PRAISE FOR
DOING GOOD BETTER
“Beautifully written and extremely smart. Doing Good Better should be required reading for anyone
interested in making the world better.”
Steven D. Levitt, #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Freakonomics and When to Rob a
Bank
“MacAskill tackles a monumental question: How can we make the biggest difference for the greatest
number of people? His answer is a grand vision to make giving, volunteering, spending, and working
more worthwhile.”
Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take
“Effective altruism—efforts that actually help people rather than making you feel good or helping
you show off—is one of the great new ideas of the twenty-first century. Doing Good Better is the
definitive guide to this exciting new movement.”
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of
The Better Angels of Our Nature
Doing Good Better is a superb achievement. Will MacAskill, a leader of the effective altruism
movement and a rising star in philosophy, now displays his talent for telling stories that pack a
punch. This must-read book will lead people to change their careers, their lives, and the world, for
the better.”
Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at Princeton University and author of Animal
Liberation and The Most Good You Can Do
“Humanity currently spends more money on cigarette ads than on making sure that we as a species
survive this century. We’ve got our priorities all wrong, and we need effective altruism to right them.
If you want to make a real difference on the biggest issues of our time, you need to read Doing Good
Better.
Jaan Tallinn, cofounder of Skype, Kazaa, and MetaMed
“MacAskill leads his readers on a witty, incisive tour through the ideas and applications of effective
altruism, which seems increasingly poised to become a dominant social movement of the twenty-first
century.”
Julia Galef, cofounder of the Center for Applied Rationality
“This is the most valuable guide to charitable giving ever published. Even readers who disagree with
MacAskill’s conclusions about the value of particular charitable donations will make smarter
decisions by learning from his analysis.”
Paul Brest, codirector of the Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society and former
president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Doing Good Better provides an absolutely indispensable framework for anyone wanting to actually
help others with their money, time, or career. Warning: Failure to read it, share it, and keep it close as
you set out to ‘do good’ is likely to be harmful to yourself and others!”
Charlie Bresler, executive vice president of Men’s Wearhouse and executive director of the Life
You Can Save
“Are you interested in giving away money more effectively? This is the very best book on how to do
that.”
—Tyler Cowen, Holbert C. Harris professor of economics at George Mason University and author of
Average Is Over
Doing Good Better has a rare combination of strikingly original ideas, effortless clarity of delivery,
and a thoroughgoing practicality that leaves the reader inspired to get out of their chair and take on
the world. Humanity faces some big challenges in the twenty-first century; this is a much-needed
manifesto for social change, and Will MacAskill is the ideal ambassador.”
Eric Drexler, founder of nanotechnology and author of Engines of Creation
“MacAskill brings fresh, bold thinking to today’s big problems. He leads from first principles to
counterintuitive conclusions. Like laser eye surgery, this book will change how you look at the world
forever.”
Uri Bram, bestselling author of Thinking Statistically
“Inspiring, engrossing, and at times hilarious. I couldn’t put it down. This book will change your
life.”
Nick Cooney, author of How to Be Great at Doing Good
“William MacAskill shows that we can make a surprisingly large life-changing difference to those in
disadvantaged parts of the world—provided that our altruistic impulses are intelligently channeled.
This fascinating and clearly written book deserves wide readership: It can in itself do great good if its
message is heeded.”
Lord Martin Rees, former president of the Royal Society
“Think philosophers are dry, inaccessible, and obsessed with mere ideas, not actions? Think again.
MacAskill puts forward an eye-popping claim: By combining heart and mind, one can make the
world a better place. And then he shows you how.”
Dean Karlan, professor of economics at Yale University and coauthor of More Than Good
Intentions
“This is a challenging and thought-provoking book. We are encouraged first to ask ourselves whether
we are altruistic enough, and second whether we practice effective altruism, a much tougher and
more contested ask. This book will guarantee lively debates and should encourage us all to ask
searching questions.”
Fiona Reynolds, former director-general of the National Trust
Doing Good Better is a must-read for anyone with both a heart and a brain. MacAskill demolishes
the lazy myths of nothing-you-can-do-ism and demonstrates the power of asking the right questions.
This is an important book. It’s also surprisingly fun. Figuring out what really helps people is a
challenging scientific puzzle, and these pages are full of unexpected twists—enlightening and
invigorating.”
Joshua Greene, director of Harvard’s Moral Cognition Lab and author of Moral Tribes
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Version_1
To Toby Ord, Peter Singer, and Stanislav Petrov, without whom this book
would not have been written
CONTENTS
PRAISE FOR DOING GOOD BETTER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
Worms and Water Pumps: How can you do the most good?
ONE
You Are the 1 Percent: Just how much can you achieve?
PART ONE
THE FIVE KEY QUESTIONS OF EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM
TWO
Hard Trade-offs: Question #1: How many people benefit, and by how
much?
THREE
How You Can Save Hundreds of Lives: Question #2: Is this the most
effective thing you can do?
FOUR
Why You Shouldn’t Donate to Disaster Relief: Question #3: Is this area
neglected?
FIVE
The Best Person Who Ever Lived Is an Unknown Ukrainian Man: Question
#4: What would have happened otherwise?
SIX
Why Voting Is Like Donating Thousands of Dollars to Charity: Question
#5: What are the chances of success, and how good would success be?
PART TWO
EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM IN ACTION
SEVEN
Overhead Costs, CEO Pay, and Other Confusions: Which charities make
the most difference?
EIGHT
The Moral Case for Sweatshop Goods: How can consumers make the most
difference?
NINE
Don’t “Follow Your Passion”: Which careers make the most difference?
TEN
Poverty Versus Climate Change Versus . . . : Which causes are most
important?
CONCLUSION
Becoming an Effective Altruist: What should you do right now?
APPENDIX
Thinking Like an Effective Altruist: The five key questions of effective
altruism.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
Worms and Water Pumps
How can you do the most good?
Until 1989, Trevor Field was a typical middle-aged South African man who
had lived a fairly normal life. He enjoyed fresh steaks, cold beer, and
fishing with his friends. Working in advertising for magazines like TopCar
and Penthouse, he had never thought seriously about using his skills for the
greater good. When he discovered the PlayPump, however, everything
changed.
That year, Field and his father-in-law, a farmer, visited an agricultural
fair in Pretoria. There, he met a water engineer named Ronnie Stuiver who
was demonstrating a model for a new type of water pump. The
demonstration reminded Field of a fishing trip he’d taken years before,
during which he had watched the women of a rural village wait for hours
next to a windmill-powered water pump. There had been no wind that day,
but the women, who had trekked for miles, still needed to bring water back
to their homes. So they simply sat and waited for the water to flow. Field
had been struck by how unfair this was. There simply must be a better way
to do this, he thought. Now he was witnessing a potential solution.
Stuivers invention seemed brilliant. Instead of the typical hand pump
or windmill pump found in many villages in poor countries, Stuivers pump
doubled as a playground merry-go-round. Children would play on the
merry-go-round, which, as it spun, would pump clean water from deep
underground up to a storage tank. No longer would the women of the
village need to walk miles to draw water using a hand pump or wait in line
at a windmill-powered pump on a still day. The PlayPump, as it was called,
utilized the power of playing children to provide a sustainable water supply
for the community. “African [kids] have almost nothing—not even books in
school let alone playground equipment—and access to water is a huge
problem,” Field later told me. “I thought it was just the best idea I’ve ever
seen.”
Field bought the patent from Stuiver and worked in his spare time over
the next five years to improve the design. Using his experience in
advertising, Field came up with the idea of placing billboard advertisements
on the sides of the water tank as a way to generate revenue to pay for pump
maintenance. In 1995, he secured his first sponsor, Colgate Palmolive;
installed the first PlayPump; and quit his job in order to focus full-time on
the project, now a registered charity called PlayPumps International.
Progress was slow at first, but he persevered, paying for several pumps with
his own money. At the same time, he developed connections with
corporations and government bodies across South Africa to pay for more
pumps. By the turn of the millennium, he had installed fifty pumps across
the country.
His first major breakthrough came in 2000 when, out of three thousand
applicants, he won a World Bank Development Marketplace Award, given
to “innovative, early-stage development projects that are scalable and/or
replicable, while also having high potential for development impact.” That
award attracted funding and attention, which culminated in a site visit from
Steve Case, CEO of AOL, and his wife, Jean. “They thought the PlayPump
was incredible,” Field said. “As soon as they saw it in action, they were
sold.” In 2005, the Cases agreed to fund the project and worked with Field
to set up an American arm of PlayPumps International. Their aim was to
roll out thousands of new PlayPumps across Africa.
The PlayPump became the center of a massive marketing campaign.
Steve Case used his expertise from running AOL to pioneer new forms of
online fund-raising. The One Foundation, a British fund-raising charity,
launched a bottled water brand called One Water and donated the profits to
PlayPumps International. It was a huge success and became the official
bottled water of the Live 8 concerts and the Make Poverty History
campaign. The PlayPump became the darling of the international media,
who leaped at the opportunity to pun, with headlines like PUMPING WATER IS
CHILD’S PLAY and THE MAGIC ROUNDABOUT. In an article for Time in 2006,
Bill Clinton called the PlayPump a “wonderful innovation.”
Celebrities, too, jumped on the bandwagon. Jay-Z raised tens of
thousands of dollars through his “The Diary of Jay-Z: Water for Life”
concert tour. Soon after, PlayPumps International secured its biggest win: a
$16.4 million grant awarded by then First Lady Laura Bush, launching a
campaign designed to raise $60 million to fund four thousand PlayPumps
across Africa by 2010. By 2007, the PlayPump was the hottest thing in
international development, and Trevor Field was at the center of it all—a
rock star of the charity world.
“It has just gone berserk! . . . When I first looked at this water pump . . .
I could never imagine that this is something that could possibly change the
world,” Field said in 2008, reflecting on PlayPump International’s startling
success. “It really rocks me to know we’re making a difference to a lot of
people who are nowhere near as privileged as I am or my family is.” By
2009, his charity had installed eighteen hundred PlayPumps across South
Africa, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Zambia.
Then things went sour. Two damning reports were released, one by
UNICEF and one by the Swiss Resource Centre and Consultancies for
Development (SKAT). It turned out that, despite the hype and the awards
and the millions of dollars spent, no one had really considered the
practicalities of the PlayPump. Most playground merry-go-rounds spin
freely once they’ve gained sufficient momentum—that’s what makes them
fun. But in order to pump water, PlayPumps need constant force, and
children playing on them would quickly get exhausted. According to the
UNICEF report, children sometimes fell off and broke limbs, and some
vomited from the spinning. In one village, local children were paid to
“play” on the pump. Much of the time, women of the village ended up
pushing the merry-go-round themselves—a task they found tiring,
undignified, and demeaning.
What’s more, no one had asked the local communities if they wanted a
PlayPump in the first place. When the investigators from SKAT asked the
community what they thought about the new PlayPump, many said they
preferred the hand pumps that were previously installed. With less effort, a
Zimbabwe Bush hand pump of the same cylinder size as a PlayPump
provided thirteen hundred liters of water per hour—five times the amount
of the PlayPump. A woman in Mozambique said, “From five A.M., we are in
the fields, working for six hours. Then we come to this pump and have to
turn it. From this, your arms start to hurt. The old hand pump was much
easier.” One reporter estimated that, in order to provide a typical village’s
water needs, the merry-go-round would have to spin for twenty-seven hours
per day.
Even when communities welcomed the pumps, they didn’t do so for
long. The pumps often broke down within months, but unlike the
Zimbabwe Bush Pump, the mechanics of the pump were encased in a metal
shell and could not be repaired by the community. The locals were
supposed to receive a phone number to call for maintenance, but most
communities never received one, and those who did never got anyone on
the phone. The billboards on the storage tanks lay bare: the rural
communities were too poor for companies to be interested in paying for
advertising. The PlayPump was inferior in almost every way to the unsexy
but functional hand pumps it competed with. Yet, at $14,000 per unit, it cost
four times as much.
Soon, the media turned on its golden child. PBS ran a documentary
exposing the PlayPump’s many shortcomings. (One thing that didn’t change
was the media’s love of puns: the documentary was called Southern Africa:
Troubled Water; The Guardian repeatedly referred to the PlayPump as
“money down the drain.”) In an admirable response to this criticism, the US
arm of PlayPumps International shut down and its sponsor, the Case
Foundation, publicly acknowledged that the program had been a failure.
Yet, despite its fall from grace, the PlayPump lives on. Under the name of
Roundabout Water Solutions, Field’s nonprofit continues to install the same
model of PlayPumps across South Africa, funded by corporations like Ford
Motor Company and Colgate Palmolive.
• • •
Most people want to make a difference in their lives and, if you’re reading
this book, you’re probably no exception. As Trevor Field’s story illustrates,
however, good intentions can all too easily lead to bad outcomes. The
challenge for us is this: How can we ensure that, when we try to help others,
we do so as effectively as possible? How can we ensure that we avoid
accidentally causing harm, and succeed in having the greatest positive
impact we can?
This book tries to help answer these questions. I believe that by
combining the heart and the head—by applying data and reason to altruistic
acts—we can turn our good intentions into astonishingly good outcomes. To
illustrate, let’s look at a story with a very different ending from the one you
just read about.
• • •
In 2007, at the peak of the PlayPump’s popularity, Michael Kremer and
Rachel Glennerster launched an organization of their own, the culmination
of decades of research into how to improve the lives of the poorest people
in the world.
Glennerster had studied economics at the University of Oxford,
graduating in 1988. She was interested in learning about poverty relief, so
she decided to live in a developing country and spent a summer in Kenya.
She spoke to people working in development, many of whom were deeply
disillusioned. When she asked why, they told her to look at some of the
ways development projects had backfired.
“I got sent down to big projects that had failed,” Glennerster told me. “I
went to Lake Turkana, up in the north of Kenya. The Turkana people are
basically nomadic, and various development projects had hoped to improve
their quality of life by settling them on the lake, so they built a big factory
for fish. They managed to get them to settle and fish in the lake, but then
the lake got overfished, and the fish stock collapsed. . . . It was depressing.”
Disenchanted about the potential to have an impact in global development,
she moved into domestic policy, taking a job at the British Treasury.
Michael Kremer also spent some of his young adulthood in Kenya,
living there for a year after finishing his undergraduate degree. Like
Glennerster, he was concerned by extreme poverty and wanted to learn
more, so he lived with a local family, teaching English at a secondary
school. He also saw some dramatic ways in which attempts to improve
conditions there were failing. When he returned to grad school, he decided
to figure out how things could be done better.
Kremer and Glennerster met at Harvard University in 1990. Kremer
was a PhD student; Glennerster was visiting on a Kennedy Scholarship,
having taken a sabbatical from her work at the Treasury. By the time
Kremer became a professor at MIT in 1993, he and Glennerster were
married. As a vacation, they returned to Kenya to visit the family Kremer
had lived with several years prior.
While there, Kremer spoke to Paul Lipeyah, a friend who worked for
the Dutch charity International Christian Support (now called Investing in
Children and Their Societies, or ICS). ICS’s main program was child
sponsorship, in which a donor paid a regular amount to help an individual
child or a small community. ICS had been trying to improve school
attendance and test scores. They provided a package of different things:
new textbooks and additional teachers to schools, and free school uniforms
to the students. ICS had received new funding, and Paul Lipeyah was about
to roll out the program to seven new schools.
Kremer urged Lipeyah to test his program using what’s called a
randomized controlled trial: he would monitor and collect data for fourteen
local schools, implementing the program in seven of them, while letting the
other seven go about business as usual. By collecting data from all fourteen
schools to see which fared better, he could find out if his program actually
worked.
In hindsight, Kremers idea seems obvious. Randomized controlled
trials are the gold-standard method of testing ideas in other sciences, and for
decades pharmaceutical companies have used them to test new drugs. In
fact, because it’s so important not to sell people ineffective or harmful
drugs, it’s illegal to market a drug that hasn’t gone through extensive
randomized controlled trials. But before Kremer suggested it, the idea had
never been applied to the development world.
With the help of collaborators, Kremer tested the different ICS
programs one by one. First, he looked at the efficacy of providing schools
with additional textbooks. Classrooms would often have only one textbook
for a class of thirty, so it seemed obvious that providing more textbooks
would help students learn. However, when Kremer tested this theory by
comparing test scores between schools that received books and those that
didn’t, he found no effect for all but the most high-achieving of students.
(He suggests the textbooks were written at too high a level for the children,
especially considering they were in English, the pupils’ third language after
Swahili and their local languages.)
Next, Kremer looked at providing flip charts. The schoolchildren
couldn’t understand the textbooks, but having flip charts would allow
teachers to tailor lessons to the specific needs of the students. Perhaps these
would work better. Again, however, no effect.
Undaunted, he took a different approach. If providing additional
materials didn’t work, maybe increasing the number of teachers would.
After all, most schools had only one teacher, catering to a large class. But,
again, he found no discernible improvement from decreasing class sizes.
Over and over again, Kremer found that seemingly obvious programs to
improve education just weren’t working. But he persisted. He refused to
believe there was simply no way to improve the education of children in
Kenya. At that point, a friend at the World Bank suggested he test
deworming.
Few people in developed countries know about intestinal worms:
parasitic infections that affect more than one billion people worldwide.
They aren’t as dramatic as AIDS or cancer or malaria, because they don’t
kill nearly as many people as those other conditions. But they do make
children sick, and can be cured for pennies: off-patent drugs, developed in
the 1950s, can be distributed through schools and administered by teachers,
and will cure children of intestinal worms for a year.
Kremer did an experiment to see whether treating children for these
intestinal worms had an impact on education. The results were striking.
“We didn’t expect deworming to be as effective as it was,” Kremer told me.
“It turned out to be one of the most cost-effective ways of increasing school
participation.”
Absenteeism is a chronic problem in schools in Kenya, and deworming
reduced it by 25 percent. In fact, every child treated spent an extra two
weeks in school, and every one hundred dollars spent on the program
provided a total of ten years of additional school attendance among all
students. Enabling a child to spend an extra day in school therefore cost just
five cents. It wasn’t merely that deworming children “worked” at getting
children into school. It worked incredibly well.
What’s more, deworming didn’t merely have educational benefits. It
had health and economic benefits, too. Intestinal worms can cause a variety
of maladies, including anemia, intestinal obstruction, and a suppressed
immune system that can increase the risk of other diseases like malaria.
Deworming decreases all these risks. Moreover, when Kremers colleagues
followed up with the children ten years later, those who had been dewormed
were working an extra 3.4 hours per week and earning an extra 20 percent
of income compared to those who had not been dewormed. In fact,
deworming was such a powerful program that it paid for itself through
increased tax revenue.
By the time his work on deworming was published, Kremers
revolutionary new approach to development had spawned a following, with
dozens of the brightest young economists running hundreds of trials of
different development programs. Meanwhile, Glennerster had quit her job
and become the executive director of the newly founded Poverty Action
Lab at MIT, where she used her knowledge of policy to ensure the research
Kremer and his colleagues were conducting would have real-world impact.
In 2007, on the basis of this research, Kremer and Glennerster
cofounded the nonprofit Deworm the World Initiative, which provides
technical assistance to the governments of developing countries, enabling
them to launch their own deworming programs. The charity has provided
more than forty million deworming treatments, and the independent charity
evaluator GiveWell regards them as one of the most cost-effective
development charities.
• • •
When it comes to helping others, being unreflective often means being
ineffective.
The PlayPump is the perfect example. Trevor Field and everyone who
supported him were driven by emotions—the appeal of seeing happy
children provide their communities with clean water through the simple act
of playing—rather than facts. The Case Foundation, Laura Bush, and Bill
Clinton supported the PlayPump not because there was good evidence to
believe it would help people but because it had the thrill of a revolutionary
technology. Even critics of the campaign would stop short of accusing Field
and his supporters of bad intentions—they no doubt genuinely wanted to
help the people of rural Africa. But relying on good intentions alone to
inform your decisions is potentially disastrous.
It would be nice if the PlayPump were an isolated example of
unreflective altruism, but sadly it’s just an extreme example of a much more
general trend. We very often fail to think as carefully about helping others
as we could, mistakenly believing that applying data and rationality to a
charitable endeavor robs the act of virtue. And that means we pass up
opportunities to make a tremendous difference.
Imagine, for example, that you’re walking down a commercial street in
your hometown. An attractive and frighteningly enthusiastic young woman
nearly assaults you in order to get you to stop and speak with her. She
clasps a tablet and wears a T-shirt displaying the words Dazzling Cosmetics.
You agree to let her speak, and she explains that she’s representing a beauty
products company that is looking for investment. She tells you about how
big the market for beauty products is, and how great the products they sell
are, and how, because the company spends more than 90 percent of its
money on making the products and less than 10 percent on staff,
distribution, and marketing, the company is extremely efficient and
therefore able to generate an impressive return on investment. Would you
invest?
Of course you wouldn’t. If you wanted to invest in a company, you
would consult experts or investigate different companies and compare
Dazzling Cosmetics’ performance with the rest of them. Either way, you
would look at the best available evidence in order to work out where you
will get the most bang for your buck. In fact, almost no one is foolish
enough to invest in a company that is pitched to them on the street—which
is why the imaginary situation I described here never occurs. Yet, every
year, hundreds of thousands of people donate to charities they haven’t heard
of simply because a well-spoken fund-raiser whom they didn’t know asked
them to. And they normally have no way of knowing what happened to the
money they donated.
