or buying them malaria nets. But the arguments deployed in support of that argument in this thread seem to me to be terrible in the same kind of way as the arguments for conventional EA are alleged to be, but with less excuse; and thinly disguised self-interest seems like an awfully plausible explanation for that.
I suppose I should make some attempt to justify my claim that the arguments are terrible, or at least explain it. Here is what I think is the best example.
Both Salemicus (in the OP) and pianoforte611 (a few articles upthread) seem just to tacitly assume that whatever produces the most growth must be best overall, and that this means not transferring any wealth to poorer people whose growth rate is lower. This seems to me exactly parallel to just tacitly assuming that whatever gives the most short-run benefit to the world's poorest people must be best overall. And I think it's flatly wrong. Here is a toy model to explain why I think so.
Consider a world made up of two populations, the Rich and the Poor. The sizes of these populations are, let's say, in the fixed ratio 1:a. At time t they have wealth per capita of u(t),v(t). Utility per person is proportional to log wealth. Wealth grows exponentially: u' = pu, v' = qv. We suppose u(0)>v(0) -- the rich are richer than the poor -- and p>q -- the rich generate more growth than the poor. We discount everyone's future utility by a factor exp(-rt); same discount rate r for rich and poor. And, finally, the rich give some fraction of their wealth to the poor, so the actual differential equations are u' = (p-c)u, v' = qv+cu.
So, the solution of these differential equations is a linear combination of exponentials that I won't bother you with; then the net utility looks like the integral from 0 to infinity of exp(-rt) log(linear combination of exponentials) which, so far as I know, doesn't have a closed form; so I used Mathematica to do it numerically.
The resulting plot of net utility against donation level c is typically not monotone decreasing; its global maximum is at a small but positive value. For instance, let's consider the Rich to consist of the US plus Western Europe (population about 720M) and the Poor to consist of sub-Saharan Africa (population about 800M) so crudely take a=1; take u(0)=40000 and v(0)=1700 (rough estimates of GDP per capita; not the same as wealth but it'll do; ratio of wealth will probably be much larger); take p=0.06 and q=0.03, although in fact I think sub-Saharan Africa is doing better than that lately; and take r=0.02 (which I think is lower than most people's discount rates; higher discount rates tend to favour more charity).
The resulting curve has its maximum at about c=0.01; about 1% of GDP in the Rich countries should be given to the Poor to maximize long-term net utility. Diddling with the parameters doesn't change this hugely; over a wide range of values we get optima roughly in the range 0.001 .. 0.02.
As long as the discount rate is fairly small, this model will never recommend a value of c much bigger than half the difference in growth rates -- because if c is bigger than that, the Poor get richer faster than the Rich do and in the long run they are richer than the Rich :-). (A better model would allow c to vary, and I bet it would end up recommending larger values of c while the Poor are much poorer than the Rich.)
I think most of this discussion just boils down into a difference of values. You suggest that donating to the world's poorest people seems like to way to increase net utility, but this depends on a utility function and moral framework that I am questioning. I have alluded to at least two objections, which is that this outlook seems too near-mode, and it assumes that people should be weighted the same. I agree with you that getting into a deeper discussion of values would not be fruitful.
Your model is interesting, but it still looks like it weights utility ...
Epistemic status: 90% confident.
Inspiration: Arjun Narayan, Tyler Cowen.
Moses Maimonides.
Background
Effective Altruism (EA) is "a philosophy and social movement that applies evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to improve the world." Along with the related organisation GiveWell, it often focuses on getting the most "bang for your buck" in charitable donations. Unfortunately, despite their stated aims, their actual charitable recommendations are generally wasteful, such as cash transfers to poor Africans. This leads to the obvious question - how can we do better?
Doing better
One of the positive aspects of EA theory is its attempt to widen the scope of altruism beyond the traditional. For instance, to take into account catastrophic risks, and the far future. However, altruism often produces a far-mode bias where intentions matter above results. This can be a particular problem for EA - for example, it is very hard to get evidence about how we are affecting the far future. An effective method needs to rely on a tight feedback loop between action and results, so that continual updates are possible. At the extreme, Far Mode operates in a manner where no updating on results takes place at all. However, it is also important that those results are of significant magnitude as to justify the effort. EA has mostly fallen into the latter trap - achieving measurable results, but which are of no greater consequence.
The population of sub-Saharan Africa is around 950 million people, and growing. They have been a prime target of aid for generations, but it remains the poorest region of the world. Providing cash transfers to them mostly merely raises consumption, rather than substantially raising productivity. A truly altruistic program would enable the people in these countries to generate their own wealth so that they no longer needed poverty - unconditional transfers, by contrast, is an idea so lazy even Bob Geldof could stumble on it. The only novel thing about the GiveWell program is that the transfers are in cash.
Unfortunately, no-one knows how to turn poor African countries into productive Western ones, short of colonization. The problem is emphatically not a shortage of capital, but rather low productivity, and the absence of effective institutions in which that capital can be deployed. Sadly, these conditions and institutions cannot simply be transplanted into those countries.
A greater charity
However, there do exist countries with high productivity, and effective institutions in which that capital can be deployed. That capital then raises world productivity. As F.A. Harper wrote:
That is because those tools increase the productivity of labour, and so raise output. The pie has grown. Moreover, the person who invests their portion of the pie into new capital is particularly altruistic, both because they are not taking a share themselves, and because they are making a particularly large contribution to future pies.
In the same way that using steel to build tanks means (on the margin) fewer cars and vice-versa, using craftsmen to build a new home means (on the margin) fewer factories and vice-versa. Investment in capital is foregone consumption. Moreover, you do not need to personally build those economic tools; rather, you can part-finance a range of those tools by investing in the stock market, or other financial mechanisms.
Now, it's true that little of that capital will be deployed in sub-Saharan Africa at present, due to the institutional problems already mentioned. Investing in these countries will likely lead to your capital being stolen or becoming unproductive - the same trap that prevents locals from advancing equally prevents foreign investors from doing so. However, if sub-Saharan Africa ever does fix its culture and institutions, then the availability of that capital will then serve to rapidly raise productivity and then living standards, much as is taking place in China. Moreover, by making the rest of the world richer, this increases the level of aid other countries could provide to sub-Saharan Africa in future, should this ever be judged desirable. It also serves to improve the emigration prospects of individuals within these countries.
Feedback
Another great benefit of capital investment is the sharp feedback mechanism. The market economy in general, and financial markets in particular, serve to redistribute capital from ineffective to effective ventures, and from ineffective to effective investors. As a result, it is no longer necessary to make direct (and expensive) measurements of standards of living in sub-Saharan Africa; as long as your investment fund is gaining in value, you can rest safe in the knowledge that its growth is contributing, in a small way, to future prosperity.
Commitment mechanisms
However, if investment in capital is foregone consumption, then consumption is foregone investment. If I invest in the stock market today (altruistic), then in ten years' time spend my profits on a bigger house (selfish), then some of the good is undone. So the true altruist will not merely create capital, he will make sure that capital will never get spent down. One good way of doing that would be to donate to an institution likely to hold onto its capital in perpetuity, and likely to grow that capital over time. Perhaps the best example of such an institution would be a richly-endowed private university, such as Harvard, which has existed for almost 400 years and is said to have an endowment of $32 billion.
John Paulson recently gave Harvard $400 million. Unfortunately, this meant he came in for a torrent of criticism from people claiming he should have given the money to poor Africans, etc. I hope to see Effective Altruists defending him, as he has clearly followed through on their concepts in the finest way.
Further thoughts and alternatives
Conclusion