Could 'earning to give' be the reason for history's biggest crypto collapse?

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Save the world, don't get a job at a charity, go work on Wall Street. That was the title of a post on a forum in 2013, 9 years before the Super Bowl of 2022. It was written by a guy called William MacAskill. He is the associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, co-founder of the effective altruism movement. For the last 10 years, my colleagues and I have developed a philosophy and research program that we call effective altruism.

[00:00:29]He has pledged to donate everything you earn to organizations he believes [music] will do the most good. Effective altruism is a philosophy and a community that's about trying to figure out how can we do as much good as possible with the time and money we have.

[00:00:44]>> boiled down to, in its simplest form, was figuring out how to make the world a better [music] place using the most evidence-based approach. One strategy was known as earning to give, which meant maximizing [music] your own wealth so that you could give away more to charitable causes. Or, as others might put it, get filthy rich for charity's sake. He described a student who had been convinced by the philosophy and now works in finance at a trading firm called Jane Street, giving away 50% of his income to charitable causes. In the same year he made that forum post, [music] MacAskill heard of another student at MIT that may be a good fit for the movement, a 24-year-old physics undergraduate who went by the name Sam Bankman-Fried.

[00:01:28]And just like that, Sam Bankman-Fried was introduced to effective altruism.

[00:01:34]He was a mathematics nerd with a passion for utilitarianism and a vegan who already engaged in animal rights activism. [music] MacAskill persuaded Sam that instead of working for charity directly, he could make a greater impact by pursuing a high-paying career, then donate a substantial amount of his income to charitable causes. Sam was convinced, and just like the student mentioned in MacAskill's forum [music] post, Sam decides to get a job at the same trading firm known as Jane Street.

[00:02:02]It was a popular firm amongst other effective altruists. Little did MacAskill [music] realize just how much damage his new convert would cause the movement in the years to come.