One difference between investing in a company and donating to a
charity is that the charity world often lacks appropriate feedback
mechanisms. Invest in a bad company, and you lose money; but give money
to a bad charity, and you probably won’t hear about its failings. Buy a shirt
that’s advertised as silk when it’s really polyester, and you’ll realize pretty
quickly; but buy coffee that has a Fairtrade stamp on it, and you never know
whether doing so helped people, harmed them, or did nothing. If it weren’t
for the independent investigations by UNICEF and SKAT, PlayPumps
International would have looked like a terrific success to those who
supported it. Because we don’t get useful feedback when we try to help
others, we can’t get a meaningful sense of whether we’re really making a
difference.
Kremer and Glennerster succeeded in part because they didn’t assume
they knew what the most effective way of helping people was. Instead, they
tested their ideas before putting them into action. They were willing to
revise their beliefs about what worked in light of the evidence they received
and then went out and did what the evidence suggested they should do. In
contrast with the PlayPump, the most effective program turned out to be
remarkably boring: Grace Hollister, now the director of Deworm the World
Initiative, told me that “deworming is probably the least sexy development
program there is.” But by focusing on what was effective rather than what
was emotionally appealing, they produced outstanding results, significantly
improving the lives of millions of people.
Kremer and Glennerster exemplify a way of thinking I call effective
altruism. Effective altruism is about asking, “How can I make the biggest
difference I can?” and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an
answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good. Just as science consists
of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s true, and a
commitment to believe the truth whatever that turns out to be, effective
altruism consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s best
for the world, and a commitment to do what’s best, whatever that turns out
to be.
As the phrase suggests, effective altruism has two parts, and I want to
be clear on what each part means. As I use the term, altruism simply means
improving the lives of others. Many people believe that altruism should
denote sacrifice, but if you can do good while maintaining a comfortable
life for yourself, that’s a bonus, and I’m very happy to call that altruism.
The second part is effectiveness, by which I mean doing the most good with
whatever resources you have. Importantly, effective altruism is not just
about making a difference, or doing some amount of good. It’s about trying
to make the most difference you can. Determining whether something is
effective means recognizing that some ways of doing good are better than
others. The point of this isn’t to lay blame, or to claim that some ways of
doing good are “unworthy.” Rather, it’s simply to work out which ways of
doing good are best, and to do those first. This project is crucial because, as
we’ll discuss, the best ways of doing good are very good indeed.
I helped to develop the idea of effective altruism while a graduate
student at the University of Oxford. I had begun donating to charity and
wanted to ensure that my donations did as much to help others as possible.
Along with Toby Ord, a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford, I began to
investigate the cost-effectiveness of charities that fight poverty in the
developing world. The results were remarkable. We discovered that the best
charities are hundreds of times more effective at improving lives than
merely “good” charities. In 2009, Toby and I cofounded Giving What We
Can, an organization that encourages people to donate at least 10 percent of
their income to these most cost-effective charities. Around the same time,
two New York hedge fund analysts, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld,
quit their jobs to start GiveWell, an organization that does extraordinarily
in-depth research to work out which charities do the most good with every
dollar they receive.
From there, a community developed. We realized that effective altruism
could be applied to all areas of our lives—choosing a charity, certainly, but
also choosing a career, volunteering, and choosing what we buy and don’t
buy. On the basis of this, in 2011, I cofounded 80,000 Hours (a name that
refers to the number of hours you typically work in your life), which
provides advice and coaching on how to choose a career that will allow you
to make the most difference.
In this book, I’ll present in more depth effective altruism’s approach to
making a difference. What I hope to convey is not a series of facts but a
new way of thinking about helping others, which you can take with you and
apply in your own life. The first part of this book outlines effective
altruism’s way of thinking, enabling us, in the second part of the book, to
apply that way of thinking to specific issues.
In the first part, I dedicate each chapter to exploring one of effective
altruism’s five key questions:
1. How many people benefit, and by how much?
2. Is this the most effective thing you can do?
3. Is this area neglected?
4. What would have happened otherwise?
5. What are the chances of success, and how good would
success be?
Asking these five key questions can help us avoid common pitfalls
when thinking about doing good. The first question helps us to think
concretely about how different actions improve people’s lives, so that we
don’t squander our time or money on activities that don’t, ultimately, make
people better off. The second question ensures we try to spend our efforts
not on “merely good” activities but on the very best activities. The third
question directs us to focus on those areas that receive comparatively little
attention, and for which others haven’t taken the outstanding opportunities
to make a difference. The fourth question helps us to avoid trying to do
good works that would happen with or without our involvement. The fifth
question helps us to think about uncertainty correctly, so that we can know
when to pursue activities that have low odds of success but large potential
payoffs instead of activities with guaranteed smaller benefits.
Taken together, these five questions help us to answer the guiding
question of effective altruism: “How can I do the most good?” They form
the core of effective altruism’s approach to making a difference.
In the second part of this book, I apply these questions to specific areas:
How can I figure out which charities will do the most good with my
donations? How can I choose a career or volunteering opportunity with the
biggest impact? How much of a difference can I make through ethical
consumption? Of the many problems in the world, how can I decide which
to focus on? In each case, I provide a framework for thinking about the
issue, a checklist of questions to help you ensure that you think through all
the most important considerations. I hope to show how effective altruism
can help us to have a greater impact in all aspects of our lives. For ease of
reference, the frameworks and the five key questions are all restated in the
appendix.
Before we begin, let me emphasize why these considerations are so
important. In the next chapter, I’ll explain why each and every one of us has
the power, if we so choose, to do extraordinary things.
ONE
YOU ARE THE 1 PERCENT
Just how much can you achieve?
When the Occupy Wall Street movement gained traction in the fall of 2011,
disaffected citizens of the Western world quickly adopted the term the 1
percent to refer to the top 1 percent of income earners in wealthy nations,
primarily the United States. The term came from a popular statistic that the
richest 1 percent of the population receives 24 percent of total income—
that’s more than $340,000 per year, twelve times the $28,000 earned by the
typical American worker. References to the 1 percent versus the 99 percent
—i.e., the rest of the population—quickly became shorthand for the income
gap in America.
Inequality in America is getting starker over time: while typical
household income grew by less than 40 percent between 1979 and 2007, the
income of the richest 1 percent grew by 275 percent in that same time
period. The French economist Thomas Piketty, who gained international
fame for his 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has suggested
that the level of income inequality in the United States is “probably higher
than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.”
This can lead those of us who aren’t in that 1 percent to feel powerless,
but this focus neglects just how much power almost any member of an
affluent country has. If people focus exclusively on American inequality,
they’re missing an important part of the bigger picture. Consider this graph
of global income distribution:
Source: Branko Milanovic, PovcalNet
This graph lines up everyone in the world, ordered by their income. The
space between 0 and 25 percent represents the 25 percent of the world with
the smallest incomes; the space between 75 and 100 percent represents the
25 percent of the world with the largest incomes. If everyone had the same
income, the line would be flat, forming a neat rectangle under it. But they
don’t. The poorest people in the world barely even register on the graph.
Income soars when you hit the top 10 percent. And the richest 1 percent?
That spike goes off the chart. If I wanted to draw the whole of this graph so
that you could see where the spike ends, this book would have to be as tall
as a twenty-three-story building, taller than the original Godzilla.
Where do you fall on this graph? You obviously won’t know for sure,
since I’ve deliberately left the vertical axis unlabeled, but have a guess.
What percentage of the world’s population is above you in income, and
what percentage is below?
When I ask residents of the United States or the United Kingdom this
question, they typically guess they fall into the seventieth or eightieth
percentile. They know they’re from an affluent country, but they also know
they’re not like those bankers and CEOs who make up the global elite.
They therefore guess that they’re at the corner of the curve, peering up at
the megarich who sit atop that spike. That’s what I used to think, too.
Here’s that graph with the vertical axis labeled.
Source: Branko Milanovic, PovcalNet
If you earn more than $52,000 per year, then, speaking globally, you are
the 1 percent. If you earn at least $28,000—that’s the typical income for
working individuals in the United States—you’re in the richest 5 percent of
the world’s population. Even someone living below the US poverty line,
earning just $11,000 per year, is still richer than 85 percent of people in the
world. Because we’re used to judging ourselves in comparison with our
peers, it’s easy to underestimate just how well off those of us in rich
countries are.
You might be feeling skeptical at this point. I certainly was when I first
heard these facts. “Sure,” you might say, “the poor in developing countries
might not have much money, but that money can pay for so much more
because the cost of living in those places is cheaper.”
It’s true that money goes further overseas. When I was in Ethiopia, I ate
at one of Addis Ababa’s fanciest restaurants, and the bill came to about ten
dollars. I even once stayed in a hotel room (albeit, a nasty one) for a night
for one dollar. However, that graph of income inequality has already taken
into account the fact that money goes further overseas. Let’s look at that
bottom 20 percent of the world’s population: that’s 1.22 billion people who
earn less than $1.50 per day, and thereby count as members of the “extreme
poor.” You might assume that “$1.50 per day” means that every day the
extreme poor live on the equivalent of $1.50 in their local currency. But it
actually means they live on an amount of money equivalent to what $1.50
could buy in the United States in 2014. What can $1.50 buy you in the
United States? A candy bar? A bag of rice?
You might still be skeptical. Perhaps, you think, people in poor
countries can live on less than $1.50 a day because they produce a lot of
their own goods. They don’t have much money but they don’t need that
much money because they farm their own land and mainly live off what
they grow. Again, however, this has already been taken into account in that
graph. Suppose Annette is a farmer who earns $1.20 per day from selling
her produce, but who also eats forty cents’ worth of what she grows per
day. According to the way these figures are calculated, she lives on $1.60
per day and is therefore above the $1.50-per-day poverty line.
You might wonder: How can anyone live on such little money? Surely
they’d die? And the answer is . . . they do. At least, they die much more
regularly than those of us who live in developed countries do. Even though
average life expectancy in developing countries has skyrocketed over the
last few decades, in poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa it is only fifty-six
years, compared to over seventy-eight years in the United States. In other
dimensions, their lives are just as lacking as you’d expect given their
earnings. In order to get a full picture of what life is like for the extreme
poor, Professors Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, economists at MIT,
conducted a survey of more than thirteen countries. They found that the
extreme poor consume an average of fourteen hundred calories per day—
about half of what is recommended for a physically active man or a very
physically active woman—while spending most of their income on food.
The majority are underweight and anemic. Most households own radios but
lack electricity, toilets, or tap water. Less than 10 percent of households
possess a chair or a table.
There is, however, one way in which the $1.50-per-day figure can’t
quite be cashed out as “what $1.50 could buy in the United States in 2014.”
In the United States, because there is no extreme poverty, there is no market
for extremely cheap goods. The lowest-quality rice you can buy in the
United States is far better than what you could buy in Ethiopia or India. The
room I rented in Ethiopia for one dollar a night was far worse than anything
I could rent in the United States. (Trust me on this.) The very worst housing
you can buy in the United States is far better than the mud-brick houses
typical for those living below the $1.50-per-day extreme-poverty line. This
explains how someone living in extreme poverty can still have a “home,”
but it doesn’t do much, if anything, to improve life in extreme poverty.
• • •
The fact that we’ve found ourselves at the top of the heap, globally
speaking, provides us with a tremendous opportunity to make a difference.
Because we are comparatively so rich, the amount by which we can benefit
others is vastly greater than the amount by which we can benefit ourselves.
We can therefore do a huge amount of good at relatively little cost.
Just how much good should we expect to be able to do? Let’s very
simplistically suppose that by some social action—giving to a development
charity, buying fair-trade items, or something else—we make ourselves a
dollar poorer and thereby make an Indian farmer living in extreme poverty
a dollar richer. How much greater a benefit would that dollar provide the
poor Indian farmer than it would provide for ourselves? It’s a basic rule of
economics that money is less valuable to you the more you have of it. We
should therefore expect a dollar to provide a larger benefit for an extremely
poor Indian farmer than it would for you or me. But how much larger?
Economists have sought to answer this question through a variety of
methods. We’ll look at some of these in the next chapter, but for now I’ll
discuss just one method, which is to ask people directly about their well-
being. (Estimates via other methods would support my conclusion at least
as well as this one does.)
In order to work out the relationship between level of income and level
of subjective well-being, economists have conducted large-scale surveys of
income levels and the subjective well-being of people in each of them.
Their results are given in this graph, which shows the relationship between
income and subjective well-being both within a country and across
countries.
Source: Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers
The vertical axis of this graph represents self-reported well-being.
Those interviewed had to say how satisfied they were with their lives on a
scale from 0 to 10. Rating yourself at 10 means you consider yourself
maximally happy: you think that, realistically, life couldn’t get any better.
Rating yourself at 0 means you consider yourself maximally unhappy: you
think that, realistically, life couldn’t get any worse. Most people fall in the
middle of this range. The horizontal axis represents annual income.
What’s interesting about this graph is that a doubling of income will
always increase reported subjective well-being by the same amount. For
someone earning $1,000 per year, a $1,000 pay rise generates the same
increase in happiness as a $2,000 pay rise for someone earning $2,000 per
year, or an $80,000 pay rise for someone already earning $80,000 per year.
And so on.
This graph allows us to determine just how much greater a benefit the
extreme poor receive from one dollar than you or I do. Imagine if your boss
called you into her office and told you your salary would double for the
next year. You’d be pretty pleased, right? What the conclusions from the
economic studies suggest is that the benefit you get from having your salary
doubled is the same as the benefit an extremely poor Indian farmer gets
from having his salary doubled. If you’re on the typical US wage of
$28,000 per year, the benefit you’d get from an additional $28,000 in
income is the same as the benefit a poor Indian farmer would get from an
additional $220.
This gives us a good theoretical reason for thinking that the same
amount of money can do one hundred times as much to benefit the very
poorest people in the world as it can to benefit typical citizens of the United
States. If you earn as much as the typical American worker, then you are
one hundred times as rich as the very poorest people in the world, which
means additional income can do a hundred times as much to benefit the
extreme poor as it can to benefit you or me. This isn’t to say that income is
all that matters to well-being—of course other factors like safety and
political freedom are involved. But income certainly plays a critical role in
how enjoyable, long, and healthy your life is. Looking at how much we can
benefit people via increasing their income gives us a particularly robust way
of assessing how much we can benefit others compared to ourselves.
It’s not often you have two options, one of which is one hundred times
better than the other. Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy
yourself a beer for five dollars or buy someone else a beer for five cents. If
that were the case, we’d probably be pretty generous—next round’s on me!
But that’s effectively the situation we’re in all the time. It’s like a 99-
percent-off sale, or getting 10,000 percent extra free. It might be the most
amazing deal you’ll see in your life.
This idea is important enough that I’ve given it a name. I call it the
100x Multiplier. For those of us living in rich countries, you should expect
to be able to do at least one hundred times as much to benefit other people
as you can to benefit yourself.
The 100x Multiplier should surprise us. We shouldn’t expect to be able
to do so much to benefit others at such little cost to ourselves. But we live
in an unusual place during an unusual time.
It’s an unusual place because, if you’re reading this book, then, like me,
you’re probably lucky enough to be earning $16,000 per year or more,
putting you in the richest 10 percent of the world’s population. That’s a
remarkable situation to be in.
It’s an unusual time because it comes after a period of remarkable
economic progress, which has led to some of the world experiencing what
is, historically, fabulous wealth. In 1800, the gross domestic product per
person per year in America was only $1,400 (in today’s money), whereas
now it’s more than $42,000. In a mere two hundred years, we’ve become
thirty times richer. But it is a time following remarkably unequal economic
progress. Despite the riches of people like us, there are still billions living in
abject poverty. This is highly unintuitive, as can be seen by this graph of
gross domestic product per person, over the last two thousand years.
Source: Angus Maddison
For almost all of human history—from the evolution of Homo sapiens
two hundred thousand years ago until the Industrial Revolution 250 years
ago—the average income across all countries was the equivalent of two
dollars per day or less. Even now, more than half of the world still lives on
four dollars per day or less. Yet, through some outstanding stroke of luck,
we have found ourselves as the inheritors of the most astonishing period of
economic growth the world has ever seen, while a significant proportion of
people stay as poor as they have ever been.
Moreover, because of that economic progress, we live at a time in
which we have the technology to easily gather information about people
thousands of miles away, the ability to significantly influence their lives,
and the scientific knowledge to work out what the most effective ways of
helping are. For these reasons, few people who have ever existed have had
so much power to help others as we have today.
Sometimes we look at the size of the problems in the world and think,
“Anything I do would be just a drop in the bucket. So why bother?” But, in
light of the research shown in these graphs, that reasoning doesn’t make any
sense. It’s the size of the drop that matters, not the size of the bucket, and, if
we choose, we can create an enormous drop. We’ve already seen that we
have the opportunity to provide a benefit for others that is one hundred
times greater than the benefit we could provide for ourselves. That we can’t
solve all the problems in the world doesn’t alter in any way the fact that, if
we choose, we can transform the lives of thousands of people.
THE FIVE KEY QUESTIONS OF
EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM
TWO
HARD TRADE-OFFS
Question #1: How many people benefit, and by how
much?
June 21, 1994. Kigali, Rwanda. Two months into one of the most horrific
genocides the world has ever witnessed, James Orbinski manned a small
Red Cross hospital, a tiny wellspring amid a moral wasteland.
The problems in Rwanda began to build up decades before, when the
early Belgian colonialists had decreed that, of the native population, the
minority Tutsi were racially superior to the more numerous Hutu. Under
this regime, the Tutsi assisted the colonial rulers while Hutu were used as
forced labor. This situation changed radically in 1959, when the Tutsi
monarchy was overthrown and replaced with a Hutu republic and Rwanda
became independent of Belgium. But things did not get better. The
country’s new leaders imposed dictatorial military rule and harvested the
little wealth the country had for their own ends. Many of Rwanda’s Tutsi
fled to neighboring countries as refugees, and the country soon became one
of the poorest in the world.
As the prosperity of the country declined, the Hutu’s resentment toward
the Tutsi grew. As time passed, the extremist ideology known as Hutu
Power, explicitly based around racist anti-Tutsi principles, gained
popularity. By 1990, Rwanda’s leaders had begun arming Hutu citizens
with machetes, razor blades, saws, and scissors; a new radio station had
been set up to broadcast propaganda and hate speech; and attacks from the
Tutsi refugee army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, were being used to
catalyze fear among the Hutu populace. By 1994, anti-Tutsi sentiment
reached its zenith. On April 6, 1994, the Rwandan president was
assassinated. The extremist Hutus blamed the Rwandan Patriotic Front,
giving them the perfect opportunity to initiate their long-planned genocide.
By the time Orbinski found himself at that Red Cross hospital,
hundreds of thousands of Tutsi had been killed. The UN was stalling, not
wanting to admit that a genocide was happening, and had provided almost
no support. Only a handful of nonprofit workers remained in the country.
Later in his life, Orbinski would become the president of Doctors Without
Borders and accept the Nobel Peace Prize on its behalf, but at this time his
role was simply to provide care for those who needed it, and with so many
casualties, what could he do? He later recalled:
There were so many, and they kept coming. Patients were taped
with a 1, 2, or 3 on their foreheads: 1 meant treat now, 2 meant treat
within twenty-four hours, and 3 meant irretrievable. The 3s were
moved to the small hill by the roadside opposite the emergency
room and left to die in as much comfort as could be mustered for
them. They were covered with blankets to stay warm and given
water and whatever morphine we had. The 1s were carried by
stretcher to the emergency room or to the entrance area around it.
The 2s were placed in groups behind the 1s.
I cannot comprehend what it was like for James Orbinski to see so
many in pain at once and know he could help so few of them. I can only be
thankful that I will never witness suffering of that magnitude. I imagine you
feel the same.
However, there is a way in which Orbinski’s situation is similar to ours.
With so many casualties coming in, Orbinski knew he could not save
everyone, and that meant he had to make tough choices: whom did he save,
and whom did he leave to die? Not all could be helped, so he prioritized and
engaged in triage. If it were not for that cold, calculating, yet utterly
necessary allocation of 1s, 2s, and 3s, how many more lives would have
been lost? If he had made no choice—if he had put his hands in the air and
claimed defeat, or if he had simply tried to treat whoever came in first—he
would have made the worst choice of all.
The reality of our world is such that, if we want to make the world a
better place, we must make choices similar to those of Orbinski.
Suppose you have money you want to donate to charity. If you donate
to Haiti earthquake relief, you help disaster victims. That means you have
less money to fund antiretrovirals to fight HIV in Uganda, or to help the
homeless in your hometown. As a result of your choices, someone is made
better off and someone else is not. Confronted with the choice, you might
be inclined to give to all these causes: make more room in your budget for
increased charitable giving or divide your donation among several causes.
But your time and money are limited and you cannot solve all the problems
in the world. This means you need to make some hard decisions: Whom do
you choose to help?
Exactly the same problem arises for our use of time. If you have a spare
couple of hours per week that you’re happy to dedicate to helping others,
how should you use them? Should you work at a soup kitchen? Join a
mentorship program for troubled youth? Organize fund-raisers for your
favorite charity? Again, there are far too many problems in the world and
not enough time to solve them all. We need to prioritize.
Orbinski’s situation was more salient than ours, since the potential
beneficiaries were there in front of him, crying out for help. The fact that he
had to make a choice, and that not choosing would itself be a decision, was
inescapable. That we are not directly confronted with the competing
beneficiaries of our charitable efforts and donations may lead us to take our
situation less seriously than we would if we were in Orbinski’s shoes, but it
makes the situation no less real. There are literally billions of potential
recipients of our help. Each one is a worthy beneficiary, someone who has
real problems and whose life could be made better by our actions. We
therefore need to make decisions about whom we choose to help, because
failure to decide is the worst decision of all.
Effective altruism, at its core, is about confronting Orbinski’s dilemma
and trying our best to make hard trade-offs. Of all the ways in which we
could make the world a better place, which will do the most good? Which
problems should we tackle immediately, and which should we leave for
another time? Valuing one action over another is difficult both
psychologically and practically, but it is not impossible. In order to make
comparisons between actions, we need to ask: How many people benefit,
and by how much? This is the first key question of effective altruism.
