I think a better critique of EA is that they fail to demonstrate that charity makes the world better. I think there's a very strong argument that the best way to improve the world is to maximize economic growth, and all charity (at least all institutional charity) represents a misallocation of resources away from the economic engine. There are many more future humans than current humans, so they must be given greater weight in Utilitarian calculations. If redistribution harms economic growth (an empirical question!) then charity offers a fixed one-time benefit at the expense of an exponentially greater future benefit.
This problem is exacerbated by the Peter Singer-inspired notion that all lives are equally valuable. I think that's obviously false. The drowning child in front of me in the US is much more valuable than the drowning child in the Democratic Republic of Malariastan. The US child has a much higher chance of growing up to be a scientist or engineer who could discover something to benefit humanity. But failing that, it has a rational expectation of one day contributing $70k/year to the world economy. The expected contribution of the Malariastan child is essentially zero if you consider cost of living - people in places like that are living at the subsistence level. IMO that difference really really matters. Having a philosophy that systematically reallocates resources from a functional post-industrial society to a dysfunctional malthusian society seems pretty clearly suboptimal from a "what is objectively best for the world" perspective.
Whether or not this line of reasoning is actually correct isn't totally clear to me, but I think it's something that at least deserves serious consideration. I've tried to get EA's to respond to this argument on several subreddits, but I've yet to encounter a robust response. I would like to challenge someone to seriously engage with me on this.
1. Saying "economic growth is the biggest empowerment to mankind" is a slogan and not a plan. A plan is "if you donate 5000 dollars to malaria nets, you get a statistical equivalent a life in terms of QALYs. A plan is not
invest in no specified thing
?????
Profit.
2. I don't think we live in a world where "just" donating money to investors results in above average market returns. If what you are saying is true, it seems like:
a. Venture capitalists would be mostly funding constrained, and also since it's so easy to invest in growth, they would get above average market returns consistently, since they have access to a privileged market.
b. Grants for research should be relatively efficient, or research within companies should be getting increasing returns, at a generic population level.
I think we don't live in that world since VCs actually get below average returns, most grants don't discover new things and most industries do not derive increasing returns from R&D. This is not to say that it'd be *impossible* to do better, but at this point you're asking a question along the lines of "why can't EA, by fiat, become the most successful investing fund ever".
3. If we're talking about non investing related fields, most effective interventions to grow the economy, I believe healthcare, education, housing and immigration would constitute some of the biggest blockers to productivity. As far as I know there's no "shovel ready" project we can just throw money into and predictably increase the GDP. Or hell, if you really believed that any old child can be super productive, you'd be throwing money at some newlywed couple's face and scream "please baby make already I'm altruistically begging you for non perverse reasons".
4. Catch up growth is just going to be faster on several direct empirical data points, like China, Singapore and South Korea, and on reasoning grounds: it's a lot easier to build skyscrapers in a country without first world norms of safety, it's a lot easier to copy infrastructure projects of already developed nations than it is to invent new technologies. I haven't precisely checked, but the comparison isn't between one American child and one African child, but more like 1 American child to 600 African children (if we take the rough government estimate of 3 million dollars spent to save a marginal US life from traffic accidents, and 5000 for the Givewell estimate of dollars per marginal life from bed nets.) I think you can argue that the American life cost is inflated, but I think you have to get lower than 300k per child life saved to even come close to net GDP gain, assuming a gdp/capita ratio of 60 Kenyans generating 1k/year per 1 American generating 60k a year and I'm pretty sure if you believed that you'd also believe that all American child mortality can be solved by adding 2.1 million dollars to the problem). So no, not even doing your original naive analysis fits.
5. A reasonable model of money to wellbeing is that it scales with the log of money, so any amount of money that goes to people 100 times poorer, to the point where they're going to die, is going to do a lot more good. You need a pretty low discount rate or an actual lower value to their life independent of economic effects to do so.
These are just arguments I've thought of since your post here.
>Saying "economic growth is the biggest empowerment to mankind" is a slogan and not a plan.
