Interesting article, thanks for writing it!

As has been noted,I do think many leftists, and people in rich countries across the political spectrum e.g. people who spend a lot of time volunteering at church, do make major changes to their lives based on altruism and not just because they like spending money. A critique of EA that I'm sympathetic to from people like this is that people know best how to help themselves and their own communities, vs. knowing the needs of someone from a very different place and donating to an organization they know nothing about and might be corrupt.

Two responses have generally been helpful here, first that there's great global wealth inequality so that if everyone only kept money within their communities, you'd have very rich towns that have great philanthropy and very poor towns that have none, and lowercase effective altruism is sort of expanding this view to the whole world. Second is advocating to donate to GiveDirectly which provides this indiduval/community self sufficiency and I also personally vouch for, which means a lot when people are inherently suspicious of corruption.

I've worked in an EA adjacent career for the better part of a decade and have always wished there was a bit more guidance on identifying highly effective local organizations in low and middle income countries for people who would prefer to give to community organizations in other places — while they might not be as scalable as AMF they can certainly be very effective per dollar especially where cost of living is low. I learned as a grantmaker that this is really hard largely because having expansive enough networks to vet these organizations is hard, but I think its worthwhile and could mobilize a lot of altruistic-but-skeptical donors and maybe I should finally get around to trying to do this.