• • •
To begin to answer this question, we need to know the consequences of our
actions. To illustrate, let’s think about choosing which charity to give to. In
order to assess your potential impact by donating to a charity, you need to
know what exactly that charity will do with your donation.
For many charities, it’s not clear what the answer is. For example, if
you go onto the Salvation Army’s website, you can read about the many
programs they run, like soup kitchens, community support for veterans,
emergency shelters for the homeless, and summer camps and after-school
programs for children from low-income families. If you dig into their
website, you can see what proportion of their revenue they spend on broad
categories of expenditure like “rehabilitation,” “corps community center,”
and “other social services.” Nowhere, however, do they tell you how much
any of their programs cost, and therefore what your donation would
achieve. Perhaps fifty dollars is enough to pay for one person’s meals at a
soup kitchen for a whole year, but from the information provided on the
website, we can’t know for sure.
This is such a typical state of affairs that you might not have thought
about how astonishing it is. But imagine if you went into a grocery store
and none of the products had prices on them. Instead, the storekeeper asks:
“How much would you like to spend at this grocery store today?” When
you give the storekeeper some money, he hands over a selection of
groceries chosen by him.
This, of course, would be absurd. If this was how things worked, how
could we figure out if one grocery store was better than another? One store
could charge ten times the amount for the same produce, and, prior to
actually paying for the products, we wouldn’t be able to tell.
If it would be absurd to buy groceries this way, why is donating to
charity any different? In the case of charity, you’re buying things for other
people rather than yourself, but if you’re interested in using your money to
help other people effectively, that shouldn’t make a difference.
Sometimes, charities do tell you what you’re getting with your money.
For example, on its “Donate Now” webpage, the New York City branch of
the United Way tells you that a donation of fifty dollars is enough to
provide five books with parent guides to a family. This is a step in the right
direction. But, even assuming that the “fifty dollars for five books” figure is
accurate, it’s still not that useful because we don’t know what benefits those
books provide. We care about providing books only if doing so will lead to
things that really are of value. Do the books help children do better in
school? Do they enrich a family’s lives through a better understanding of
the world? If those extra books don’t actually improve anyone’s lives, then
your fifty-dollar donation is worthless.
We can overcome this problem by thinking in terms of improving lives
rather than in terms of intermediate metrics like number of schoolbooks
provided. In order to truly make comparisons between different actions, we
need to measure impact in terms of the size of the benefits we confer
through those actions.
In some cases, it’s relatively clear which action will provide a larger
benefit. Let’s think about Orbinski again. Saving someone from dying
provides a larger benefit than saving someone from losing a limb, so if
Orbinski had to choose between one or the other, he should save the life.
Similarly, he would provide a larger benefit by saving five lives than by
saving one. So, if, for example, he could provide five simple lifesaving
surgeries in the time it would take to provide one more-complicated
lifesaving surgery, it’s clear he should opt to perform the simpler surgeries.
However, there are many harder cases: If you can prevent the death of a
five-year-old or a twenty-year-old, which should you do? What if you can
prevent ten people from suffering from AIDS or one hundred people from
suffering from severe arthritis? What about preventing one woman from
being domestically abused versus enabling one child to go to school?
For health benefits, economists have spent decades conducting research
in order to answer questions like these. They have developed a metric called
the quality-adjusted life year, or QALY (pronounced “kwalee”), in order to
help make decisions about how to prioritize among different health
programs.
The idea behind the QALY is that there are two ways you can give a
health benefit to someone. First, you can “save someone’s life.” (I use
quotes here because “saving” a life, of course, only ever means extending
someone’s life.) The second way to benefit someone is to improve the
quality of their life during the time they are alive. Migraines don’t kill
people, but, as someone who occasionally suffers from them, I know that
life is better without them.
The QALY combines these two benefits into one metric, using survey
data about the trade-offs people are willing to make in order to assess how
bad different sorts of illnesses or disabilities are. For example, people on
average rate a life with untreated AIDS as 50 percent as good as life at full
health; people on average rate life after a stroke as 75 percent as good as
life at full health; and people on average rate life with moderate depression
as only 30 percent as good as life in full health.
We can illustrate the QALY metric using graphs. Here’s a graph that
illustrates a fairly typical life, representing how well the person’s life goes
over time.
This graph shows a person who lives most of his life very healthy, who
has some mild health troubles at age thirty-five but then gets better. His
health begins to deteriorate as he enters old age, until his death at seventy-
two.
The next two graphs show the two ways you can benefit someone’s life.
The first graph illustrates improving the quality of someone’s life by 20
percent for the sixty years of their life. That would amount to twelve
QALYs in total (60 x 20% = 12). The second graph illustrates extending the
life of someone who is currently at 70 percent health by ten years. That
amounts to seven QALYs overall (10 x 70% = 7). The QALY metric
therefore allows us to measure the size of benefits that different people
receive.
If you want, you can come up with your own personal quality weights.
Think of an ailment that you have suffered from at some point in your life.
Suppose you suffer from back pain, as I sometimes do. You could think to
yourself: If 10 represents how good my life is when I’m perfectly healthy,
how good is my life on a day when I’m suffering from back pain? This can
be difficult to answer, so a way to make your judgments more precise is to
ask yourself about what sorts of trade-offs you’d make. If you could live
one extra day at perfect health or a certain larger number of days living with
back pain, at what point would you be indifferent? In my own case, I’d be
indifferent between living an extra four days perfectly healthy, or an extra
five days with back pain. That suggests that I think life with back pain is 80
percent as good as life pain-free. In the endnotes, I link to some official lists
of quality-of-life estimates, to help you assess the severity of different
conditions yourself.
Economists have used the QALY metric to assess the cost-effectiveness
of different health treatments. They test a certain program, assess how much
it costs and what health improvements it provides, and then translate those
health improvements into QALYs. After doing this for a number of
different programs, they can make comparisons between these programs to
see which provides the largest benefit for a given amount of money. If you
have limited resources, then, other things being equal, you should spend
those resources in whatever way will provide the most QALYs.
To illustrate, consider a simple hypothetical example. Suppose that you
have $10,000, and with that money you could pay for antiretroviral therapy
for a forty-year-old who has AIDS or a surgery to prevent blindness in a
twenty-year-old, but not both. Without the antiretroviral therapy, the forty-
year-old would die in five years’ time; with the antiretroviral therapy, the
forty-year-old would die in ten years’ time. The twenty-year-old will live to
the age of seventy whether or not she receives the blindness-preventing
surgery. (Of course, in the real world we can never know exactly how long
people will live, so to perform this calculation we’d have to use average life
expectancy.) Should you pay for the antiretroviral therapy or for the
surgery? QALYs can help us to make that decision. First, we assess the size
of the benefit from the antiretroviral therapy. People rate the quality of life
with AIDS while not receiving antiretroviral therapy at 50 percent, and rate
the quality of life with AIDS while receiving antiretroviral therapy at 90
percent. By providing antiretroviral therapy to the forty-year-old, you’d
therefore increase her quality of life from 50 percent to 90 percent for five
years, and give her an extra five years of life at 90 percent health. That
equals 6.5 QALYs (because [90% – 50%] × 5 + [90% × 5] = 6.5).
Second, we assess the size of the benefit from the blindness-preventing
surgery. People rate the quality of life while blind at 40 percent. By
preventing the blindness of the twenty-year-old, you’d therefore increase
her quality of life from 40 percent to 100 percent for fifty years. That equals
thirty QALYs (because [100% – 40%) × 50 = 30). This tells us that you’d
provide a larger benefit by paying for the surgery than for paying for the
antiretroviral therapy. All other things being equal, that suggests you should
pay for the surgery rather than the antiretroviral therapy.
QALYs are imperfect, as any measure of health benefit will be. For
example, on average, people who have never been on dialysis estimate that
if they were on dialysis, their health-related quality of life would be 39
percent, whereas people who actually are on dialysis on average rate their
health-related quality of life at 56 percent. The same is true for other
medical conditions: patients tend to regard their conditions as less bad than
the general public does. Is this because the general public doesn’t really
understand what life with the medical condition is like and overestimates
how bad it is? Or is it because patients have subconsciously lowered the
standard for what they regard as 100 percent health? It’s difficult to know,
and academics continue to debate the topic. Similarly, some people think
that we should give special importance to preventing the deaths of younger
people, or give special weight to those who are particularly badly off. These
are contested issues, and they are unlikely to be resolved any time soon.
For our purposes, however, it’s often not important for us to have
precise numbers on how good or bad different conditions are. As we’ll see
in the next chapter, programs differ dramatically in how great an impact
they have, so even a rough idea of how many people are affected, and by
how much, is often enough to show that one program has a much larger
impact than another.
In this book, I’ll talk about QALYs quite a lot. That’s not because I
think the only way to make a difference is to improve someone’s health.
Rather, it’s because, as I’ll explain in the coming chapters, many of the best,
most concrete, and easiest-to-measure ways of doing good involve
improving global health. We’ve also got much better data for health
programs than for many other sorts of activity. Since the goal of effective
altruism is to do the most good we can, health is a good place to start.
Moreover, in principle, the same methods that were used to create the
QALY could be used to measure the costs and benefits of pretty much
anything. We could use these methods to estimate the degree to which your
well-being is affected by stubbing your toe, or by going through a divorce,
or by losing your job. We could call them well-being-adjusted life years
instead. The idea would be that being dead is at 0 percent well-being; being
as well off as you realistically can be is at 100 percent well-being. You can
compare the impact of different activities in terms of how much and for
how long they increase people’s well-being. In chapter one we saw that
doubling someone’s income gives a 5-percentage-point increase in reported
subjective well-being. On this measure, doubling someone’s income for
twenty years would provide one WALY.
Thinking in terms of well-being improvements allows us to compare
very different outcomes, at least in principle. For example, suppose you
were unsure about whether to donate to the United Way of New York City
or to Guide Dogs of America. You find out that it costs Guide Dogs of
America approximately $50,000 to train and provide one guide dog for one
blind person. Which is a better use of fifty dollars: providing five books, or
a 1/1,000th contribution to a guide dog? It might initially seem like such a
comparison is impossible, but if we knew the impact of each of these
activities on people’s well-being, then we could compare them.
Suppose, hypothetically, that we found out that providing one guide
dog (at a cost of $50,000) would give a 10-percentage-point increase in
reported well-being for one person’s life over nine years (the working life
of the dog). That would be 0.9 WALYs. And suppose that providing five
thousand books (at a cost of $50,000) provided a 0.001-percentage-point
increase in quality of life for five hundred people for forty years. That
would be two WALYs. If we knew this, then we’d know that spending
$50,000 on schoolbooks provided a greater benefit than spending $50,000
on one guide dog.
The difficulty of comparing different sorts of altruistic activity is
therefore ultimately due to a lack of knowledge about what will happen as a
result of that activity, or a lack of knowledge about how different activities
translate into improvements to people’s lives. It’s not that different sorts of
benefits are in principle incomparable.
Not everyone agrees with this. For example, in 2013, the CEO of
Charity Navigator (a charity evaluation service that I’ll discuss in chapter
seven), Ken Berger, and his colleague Robert M. Penna wrote a critical
piece on effective altruism for the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog.
They objected that the comparing of one cause to another “amounts to little
more than charitable imperialism, whereby ‘my cause’ is just, and yours is
—to one degree or another—a waste of precious resources.” As they
clarified in correspondence, Berger and Penna believe that “it’s impossible
to weigh one person’s interests against anothers”; they therefore think it’s
immoral to try to determine which causes are most effective.
However, their view simply cannot be correct. If Berger and Penna
were right, then we couldn’t say that giving someone an extra dessert is a
smaller benefit than saving someone’s life. Nor could we say that you do
more good by saving one million lives than by saving ten. We would have
to conclude that nurses who engage in triage—ensuring that doctors don’t
spend their time treating mild coughs when they could be treating heart
attacks—have no basis for their decisions. But that would be absurd. It
might be difficult, both emotionally and practically, to weigh different
people’s interests against each other, but it’s not impossible in principle.
Let’s consider a different objection. Doesn’t the focus on trying to
benefit others as much as possible neglect the fact that you might have a
closer personal connection to some causes rather than others? If a family
member died of cancer, isn’t it natural to want to direct your energies to
fighting cancer? Shouldn’t you focus on that cause, even if you could
theoretically do more good elsewhere?
I feel the pull of this objection. For example, in 2009, when setting up
Giving What We Can, I was trying to find those charities that do the most
good with every dollar they receive. In the course of doing this, I came
across the Fistula Foundation. Obstetric fistulas are truly awful conditions:
a hole between a women’s vagina and bladder or rectum, through which
urine or feces leak uncontrollably. They are generally caused by prolonged
labor during childbirth, though they can be caused by rape or sexual abuse.
They occur almost entirely in poor countries, where malnutrition results in
women having an underdeveloped pelvis, and where there are insufficient
medical resources available to perform a cesarean. The fistula causes
incontinence, and the women who suffer from them often end up ostracized
from their communities, unable to get work.
The primary recipient of the Fistula Foundation’s revenue is the Hamlin
Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. They treat fistulas through
surgery and provide follow-up care, counseling, and education. It was
clearly a highly worthy cause, doing a huge amount of good. Ultimately,
however, I concluded that you’d probably have an even bigger impact on
people’s lives by donating elsewhere. (I’ll discuss what causes I believe to
be most effective later in the book.)
But there was a catch. When I’d visited Ethiopia several years before,
I’d visited this hospital. I’d hugged the women who suffered from this
condition, and they’d thanked me for visiting them. It had been an
important experience for me: a vivid firsthand demonstration of the severity
of the problems in the world. This was a cause I had a personal connection
with.
Should I have donated to the Fistula Foundation, knowing I could do
more to help people if I donated elsewhere? I do not think so. If I were to
give to the Fistula Foundation rather than to the charities I thought were
most effective, I would be privileging the needs of some people over others
merely because I happened to know them. That would be unfair to those I
could have helped more. If I’d visited some other shelter in Ethiopia, or in
any other country, I would have had a different set of personal connections.
It was arbitrary that I’d seen this problem close up rather than any of the
other problems in the world.
Similar thoughts apply to deciding what cause to focus on more
generally. For example, if an uncle dies of cancer, you might naturally want
to raise money for cancer research. Responding to bereavement by trying to
make a difference is certainly admirable. But it seems arbitrary to raise
money for one specific cause of death rather than any other. If that family
member had died of a different illness, it would have been no less tragic.
What we care about when we lose someone close to us is that they suffered
and died before their time, not that they died from a specific cause. By all
means, we should harness the sadness we feel at the loss of a loved one in
order to make the world a better place. But we should focus that motivation
on preventing death and improving lives, rather than preventing death and
improving lives in one very specific way. Any other decision would be
unfair to those whom we could have helped more.
• • •
If we want to do as much good as we can, we need to think about what the
consequences of our actions will be. Moreover, we need to think about how
our actions will turn into improvements to people’s lives. When making
decisions, whether it’s in volunteering, choosing a career, or deciding to buy
“ethical” produce, we should therefore ask: How much does this activity
cost, in terms of time or money? How many people does it affect? And,
crucially: By how much does it improve people’s lives?
This is the first step toward addressing the hard question of how to
allocate our limited time and money. The crucial second step is to realize
the importance of focusing on the best activities. Let’s turn to that.
THREE
HOW YOU CAN SAVE HUNDREDS OF
LIVES
Question #2: Is this the most effective thing you can
do?
In 2009, a Zambian-born economist, Dambisa Moyo, published a book
called Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way
for Africa, in which she argued that “aid is malignant” and should stop. She
summed up her views early on in the book: “So there we have it: sixty
years, over US$1 trillion dollars of African aid, and not much good to show
for it.” Her message rang true for many, and her book was a bestseller.
She’s not alone in her anti-aid sentiment. In 2006, William Easterly, an
economist at New York University, wrote a book entitled The White Man’s
Burden. Easterly’s book, which popularizes the view that aid has been
ineffective at best and harmful at worst, has become the bible for aid
skeptics—those who believe international aid efforts have been a waste of
time and energy. He writes: “The other tragedy of the world’s poor . . . is
the tragedy in which the West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last
five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to
children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion
and still had not managed to get six-dollar bed nets to poor families. The
West spent $2.3 trillion and had still not managed to get three dollars to
each new mother to prevent five million child deaths.”
I endorsed something like aid skepticism for quite a long time. After I
graduated college, I decided against applying to jobs at nonprofits partly
because of stories I’d heard about food aid being stolen and sold by corrupt
governments, and assumed there was no way I could have an impact under
these conditions. I donated to development charities, but I always felt
uneasy about whether I was actually helping others or merely alleviating
my own sense of guilt about being born privileged in a world with so much
need.
I’ve since realized that I was thinking about development in entirely the
wrong way. The picture that aid skeptics paint is highly misleading and,
even more important, isn’t particularly relevant for people who want to do
good.
One error skeptics make is emphasizing in their critiques the amount of
money spent. A trillion dollars of aid spending, which Moyo appealed to in
her book, sounds like a lot of money, but, to the average person, it’s too
great a sum to comprehend, so we need to put it into context. The total
annual economic output of the world is $87 trillion; the United States
spends about $800 billion on social security every year; a decade of
cosmetics sales amounts to $1.7 trillion; and in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld
mentioned that the US military had simply lost track of $2.3 trillion. In
global terms, therefore, $1 trillion is not very much money. We can see this
even more clearly once we translate this figure into more meaningful terms.
Over sixty years of aid spending, $1 trillion is slightly less than $17 billion
per year. Divided by 412 million people—the average population of sub-
Saharan Africa during that time period—that’s only forty dollars per
recipient per year. When we take into account the fact that the $1 trillion in
aid spending must be divided among a very large number of people over
many decades, we see that the amount of aid spent per recipient is very
small indeed.
Second, the claim that there is “not much to show for it” is simply false.
Even among the “bottom billion”—the population of countries that have
experienced the weakest economic growth over the last few decades—
quality of life has increased dramatically. In 1950, life expectancy in sub-
Saharan Africa was just 36.7 years. Now it’s 56 years, a gain of almost 50
percent. The picture that Dambisa Moyo paints is inaccurate. In reality, a
tiny amount of aid has been spent, and there have been dramatic increases
in the welfare of the world’s poorest people.
Of course, correlation is not causation. Merely showing that the
people’s welfare has improved at the same time the West has been offering
aid does not prove that aid caused the improvement. It could be that aid is
entirely incidental, or even harmful, holding back even greater progress that
would have happened anyway or otherwise. But in fact there’s good reason
to think that, on average, international aid spending has been incredibly
beneficial. Moyo points to aid’s inefficiencies by focusing on typical aid
programs. But to get a true picture of how much benefit the developing
world has received from aid, one needs to focus instead on the best aid
programs.
A good contender for the best aid program ever is the eradication of
smallpox. Smallpox was a horrific disease. The infection would present
itself initially like the flu, resulting in fever, muscle pain, malaise, and
headaches. After two weeks, small lesions appeared on the mouth, tongue,
and throat. Soon afterward, fluid-filled blisters developed on the skin: first
the forehead, then the face, then the rest of the body. Those who were
infected would be badly disfigured for the rest of their lives, and about 30
percent would die. In the twentieth century alone, smallpox killed more
than three hundred million people. Fortunately, in 1977, we eradicated it.
It’s difficult to comprehend just how great an achievement this was, so
let’s make a comparison. Suppose we’d achieved world peace in 1973. How
many deaths would have been prevented? That timescale includes the
killings of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan genocide, the two
Congo wars, the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you
add up all the wars, genocides, and terrorist acts that occurred since 1973,
the death toll is a staggering twelve million. Prior to its eradication,
smallpox killed 1.5 to 3 million people every year, so by preventing these
deaths for over forty years, its eradication has effectively saved somewhere
between 60 and 120 million lives. The eradication of smallpox is one
success story from aid, saving five times as many lives as world peace
would have done.
Just for the sake of argument, let’s be generous to the aid skeptics. Let’s
suppose that, over the last six decades, foreign aid achieved absolutely
nothing except eradicating smallpox. A simple calculation shows that even
if this were true, foreign aid would still be a bargain. The total aid spending
of all countries over the last five decades is $2.3 trillion (Moyo’s $1 trillion
figure was aid just to Africa). That means that, using the low estimate of the
benefits of smallpox, at sixty million lives saved, foreign aid has saved a
life with every $40,000 spent. In comparison, government departments in
the United States will pay for infrastructure to improve safety if doing so
costs less than about $7 million per life saved; the precise figures are $9.1
million for the Environmental Protection Agency, $7.9 million for the Food
and Drug Administration, and $6 million for the Department of
Transportation. This means that, even if aid had achieved absolutely
nothing except eradicating smallpox, it still would have prevented a death
for 1/150th of the cost that the United States is currently willing to spend to
save the lives of its own citizens.
This calculation not only shows that aid has “worked,” but also that it’s
been cost-effective on average. Moreover, this calculation significantly
underestimates the positive impact of aid. Thanks to immunization, annual
deaths from preventable illnesses have declined from 5 million in 1960 to
1.4 million in 2001, despite world population doubling in that time. Annual
malaria deaths have declined from 3.8 million to about 0.7 million. Annual
diarrheal deaths have declined from 4.6 million to 1.6 million. Aid isn’t
responsible for all of these reductions, but it is responsible for a proportion
of them, and that’s despite the fact that the amount of money spent on aid is
tiny in global terms.