The plan is: maximize your wealth by developing a skill and participating in a first-world economy. Invest your profits in a way that maximizes your ROI.
>I don't think we live in a world where "just" donating money to investors results in above average market returns
When did I say anything about beating the market? Just invest IN the market. The positive externalities of generic market-driven economic growth outstrip the benefits of charitable transfers, unless those charitable transfers result in market-beating returns. If you can demonstrate that then I'm all for charity.
>but more like 1 American child to 600 African children
Ok, I don't measure value by number of lives. I measure value by economic output. I explicitly reject the Utilitarian notion of intrinsic value. All moral value is instrumental, and that is best (or at least most easily) captured by economic output. I think I could more-or-less prove that intrinsic and instrumental value have to converge over time, since intrinsic value 500 years from now depends heavily on instrumental value today. If humanity had experienced 1% less annual economic growth over the previous millennium then there would be far less than 8 billion people today.
In any case, having 1 more marginal American who could one day invent the next internet is much better than having 600 more marginal Africans who are living a subsistence existence. The marginal American is positive for the world. The marginal African is an additional charity case that the world has to worry about supporting.
>A reasonable model of money to wellbeing is that it scales with the log of money,
I'm skeptical of all happiness/wellbeing research. People's revealed preferences don't seem to indicate that there's a logarithmic tradeoff between work and leisure. Plenty of people work 2 jobs for twice the money or work much harder (like being a lawyer at a big firm) for much more money. But fine, let's assume happiness ~ log(money). Maximizing current happiness via redistribution is a one-time boost that is outweighed by the exponential future cost of any lost economic growth. Would you push a button to switch our world to one in which all wealth in medieval Europe had been evenly distributed at the cost of 1000 years of slower economic development (thereby consigning everyone today to extreme poverty)? If not, then why do you want to make a similar tradeoff today? Consider that there are more future people than current people. Don't they have a greater weight in Utilitarian happiness calculations? Marginally larger economic growth today means much more total happiness when integrated over future generations.
> Ok, I don't measure value by number of lives. I measure value by economic output.
Yes, the sentence after that says that until you have less than 60 Kenyan kids per American kid's life saved, the 60 Kenyans will in fact have more economic output than one American.
> Having 1 more marginal American who could one day invent the next internet is much better than having 600 more marginal Africans who are living a subsistence existence.
Like, it's telling that your example is "invent the internet", when the internet was invented at CERN, a European based particle accelerator, by a British man, and the equivalent American version, project Xanadu is a footnote.
The above is an unfair gotcha, but still, many inventions are in fact by immigrants (see: Covid vaccine, Elon musk, 5G).
Anyway, your response is scope insensitive in three ways:
1. Total GDP in fact includes Africa, you cannot claim that growth matters for America but not for developing unless you have some scale by which to compare them.
2. Inventions often aren't "before their time", so if the timing of an invention gets missed it's usually not "no invention" but "slow invention" or "worse invention". Without a model of this that comes out decisively in favor of innovation, this is a values difference and not EA not listening to you on their terms.
3. Problems in the other parts of the world both provide reasons to innovate as well as sources of innovation. See: Norman Borlaug and the green revolution, the immigration point above plus first generation immigrants like Steve Jobs, the Covid vaccine only got developed when its inventor got hired at a non American institution.
> Maximizing current happiness via redistribution is a one-time boost that is outweighed by the exponential future cost of any lost economic growth.
I'm pretty annoyed that I've been repeatedly talking about saving a life, and how the African child goes on to at least be an averagely productive member of society, and you're still modeling it as a one time distribution. I'm use all of the failed startups, or frat boys being stupid, or trust fund kids existing in which first world funds end up doing nothing because of semi uncommon circumstances, or circumstances we agree are in the normal variation of doing something ultimately net good, but if you think those would be unfair and invalid points to counter your claims about growth, reconsider that saving lives has some type of cumulative benefit.
> Marginally larger economic growth today means much more total happiness when integrated over future generations.
Funnily enough, I'm a doomer, so I suppose I would take that trade. For what it's worth, I'd take the growth path if I assume we live.
