Doing Good Better, by William MacASkill

Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference (2015)

The starting shot for the effective-altruist movement. MacAskill asks how to make charitable giving actually count, and much of the answer — measure outcomes, compare interventions, resist the pull of whatever is emotionally vivid this month — is straightforwardly correct. What concerns me is the form rather than the conclusion. Moral action becomes an optimization problem with a measurable objective function, and public goods get routed around public institutions on the way. Both moves recur throughout this book, usually with worse consequences.

Read it asking: nearly every intervention MacAskill ranks is one a functioning state could have funded through taxation. Why should it be up to individuals as opposed to states?