Indeed, even aid skeptics agree that the best sorts of development
programs, especially those within global health, are very effective. For
example, William Easterly (the author of The White Man’s Burden) notes
that “there are well-known and striking donor success stories, like the
elimination of smallpox, the near-eradication of river blindness and Guinea
worm, the spread of oral rehydration therapy for treating infant diarrheal
diseases, DDT campaigns against malarial mosquitoes (although later
halted for environmental reasons), and the success of WHO vaccination
programs against measles and other childhood diseases.” He summarizes
his view by commenting that “even those of us labeled as ‘aid critics’ do
not believe aid has been a universal failure. If we give you aid agencies
grief on failures, it is because we have seen some successes, and we would
like to see more!”
There are certainly many examples of attempts to help those that do
little good: PlayPumps is just one example. But when evaluating whether
aid has worked on average, it’s not enough to look at typical cases of aid;
you also need to look at the best cases. In the context of doing good, this is
vital, because the best activities are often far superior to typical ones, which
can make the average benefits of aid spending very high, even if typical
benefits are small.
• • •
We’re used to thinking of what’s typical and what’s average as being the
same. For example, if you measured the height of all women in North
America and plotted those heights on a graph, you get this:
The height of a typical woman in North America (that is, a woman who
is taller than 50 percent of people and shorter than 50 percent of people) is
five feet five inches; the height of the average woman (which is equal to the
total height of all women divided by the number of women) is also five feet
five inches. In the case of height, what is typical and what is average is the
same. This sort of distribution is what we’re most familiar with, so it’s aptly
called a normal distribution.
But this isn’t always true. Look at the following graph, which, like the
graph in chapter one, represents global income distribution.
This graph shows how many people live in various income brackets.
Notice how different this is from the distribution of height. In this graph,
the right-hand “tail” of the curve just keeps going. In fact, in order to make
the shape of the curve visible on the page, I had to cut off the graph at
$6,000 per year, even though 20 percent of the world earns more than that.
Distributions that look like this are called fat-tailed distributions. (You
might have heard of the 80/20 rule: that 80 percent of the value of a set of
activities comes from the best 20 percent of activities. That rule describes a
fat-tailed distribution.) Fat-tailed distributions are interesting because
they’re marked by extreme events. Whereas there are very few extremely
small or extremely tall people, there are a relatively large number of
extremely rich people. (If height were distributed like income is, we would
regularly see people towering 270 feet tall, peering over skyscrapers.)
That’s why the world’s average income, which is $10,000 per year, is so
much higher than the typical income, which is only $1,400 per year: the
richest people bring up the average.
For this reason, fat-tailed distributions are unintuitive. That’s partly
why it’s so difficult to understand income inequality. We don’t realize that
we’re extreme outliers. In fact, fat-tailed distributions are fairly common.
For example, most people live in a small number of cities; most people who
have died in an earthquake died in one of the relatively rare catastrophic
ones; a small number of words make up the majority of most printed text
(which means that, if you want to learn a language, you’re better off
learning the one thousand or so most common words first). When it comes
to doing good, fat-tailed distributions seem to be everywhere. It’s not
always true that exactly 80 percent of the value comes from the top 20
percent of activities—sometimes things are even more extreme than that,
and sometimes less. But the general rule that most of the value generated
comes from the very best activities is very common.
The effectiveness of different aid activities forms a fat-tailed
distribution, and this fact is very important if we want to make a difference.
In response to Dambisa Moyo, I pointed out that, because the best programs
are so good, they make aid very effective on average. But we don’t need to
fund programs of merely average effectiveness. We can deliberately choose
to fund only the very best programs, which allows us to do a tremendous
amount of good.
To see how this plays out, let’s consider two types of aid programs.
First, developing-world education:
All the programs listed in this graph are programs that “work,” in the
sense that they have a measurable positive impact. But the differences
between these four estimates are enormous. Providing cash rewards to girls
who stay in school yields an additional 0.2 years of school attendance with
every $1,000 spent. Providing free primary-school uniforms does ten times
better, resulting in 7.1 additional years of school attendance for every
$1,000 spent. But deworming schoolchildren does fifteen times better than
that, with 139 total years of school per $1,000.
In the context of helping others, the difference between a good use of
money and a great use of money is huge. We shouldn’t just ask: Is this
program a good use of money? We need to ask: Is this program the best use
of money?
The same phenomenon occurs with respect to developing-world health.
This graph lists the estimated cost-effectiveness of different health
programs, measured in QALYs (where one QALY, remember, represents a
benefit equivalent to giving one person one year of life in perfect health).
These results are even more amazing than those for school attendance.
Consider Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer that occurs in those with HIV and
typically causes disfiguring purple tumors on the skin and in the mouth.
Kaposi’s sarcoma can cause painful swelling of the legs and feet and it can
be life-threatening if the tumors occur in the lungs, liver, or digestive tract.
One estimate puts the cost-effectiveness of surgery to remove Kaposi’s
sarcoma, which produces mainly cosmetic benefit, at about $50,000 per
QALY.
Spending money to treat Kaposi’s sarcoma is clearly a good deal,
costing less than the governments of the United States or the United
Kingdom are willing to spend to provide one QALY and less than I would
be willing to spend to give myself an extra year of perfect health. But
treating Kaposi’s sarcoma is clearly not the best use of money if we wish to
help people in the developing world. On these estimates, by promotion of
condom use, we can do one hundred times as much to benefit people than
we can by treating Kaposi’s sarcoma; by providing antiretroviral therapy we
provide two and a half times the benefit again. Moreover, the QALY allows
us to make comparisons across very different programs that combat very
different illnesses. By donating to the Against Malaria Foundation, which
buys and distributes long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets, you would, by
this estimate, provide five hundred times the benefit as you would by
spending the same amount of money treating Kaposi’s sarcoma.
Once again, we see the importance of focusing on the very best
activities. We need to ensure we’re making not just a difference but the
most difference we can.
Importantly, the cost-effectiveness estimates given are just that:
estimates. The figures for Kaposi’s sarcoma, condom distribution, and
antiretroviral therapy are individual estimates based on specific contexts
and may therefore be optimistic. The figure for bed-net distribution is more
robust—the calculation behind it tries to correct for biases in favor of
optimism, and takes into account the specific context in which the charities
work—but even this estimate should not be taken as gospel. However, in
the context of fat-tailed distributions, even rough estimates are vitally
important for decision making. In the health-care graph, the best program is
estimated to be five hundred times more effective than the worst program
(which, remember, is still a good program). Even if the highest estimates
were too optimistic by a factor of fifty, it would still be vitally important to
focus on the best programs rather than merely good ones.
• • •
What we’ve seen is that thinking carefully about how you can do the most
to benefit others doesn’t just allow you to do a bit more good—it enables
you to do vastly more than you might have done otherwise.
Imagine saving a single person’s life: you pass a burning building, kick
the door down, rush through the smoke and flames, and drag a young child
to safety. If you did that, it would stay with you for the rest of your life. If
you saved several people’s lives—running into a burning building one
week, rescuing someone from drowning the next week, and diving in front
of a bullet the week after—you’d think your life was really special. You’d
be in the news. You’d be a hero.
But we can do far more than that.
According to the most rigorous estimates, the cost to save a life in the
developing world is about $3,400 (or $100 for one QALY). This is a small
enough amount that most of us in affluent countries could donate that
amount every year while maintaining about the same quality of life. Rather
than just saving one life, we could save a life every working year of our
lives. Donating to charity is not nearly as glamorous as kicking down the
door of a burning building, but the benefits are just as great. Through the
simple act of donating to the most effective charities, we have the power to
save dozens of lives. That’s pretty amazing.
• • •
In this chapter, we’ve seen the importance of focusing on the best charitable
programs, and we’ve seen just how good those programs can be. In the
next, we’ll look at one rule of thumb to help us find those most effective
programs, and we’ll begin to look at how we can best use our time as well
as our money.
FOUR
WHY YOU SHOULDN’T DONATE TO
DISASTER RELIEF
Question #3: Is this area neglected?
Greg Lewis was fourteen when he decided to become a doctor. Born and
raised in the quiet rural city of Salisbury, England, his reasons were typical
of countless others who decide to pursue medicine. “I want to study
medicine because of a desire I have to help others,” he wrote in his
university application.
Indeed, medicine is the banner career for people who want to make a
difference. Every year, about twenty thousand people in the United States
and eight thousand people in the United Kingdom go to medical school, and
the number is growing year after year. Even for those for whom medicine
isn’t a good fit, the desire to pursue a career that makes a difference is
widespread. According to one study, 70 percent of young people regard
ethical considerations as “crucial” in their choice of employer. Enterprises
like Teach for America have grown dramatically, explicitly targeting
students who care more about making a difference than about making a
high salary. Organizations like Net Impact, Idealist, and ethicalcareers.org
all offer advice on choosing a vocation that does good. Even Oprah
Winfrey, on her website, provides examples of “jobs that make a
difference.”
But since effective altruism holds that we should test our assumptions
about how to do good before putting them into action, we should look at
this more critically. Are the most popular ways to make a difference
through one’s work really the most effective ones?
If anyone was going to make a big difference through medicine, it was
Greg Lewis. After acing his high school classes and representing his
country in the British Biology Olympiad, he pursued his dream and went to
Cambridge to study medicine. He excelled there, too, publishing his first
paper at the age of twenty-one. But as Greg began life as a doctor, he started
to wonder what impact he was really having.
Wasn’t it obvious? He was in the ward, in the midst of the action,
saving lives and healing the sick on a daily basis. He could see the
beneficiaries of his actions—they were right there in front of him!
It wasn’t obvious enough for Greg, though, and he started to use the
research skills he’d honed in the lab to analyze a new question: How much
good was he really doing by choosing medicine as a career rather than some
other? As a result of that research, he developed a different view on how he
could best make a difference in the world. To explain the reasoning behind
that view, we need to look at the third of effective altruism’s key questions:
Is this area neglected?
• • •
Which is more valuable: water or diamonds?
I imagine this question has divided my readership into two camps.
Team Water will say: Obviously water is more valuable. If we didn’t have
water, we’d all be dead. If we didn’t have diamonds, we’d just have slightly
less attractive jewelry. No big loss. In contrast, Team Diamonds will say:
Obviously diamonds are more valuable. If you think water is more valuable,
then how about we make a little trade? I’ll give you a gallon of water and
you give me a twenty-carat diamond. Sound fair?
So which team is right? They both are, depending on what exactly we
mean. Drinkable water is in one sense extremely valuable because it’s
necessary for us to keep living. This makes the average value of drinkable
water high. But we’ve already got a lot of water, so the value of an
additional gallon of water (in developed countries) is very low. If I, a
citizen of a developed Western nation, have one additional gallon of water,
that means I may simply have a slightly deeper bath one evening. This is
why the cost of a gallon of water from the tap in New York City, where I’m
writing these lines, is just $0.015—less than two cents.
In contrast, even though the average value of diamonds is much lower
than that of water, the value of an additional (or “marginal”) diamond is
much higher. The reason, simply, is that there aren’t that many diamonds
available on the market: they are therefore scarce in the way that water
isn’t. If I had no possessions at all, and couldn’t sell what I gained, I’d
rather have a gallon of water than a twenty-carat diamond. In contrast,
given the easy access to water that I currently have, I’d prefer the diamond
if given the choice.
This “water and diamonds” paradox shows the importance of what
economists call thinking at the margin: assessing the value of an additional
thing—what is known in economics as its marginal utility—rather than
thinking about the average value of that thing.
We think on the margin all the time. Suppose you receive a new sweater
for Christmas. How good is that sweater? The answer depends on how
many sweaters you already have. If it’s winter, you’re homeless, and you
have no warm clothes, that sweater might prevent you from getting
hypothermia, so an additional sweater would be extremely valuable. If
you’ve got a place to live but are low on sweaters, that extra cable-knit
might give you something new to wear on a cold day and would therefore
still be pretty valuable. If you already have too many sweaters, though, one
more might just be a nuisance—one extra thing to pack when you move—
and therefore be bad overall.
The value of a new sweater decreases the more sweaters you already
have. The value can even become negative if you already have lots of
sweaters. In fact, it’s true of most good things (though not all of them all the
time), that their value diminishes as their quantity increases. The first slice
of cake is delicious, but by the third, you’re feeling a little sick. Having one
copy of this book might provide you with an interesting and entertaining
experience, but having a second might just provide you with a makeshift
doorstop. This is what economists call the law of diminishing returns.
So far we’ve only compared different sorts of programs within a
specific cause—like developing-world education, or developing-world
health. If we want to do as much good as we can, we’ve also got to ask
which cause to focus on. The law of diminishing returns provides a useful
rule of thumb for comparing causes. If a specific area has already received a
great deal of funding and attention, then we should expect it to be difficult
for us to do a lot of good by devoting additional resources to that area. In
contrast, within causes that are comparatively neglected, the most effective
opportunities for doing good have probably not been taken.
Consider disaster relief. On March 11, 2011, the Tohoku region of
Japan was hit by the fourth most powerful earthquake since recording began
in 1900. Tsunamis reached heights of 130 feet and traveled six miles inland.
The earthquake was so large that the entire main island of Japan was moved
2.4 meters (7.9 feet) east. Millions of people were left without electricity or
water. Thousands died.
On January 12, 2010, just one year before, an earthquake hit Haiti. The
epicenter was near Léogâne, sixteen miles west of the country’s capital,
Port-au-Prince. An estimated 280,000 buildings collapsed, including the
National Palace, the National Assembly, the Port-au-Prince Cathedral, and
the main jail. Cholera broke out. Thousands died.
In both cases, there was massive international media attention and a
huge humanitarian relief effort. The disaster dominated the news. Aid
agencies were mobilized, and individuals around the world reached for their
wallets. In each case, the total international aid raised in the immediate
aftermath came to about $5 billion.
The two disasters seem very similar. Both were caused by earthquakes.
Both resulted in destruction on a massive scale. But in two ways they were
very different, which should make us wonder why the international aid
response was so similar. First, the human scale of the two disasters differed
dramatically. Including deaths in the aftermath, the Japanese earthquake
caused fifteen thousand deaths. The Haitian earthquake, by comparison,
caused 150,000. Second, Japan is the fourth richest country in the world and
had the resources to deal with a disaster on that scale. Haiti didn’t. Per
person, Japan was thirty times richer than Haiti. As a whole, the country
was a thousand times richer. For that reason, on the fifteenth of March, just
four days after the earthquake hit, the Japanese Red Cross made the
following statement:
The Japanese Red Cross Society, with the support of the
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies,
has determined that external assistance is not required, and is
therefore not seeking funding or other assistance from donors at
this time.
If the international response to natural disasters was rational, we would
expect a greater amount of funding to be provided to larger disasters and to
disasters that occur in poorer countries, which are less able to cope. But
that’s not what happens. Funding seems to be allocated in proportion with
how evocative and widely publicized the disaster is, rather than on the basis
of its scale and severity.
I’m using this example because it illustrates why, if we want to have an
impact, we should donate to less widely publicized disasters rather than to
the ones that make the news. For example, in 2008, an earthquake hit
Sichuan, China. You probably haven’t heard of it: I hadn’t before I started
writing this book. This earthquake struck fifty miles northwest of Chengdu,
right in the center of China. It killed eighty-seven thousand people: five
times as many as the Japanese earthquake, and half as many as the Haitian
earthquake. Yet it only raised $500 million in international aid—one-tenth
that of Haiti or Japan. For some reason, it wasn’t as widely publicized as the
other earthquakes, so it received fewer funds. Because it received so much
less, donations would have probably made a bigger impact.
The law of diminishing returns also explains why in general, it makes
less sense to donate to disaster relief than it does to donate to the best
charities that fight poverty. Every day, people die from easily preventable
diseases like AIDS, malaria, or tuberculosis. This is a disaster far beyond
that of Haiti, or Tohoku, or Sichuan. Every day, eighteen thousand children
—more than the number of people who perished in Tohoku—die from
preventable causes. For every death the Japanese earthquake caused, aid
organizations received $330,000 in donations. In contrast, for every person
who dies from poverty-related causes worldwide, only $15,000 on average
is spent in foreign aid and philanthropy. Partly for this reason, experts from
the World Health Organization and World Bank concluded that “emergency
health interventions are more costly and less effective than time-tested
health activities.”
Our response to natural disasters is one of the clearest cases of how,
when it comes to charity, most people follow their gut and respond to new
events rather than ongoing problems. When a disaster strikes, the emotional
centers of our brain flare up: we think—emergency! We forget there is an
emergency happening all the time, because we’ve grown accustomed to
everyday emergencies like disease and poverty and oppression. Because
disasters are new and dramatic events, they inspire deeper and more urgent
emotions, causing our subconscious to mistakenly assess them as more
important or worthy of attention.
Ironically, the law of diminishing returns suggests that, if you feel a
strong emotional reaction to a story and want to help, you should probably
resist this inclination because there are probably many others like you who
are also donating. By all means, you should harness the emotion you feel
when a natural disaster strikes, but remind yourself that a similar disaster is
happening all the time—and then consider donating to wherever your
money will help the most rather than what is getting the most attention.
Diminishing returns also provides a powerful argument for focusing
your altruistic efforts on people in poor countries rather than those in rich
countries.
For example, it costs about $50,000 to train and provide one guide dog
for one blind person, something that would significantly improve that
person’s quality of life. However, if we could use that $50,000 to
completely cure someone of blindness, that would be an even better use of
money, since it provides a larger benefit for the same cost. Not only is
$50,000 enough to cure one person of blindness in the developing world,
it’s enough to cure five hundred people of blindness if spent on surgery to
prevent blindness from sufferers of trachoma (a bacterial infection that
causes the eyelids to turn inwards, causing the eyelashes to scratch the
cornea). Any program that costs one hundred dollars to cure blindness
would have been fully funded in rich countries decades ago. The same is
not true in poor countries, which means we can do so much more to help
those people than we can at home.
Similar considerations apply to which sorts of health treatments do the
most good with additional funding. Every year, cancer kills 8.2 million
people and is responsible for 7.6 percent of all deaths and ill health
worldwide (measured in terms of QALYs lost). Per year, $217 billion is
spent on cancer treatment. Malaria is responsible for 3.3 percent of QALYs
lost worldwide. In terms of its health impacts, cancer is about twice as bad
as malaria, so if medical spending were in proportion to the scale of the
problem, we would expect malaria treatment to receive about $100 billion
per year. In reality, only $1.6 billion per year is spent on malaria treatment
—about sixty times less than we would expect.
Cancer treatment receives so much more funding than malaria
treatment because malaria is such a cheap problem to solve that rich
countries no longer suffer from it. (It was eliminated from the United States
in 1951.) The fact that cancer treatment receives so much more funding
than malaria treatment means that, on the margin, each of us can provide a
far greater benefit for other people by funding the most effective malaria
treatments in the developing world than we can by funding the most
effective cancer treatments in the developed world. In the United States,
public health experts regard any program that provides one QALY for less
than $50,000 as a good value, and health programs will often be funded
even if the cost per QALY is much higher than $50,000. In contrast,
providing the same benefit in poor countries (such as by distributing
insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent the spread of malaria) can cost as
little as one hundred dollars. That means that, with a given amount of
money, you can benefit people in poor countries five hundred times more
than people in rich countries.
Again, we see the 100x Multiplier at work. We’re about one hundred
times richer than the poorest billion people in the world, and we can do
several hundred times more to help them than we can to help others in the
rich countries we live in.
• • •
So far we’ve looked at how money diminishes in value, but similar
reasoning applies to time. One subtle implication of the principle of
diminishing returns is how it applies to career choice. Let’s come back to
Greg Lewis, the idealistic medical student we encountered at the beginning
of this chapter, and consider the question: How much good does a doctor
do?
“I had hoped that this question would already be extensively
researched,” Greg told me. “Because you’d think that if you were trying to
run a health service, you’d really want to know what the returns are on
having more doctors. So I was quite surprised to find that no one had really
looked at this question at all.”
You might think this is easy to work out and that’s why no one had
needed to research it. To ascertain how many lives a doctor saves, all you
have to do is add up how many lifesaving surgeries they perform and
lifesaving treatments they administer over the course of their lives. To
figure out how much sickness they heal, you add up all the occasions when
they’ve done something to improve a patient’s life. Add up the benefits of
both activities and that tells you how much good they’ve done. Easy, right?
This is what Greg did initially. He looked at the data for a large number
of countries. For the United States, he divided the total benefit of American
healthcare by the number of doctors in the United States. The National Area
Health Education Center Organization estimated there to be 878,194
doctors in the United States, and Greg found work by an epidemiologist
named John Bunker, who estimated that the total benefits from medicine in
the United States is about 7 QALYs per person, or 2.2 billion QALYs in
total. (Remember that a QALY is equivalent to providing someone with one
additional year of healthy life.) On this calculation, each doctor is estimated
to provide 2,500 QALYs (2.2 billion ÷ 878,194). That includes both
benefits through saving lives and benefits through improving quality of life.
It can be hard to get an intuitive sense of that, so we could think of this in
terms of the equivalent number of “lives saved.” Health economists
estimate that, on average, the benefit of “saving a life” is the same as the
benefit of providing 36.5 QALYs. Based on this calculation, therefore, a
doctor provides health benefits equivalent to saving seventy lives over the
course of his or her career. Greg knew this was an overestimate insofar as it
didn’t account for the impact of nurses, hospital administrators, and so on,
so he scaled down that number, figuring the real figure might be something
like twenty-five or thirty lives saved per doctor. Still, pretty impressive,
right?
Let’s call this the Simple View. Greg realized that, even though this was
the view most people intuitively held, it wasn’t the right way to think about
things, because it made the mistake of assessing the average value of a
doctor. As we’ve discussed throughout this chapter, this is the wrong
calculation to consider when trying to determine how much impact you can
have. Instead, young people wanting to make a difference through their
careers should determine the marginal value they would provide by
becoming a doctor.