Longtermism is already a fringe view in EA, I'm not a longtermist, and as far as I know no one on ACX is a longtermist either, so if you want to know an answer to "why isn't EA responding" it's because they don't share your views on the long term, they think that catchup growth and the sheer arbitrage of an African child to an American child even in terms of economic output makes sense and they don't put literally infinite value on inventions.
>the 60 Kenyans will in fact have more economic output than one American.
I don't think that's right, because what I'm actually interested in is net value so you have to subtract things like living expenses. If 100% of a person's output goes to just feeding and housing that person then that person isn't really contributing to the world. That's why subsistence cultures never produce scientific research. Once you make that adjustment, I'm certain that the American is much more than 60 times as valuable as a Kenyan.
>The above is an unfair gotcha, but still, many inventions are in fact by immigrants
Yes, don't take my use of 'American' as specific. I'm using the US as a shorthand for all first-world countries.
>I've been repeatedly talking about saving a life, and how the African child goes on to at least be an averagely productive member of society, and you're still modeling it as a one time distribution
It IS a one-time distribution. The ongoing effects that you're talking about are making a false equivalence between the productivity of the saved African and the productivity of investing the difference-making charitable transfer in the stock market instead. My argument is that the productivity of the African is lower than that of the investment. That's because people in the third world are less productive than people in the first world. Hence the charitable transfer results in a net lowering of global economic growth.
>reconsider that saving lives has some type of cumulative benefit.
It has a benefit only if those lives are productive relative to the opportunity cost of not saving them.
>Funnily enough, I'm a doomer, so I suppose I would take that trade. For what it's worth, I'd take the growth path if I assume we live.
Wait, I'm confused. Absent near-term extinction you agree with me? Then what are we arguing about?
> I don't think that's right, because what I'm actually interested in is net value so you have to subtract things like living expenses.
Why not do a back of the envelope calculation then? Including costs to raise a first world child.
> If 100% of a person's output goes to just feeding and housing that person then that person isn't really contributing to the world.
This seems pretty disingenuous if you don't also include the average costs of raising an American child.
> My argument is that the productivity of the African is lower than that of the investment. That's because people in the third world are less productive than people in the first world. Hence the charitable transfer results in a net lowering of global economic growth.
You haven't responded to any of my points regarding catchup growth, except for essentially declaring by fiat all African countries are subsistence based and will be subsistence based.
> Wait, I'm confused. Absent near-term extinction you agree with me? Then what are we arguing about?
Because I think you're wrong on the merits, provided no convincing evidence and we do not share values on the relative benefits of innovation vs catch up growth.
I think I'm going to disengage until someone does the numbers, even in a very handwoven way.
>Why not do a back of the envelope calculation then? Including costs to raise a first world child.
That's not relevant to the question, since the charitable donation isn't going to raise an American child. The opportunity cost of any choice is the best alternative to that choice, and the best alternative to charitable donation in Africa isn't "raising an American child". I can put my money in the stock market and get 7% or whatever. My contention is that you cannot get 7% out of the rescued African.
>You haven't responded to any of my points regarding catchup growth
That's because I didn't detect a coherent point to respond to. Possibly the problem is my understanding, but I don't see what relevance catchup growth has here. If you're arguing that all potential third world lives should be modeled as eventually reaching first-world levels of productivity then I think I disagree. If you'd like to argue for that claim go ahead, or if you mean something else then please explain.
In the anti-EA worldview, Norman Borlaug is a monster. Enabling the global population to increase so rapidly while climate change remains uncontrolled is akin to OpenAI burning timeline while AGI alignment remains unsolved.
At some point you have to choose where to start, and EAs start with the idea that all human lives are equal. You start with the idea that the worth of human lives vary based on their economic output or a reasonable expectation of their future output. How's an EA supposed to offer a robust response to such a disagreement, even assuming that you can engage with one who's unperturbed by reasoning that starts so far beyond the pale for most normal people?
