Sublime

‘Homo economicus’,

Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer

our democratic decisions regarding the distribution of wealth are thus constrained by the need to facilitate continued profiteering.

The Copenhagen Consensus approach has always been to look at important issues and to ask: how can economic analysis help us do the most good here?

One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to futur

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The government (or a well-meaning NGO) should make the option that it thinks is the best for most people the default choice, so that people will need to actively move away from it if they want to.

Jeremy Bentham declared that the supreme good is ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, and