To see why the Simple View doesn’t work, imagine you’re in a small
town, isolated from the rest of the country. That town has the resources to
employ in its hospital three doctors—Alice, Bob, and Charlotte. There are
three categories of activities that they do: (i) lifesaving operations and
treatments, like heart surgery; (ii) major health improvements, like anxiety
treatments; (iii) treating minor ailments, like coughs and colds. In this
hospital, Alice, Bob, and Charlotte each spend about one-third of their time
on each of these categories, and the health-care needs of the town are met.
Each doctor performs one hundred lifesaving surgeries per year, so,
according to the Simple View, each saves approximately one hundred lives
per year.
Now let’s suppose that the clinic loses resources and can no longer
afford to employ Charlotte. How bad would that be for the residents of the
town? According to the Simple View, it’s a disaster, because Charlotte will
not be available to perform those one hundred lifesaving operations, which
means one hundred people will die.
However, when we think about this realistically, we realize this is not
what would happen. If Charlotte was no longer employed, Alice and Bob
would do some reprioritizing. They’d neglect or delegate to other health-
care personnel all the minor ailments they could have treated so they can
focus solely on major health improvements and lifesaving operations and
treatments. In Charlotte’s absence, Alice and Bob now each save 150 lives
per year. So, even though Charlotte was performing lifesaving operations,
the difference she made by working for that clinic was really in treating
minor ailments like coughs and colds that could not have been treated with
fewer doctors.
Saving lives is the most important task a doctor can do—and it’s a task
that would be taken care of in the absence of almost any individual doctor
we could point to. As stated earlier, there are an estimated 878,194 doctors
in the United States. Suppose you become the 878,195th doctor. What’s the
difference you make as a result? Well, those 878,194 will have already
plucked all the low-hanging fruit in terms of easy ways to save lives, so
you, as the 878,195th doctor, will have only hard-to-realize opportunities to
improve health. That’s unlikely to include performing heart surgeries and
more likely to involve treating minor ailments.
Using this idea, we can revise our estimates of how much good a doctor
really does. The good that you would do by becoming a doctor (effectively
becoming the 878,195th doctor in the United States) is the difference
between (i) the total benefit from US health-care given that the United
States has 878,194 doctors, and (ii) the total benefit from US healthcare
given that the United States has 878,195 doctors. How big is that
difference?
Greg used statistics to work out the answer. He looked at both how
good the quality of health is in many different countries and how many
doctors there are in each of those countries, and then plotted the relationship
between those two factors (while also taking into account the effect of
things like wealth and education). This enabled him to answer his question.
He worked out that adding one doctor to the United States adds about four
QALYs per year to the population as a whole. Over a forty-year career,
that’s 160 QALYs. Once we take into account the fact that nurses and other
health-care workers also generate some of this benefit, we get the
conclusion that one additional doctor in the United States provides a benefit
equivalent to about four lives saved over the course of their career. That is
still awesome. But it’s also less than you probably thought before, all
because of diminishing returns. Of course, the good that a doctor does will
vary from specialty to specialty; this estimate is an average across all
specialties. Unless some specialties do far more good than others, however,
this won’t make much difference to our assessment of the good that doctors
do.
If you aim to become a doctor in a rich country, you’re adding only
your labor to the already very large pool of doctors who are working in that
country. That means that becoming a doctor probably does less good than
you’d intuitively think. The same consideration explains why doctors have
a much bigger impact if they work in poor countries than in rich ones. Greg
did some more statistics to work out how much good he’d do if he upped
roots and went to work in a very poor country like Ethiopia. He found that
he’d make a much larger difference, providing an extra three hundred
QALYs per year, or about three hundred lives over a forty-year career.
That’s more than one hundred times as big an impact than if he worked in
the United Kingdom. Once again, we see the 100x Multiplier in effect:
because far fewer resources are spent on healthcare in poor countries, Greg
could do far more good working in a poor country than in a rich one.
Asking, “Is this area neglected?” and trying to focus only on those areas
that truly are neglected can be counterintuitive. It means that the most
popular causes are, precisely for that reason, the ones where it will be
difficult to have a big impact. Because of diminishing returns, we can make
a much bigger difference if we focus our efforts on areas on which
comparatively fewer resources have been spent, like less-publicized
disasters, or global poverty rather than domestic poverty.
You might be wondering what Greg ultimately decided to do with his
career: Did he move to work in a poor country? In fact, he concluded that
he should continue to work in the United Kingdom. We’ll find out why in
the next chapter.
FIVE
THE BEST PERSON WHO EVER LIVED
IS AN UNKNOWN UKRAINIAN MAN
Question #4: What would have happened otherwise?
Out of everyone who ever existed, who has done the most good? In
researching this question, I came across a list that Esquire had published
called “The 75 Best People in the World.” The writers suggested that the
number one spot should go to . . . Matt Damon. Which seems unlikely.
In chapter three, I suggested that smallpox eradication was one of
humanity’s greatest achievements. If we’re looking for the Best Person
Ever, we could start by looking at those who helped in this effort. In fact,
much of the responsibility of smallpox eradication can be attributed to just
one man.
In 1966, Ohio-born doctor D. A. Henderson became the leader of the
WHO’s Global Smallpox Eradication campaign. At only thirty-eight years
old, and with only ten years’ clinical experience, he was fifteen years
younger than everyone else in the program, but he excelled at what he did.
When he took charge of the campaign, he proposed an ambitious goal: to
completely wipe smallpox off the face of the planet within ten years.
Astoundingly, the campaign succeeded, and between 1967 and 1971 the
number of smallpox-endemic countries plummeted from thirty-one to five.
Henderson pioneered the novel technique of ring-vaccination in which,
rather than vaccinating an entire population—a costly and time-consuming
procedure—his team used large-scale reporting to identify outbreaks of the
disease, contain those who had it, and vaccinate everyone else within a
certain radius. It exceeded everyone’s expectations, and in 1977, the last
naturally occurring case of smallpox was diagnosed in Somalia. Smallpox
was the first disease ever to have been eradicated.
Henderson’s success resulted in a string of accolades. He won more
than a dozen major awards, including the Public Welfare Medal, the
National Medal of Science, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the
highest civilian award in the United States. He received honorary degrees
from seventeen different universities. Immediately after 9/11, he became
President George W. Bush’s lead expert on bioterrorism. He was even
knighted by the king of Thailand.
But D. A. Henderson is not the person I’m talking about.
By the time Henderson was hired, the political will to eradicate
smallpox already existed. There was a job opening—a job he didn’t even
want initially—and Henderson filled it. This isn’t to say he didn’t rise to the
challenge or that he wasn’t a hero, but if he had never existed, someone else
would have been in his shoes and eradicated smallpox eventually. This
person might not have been as good or as quick as Henderson, but as long
as he or she was good enough, smallpox would have been eradicated.
Instead, we should look to a much more unlikely hero: Viktor Zhdanov,
a Ukrainian virologist who died in 1987. At the time of this writing, he has
a mere four-paragraph Wikipedia page, and there are only a few grainy
black-and-white photos of him available online. I’m not aware of any major
accolades for his work.
In 1958, Zhdanov was a deputy minister of health for the Soviet Union.
In May of that year, at the Eleventh World Health Assembly meeting in
Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the Soviet Union’s first appearance in the
assembly after a nine-year absence, Zhdanov described a visionary plan to
eradicate smallpox. At the time, no disease had ever before been eradicated.
No one knew if it could even be done. And no one expected such a
suggestion to come from the Soviet Union. But he conveyed his message
with passion, conviction, and optimism, boldly suggesting that the disease
could be eradicated within ten years. Since smallpox was an exclusively
human disease, he argued, it would be easier to eradicate than mosquito-
borne infections such as malaria. He pointed to the Soviet Union’s success
at eliminating smallpox, despite its vast territory and poor transportation
networks. He referenced Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the inventor of the
smallpox vaccine, Edward Jenner: “I avail myself of this occasion of
rendering you a portion of the tribute of gratitude due to you from the
whole human family. Medicine has never before produced any single
improvement of such utility. . . . Future nations will know by history only
that the loathsome small-pox has existed and by you has been extirpated.”
By the force of his arguments, Zhdanov was successful. For the first
time in its history, the WHO agreed to form a campaign to completely
eradicate a disease.
To assess how much good Zhdanov did, we should bear in mind that,
even if he had not lobbied the WHO, smallpox would probably have been
eradicated anyway. The problem was serious enough that someone would
have started a campaign to fix it. Many of those 120 million lives that have
been saved by smallpox eradication would therefore have been saved
anyway. But there would probably have been a considerable delay in the
smallpox eradication campaign. Suppose, therefore, that Zhdanov moved
forward the eradication of smallpox by a decade. If so, then he alone
prevented between 10 and 20 million deaths—about as much as if he’d
achieved three decades of world peace.
We don’t usually think of achievements in terms of what would have
happened otherwise, but we should. What matters is not who does good but
whether good is done; and the measure of how much good you achieve is
the difference between what happens as a result of your actions and what
would have happened anyway.
Suppose, for example, that I see a woman collapse on the ground. She’s
had a heart attack. There’s no one else around, so I run up to her and start
performing CPR. Suppose I’ve never performed CPR before, but I manage
to restart the woman’s heart. She recovers but, as a result of the poor-quality
CPR, is left with a disability. Even so, it’s clear that I have done a great
thing.
Now suppose there had been a paramedic around when the woman
collapsed. This paramedic would have surely restarted her heart without
causing injury, but, while I was running toward the woman, I pushed the
paramedic out of the way and started performing CPR myself. In this case, I
still saved her life, but if I hadn’t, the paramedic would have been able to do
the same thing without causing damage. In this case, how should I feel
about my actions? Am I a hero? After all, I “saved a life!”
Of course I’m not a hero. The good I do is not a matter of the direct
benefits I cause. Rather, it is the difference I make. Even though I
technically saved this woman’s life, I actually did harm overall.
Looking at what would have happened otherwise is a fundamental
piece of scientific reasoning, referred to as assessing the counterfactual. But
the mistake of neglecting the counterfactual is rife within the world of
altruism, and this mistake can have terrible consequences.
• • •
Sixteen-year-old Brandon lived in the northwest of Detroit. He had already
been in trouble with the law for armed robbery, home invasion, and drug-
related offenses, and he was being brought into Oakland County Jail so he
could see how awful prison life was. The goal was to make him reconsider
his life choices before he ended up in jail for good. Brandon is the central
character in an episode of Beyond Scared Straight.
Scared Straight! began in 1978 as a documentary by Arnold Shapiro. It
told the true story of a group of teenage delinquents who were taken by
correctional officers to spend three hours at a prison. The inmates screamed
at, intimidated, and threatened the juveniles, telling stories of the horrors of
life in prison, of rapes and beatings, in order to scare them out of a life of
crime. The documentary ends by revealing that most of the juveniles have
turned away from their troubled paths, though acknowledging that some did
go on to reoffend. The documentary was highly successful, wining an Oscar
and eight Emmys, and begat a succession of follow-ups: Scared Straight!
Another Story, Scared Straight! 10 Years Later, Scared Straight! 20 Years
Later. The latest incarnation, Beyond Scared Straight, broadcast on A&E in
the United States, is as of this writing in its eighth season, airing weekly
and attracting millions of viewers.
In this episode, when Brandon enters the prison, he’s cocky and defiant.
He faces a wall of inmates through the bars. They taunt him, yelling, “We
got a hard-ass? Let’s do this!” and “You want to be a real fucking tough
guy, is that it?” They threaten him, they jeer, and the guards emphasize the
seriousness of their threats.
Through all this, Brandon smiles. He thinks it’s funny. When he gets
taken aside by a correctional officer, he continues to play tough guy: “I ain’t
tripping. I ain’t scared of none of these shitheads . . . they breathe just like I
breathe and they bleed just like I bleed.” Time and again, he shrugs off the
intimidation.
Things change when he sees an “extraction”: a prisoner tased, bound to
a chair, and forcibly sedated. Out in the corridor he breaks down, tears in
his eyes. The guards tell him they are on his side. They don’t want him to
end up in here.
At the end of the show, we visit Brandon one month later. He’s smiling
again, but this time there’s hope in his eyes, not defiance. He’s got a
personal tutor, and he’s stopped hanging out with the friends who got him
into trouble. He goes back to the prison to apologize to the guards he stood
up to. Brandon says he now recognizes he was wrong. “I’m happy I went to
the jail tour because it changed my life and made me a better person,” he
says. “And it made me realize that some of the stuff I was doing wasn’t
good . . . the future look[s] bright now.”
Beyond Scared Straight introduces us to a world most of us will never
experience. It’s a mix of pop entertainment and uplifting coming-of-age
narrative. The producers say it’s a highly effective social program, with
cases like Brandon’s, in which a once-troubled teen turns his or her life
around, being the norm rather than the exception. Since the original release
of Scared Straight!, hundreds of prisons across the United States have
adopted similar programs. The program seems to be a win-win: It reduces
the recidivism rate among juvenile offenders, and it makes for great TV.
But, as you’ve probably guessed based on my discussion of it in this
chapter, there’s a darker side to Scared Straight. Those who tout the
program’s effectiveness are wrong. Not only is the program ineffective, it’s
downright harmful.
Nine high-quality studies have been done on the program, assessing the
progress of one thousand juveniles overall. The Cochrane Collaboration, a
nonprofit institute that rigorously assesses the evidence behind health and
social programs, looked at these studies and found that two of them had no
significant effect, while the remaining seven showed increased rates of
criminality among juveniles. The authors of the review estimated that the
Scared Straight programs that had been studied increased the odds of
offending by about 60 percent. “The analyses show the intervention to be
more harmful than doing nothing,” they concluded. “The program effect,
whether assuming a fixed or random effects model, was nearly identical and
negative in direction, regardless of the meta-analytic strategy.” In the jargon
of academia, that’s just about as harsh a criticism as you can get, claiming
that, no matter what way they looked at it, Scared Straight caused more
crime than it prevented. In a separate study, the Washington State Institute
for Public Policy estimated the value for society, per dollar invested, of a
range of preventative social policies, such as psychotherapy and anger
management. Of the sixty interventions studied, the vast majority were
shown to produce more value than they cost. Only three were harmful, and
only one of these egregiously so—the Scared Straight program. The
researchers concluded that, because Scared Straight was increasing rates of
crime, with associated penitentiary costs and costs to the local community,
every dollar spent on Scared Straight cost society $203.
Yet Scared Straight programs still continue and are still touted as
effective. How can a program that has been proven to cause harm thrive?
The problem is that those who tout its effectiveness aren’t thinking in
terms of what would have happened otherwise. They see delinquent kids
come to the Scared Straight program, they see them go on to commit fewer
crimes than they’d been committing in the past (only one-third of kids who
go through the program go on to commit a crime in the following year), and
they conclude it’s a success. But you can’t conclude a certain program
causes things to get better based solely on the fact that they have gotten
better. In the case of Scared Straight, studies show that rates of delinquency
would have decreased even without the Scared Straight program. In fact,
they show that rates of delinquency would have decreased by a greater
amount if the Scared Straight program had never been run. Scared Straight
actually impedes progress that is happening anyway.
I suspect the apparent effectiveness of Scared Straight can be explained
by a phenomenon called regression to the mean. If you play a truly
excellent round of golf one day, you’ll probably play worse the next time
you play because that excellent round was statistically unlikely and you
should expect to see a more typical performance the next time. Similarly,
people who are undergoing a bout of particularly severe depression will on
average be happier three months later, because they are likely closer to their
average level of happiness. And, similarly, if you select a group of juveniles
to go through a reform program because they’ve committed an unusually
high number of misdemeanors in a given time period, they’re likely to
exhibit something closer to typical behavior in the following months.
But that only explains why Scared Straight can appear to be effective
when it really does nothing. Why, then, does the program increase rates of
criminality? No one knows for sure, but one hypothesis is that the inmates
—who play up how tough they are for surviving life in prison—act as role
models rather than deterrents for the delinquents. The delinquents identify
with the inmates and then imitate their behaviors. Watching the show again,
this hypothesis seems plausible. The inmates tell the kids they should try to
avoid prison not because it’s an awful place to be, or because it’s shameful
to have broken the law, but because they’re not tough enough for life inside.
The example of Scared Straight shows the importance of ensuring,
wherever possible, that large-scale social programs undergo rigorous testing
through controlled trials before they are put into practice. If an amateur
chemist created a pill he claimed would reduce crime, we would never
administer it to thousands of children without rigorous testing because it
would be dangerous, not to mention illegal, to do so. Yet new social
programs like Scared Straight can be rolled out without any good evidence
behind them. Without rigorous testing, we can’t know if a social program is
making things better, making things worse, or achieving nothing at all. Of
course, sometimes programs are too small in scale for testing to be a good
use of money, and sometimes rigorous trials are impossible. But our default
attitude should be that, if a social program is going to be rolled out on a
large scale, then it should have been proven to be effective first.
• • •
The most subtle and interesting way in which we neglect to think about
what would have happened otherwise is when we think about career choice.
This takes us back to Greg Lewis, our statistically inclined doctor from the
previous chapter, and his estimate of how much good doctors do.
In the previous chapter, we estimated the benefit of one additional
doctor in the United States at four lives saved per doctor. But that doesn’t
yet measure how good becoming a doctor is, because, by becoming a
doctor, you aren’t simply adding one extra doctor to the supply of doctors.
The number of spots at medical school is fairly rigid, so if you decide not to
go to medical school, someone else will take your place and become a
doctor in your stead. Thus, by becoming a doctor, you’re really just
changing who works as a doctor, not adding to the overall amount of talent
out there. The difference you make isn’t equal to the difference between the
United States having 878,194 doctors and the United States having 878,195
doctors (which is how we analyzed it in the previous chapter). It’s the
difference you make by becoming a doctor as compared to the difference
someone else would make if he or she took your place.
This consideration means that our previous estimate that each doctor
saves approximately four lives over the course of their careers is too high.
There are still benefits to becoming a doctor: if you get into medical school,
then you increase the average quality of doctors (assuming the selection
process selects the best applicants); and adding yourself to the labor pool
may decrease doctors’ wages slightly, allowing more doctors to be
employed. But the contribution won’t be as much as we suggested earlier.
Factoring this consideration into his calculations, Greg estimated that,
rather than saving four lives over the course of your career, you might
actually save only an additional one or two that would not have been saved
otherwise. This is still a very valuable contribution to society, but less than
one might expect.
This consideration is widely applicable. For example, in my teenage
years, I used to work as a care assistant at a nursing home. How much of an
impact was I making? When I initially thought about this, I thought about
the direct benefits of the work: the improvements in the lives of the people
who were living at that nursing home. However, I should have thought
about whether I was doing a better job than whoever would have taken my
place. Though enthusiastic, I was slow and inexperienced, and I probably
needed the money I was paid less than whoever would have been in my
shoes, who might have had a family to support. So it’s not clear that, on
balance, I was doing any good at all.
This explains, in part, why Greg didn’t go to Africa. If he took a job in
a nonprofit, he’d be taking the place of someone else who wanted to do the
same. The impact of an additional doctor in a developing country is about
three hundred QALYs per year, which is very large, but the difference he’d
make by taking someone else’s position would be less than that. He
therefore chose a different path, one that brings together many of the
considerations we’ve covered so far. I call it earning to give.
• • •
Earning to give means exactly what it sounds like: rather than trying to
maximize the direct impact you have with your job, you instead try to
increase your earnings so you can donate more, improving people’s lives
through your giving rather than your day-to-day work. Most people don’t
consider this option when choosing a career that “makes a difference.” But
time and money are normally interchangeable—money can pay for people’s
time, and your time can be used to earn money—so there’s no reason to
assume the best careers are only those that benefit people directly through
the work itself. If we’re serious about doing good, earning to give is a path
we should consider.
Let’s look at Greg Lewis’s options. If he worked as a doctor in a rich
country and didn’t donate a portion of his income, he would do an amount
of good equivalent to saving two lives over the course of his career. If he
went to work as a doctor in a very poor country, he would do an amount of
good equivalent to saving four lives every year, or 140 lives over a thirty-
five-year career. But how many lives could he save if he stayed home and
donated his earnings?
The average salary of a doctor in the UK is about £70,000 per year
before taxes. In dollars, that’s about $110,000 or $4.6 million over a forty-
two-year career. By pursuing a particularly lucrative specialty—medical
oncology—Greg could earn almost double that, earning about $200,000 per
year on average. Earlier I said that one of the most cost-effective ways to
save lives is by distributing antimalarial bed nets: $3,400 pays for 560 nets,
which on average will prevent one death due to malaria. By pursuing
medical oncology, Greg could therefore donate 50 percent of his $200,000
per year earnings while still having a very comfortable $100,000 per year
pretax salary (donations are tax-deductible). His donations would save
dozens of lives a year, considerably more than he could have done if he’d
worked directly in a poor country.
Because of this, Greg decided to earn to give, planning to specialize in
medical oncology. “I found it pretty humbling, when I looked at the
difference. I’d save a few lives through my direct impact as a doctor,” Greg
told me. “Which was less than I thought, but still great. But through my
donations, I could save hundreds of lives.” For Greg, the same reasons that
made him want to go into medicine made it clear to him that he should start
donating, too. “I started out giving around ten percent. But I’ve gradually
been increasing that, as I found that I really didn’t miss the money. Now
I’m donating about fifty percent and my life is, if anything, better than it
was. I feel that I’m doing justice to my seventeen-year-old self who wanted
to make the world a better place.” In 2014, Greg donated £20,000, enough
to save ten lives.