I always took the philosophical starting point for EA to be to "make the world better through rational analysis" so I think it's reasonable to question the all-lives-are-equal assumption in light of that goal. I think that any careful examination of human flourishing will eventually arrive at the fundamental importance of economic output. To wit, I think there's a strong argument that intrinsic and instrumental value more-or-less have to converge since intrinsic value 500 years from now depends heavily on instrumental value today. If humanity had experienced 1% less annual economic growth over the previous millennium then there would be far less than 8 billion people today.
Whether or not this view is unfashionable isn't relevant. I think it's correct and I think any Rationalist-type movement should be compelled to examine unfashionable ideas if they're potentially correct.
But I think EA's have a case to answer even if you assume that all lives are equally valuable. Lives saved is a linear function of wealth. Wealth is an exponential function of time. Unless you impose a discount rate on the intrinsic value of life then I don't see how the utilitarian calculus doesn't compel you to maximize economic growth even at the expense of near-term charitable interventions.
>"make the world better through rational analysis"
Your 'make the world better' phrasing is doing a lot of the work and I do not think it is correct. I take EAs as starting with 'make lives better'. This also explains the common objection to EA that it's a good thing to care more about people closer to you than further away from you - note I used 'further' instead of 'farther' for a reason. Of course your economic evaluation of life is incomprehensible to the EA definition, take for example the EAs who try to make animals' lives better.
Is that really a distinction? "Make the world better" is really just shorthand for "make it better for the people in it". But regardless of how you value life, the best way to make lives better is through economic development, as my last paragraph explains. I don't see why straightforward economic reasoning should be incomprehensible to EAs. If it really is then I suggest that they should probably drop 'rationalist' from their branding.
"Ackshually, a white American kid will make $70,000 per year or have a 0.001% of inventing a life saving drug so according to these calculations you should spend the same money saving him and let 2000 African babies die" can be reasonably said to be incomprehensible to someone who gives money to efficiently make lives better.
Saving 2000 babies now comes at the cost of saving 4000 babies in 10 years. Are you applying a discount rate to the value of human life or do you simply not understand the concept of compounding growth?
I think a better critique of EA is that they fail to demonstrate that charity makes the world better. I think there's a very strong argument that the best way to improve the world is to maximize economic growth, and all charity (at least all institutional charity) represents a misallocation of resources away from the economic engine. There are many more future humans than current humans, so they must be given greater weight in Utilitarian calculations. If redistribution harms economic growth (an empirical question!) then charity offers a fixed one-time benefit at the expense of an exponentially greater future benefit.
This problem is exacerbated by the Peter Singer-inspired notion that all lives are equally valuable. I think that's obviously false. The drowning child in front of me in the US is much more valuable than the drowning child in the Democratic Republic of Malariastan. The US child has a much higher chance of growing up to be a scientist or engineer who could discover something to benefit humanity. But failing that, it has a rational expectation of one day contributing $70k/year to the world economy. The expected contribution of the Malariastan child is essentially zero if you consider cost of living - people in places like that are living at the subsistence level. IMO that difference really really matters. Having a philosophy that systematically reallocates resources from a functional post-industrial society to a dysfunctional malthusian society seems pretty clearly suboptimal from a "what is objectively best for the world" perspective.
Whether or not this line of reasoning is actually correct isn't totally clear to me, but I think it's something that at least deserves serious consideration. I've tried to get EA's to respond to this argument on several subreddits, but I've yet to encounter a robust response. I would like to challenge someone to seriously engage with me on this.
1. Saying "economic growth is the biggest empowerment to mankind" is a slogan and not a plan. A plan is "if you donate 5000 dollars to malaria nets, you get a statistical equivalent a life in terms of QALYs. A plan is not
invest in no specified thing
?????
Profit.
2. I don't think we live in a world where "just" donating money to investors results in above average market returns. If what you are saying is true, it seems like:
a. Venture capitalists would be mostly funding constrained, and also since it's so easy to invest in growth, they would get above average market returns consistently, since they have access to a privileged market.
b. Grants for research should be relatively efficient, or research within companies should be getting increasing returns, at a generic population level.