Importantly, by earning to give, Greg is making a difference that
wouldn’t have happened otherwise. If he weren’t a doctor, someone else
would take his place, but that doctor would probably donate very little (the
average is about 2 percent). In contrast, by working for a nongovernmental
organization (NGO) in a poor country, Greg would be using money from
the NGO that would otherwise have been spent on a different doctors
salary, or on medical supplies. Because he’s making a difference that
wouldn’t have happened anyway, Greg will do even more good by earning
to give than he would have done if he worked directly in poor countries.
And he can do so without having to give up the comforts of home.
It’s worth reflecting on this. In 2007, Louis Theroux, a British
documentary filmmaker, released a documentary called Under the Knife in
which he explored the world of cosmetic surgery in Beverly Hills. In the
culmination of the show, he accused the cosmetic surgeon he’d been
interviewing of wasting his talent and skills to make wannabe movie stars
more attractive, rather than saving lives. What we’ve seen so far shows that
Louis Theroux’s sentiment, while understandable, is misplaced. It’s the
cosmetic surgeon’s decision about how to spend his money that really
matters.
Earning to give seems to be an enormously powerful way of doing
good. It exploits the fact that even typical workers in developed countries
are among the top income earners in the world and that there are some
charities that do huge amounts to help the world’s poorest people for
relatively little money. Moreover, unlike the conventional “ethical” careers
guidance, earning to give is a path that’s open to everyone. The
conventional advice is that if you want to make a difference you should
work in the nonprofit or public sector or work in corporate social
responsibility. But many people struggle to get a job, let alone find a job in
a specific sector. However, many more people have the option to work
overtime in order to earn more, or to work harder in order to get a raise or
promotion, or to move toward a higher-paying career, or just to live on less.
By doing this, and being smart about where you give, almost anyone in rich
countries can do a tremendous amount to help others.
• • •
There is plenty more to be said about doing good through your career, and
the whole of chapter nine will be devoted to it. But before we can address
this question properly, and before we can see why earning to give is merely
one path and not always the most effective career choice, we need to look at
another key question of effective altruism.
SIX
WHY VOTING IS LIKE DONATING
THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS TO
CHARITY
Question #5: What are the chances of success, and
how good would success be?
“The possibility of a severe accident occurring is so small that from an
engineering standpoint, it is practically unthinkable.” This is a quote from
the comprehensive accident management plan of the Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear power plant, and it helps us see the importance of thinking correctly
about risk.
Fukushima Daiichi was located seventy kilometers away from the
epicenter of the massive earthquake that hit Japan in March 2011. All
operating nuclear reactors shut down automatically following the
earthquake, a safety precaution designed to prevent a meltdown, which
would result in hazardous radioactive material leaking out into the
environment. However, an ensuing tsunami hit and disabled the plant’s
cooling system, causing the meltdown of three of its reactors. Although no
one died from radiation exposure, about 160,000 people had to be
evacuated from their homes, and sixteen hundred people died during the
evacuation because of conditions such as hospital closures. The Fukushima
disaster remains the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
Four months after the disaster, the Japanese government formed an
investigation committee, made up of a panel of ten independent experts in
fields including radiation protection, medicine, and law, which presented a
450-page report to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. Panel chairman Yotaro
Hatamura, an emeritus professor of engineering at the University of Tokyo,
told a news conference that “the root cause of the Fukushima crisis is that
[the regulatory bodies and the Tokyo Electric Power Company] selfishly
assumed that natural disasters that are beyond their imagination would not
occur.” In a closing note, Hatamura wrote that Japan “should take the
accident as a reminder from nature that humans’ way of thinking can be
defective.”
• • •
So far in this book we have focused on measurable, concrete ways of
helping others. The real world, unfortunately, is not always so simple. Often
we don’t know whether our actions will be successful, and, given the
difficulty of knowing what would have happened otherwise, we will usually
never know whether our actions really make a difference. When it comes to
effecting political change, this problem becomes particularly severe. Even if
you run a campaign and the policy you’ve campaigned for is put into place,
there are usually other forces at work, making it difficult to measure your
individual impact.
We shouldn’t dismiss more speculative or high-risk activities out of
hand, though, because when successful, they can have an enormous impact.
We therefore need a way to compare higher-risk but higher-upside actions
with actions that are certain to have an impact.
Within economics and decision theory the standard way to do this is to
look at an action’s expected value. To take a simple example, suppose I
offer you a bet. I’ll flip a coin and if the coin lands heads, I’ll give you two
dollars; if the coin lands tails, you give me a dollar. Should you take the
bet? According to the idea of expected value, you should.
To calculate the expected monetary value of each bet, you look at all
the possible outcomes of that bet. For each outcome, you take the monetary
gain or loss and multiply it by the probability of the outcome. In this case,
there are two possible outcomes, heads and tails. Each has a 50 percent
chance of occurring. The expected monetary value of taking the bet is
therefore (50% × +$2) + (50% × –$1) = $0.50. The expected monetary
value of refusing the bet is zero. Taking the bet has the higher expected
value, so you should take the bet.
Maximizing expected value is generally regarded as the best strategy
for making decisions when you know the value and the probabilities of each
option. It’s the strategy used by economists, statisticians, poker players,
risk-management experts, and pretty much anyone else who needs to
regularly deal with uncertain outcomes. To see why, suppose that I offer
you the same bet over and over again. In the long run, you’re almost
guaranteed to make more money if you accept my bets than if you don’t: in
fact, on average you’ll make fifty cents for every bet that you take.
In the flipping-a-coin example we talked about expected monetary
value. When thinking about buying things for yourself, however, expected
monetary value isn’t always what you care about. Most people would prefer
to keep $1,000 than to bet it on a one-in-a-hundred chance of receiving
$100,001, even though the expected monetary value of the bet is positive.
That’s rational because money has diminishing returns: if you’re like most
people, the improvements you’d make to your life by spending the first
$1,000 of your $100,001 lottery winnings will bring you more joy than the
improvements you make to your life by spending the last $1,000. The same
isn’t true, however, when we’re thinking about philanthropy. If you donate
$1,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation, they will buy and distribute one
hundred and sixty bed nets. If you donate $100,000 to the Against Malaria
Foundation, they will buy and distribute ten thousand six hundred bed nets.
Because the social problems in the world are so big, additional resources
directed to them diminish in value very slowly. Additional resources do
diminish in value somewhat—if the Against Malaria Foundation received
$50 million (several times its current budget), it would struggle to spend all
that money as quickly or as well as it has spent money so far. And after
spending billions of dollars on bed nets, spending more money on bed nets
wouldn’t be effective because everyone who needs a bed net would have
one. And, as we’ve seen, it’s more effective to spend money on malaria
treatment than cancer treatment in part because malaria treatment receives a
tiny fraction of the resources that cancer treatment receives. But when
thinking “merely” in terms of millions of dollars, one can often assume the
altruistic value of money stays the same no matter how much of it you have.
To see how useful the idea of expected value is, let’s consider a morbid
but important application: assessing the risk of death from different
activities. Smoking, riding a motorbike, scuba diving, taking ecstasy, eating
peanut butter: all these things increase your risk of death. How much should
you worry about each of them? Public health experts use the concept of a
“micromort” to compare the risks, where one micromort equals a one-in-a-
million chance of dying, equivalent to thirty minutes of expected life lost if
you’re aged twenty, or fifteen minutes of expected life lost if you’re aged
fifty. By comparing different activities in terms of micromorts, we can
easily assess their relative dangers. The results can be surprising. Based on
reported cases of deaths from these activities, one ecstasy session (two
tablets) is only about one micromort, whereas going scuba diving is five
micromorts and going skydiving is nine micromorts. Flying in a space
shuttle is seventeen thousand micromorts, or a 1.7 percent chance of dying,
which is about as dangerous as attempting to climb Mount Everest beyond
base camp, at thirteen thousand micromorts, or a 1.3 percent chance of
dying.
The same concept can be applied to things that increase risk of death
later in life as well. Eating forty tablespoons of peanut butter gives you one
micromort because you risk ingesting aflatoxin, a fungal toxin that
increases your risk of liver cancer later in life. Smoking a single cigarette
gives you 0.7 micromorts, increasing your chance of dying of lung cancer
many years down the line. Taking this into account, smoking one cigarette
reduces life expectancy by five minutes—about the same length of time it
takes to smoke it.
When thinking about risk from transport, you can think directly in
terms of minutes of life lost per hour of travel. Each time you travel, you
face a slight risk of getting into a fatal accident, but the chance of getting
into a fatal accident varies dramatically depending on the mode of transport.
For example, the risk of a fatal car crash while driving for an hour is about
one in ten million (so 0.1 micromorts). For a twenty-year-old, that’s a one-
in-ten-million chance of losing sixty years. The expected life lost from
driving for one hour is therefore three minutes. Looking at expected
minutes lost shows just how great a discrepancy there is between risks from
different sorts of transport. Whereas an hour on a train costs you only
twenty expected seconds of life, an hour on a motorbike costs you an
expected three hours and forty-five minutes.
In addition to giving us a way to compare the risks of different
activities, the concept of expected value helps us choose which risks are
worth taking. Would you be willing to spend an hour on a motorbike if it
was perfectly safe but caused you to be unconscious later for three hours
and forty-five minutes? If your answer is no, but you’re otherwise happy to
ride motorbikes in your day-to-day life, you’re probably not fully
appreciating the risk of death.
Thinking explicitly about expected value is important because humans
are often terrible at assessing low-probability high-value events.
Psychologists have found that people either give too much weight to low-
probability events (as, perhaps, when people choose to play the lottery), or
they simply ignore them all together.
This takes us back to the Fukushima safety report.
The authors of the comprehensive accident management plan were
correct that the probability of a catastrophe occurring was very small.
However, they didn’t think correctly about how they should deal with that
probability. They assimilated “very small” to zero and promptly forgot all
about it. Their mistake was failing to consider that if a catastrophe happens
at a nuclear power plant, the costs are huge—in this case, more than a
thousand deaths. Even though the chance of this catastrophe was small, it
was clearly worth taking substantial safety precautions.
The Fukushima safety engineers were trying to prevent harm with their
safety assessment, and they failed by ignoring an important but low-
probability event. In just the same way, when trying to do good, we need to
be sensitive both to the likelihood of success and to the value of that
success. This means that low-probability high-payoff activities can take
priority over sure bets of more modest impact. It also shows that people are
often confused when they say that “one person can’t make a difference.”
Voting provides a vivid illustration.
• • •
Most people believe you should vote in government elections. But many
economists argue that, if your concern is to actually affect the outcome, it’s
a waste of time. Steven Levitt, professor of economics at the University of
Chicago and coauthor of Freakonomics, wrote a blog post reiterating a
sentiment he’d previously made in The New York Times:
Nobody in their right mind votes because they think they’re going
to affect the outcome of an election. If you look over the last
hundred years of, say, elections for the US House of
Representatives, I think there’s been maybe one [very close]
election that’s been decided by votes. . . . The reasons for voting
have to be something very different: it’s fun, your wife will love
you more if you do it, it makes you feel like a proud American—
but never should anyone delude themselves into thinking that the
vote they cast will ever decide an election. . . . Just about anything
you do with your time would be more productive.
Given the concept of expected value, however, Levitt’s reasoning is too
quick. We can’t just say that the chance of affecting the outcome by voting
is so small as to be negligible. We need to work out how large the benefit
would be if we did indeed affect the outcome.
Luckily, some statisticians have done the hard work for us, including
political pundit extraordinaire Nate Silver, who correctly predicted the
winner of the 2012 election in all fifty states and the District of Columbia.
Along with Columbia University professor of statistics Andrew Gelman and
Berkeley professor of law Aaron Edlin, Silver calculated the odds of an
individual vote swaying the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and
found that, on average, a voter had approximately a one-in-sixty-million
chance of affecting the outcome—small odds to be sure.
Next, we have to work out what the stakes are. This will necessarily
involve some guesstimation. You should start by asking yourself: How
much do I personally expect to gain by having my preferred party in power?
If your preferred party is the Republicans, then you might expect to benefit
because you’ll pay fewer taxes. If your preferred party is the Democrats,
you might expect to benefit because you’ll receive more government-
funded public services. Suppose for the sake of argument you conclude that
your preferred party getting into power is worth $1,000 to you. Although
this $1,000-per-citizen figure is hypothetical, it seems plausible to me. The
total spending of the US government is $3.5 trillion per year: that’s $14
trillion over four years, or $44,000 per person. If that money is spent 2.5
percent more effectively, then the benefits amount to $1,000 per person.
The government also, of course, makes people better or worse off in other
ways, such as through regulation.
An economist like Levitt might say that, for you, the expected value of
voting is only one in sixty million times $1,000, which equals 0.0016 cents.
With such a low expected value, it’s clearly not worth it to vote.
But this line of reasoning assumes that the value of voting is only the
value to you. Instead, we should think about the total benefit of the better
party being in power. Let’s keep using this hypothetical $1,000 figure of the
benefit per person of the better party being in power. If so, the total benefit
to all Americans is $1,000 multiplied by the US population of 314 million,
so $314 billion. The average expected value of voting for the better party,
therefore, is the probability of success (one in sixty million) multiplied by
the benefit to Americans (which I’m supposing to be $314 billion), which
equals about $5,200 of value to the people of the United States. That’s the
sense in which voting is like donating thousands of dollars to (developed-
world) charities. For all but the ultrarich, that’s a much better use of time
than you could get, for example, by working the hour it takes you to vote
and donating your earnings.
Some caveats on this conclusion are required. First, the total benefit per
American was a purely hypothetical number, so it should be taken with a
grain of salt. If you’re uncertain about which party is really better, you
might reasonably think that it’s an overestimate: your expected value of
voting will be lower due to a greater chance of voting for the worse party;
and if you’re completely unsure which party is better, the expected value of
voting drops to zero. If so, that’s fine; you should make your own estimate
of the benefits of your preferred party getting into power, and then run the
calculation. Only if you think the expected benefit of one party over another
is very small (perhaps less than twenty dollars of benefit per person) will
you conclude that voting isn’t a reasonable altruistic activity.
A more important caveat is that the probability of swinging the election
varies dramatically by state. In swing states such as Colorado, New
Hampshire, and Virginia, the probability goes as low as one in ten million,
which makes the case for voting much stronger. Using my hypothetical
number of $1,000 of benefit per person, the value of the benefit to the
people of the United States of you voting for the better party is $30,000.
However, in safe states, the probability of your vote making a difference is
much less. In Massachusetts, for example, the probability of your vote
making a difference is only one in a billion. Given my estimate of the
benefit of the better party being in power, that would still mean that voting
has an expected value of $300, which seems well worth it. In the District of
Columbia, however, the probability of your vote making the difference is
less than one in one hundred billion, giving an expected value of voting of
only three dollars.
We used the idea of expected value to show why voting for the better
party is often an (expected) high-impact altruistic activity. The same sort of
reasoning, however, can be applied to other areas. On many issues, I find
that people hold the following two views:
If many people did this thing, then change would happen.
But any individual person doesn’t make a difference.
Holding that combination of views is usually a mistake when we
consider expected value.
Consider ethical consumption, like switching to fair-trade coffee, or
reducing how much meat you buy. Suppose someone stops buying chicken
breasts, instead choosing vegetarian options, in order to reduce the amount
of animal suffering on factory farms. Does that person make a difference?
You might think not. If one person decides against buying chicken breast
one day but the rest of the meat eaters on the planet continue to buy
chicken, how could that possibly affect how many chickens are killed for
human consumption? When a supermarket decides how much chicken to
buy, they don’t care that one fewer breast was purchased on a given day.
However, if thousands or millions of people stopped buying chicken
breasts, the number of chickens raised for food would decrease—supply
would fall to meet demand. But then we’re left with a paradox: individuals
can’t make a difference, but millions of individuals do. But the actions of
millions of people are just the sum of the actions of many individual people.
Moreover, an iron law of economics is that, in a well-functioning market, if
demand for a product decreases, the quantity of the product that’s supplied
decreases. How, then, can we reconcile these thoughts?
The answer lies with expected value. If you decline to buy some
chicken breast, then most of the time you’ll make no difference: the
supermarket will buy the same amount of chicken in the future. Sometimes,
however, you will make a difference. Occasionally, the manager of the store
will assess the number of chicken breasts bought by consumers and decide
to decrease their intake of stock, even though they wouldn’t have done so
had the number of chicken breasts bought been one higher. (Perhaps they
follow a rule like: “If fewer than five thousand chicken breasts were bought
this month, decrease stock intake.”) And when that manager does decide to
decrease their stock intake, they will decrease stock by a large amount.
Perhaps your decision against purchasing chicken breast will have an effect
on the supermarket only one in a thousand times, but in that one time, the
store manager will decide to purchase approximately one thousand fewer
chicken breasts.
This isn’t just a theoretical argument. Economists have studied this
issue and worked out how, on average, a consumer affects the number of
animal products supplied by declining to buy that product. They estimate
that, on average, if you give up one egg, total production ultimately falls by
0.91 eggs; if you give up one gallon of milk, total production falls by 0.56
gallons. Other products are somewhere in between: economists estimate
that if you give up one pound of beef, beef production falls by 0.68 pounds;
if you give up one pound of pork, production ultimately falls by 0.74
pounds; if you give up one pound of chicken, production ultimately falls by
0.76 pounds.
This same reasoning can be applied when considering the value of
participating in political rallies. Suppose there’s some policy that a group of
people want to see implemented. Suppose everyone agrees that if no one
attends a rally on this policy, the policy won’t go through, but if one million
people show up, the policy will go through. What difference do you make
by showing up at this rally? You’re just one body among thousands of
others—surely the difference you make is negligible. Again, the solution is
to think in terms of expected value. The chance of you being the person
who makes the difference is very small, but if you do make the difference, it
will be very large indeed. This isn’t just a speculative model. Professors of
political science at Harvard and Stockholm Universities analyzed Tea Party
rallies held on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. They used the weather in different
constituencies as a natural experiment: if the weather was bad on the day of
a rally, fewer people would show up. This allowed them to assess whether
increased numbers of people at a rally made a difference to how influential
the rally was. They found that policy was significantly influenced by those
rallies that attracted more people, and that the larger the rally, the greater
the degree to which those protestors’ representatives in Congress voted
conservatively.
For our purposes, the most important use of expected value reasoning is
in comparing concrete, measurable ways of doing good with more
speculative but potentially higher-payoff strategies. One example of this
concerns how to compare different careers. Whereas earning to give in
order to donate to charities like Deworm the World Initiative provide a
reliable way of doing good, others, like politics, are much less certain. How
should we compare these?
“I expect to fail,” Laura Brown told me while putting down her cup of
coffee. We were sitting at the Grand Café, the oldest coffee-house in the
United Kingdom, and I was there to discuss Laura’s career plans. A second-
year student of philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE), Laura had
recently read a newspaper article discussing the chances of a PPE student
being elected to Parliament. Intrigued, she traced the original source, found
work by my organization 80,000 Hours, and studied the calculations
carefully. The research persuaded her to pursue a career in politics. “I’m
most likely going to fail to become a high-flying politician. But I could do
so much good if I did succeed that I think it’s worth taking the chance,”
Laura told me.
Before making her decision, Laura had been unsure about whether to
go into politics or whether to enter a lucrative career and earn to give, but
she knew she wanted to pursue whatever would make the bigger difference.
You might think it would be impossible to make this comparison, and it is
certainly very difficult to do so. However, the idea of expected value allows
us to come up with a reasonable answer. At 80,000 Hours, we did a very
rough calculation to see if entering politics could plausibly be competitive
with earning to give.
First, one has to work out the odds of success. The most naive estimate
of the odds of becoming an member of Parliament (MP) would be to work
out how many people alive in the United Kingdom today will serve as an
MP at some point in their life (which we estimated at about 3,100, with five
of those becoming prime minister at some point), and divide by the total
population of the United Kingdom (sixty-four million), giving a one-in-
twenty-thousand chance of becoming an MP, and a one-in-twelve-million
chance of becoming prime minister. However, most people don’t try to
enter politics, and the representation of politicians in the United Kingdom is
highly skewed toward people of certain backgrounds. In particular,
graduates of Oxford are dramatically overrepresented within UK politics,
with graduates of PPE especially overrepresented. For example, both the
current prime minister, David Cameron, and the leader of the opposition, Ed
Miliband, earned degrees in PPE from Oxford. Of the 650 members of
Parliament, more than one hundred studied at Oxford (despite there being
only three thousand graduates every year), of which thirty-five studied PPE
(despite there being only two hundred PPE graduates each year). Thirty-two
percent of cabinet ministers (those MPs who hold executive power) studied
PPE at Oxford, and of the thirteen prime ministers since 1945, nine studied
at Oxford and three of those studied PPE.
These statistics represent some disappointing facts about political
mobility and equal representation in the United Kingdom. However, for
someone who is altruistically minded and happened to study PPE at Oxford,
it represents a powerful opportunity. Laura was such a person. We worked
out that, for a graduate in PPE from Oxford who chooses to enter politics,
the historical chances of his or her becoming an MP was one in thirty, with
the chances of becoming prime minister at one in three thousand. Laura’s
background gave her remarkably good odds of entering Parliament, but,
even given this, it was still far more likely than not that she would fail, so
entering politics was still a high-risk venture.
In order to determine the expected value of her pursuing politics, we
next needed to work out how big an impact she would have if she did
manage to enter Parliament.
This is very difficult to estimate, so we’ll use what I call lower-bound
reasoning: given that it’s impossible to get a precise estimate of her
potential impact in politics, we’ll try to create an estimate that we feel
confident is an underestimate (or a “lower bound”). Then we can say that,
even though we don’t know how much influence she’ll have, it is at least as
much as the lower-bound estimate. If Laura’s expected impact from going
into politics is greater than that through earning to give even based on this
lower-bound estimate, then we should think it likely that her expected
impact really is greater through politics than through earning to give.
In the spirit of being conservative, therefore, we’ll first assume that
Laura’s impact would only come through becoming an MP (or serving in
the cabinet or as prime minister), and not through other jobs she would take
within politics even if she failed to become an MP, such as being a special
adviser to an MP, or working at a think tank. Second, we’ll assume that the
impact of being an MP comes only through government expenditure and
not at all through legislation or through other forms of influence via the
public platform that a political position would give her. Both of these
assumptions are false, of course, but they help to ensure that we can be
reasonably confident that the number we end up with is an underestimate of
her expected impact.
We’re therefore only trying to estimate her potential influence over
governmental spending as an MP. The way we estimated this was to think
on an annual basis: per year, how much influence do PPE-graduate MPs
have, and how many people from PPE in Oxford try to enter politics?
Again, we’ll try to remain conservative throughout.
First, the annual influence that all MPs have (including the cabinet and
prime minister). Total UK government spending in 2014–2015 was £732
billion. Legally speaking, MPs and ministers decide government policy and
spending. However, in practice, they are restricted in how they can allocate
that spending by other political actors, international bodies, and the views
of the electorate. We want to be conservative, so we’ll assume that each of
these reduce MPs’ and ministers’ influence by half. Using these
assumptions, we conclude that MPs and ministers influence one-eighth of
government spending. However, it is civil servants who actually implement
the policies that MPs and ministers decide on. This reduces the MPs’ and
ministers’ effective influence yet again. We’ll estimate that this decreases
their influence by half, giving us our final estimate of the annual influence
of all MPs at one-sixteenth of government expenditure, or approximately
£45 billion.
Next, we estimate what proportion of that is influenced by PPE
graduates. Currently, 5 percent of MPs and 32 percent of cabinet ministers
studied PPE at Oxford. We’ll assume that the influence of all 628
noncabinet MPs is the same as the influence of the twenty-two MPs in the
cabinet (including the prime minister): so each group influences 50 percent
of the approximately £45 billion that MPs in total influence. (Again this
seems conservative; PPE has even higher representation at cabinet and
prime minister level than it does at MP level, and we suspect that the
cabinet and prime minister really have even more influence than the other
MPs combined.) We therefore estimate that people who studied PPE at
Oxford influence 5% × £22.5 billion + 32% × £22.5 billion = £8 billion
annually. Every year, two hundred people graduate from Oxford in PPE;
however only about one-quarter of them pursue a career relevant to party
politics. Therefore fifty graduates are responsible for that £8 billion of
influence. The expected influence of each of those graduates (such as Laura
Brown) is therefore 1 / 50 × £8 billion = £160 million. That expected
influence might come, for example, from the chance of causing a change in
allocation of spending between defense and overseas development aid; or it
might come from the chance of improving the effectiveness of money spent
on healthcare.
That’s her expected financial influence, but how much is that influence
worth? Because she will be restricted in how that money is used, it won’t be
worth as much as if she simply had £160 million that she could target to the
most effective causes. Moreover, we must compare how much good that
money would do given she is the person influencing it, compared to how
much good that money would do if someone else were in her shoes. Again,
being conservative, let’s assume that the money she can influence will only
do 1/50th as much good as money that was donated directly to the most
effective causes. If so, then our estimate of Laura’s expected impact of
entering politics is as great as £8 million donated to the most effective
causes.
In coming up with this number, we made conservative assumptions at
every stage, assuming no impact if she didn’t become an MP or cabinet
minister, and assuming that her impact as an MP would come only through
government expenditure rather than through legislation. We should
therefore think that the £8 million figure is an underestimate of her
expected impact. However, £8 million is considerably more than she could
donate if she earned to give. Even given our pessimistic assumptions, for
Laura, politics therefore seems to have a greater expected impact than
earning to give. She wanted to have as big an impact as she could, so, in
part on the basis of this reasoning, she chose to enter a political career.
The conclusion that earning to give isn’t always the highest-impact
career path isn’t a conclusion that’s unique to Oxford PPE graduates. In
chapter nine we’ll discuss several other career paths that have a low
probability of success but a very high upside given success, such as
research and entrepreneurship, that seem highly competitive with earning to
give.
As well as assessing careers, the concept of expected value can be used
to assess efforts to effect political change. Donating to highly effective
charities provides a comparatively concrete, reliable, and measurable way
of doing good. But the potential gains of systemic change are even greater:
if you can find the right area, funding or participating in political campaigns
could potentially do even more good. It’s not generally necessary to work
out an exact numerical estimate for the expected value of that activity;
rough estimates based on reasonable numbers can show you approximately
how great the expected value is. The point is simply that long shots can be
worth it if the payoff is big enough.
When assessing a potential course of action, one should therefore not
dismiss it as ineffective by saying “that’ll never happen.” Many ethical
ideas that are now commonsense seemed highly radical in the past. The idea
that women, or black people, or nonheterosexual people should have equal
rights was considered ridiculous up until very recently, historically
speaking. In 1790, Benjamin Franklin, for example, wrote a letter
petitioning the US Congress to end slavery. Congress debated the petition
for two days. The defenders of slavery had no shortage of objections. “Who
is going to compensate the slave owners?” they asked, and, “What is the
mixing of races going to do to American values and character?” Yet slavery
was abolished wholesale, and we now find those objections indefensible.
Those activists who campaigned for equal rights for women, black people,
and the LBGT community were right to do so, not because they had a good
chance of succeeding in the short term, but because the benefit was so great
if they did succeed.
• • •
Climate change is another issue where the concept of expected value proves
useful, in three different ways. First, it shows that the debate over whether
man-made climate change is happening is pretty irrelevant when it comes to
what we ought to do. In these debates, one group points to the scientific
consensus that man-made climate change is happening while the other
argues that the jury is still out. To be clear, there really is near consensus
among scientists that man-made climate change is happening. A UN-
backed panel of thousands of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change has said that “it is extremely likely that human
influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the
mid-twentieth century,” where they define “extremely likely” to mean at
least 95 percent probability. One article reviewed four thousand papers that
discuss global warming and reported that “97.1 percent endorsed the
consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
However, this debate is strange for another reason: even if scientists had
not already shown that man-made climate change is happening, the mere
fact that man-made climate change might be happening is enough to
warrant action. As an analogy, suppose you have a carbon monoxide
detector in your home that is a bit sensitive. It gives a false alarm every four
out of five times it goes off but is otherwise accurate. You’re watching TV
one evening, and the alarm goes off. What do you do? If you reason to
yourself, “It’s probably a false alarm, so I won’t bother doing anything,”
you’d be making a grave mistake. If it’s a false alarm but, to be safe, you
turn off the boiler and open the windows, the worst that happens is you’ve
made yourself chilly for an evening and had to pause your favorite TV
show unnecessarily. In contrast, if there really is a carbon monoxide leak
and you do nothing, you may die. Given this, the sensible thing is to turn off
the boiler. The one-in-five chance of death clearly outweighs the four-in-
five chance of being a little cold temporarily for no reason.
Our predicament with climate change is no different. If climate change
is happening and we don’t take action, millions of lives will be lost and the
world economy will lose trillions of dollars. If climate change isn’t
happening and we do take action, the costs are much lower. We would have
wasted some amount of resources developing low-carbon technology and
slowed economic progress a bit, but it wouldn’t, literally, be the end of the
world.
The second way in which expected value is relevant when figuring out
how to respond to the threat of climate change is that it shows why
individuals have reason to mitigate climate change just as much as
governments do. Over your lifetime, your individual greenhouse gas
contribution will only increase the temperature of the planet by about half a
billionth of a degree Celsius. That, you might think, is such a small
difference as to be negligible, so you shouldn’t bother trying to reduce your
personal emissions.
This reasoning, however, doesn’t consider expected value. It’s true that
increasing the planet’s temperature by half a billionth of a degree probably
won’t make a difference to anyone, but sometimes it will make a difference,
and when it does, the difference will be very large. Occasionally, that
increase of half a billionth of a degree will cause a flood or a heat wave that
wouldn’t have happened otherwise. In which case the expected harm of
raising global temperatures by half a billionth of a degree would be fairly
great. We know that something like this has to be the case because we know
that, if millions of people emit greenhouse gasses, the bad effects are very
large, and millions of people emitting greenhouse gasses is just the sum of
millions of individual actions.
Finally, expected value is important when assessing just how bad
climate change is and how much of a change we should make. When I first
looked into economic assessments of the damages of climate change, I was
surprised to find that economists tended to assess climate change as being
not all that bad. Most estimate that climate change will cost only a couple
percent of global gross domestic product (GDP). This, of course, is huge
when measured in the trillions of dollars lost. But it’s not that large when
compared to somewhat typical rates of slow economic growth. Economic
growth per person over the last decade has been about 2 percent per year, so
a loss of 2 percent of global GDP due to climate change is therefore
equivalent to going one year without economic growth. The thought that
climate change would do the equivalent of putting us back one year
economically isn’t all that scary—2013 didn’t seem that much worse than
2014.
We can see the same thing on an individual level. Carbon dioxide
equivalent, or CO
2eq
, is a way of measuring your carbon footprint that
includes greenhouse gasses other than carbon dioxide, like methane and
nitrous oxide. For example, one metric ton of methane produces as much
warming as twenty-one metric tons of carbon dioxide, so one metric ton of
methane is twenty-one metric tons of CO
2eq
. On typical estimates, the social
cost of one metric ton of CO
2eq
is about thirty-two dollars: incorporating
costs both now and in the future, emitting one metric ton of CO
2
, or an
equivalent amount of greenhouse gasses like methane or nitrous oxide,
costs all people a total of thirty-two dollars. The average American emits
about twenty-one metric tons of CO
2eq
every year. So the social cost of one
American’s greenhouse gas emissions is about $670 every year. Again,
that’s a significant cost, but it’s also not the end of the world. For those
living in other countries, the cost of greenhouse gas emissions is
significantly less again; people in the United Kingdom, for example, only
emit about nine metric tons of CO
2eq
every year, so the harm they cause
every year is only $275.
However, this standard economic analysis fails to faithfully use
expected value reasoning. The standard analysis looks only at the effects
from the most likely scenario: a 2 to 4ºC rise in temperature. It doesn’t
consider what the consequences would be if our best-guess estimates are
wrong. This is especially important because the climate is an incredibly
complex system that is difficult to predict, so we can’t be sure that our
estimates are correct. When climate scientists make estimates about
temperature rise, they have to acknowledge that there is a small but
significant risk of a temperature increase that’s much greater than 2 to 4ºC.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives more than 5 percent
probability to temperature rises greater than 6ºC, and even acknowledges a
small risk of catastrophic climate change, of 10ºC or more. To be clear, I’m
not saying that this is at all likely, in fact, it’s very unlikely. But it is
possible, and if it were to happen, the consequences would be disastrous,
potentially resulting in civilizational collapse. It’s difficult to give a
meaningful answer to the question of how bad that would be, but if we
think it’s potentially catastrophic, then we need to revise our evaluation of
the importance of mitigating climate change. In that case, the true expected
social cost of CO
2
could be much higher than thirty-two dollars per metric
ton, justifying much more extensive efforts to reduce emissions than the
estimates the economists first suggested.
Just as most of the value from aid programs comes from the very best
aid programs (which we discussed in chapter three), it’s often the case that
most of the expected harm from disasters come from the very worst
disasters. (That is: the death tolls from disasters form a fat-tailed
distribution. Nassim Taleb describes these as Black Swans: very rare events
that have a very great impact.) For example, most people who’ve died in
war have died in the very worst wars: of the four hundred wars in the last
two hundred years, about 30 percent of deaths were from World War II
alone. This means that if we’re concerned by war, we should spend most of
our efforts trying to prevent the very largest wars from occurring, or to limit
their scope. Similar considerations are true of earthquakes, floods, and
epidemics.
In cases where people seem to neglect the risks of worst-case outcomes,
helping to prevent these outcomes might be a particularly effective altruistic
activity. This is what the Skoll Global Threats Fund focuses on, trying to
reduce the chances of global catastrophes arising from climate change,
pandemics, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The charity evaluator
GiveWell is currently investigating these sorts of activities in an attempt to
work out how effective donations in these areas can be.
• • •
From the previous chapters, you might have felt that effective altruism is
limited only to those activities with comparatively easy-to-quantify
benefits, like deworming schoolchildren or distributing antimalarial bed
nets. I hope that this discussion of expected value has helped to show why
that’s not the case. Even in what seem like “unquantifiable” areas like
political change and disaster prevention, we can still think rigorously, in an
evidence-based manner, about how good those activities are. We just need
to assess the chances of success and how good success would be if it
happened. This, of course, is very difficult to do, but we will make better
decisions if we at least try to make these assessments rather than simply
throwing up our hands and randomly choosing an activity to pursue, or
worse, not choosing any altruistic activity at all.
I’ve now introduced the key questions to help you think like an
effective altruist: How many people benefit, and by how much? Is this the
most effective thing you can do? Is this area neglected? What would have
happened otherwise? What are the chances of success, and how good would
success be? Now it’s time to examine how we apply those questions to the
real world and put effective altruism into action. That is the subject of the
next part of this book.
EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM IN
ACTION
SEVEN
OVERHEAD COSTS, CEO PAY, AND
OTHER CONFUSIONS
Which charities make the most difference?
Suppose I give you a hundred dollars and tell you to donate the whole sum
to one of three charities, each of which is attempting to address a different
problem facing poor countries in Africa. Which would you choose?
First, Books For Africa (BFA). BFAs mission is to improve education
by shipping donated books from the United States to the African continent,
where they are distributed by nonprofit partners. Founded in 1988, it has
shipped more than twenty-eight million books to forty-nine different
countries. On their website, they vividly describe the problem and their
solution:
Most African children who attend school have never owned a book
of their own. In many classrooms, 10–20 students share one
textbook. . . . Although Books For Africa has made tremendous
progress in its mission, the book famine in Africa remains a reality.
Where books are available, there are still very few. Empty library
shelves are a constant reminder of Africa’s desperate need for
printed materials. If we are to see the day when African school
children are to have the books they need to learn the skills
necessary to provide for themselves and others, Books For Africa
must continue to send millions of books.
Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has personally endorsed
BFA, saying, “Books For Africa is a simple idea, but its impact is
transformative. For us, literacy is quite simply the bridge from misery to
hope.”
The second organization is Development Media International (DMI).
Their focus is on preventing deaths of African children under the age of
five. They aim to do this by designing and broadcasting radio and TV
programs that provide health education, such as encouraging breast-feeding
(to improve child health), proper hand washing (to decrease rates of
diarrheal disease), and the use of antimalarial bed nets. Sometimes these
take the form of minute-long radio ads, broadcast several times a day. Other
times they create stand-alone soap operas with educational messages built
in. In their words:
6.3 million children worldwide die under the age of five every year.
In 2013 one in 11 children in sub-Saharan Africa died before their
fifth birthday. . . . Many people cannot recognize when their child
has a potentially dangerous illness, or do not know what to do
about it, so many deaths are due to lack of knowledge rather than
lack of healthcare services. If a mother can recognize that her baby
has diarrhea and is able to provide her child with oral rehydration
therapy [a piece of advice that DMI promotes], then the child is far
more likely to reach the age of five.
DMI currently operates in Burkina Faso, and has plans to run similar
programs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique,
Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast.
The third organization is GiveDirectly. Its program is simple: it
transfers money from donors directly to some of the poorest people in
Kenya and Uganda who are then free to use that money however they wish.
Using what is called the M-Pesa system, cell phones are used as makeshift
bank accounts, thereby enabling an easy transfer of money from foreign
bank accounts to the poor. GiveDirectly uses satellite images to find
households with thatched roofs (a strong indicator of poverty, compared to
iron roofs) and then contacts those households to discuss the program. If the
household is willing, GiveDirectly transfers them a lump sum of $1,000,
which is equal to a little more than one years total income for that
household. In their words:
Recipients use transfers for whatever is most important to them; we
never tell them what to do. An independent evaluation of our work
in Kenya by Innovations for Poverty Action found that recipients
use transfers for a wide variety of purposes that on average
generate large income gains. Common uses range from buying food
to investing in tangible assets such as housing and livestock to
investing in children’s education.
Of these three charities, which do you think can do the most good with
your one-hundred-dollar donation? In this chapter, I’ll provide a framework
that will help you determine the answer.
• • •
One popular way of evaluating a charity is to look at financial information
regarding how the charity spends its money. How much does the charity
spend on administration? How much is its CEO paid? What percentage of
donations are put directly to the charity’s main programs? This is the
approach that Charity Navigator, the oldest and most popular charity
evaluator, has taken for the last fifteen years. According to Charity
Navigator, “Savvy donors know that the financial health of a charity is a
strong indicator of the charity’s programmatic performance. They know that
in most cause areas, the most efficient charities spend 75 percent or more of
their budget on their programs and services and less than 25 percent on
fund-raising and administrative fees.”
Using these metrics, let’s see how the three charities compare.
Books For Africa’s overhead costs are a tiny 0.8 percent of their total
expenditure (which was $24 million in 2013), and their CEO is paid
$116,204, which is only 0.47 percent of that total expenditure. For these
reasons, and for their general financial transparency, Charity Navigator has
given BFA its highest four-star rating for seven years running. As I write
this book, it’s rated number three on Charity Navigators list of 10 Top-
Notch Charities and carries a near-perfect score of 99.93 out of 100.
GiveDirectly isn’t rated by Charity Navigator but would also do well by
these metrics. So far, of every dollar that’s been donated to GiveDirectly,
between eighty-seven cents (in Uganda) and ninety cents (in Kenya) has
been transferred to the poor, with the rest spent on enrollment and follow-up
and transfer costs. With every dollar GiveDirectly spent on fund-raising,
they raised one hundred dollars in donations, a remarkable number
compared to the average of four dollars of donations raised for every dollar
spent on fund-raising. They had an overhead ratio of 6 percent, spending
just $124,000 on administration costs out of an expenditure of $2.2 million.
Much of the administration spending was on fixed costs, so as GiveDirectly
increases the amount of cash they transfer, the percentage spent on
overhead is likely to go down considerably.
In contrast, Development Media International’s overhead amount to 44
percent of its total budget, and there is little financial information on its
website. Charity Navigator evaluates only US-based charities, so it does not
evaluate DMI, which is based in the United Kingdom. However, DMI
clearly performs much worse than the two other charities according to
Charity Navigators metrics.
The idea that you should use financial information to compare charities
has been highly influential, and Charity Navigator has seen major success
as a result. In 2012, their site received a total of 6.2 million visits and they
claimed to have influenced approximately $10 billion of charitable
donations. Their metrics have become the gold standard for determining
whether a charity is efficient, and intuitively it makes some sense. If we’re
donating our hard-earned money to a charity that supports a cause we
believe in, we want to feel confident that our donation is actually working
to advance that cause rather than being wasted. Based on this metric, you
would choose Books For Africa as the best charity, then GiveDirectly, then
Development Media International.
Given the lessons of the previous chapters, however, we should already
understand that this approach to evaluating a charity’s effectiveness is
seriously misguided.
For starters, think about the logic behind this reasoning if you apply it
to personal spending. Suppose you’re deciding whether to buy a Mac or a
PC. What factors would you consider? You’d probably think about the
design and usability of the two computers, the hardware, the software, and
the price. You certainly wouldn’t think about how much Apple and
Microsoft each spend on administration, and you wouldn’t think about how
much their respective CEOs are paid. Why would you? As a consumer you
only care about the product you get with the money you spend; details
about the financials of the companies who make the products are almost
always irrelevant. If Apple spent a lot of money to attract a more talented
management team, you might even consider that a good sign that their
products were the best on the market!
If we don’t care about financial information when we buy products for
ourselves, why should we care about financial information when we buy
products for other people? Take a silly example: imagine I set up a charity
that distributes doughnuts to hungry police officers and I am so enthusiastic
about the mission that I manage to spend only 0.1 percent of the charity’s
money on overhead, with the rest spent on doughnuts and distribution.
Suppose, moreover, that I, as the CEO of this charity, don’t take a salary at
all. Would I really have created an amazing charity? Surely, as we discussed
in chapter two, what we should ultimately care about is the impact charities
have. When you give a hundred dollars to a charity, what does that charity
do with it? How are people’s lives improved as a result?
We can begin to answer this question by comparing the concrete
outcomes that donating to each charity achieves. Books For Africa ships
one book with every fifty cents donated to them. GiveDirectly gives the
poor ninety cents with every dollar donated to them. Development Media
International spends $1.5 million to run a mass media campaign promoting
health education in a particular country. But those numbers alone don’t tell
us that much. Is it better to ship three million schoolbooks, transfer $1.35
million to poor people, or educate a country’s populace about how they can
stay healthy (each of which would cost $1.5 million)? To answer that, we
have to know how these different expenditures affect people’s lives.
The first thing to explore is whether there’s high-quality evidence
regarding the impact of the program that the charity implements. It might
seem obvious that distributing textbooks is beneficial, but there’s
surprisingly little good evidence in favor of this idea and some evidence
against. Development economists have tested textbook distribution
(remember Michael Kremer?) and have found that, in the absence of
teacher training, providing textbooks has either no discernible effect on
children’s school performance, or only a limited effect on the very most
able students.
This should discourage us from choosing Books For Africa. It’s
supposedly “efficient” for having low administrative costs, but what’s really
important is how much good is done per dollar spent on the program the
charity implements. Books For Africa is a promising charity insofar as it
focuses on the very poorest people in the world, and it implements a
program that at least seems like it should work. But the evidence in favor of
the other two charities’ programs is much stronger. In my view, therefore,
BFA is the least effective of our three candidates.