I think we don't live in that world since VCs actually get below average returns, most grants don't discover new things and most industries do not derive increasing returns from R&D. This is not to say that it'd be *impossible* to do better, but at this point you're asking a question along the lines of "why can't EA, by fiat, become the most successful investing fund ever".
3. If we're talking about non investing related fields, most effective interventions to grow the economy, I believe healthcare, education, housing and immigration would constitute some of the biggest blockers to productivity. As far as I know there's no "shovel ready" project we can just throw money into and predictably increase the GDP. Or hell, if you really believed that any old child can be super productive, you'd be throwing money at some newlywed couple's face and scream "please baby make already I'm altruistically begging you for non perverse reasons".
4. Catch up growth is just going to be faster on several direct empirical data points, like China, Singapore and South Korea, and on reasoning grounds: it's a lot easier to build skyscrapers in a country without first world norms of safety, it's a lot easier to copy infrastructure projects of already developed nations than it is to invent new technologies. I haven't precisely checked, but the comparison isn't between one American child and one African child, but more like 1 American child to 600 African children (if we take the rough government estimate of 3 million dollars spent to save a marginal US life from traffic accidents, and 5000 for the Givewell estimate of dollars per marginal life from bed nets.) I think you can argue that the American life cost is inflated, but I think you have to get lower than 300k per child life saved to even come close to net GDP gain, assuming a gdp/capita ratio of 60 Kenyans generating 1k/year per 1 American generating 60k a year and I'm pretty sure if you believed that you'd also believe that all American child mortality can be solved by adding 2.1 million dollars to the problem). So no, not even doing your original naive analysis fits.
5. A reasonable model of money to wellbeing is that it scales with the log of money, so any amount of money that goes to people 100 times poorer, to the point where they're going to die, is going to do a lot more good. You need a pretty low discount rate or an actual lower value to their life independent of economic effects to do so.
These are just arguments I've thought of since your post here.
>Saying "economic growth is the biggest empowerment to mankind" is a slogan and not a plan.
The plan is: maximize your wealth by developing a skill and participating in a first-world economy. Invest your profits in a way that maximizes your ROI.
>I don't think we live in a world where "just" donating money to investors results in above average market returns
When did I say anything about beating the market? Just invest IN the market. The positive externalities of generic market-driven economic growth outstrip the benefits of charitable transfers, unless those charitable transfers result in market-beating returns. If you can demonstrate that then I'm all for charity.
>but more like 1 American child to 600 African children
Ok, I don't measure value by number of lives. I measure value by economic output. I explicitly reject the Utilitarian notion of intrinsic value. All moral value is instrumental, and that is best (or at least most easily) captured by economic output. I think I could more-or-less prove that intrinsic and instrumental value have to converge over time, since intrinsic value 500 years from now depends heavily on instrumental value today. If humanity had experienced 1% less annual economic growth over the previous millennium then there would be far less than 8 billion people today.
In any case, having 1 more marginal American who could one day invent the next internet is much better than having 600 more marginal Africans who are living a subsistence existence. The marginal American is positive for the world. The marginal African is an additional charity case that the world has to worry about supporting.
>A reasonable model of money to wellbeing is that it scales with the log of money,
I'm skeptical of all happiness/wellbeing research. People's revealed preferences don't seem to indicate that there's a logarithmic tradeoff between work and leisure. Plenty of people work 2 jobs for twice the money or work much harder (like being a lawyer at a big firm) for much more money. But fine, let's assume happiness ~ log(money). Maximizing current happiness via redistribution is a one-time boost that is outweighed by the exponential future cost of any lost economic growth. Would you push a button to switch our world to one in which all wealth in medieval Europe had been evenly distributed at the cost of 1000 years of slower economic development (thereby consigning everyone today to extreme poverty)? If not, then why do you want to make a similar tradeoff today? Consider that there are more future people than current people. Don't they have a greater weight in Utilitarian happiness calculations? Marginally larger economic growth today means much more total happiness when integrated over future generations.
> Ok, I don't measure value by number of lives. I measure value by economic output.
Yes, the sentence after that says that until you have less than 60 Kenyan kids per American kid's life saved, the 60 Kenyans will in fact have more economic output than one American.
> Having 1 more marginal American who could one day invent the next internet is much better than having 600 more marginal Africans who are living a subsistence existence.
Like, it's telling that your example is "invent the internet", when the internet was invented at CERN, a European based particle accelerator, by a British man, and the equivalent American version, project Xanadu is a footnote.
The above is an unfair gotcha, but still, many inventions are in fact by immigrants (see: Covid vaccine, Elon musk, 5G).
Anyway, your response is scope insensitive in three ways:
1. Total GDP in fact includes Africa, you cannot claim that growth matters for America but not for developing unless you have some scale by which to compare them.
2. Inventions often aren't "before their time", so if the timing of an invention gets missed it's usually not "no invention" but "slow invention" or "worse invention". Without a model of this that comes out decisively in favor of innovation, this is a values difference and not EA not listening to you on their terms.
3. Problems in the other parts of the world both provide reasons to innovate as well as sources of innovation. See: Norman Borlaug and the green revolution, the immigration point above plus first generation immigrants like Steve Jobs, the Covid vaccine only got developed when its inventor got hired at a non American institution.
> Maximizing current happiness via redistribution is a one-time boost that is outweighed by the exponential future cost of any lost economic growth.
I'm pretty annoyed that I've been repeatedly talking about saving a life, and how the African child goes on to at least be an averagely productive member of society, and you're still modeling it as a one time distribution. I'm use all of the failed startups, or frat boys being stupid, or trust fund kids existing in which first world funds end up doing nothing because of semi uncommon circumstances, or circumstances we agree are in the normal variation of doing something ultimately net good, but if you think those would be unfair and invalid points to counter your claims about growth, reconsider that saving lives has some type of cumulative benefit.
> Marginally larger economic growth today means much more total happiness when integrated over future generations.
Funnily enough, I'm a doomer, so I suppose I would take that trade. For what it's worth, I'd take the growth path if I assume we live.
Longtermism is already a fringe view in EA, I'm not a longtermist, and as far as I know no one on ACX is a longtermist either, so if you want to know an answer to "why isn't EA responding" it's because they don't share your views on the long term, they think that catchup growth and the sheer arbitrage of an African child to an American child even in terms of economic output makes sense and they don't put literally infinite value on inventions.
>the 60 Kenyans will in fact have more economic output than one American.
I don't think that's right, because what I'm actually interested in is net value so you have to subtract things like living expenses. If 100% of a person's output goes to just feeding and housing that person then that person isn't really contributing to the world. That's why subsistence cultures never produce scientific research. Once you make that adjustment, I'm certain that the American is much more than 60 times as valuable as a Kenyan.
>The above is an unfair gotcha, but still, many inventions are in fact by immigrants
Yes, don't take my use of 'American' as specific. I'm using the US as a shorthand for all first-world countries.
>I've been repeatedly talking about saving a life, and how the African child goes on to at least be an averagely productive member of society, and you're still modeling it as a one time distribution
It IS a one-time distribution. The ongoing effects that you're talking about are making a false equivalence between the productivity of the saved African and the productivity of investing the difference-making charitable transfer in the stock market instead. My argument is that the productivity of the African is lower than that of the investment. That's because people in the third world are less productive than people in the first world. Hence the charitable transfer results in a net lowering of global economic growth.
>reconsider that saving lives has some type of cumulative benefit.
It has a benefit only if those lives are productive relative to the opportunity cost of not saving them.
>Funnily enough, I'm a doomer, so I suppose I would take that trade. For what it's worth, I'd take the growth path if I assume we live.
Wait, I'm confused. Absent near-term extinction you agree with me? Then what are we arguing about?
> I don't think that's right, because what I'm actually interested in is net value so you have to subtract things like living expenses.
Why not do a back of the envelope calculation then? Including costs to raise a first world child.
> If 100% of a person's output goes to just feeding and housing that person then that person isn't really contributing to the world.
This seems pretty disingenuous if you don't also include the average costs of raising an American child.
> My argument is that the productivity of the African is lower than that of the investment. That's because people in the third world are less productive than people in the first world. Hence the charitable transfer results in a net lowering of global economic growth.
You haven't responded to any of my points regarding catchup growth, except for essentially declaring by fiat all African countries are subsistence based and will be subsistence based.
> Wait, I'm confused. Absent near-term extinction you agree with me? Then what are we arguing about?
Because I think you're wrong on the merits, provided no convincing evidence and we do not share values on the relative benefits of innovation vs catch up growth.
I think I'm going to disengage until someone does the numbers, even in a very handwoven way.
>Why not do a back of the envelope calculation then? Including costs to raise a first world child.
That's not relevant to the question, since the charitable donation isn't going to raise an American child. The opportunity cost of any choice is the best alternative to that choice, and the best alternative to charitable donation in Africa isn't "raising an American child". I can put my money in the stock market and get 7% or whatever. My contention is that you cannot get 7% out of the rescued African.
>You haven't responded to any of my points regarding catchup growth
That's because I didn't detect a coherent point to respond to. Possibly the problem is my understanding, but I don't see what relevance catchup growth has here. If you're arguing that all potential third world lives should be modeled as eventually reaching first-world levels of productivity then I think I disagree. If you'd like to argue for that claim go ahead, or if you mean something else then please explain.
In the anti-EA worldview, Norman Borlaug is a monster. Enabling the global population to increase so rapidly while climate change remains uncontrolled is akin to OpenAI burning timeline while AGI alignment remains unsolved.
At some point you have to choose where to start, and EAs start with the idea that all human lives are equal. You start with the idea that the worth of human lives vary based on their economic output or a reasonable expectation of their future output. How's an EA supposed to offer a robust response to such a disagreement, even assuming that you can engage with one who's unperturbed by reasoning that starts so far beyond the pale for most normal people?
I always took the philosophical starting point for EA to be to "make the world better through rational analysis" so I think it's reasonable to question the all-lives-are-equal assumption in light of that goal. I think that any careful examination of human flourishing will eventually arrive at the fundamental importance of economic output. To wit, I think there's a strong argument that intrinsic and instrumental value more-or-less have to converge since intrinsic value 500 years from now depends heavily on instrumental value today. If humanity had experienced 1% less annual economic growth over the previous millennium then there would be far less than 8 billion people today.
Whether or not this view is unfashionable isn't relevant. I think it's correct and I think any Rationalist-type movement should be compelled to examine unfashionable ideas if they're potentially correct.
But I think EA's have a case to answer even if you assume that all lives are equally valuable. Lives saved is a linear function of wealth. Wealth is an exponential function of time. Unless you impose a discount rate on the intrinsic value of life then I don't see how the utilitarian calculus doesn't compel you to maximize economic growth even at the expense of near-term charitable interventions.
>"make the world better through rational analysis"
Your 'make the world better' phrasing is doing a lot of the work and I do not think it is correct. I take EAs as starting with 'make lives better'. This also explains the common objection to EA that it's a good thing to care more about people closer to you than further away from you - note I used 'further' instead of 'farther' for a reason. Of course your economic evaluation of life is incomprehensible to the EA definition, take for example the EAs who try to make animals' lives better.
Is that really a distinction? "Make the world better" is really just shorthand for "make it better for the people in it". But regardless of how you value life, the best way to make lives better is through economic development, as my last paragraph explains. I don't see why straightforward economic reasoning should be incomprehensible to EAs. If it really is then I suggest that they should probably drop 'rationalist' from their branding.
"Ackshually, a white American kid will make $70,000 per year or have a 0.001% of inventing a life saving drug so according to these calculations you should spend the same money saving him and let 2000 African babies die" can be reasonably said to be incomprehensible to someone who gives money to efficiently make lives better.
Saving 2000 babies now comes at the cost of saving 4000 babies in 10 years. Are you applying a discount rate to the value of human life or do you simply not understand the concept of compounding growth?