We clearly need a better set of standards. Here are the five questions I
think any donor should ask before deciding where to give. They are based
on the criteria used by the charity evaluator GiveWell, which has spent the
last eight years trying to figure out which charities improve lives the most
with the donations they receive.
1. What does this charity do? How many different types of
programs does it run? For each of these programs, what
exactly is it that this charity does? If it runs more than one
program, why is that?
2. How cost-effective is each program area? Is the charity
focused on one of the most important causes? How cost-
effective does the evidence suggest the program to be?
3. How robust is the evidence behind each program? What is
the evidence behind the programs that the charity runs? Are
there trials showing that the program is effective? Does the
charity rigorously monitor and evaluate the success of its
programs?
4. How well is each program implemented? Do the leaders of
the charity have demonstrated success in other areas? Is the
charity highly transparent? Does it acknowledge mistakes that
it’s made in the past? What are the alternative charities you
could give to? Are there good reasons for supposing that this
charity is better than others?
5. Does the charity need additional funds? What would
additional funding be used to do? Why haven’t other donors
already funded the charity to the point it can’t use extra
money?
This framework enables us to genuinely assess charities in terms of
their impact, rather than on flawed metrics like administrative overhead. I’ll
explain each aspect of the framework in turn, in every case using the
framework to compare our two remaining charities—GiveDirectly and
Development Media International—against each other.
What does this charity do?
This might seem like an obvious question, but often what most people think
a charity does is quite different from what it actually does. For example, I
was surprised to find out that many developed-world medical charities
spend only a small fraction of their money on research, with the rest spent
on other programs, even though research is what they emphasize in their
marketing and websites. The American Cancer Society spends 43 percent of
its program expenses on patient support, 21 percent on prevention, 14
percent on detection/treatment, and just 22 percent on research. The ALS
Association (of ice-bucket-challenge fame) spends 41 percent of its
program expenses on public and professional education, 24 percent on
patient and community services, and just 35 percent on research. That’s not
a reason in itself against donating to any of these charities, and that’s not to
say that any of these charities have been misleading in their marketing, but
you would assess them differently knowing that donations support
numerous programs rather than just research.
I’ve already explained what GiveDirectly and DMI do. What we need
to know then is how good each of these programs are.
How cost-effective is each program area?
We want to estimate what a charity achieves with a given amount of money,
so our focus should always be on cost-effectiveness rather than just
effectiveness. Charity A and Charity B might both be effective at
distributing deworming drugs (that is to say, they successfully distribute
them), but if Charity B can do so at half the cost, then a donation to them
will do twice as much good.
The first step in estimating cost-effectiveness is to find out how much
the charity spends per person to run their program. For example, it costs
about six dollars to deliver one antimalarial bed net, which on average
protects two children for two years, so it costs $1.50 to protect one child for
one year. It costs GiveDirectly one dollar to give someone in extreme
poverty ninety cents; it costs DMI between forty and eighty cents per
listener per year to run their education campaigns. Ultimately, however, we
should try to figure out how this converts into impact on people’s well-
being. These figures don’t yet tell us whether GiveDirectly or DMI does
more good. To do that we need to assess how these programs actually affect
people’s lives.
The obvious first question to ask about GiveDirectly is: What do the
recipients of these cash transfers do with the money? If they spend it on
education, that sounds pretty good; if they spend it on drugs and alcohol,
that’s worrying. It turns out that the most common use of the transfer is to
buy assets, typically farm animals, or to convert thatched roofs into iron
ones; on average, recipients spent 39 percent of the transfer on assets. These
purchases seem to have very high returns, potentially as high as 14 percent
per year for at least a period of several years.
Cash transfers also seem to have several less-tangible effects.
Recipients of the transfer reported significant increases in subjective well-
being, reported significant decreases in number of whole days gone without
food, and scored significantly higher on an index of female empowerment,
though there weren’t significant increases in health or education during the
time period studied.
The estimated cost-effectiveness of GiveDirectly’s programs is very
impressive, but the estimated cost-effectiveness of DMI’s program is even
more so.
There’s a lot of health knowledge that we have without even realizing
it. For example, everyone in the United States knows to wash their hands
regularly; it’s a lesson that’s drilled into us from childhood. Moreover, we
know to use soap and that just because our hands look clean that doesn’t
mean they are clean. In many poor countries, however, people have never
been taught this, or they regard soap as a precious commodity and are
therefore reluctant to use it for hand washing. This can have severe
consequences. Diarrhea is a major problem in the developing world, killing
760,000 children every year, primarily through dehydration. (For
comparison, that’s a death toll equivalent to five jumbo jets crashing to the
ground every day, killing everyone on board.) A significant number of those
deaths could be avoided through simple improvements to sanitation and
hygiene, like more regular hand washing with soap.
The ads that DMI runs are terribly corny. (In one, a baby has a
conversation with a group of diseases that are ultimately defeated by breast-
feeding.) Through those ads, however, DMI can teach people crucial pieces
of information, like the importance of breast-feeding immediately after
childbirth or the proper use of bed nets, for pennies per person.
When looking at DMI’s impact, we can use QALYs as a measurement
(where one QALY, remember, represents one year of perfect health).
Studies and models of mass media education have estimated that it costs
about ten dollars to provide one QALY. In chapter three, I mentioned that
by providing insecticide-treated bed nets, you could provide one QALY for
just one hundred dollars (equivalent to saving a life for $3,400), and I
pointed out that this was an astonishing fact. If the estimate of ten dollars
per QALY is correct, however, we could do ten times as much good, the
equivalent of saving a life for just $360, by donating to DMI.
It’s difficult to know how to value the increases in income,
psychological well-being, and empowerment that DMI provides compared
with QALYs and lifesaving, but under any reasonable assumptions about
how to make the comparison, on the basis of these estimates, DMI looks
like the clear winner.
To see this, note that a $1,000 cash transfer represents approximately a
doubling of annual household income, where a household consists of about
five people. Supposing, very generously, that that doubling of income lasts
for ten years thanks to returns on investment, the entire household will
therefore be twice as rich as they would otherwise have been for ten years
following the transfer. We can then ask which is the larger benefit: saving
approximately three lives (as you would by donating $1,000 to DMI), or
doubling the income of five people for ten years (as you would by donating
to GiveDirectly). It seems clear that saving three lives is providing a larger
benefit with the same amount of resources.
Based on estimated cost-effectiveness, therefore, DMI seems like a
better bet. In order to fully compare DMI with GiveDirectly, however, we
need to complete our framework.
How robust is the evidence behind each program?
Often we should prefer a charity that has very good evidence of being fairly
cost-effective to a charity that has only weak evidence of being very cost-
effective; if the evidence behind an estimate is weak, it’s likely that the
estimate is optimistic, and the true cost-effectiveness is much lower.
For example, the evidence behind claims made on charities’ websites or
in marketing materials is often very shaky, and sometimes even downright
misleading. On its website, the charity Nothing But Nets says that, “one $10
bed net can mean the difference between life and death.” In one sense, this
is true: bed nets do save lives, so a single bed net can save a life. But not
every child who is protected by a bed net would otherwise die of malaria, so
it’s not true that $10 spent distributing bed nets will save a life; and if you
weren’t reading Nothing But Nets’ message closely, you might form the
impression that that’s what they mean. It’s cheap to save or improve lives in
poor countries, but it’s not that cheap. (For a sanity check, remember that
even the very poorest people in the world live on sixty cents per day; if it
cost ten dollars to save a life, then we’d have to suppose that they or their
family members couldn’t save up for a few weeks, or take out a loan, in
order to pay for the lifesaving product.)
Claims of a program’s effectiveness are more reliable when grounded in
academic studies. If there’s been a meta-analysis—a study of the studies—
that’s even better. Even then, there can be cause for concern because the
program that a charity implements might be subtly different from the
programs that were studied in the meta-analysis. Knowing that, it’s even
better if the charity has done its own independently audited or peer-
reviewed randomized controlled evaluations of its programs.
Robustness of evidence is very important for the simple reason that
many programs don’t work, and it’s hard to distinguish the programs that
don’t work from the programs that do. If we’d assessed Scared Straight by
looking just at before-and-after delinquency rates for individuals who went
through the program, we would have concluded it was a great program.
Only after looking at randomized controlled trials could we tell that
correlation did not indicate causation in this case and that Scared Straight
programs were actually doing more harm than good.
One of the most damning examples of low-quality evidence concerns
microcredit (that is, lending small amounts of money to the very poor, a
form of microfinance most famously associated with Muhammad Yunus
and the Grameen Bank). Intuitively, microcredit seems like it would be very
cost-effective, and there were many anecdotes of people who’d received
microloans and used them to start businesses that, in turn, helped them
escape poverty. But when high-quality studies were conducted, microcredit
programs were shown to have little or no effect on income, consumption,
health, or education. Rather than starting new companies, microloans are
typically used to pay for extra consumption like food and healthcare, and
the rate of interest on them is usually very high. There’s even concern that
they can cause harm by providing a tempting short-term income boost at the
expense of longer-term financial security: people take out a loan in order to
pay for food or health-care costs of family members but then enter debt that
they are unable to repay. The latest evidence suggests that, overall and on
average, microlending does have a small positive improvement on people’s
lives, but it’s not the panacea that the anecdotes portray.
With these warnings at the top of our minds, how should we compare
GiveDirectly and DMI? Here, GiveDirectly clearly has the edge. Cash
transfers are one of the most well-studied development programs, having
been shown to improve lives in many different countries around the world.
They also easily pass a sanity check as to whether they will be effective: the
recipients of the transfers are very well-placed to know their most pressing
needs, and they can use additional resources to fill those needs in ways they
know will benefit them. Finally, the independent development think tank
Innovations for Poverty Action has run a randomized controlled trial on
GiveDirectly, so we can be confident not just about the efficacy of cash
transfers in general but also about cash transfers as implemented by
GiveDirectly.
Because cash transfers is such a simple program, and because the
evidence in favor of them is so robust, we could think about them as like
the “index fund” of giving. Money invested in an index fund grows (or
shrinks) at the same rate as the stock market; investing in an index fund is
the lowest-fee way to invest in stocks. Actively managed mutual funds, in
contrast, take higher management fees, and it’s only worth investing in one
if that fund manages to beat the market by a big enough margin that the
additional returns on investment are greater than the additional management
costs. In the same way, one might think, it’s only worth it to donate to
charitable programs rather than simply transfer cash directly to the poor if
the other programs provide a benefit great enough to outweigh the
additional costs incurred in implementing them. In other words, we should
only assume we’re in a better position to help the poor than they are to help
themselves if we have some particularly compelling reason for thinking so.
In the case of mass media education, we do have a plausible
explanation for why it could be more effective than cash transfers: mass
media health education isn’t something individuals can buy, and even if
they could, they probably wouldn’t know just how valuable it is. Markets
alone cannot provide mass media health education, so it needs to be funded
and implemented by governments or nonprofits.
However, the mere fact we have a plausible explanation for how mass
media education could be more cost-effective than cash transfers doesn’t
show that it is more cost-effective. When we look at the evidence for
supporting mass media education, we find it’s weaker than the evidence for
cash transfers.
There are three main sources of evidence, each of which provides an
estimate of approximately ten dollars per QALY for mass media campaigns.
First, there are some published studies of mass media health education
programs, but these are of far lower quality and relevance than the studies
behind GiveDirectly’s program. Second, there is a mathematical model
created by DMI prior to rolling out its interventions. But a model is only as
good as its assumptions, and the assumptions put into this model may be
optimistic. Finally, there are the midline results from the randomized
controlled trial that DMI is performing on its own program. Their program
is based in Burkina Faso, which has many local radio services. This means
that they can implement their program in seven districts, monitor health
indicators in an additional seven districts, and then compare mortality and
disease prevalence in order to see what effect their program has. These
midline results are very promising, but they are based on self-reports, which
are not as accurate as indicators like mortality.
The fact that the evidence for the ten-dollars-per-QALY figure is
weaker than the evidence for GiveDirectly’s cost-effectiveness estimates
provides a reason for preferring GiveDirectly to DMI. Because the evidence
behind their program is better, we can be more confident that
GiveDirectly’s estimates are approximately accurate, whereas the ten-
dollars-per-QALY figure provided by DMI may be optimistic.
How well is each program implemented?
Even if a charity has chosen an extremely cost-effective program with very
robust evidence supporting it, it still might implement that program badly.
For example, distribution of antimalarial bed nets is an extremely cost-
effective program if implemented correctly, but if recipients of the bed nets
don’t believe they’re necessary or don’t believe they’re effective, they may
use them for other purposes. For example, a study of bed nets distributed by
the Kenyan government found that recipients often used bed nets for
catching and drying fish. That’s why the Against Malaria Foundation, for
example, educates the recipients of its nets about proper use and benefits
and later conducts site visits, taking photographs to ensure that the nets are
correctly installed after use.
An even more common problem than knowing that a charity
implements a program badly is simply not knowing whether it implements
it well. Most charities provide almost no information about the programs
they run, making it difficult to assess their effectiveness.
Both GiveDirectly and DMI seem excellent in terms of the quality of
their implementation. GiveDirectly is led by a leading development
economist; DMI is led by someone with extensive experience and
achievements in radio education, and has an advisory board that includes
some of the world’s best epidemiologists and development economists.
Both charities are extremely transparent. GiveDirectly even goes so far as
to provide information on how many cash transfer recipients reported
having to pay bribes to the local agents who transferred them the money (at
the time of writing, the figure is 0.4 percent). This sort of admission is very
encouraging: showing that the charity cares about identifying and fixing
mistakes, rather than brushing them under the rug.
Does the charity need additional funds?
Even if you’ve found a charity that works on an extremely cost-effective
program with robust evidence behind it, we still need to ask whether your
contribution will make a difference. Many effective programs are fully
funded precisely because they are so effective. For example, developing-
world governments usually fund the costs of the cheapest vaccination
programs, such as those for tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria, tetanus,
pertussis, and measles, providing these vaccines through existing health
systems. These programs also receive substantial support from Gavi, the
global vaccine alliance, which received $4.3 billion in funding for 2011 to
2015, exceeding its target of $3.7 billion. For these programs, the main
obstacle for universal coverage is logistical rather than a lack of funds.
The same can be true on a smaller scale. Even if there’s plenty of room
for more funding for a program in general, it can be difficult for a specific
charity to scale up rapidly. If a charity has recently received a windfall, it
might not be able to use additional donations effectively. This may have
been true of the Against Malaria Foundation in 2013: GiveWell had named
it its top-recommended organization in 2012, and it received a surge in
donations totaling $10 million. They struggled to spend that money quickly,
which suggested that additional donations to them wouldn’t have the same
effectiveness as previous donations, so GiveWell didn’t recommend them in
2013. (They successfully increased their capacity in 2013, however, so
GiveWell recommended them again in 2014.)
Both GiveDirectly and DMI are in a good position to use more funding,
but GiveDirectly could do more with additional funds than DMI could.
GiveDirectly could productively use an additional $25 to $30 million of
donations in 2015 and expects to receive about $10 million, whereas DMI
could productively use $10 million in 2015 and expects to receive $2 to $4
million. Moreover, the limit for how much money could be spent on cash
transfers is much higher than how much could be spent on mass media
education. Conceivably, hundreds of billions of dollars could be spent on
cash transfer programs; whereas providing mass media health education in
every country in the world would cost much less.
At the moment, this difference doesn’t pose a problem, but depending
on how each charity’s funding situation progresses, it might provide a
reason against donating to DMI. If DMI will close their funding gap
regardless of whether you donate to them, then your specific donation will
do very little.
• • •
This brings us to the end of the framework. What should we conclude about
which charity will do more good with one hundred dollars? As you may
have guessed, I deliberately chose these two charities because the answer is
unclear. Of the considerations we’ve canvassed, the most important issues
are estimated cost-effectiveness versus robustness of evidence. The
estimated cost-effectiveness of DMI is higher than that of GiveDirectly, but
the evidence behind that estimate is weaker than the evidence behind the
estimate of GiveDirectly’s cost-effectiveness. Which charity one chooses
depends crucially on how skeptical one should be of explicit cost-
effectiveness estimates, and that depends on your level of optimism or
pessimism about this program. This is a common difficulty we face when
trying to do good: When should you pursue an activity with more robust
evidence of more limited impact, versus an activity with much weaker
evidence of potentially much greater impact?
If I had to choose between giving to these two charities today, I’d
donate the one hundred dollars to DMI rather than to GiveDirectly, with my
reasoning based on the “expected value” considerations we discussed in
chapter six. I think that DMI is probably considerably less cost-effective
than the ten-dollars-per-QALY figure, but if that figure is even
approximately accurate, then DMI is much more cost-effective than
GiveDirectly. I therefore think the expected value of donating to DMI is
higher than that of donating to GiveDirectly. However, I would not fault
someone who thought that the robustness of evidence in favor of
GiveDirectly was more important than their lower estimated cost-
effectiveness, and chose to donate to them instead. Assessing charity
effectiveness is difficult, and these are both excellent charities whose
programs provide impressive benefit to the extremely poor.
• • •
We’ve just looked at three specific charities and determined that two of
them are cost-effective. But what about all of the other charities in the
world? I don’t have the time or the space in this book to apply my
framework to every charity, so to end this chapter I’ll provide a list of some
highly cost-effective charities, based on GiveWell’s research, and I’ll
provide a brief explanation of why each of them passes muster. Before then,
I want to clarify a few things.
First, you won’t find mega-charities like WorldVision or Oxfam or
UNICEF on these lists. These charities run a variety of different programs,
and for that reason they are very difficult to evaluate. I also think it’s
unlikely that, even if we were able to evaluate them in depth, we would
conclude that they are as effective as the charities I list here. If a charity
implements a variety of programs, inevitably some of these programs will
be more effective than others. In which case, we should simply focus on
funding those very best programs. For example, we argued earlier that
disaster relief is generally not the most effective use of funding, but many
mega-charities spend a large portion of their energies on just that.
Second, you might be surprised by how few charities are on this list.
Aren’t there dozens of worthy charities in the world? Yes, there are, but that
doesn’t mean you should give to them all. As we saw in chapter three, the
best charities are often far better even than merely very good charities.
Given that we’ve got only limited money to spend, we should focus on the
very best charities rather than merely very good charities.
Finally, you’ll notice that most of the charities I discuss implement
health-based programs in poor countries. I’ve already explained that we
should focus on poor countries because it’s easier and cheaper to save lives
there than it is in developed countries. But what about education, or water
provision, or economic empowerment? These are all promising areas, but
global health stands out for a couple of reasons. First, it has a proven track
record: smallpox eradication is the clearest example, but development aid
has made significant contributions toward other areas of health, such as
polio, measles, diarrheal disease, and guinea worm disease. In contrast, the
link between aid and economic growth is less clear. Second, by its nature,
the evidence behind health interventions is more robust. If we know that the
drug albendazole kills the parasitic worm Ascaris lumbricoides in the
United States, we can safely conclude that it will probably kill that same
worm in Kenya or India because human bodies are pretty similar all round
the world. In contrast, it’s much harder to be confident that an educational
program that works in India will also work in Kenya, where the culture and
educational infrastructure are very different.
There can be exceptions to the “focus on global health” heuristic:
GiveDirectly, for example, is an economic empowerment charity. We will
also look at a much broader array of causes in chapter ten, though the
arguments for focusing on these causes rather than global health will
necessarily be more speculative.
With those caveats out of the way, let’s look at some extremely cost-
effective charities, as judged by GiveWell (accurate as of January 2015), the
leading effective altruism charity evaluator. I’ll rate each charity along four
dimensions: estimated cost-effectiveness, robustness of evidence,
implementation, and room for more funding. These ratings should be used
to compare to one another only the charities I list, because, for example,
any charity that I assess as “fairly cost-effective” in the following list would
look extremely cost-effective compared to charities not listed here. For
completeness and for purposes of comparison, I’ll include those we’ve
already read about: GiveDirectly, Development Media International,
Deworm the World Initiative, and Against Malaria Foundation.
TOP CHARITIES
GiveDirectly
What do they do? Provide direct unconditional cash transfers to poor
households in Kenya and Uganda.
Estimated cost-effectiveness? Fairly cost-effective. One dollar in donations
results in ninety cents delivered to the poorest households in Kenya and
Uganda; this leads to increases in investment, consumption, education
spending, and subjective well-being.
Robustness of evidence? Extremely robust. There have been a large number
of studies of cash transfers showing their efficacy, and GiveDirectly has
collaborated with independent evaluators to conduct a randomized
controlled trial of its own program.
Implementation? Extremely well implemented. The charity is run in part by
a leading development economist. They are very open, transparent, and
self-skeptical.
Room for more funding? Extremely large. They estimate they could
productively use an additional $20 to $30 million in 2015 and expect to
receive about $10 million in that time. The potential for GiveDirectly to
scale up beyond that in future years is very great.
Development Media International
What do they do? Produce and run radio shows to educate people in
Burkina Faso on basic health matters, with plans to cover the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast.
Estimated cost-effectiveness? Extremely cost-effective. According to
Development Media International’s interpretation of previous studies, and
their own mathematical model, their cost-effectiveness is on the order of ten
dollars per QALY.
Robustness of evidence? Fairly robust. They are collaborating with external
investigators to conduct a randomized controlled trial on their own program
but have not yet gathered final mortality data; their current data is based on
self-reporting.
Implementation? Very well implemented. Their CEO, Roy Head, has
extensive experience in running radio programs in developing countries,
and they work with leading epidemiologists to monitor their effectiveness.
They have been open, transparent, and self-skeptical.
Room for more funding? Very large. In order to scale up to four more
countries, they believe they could use about $10 million in 2015 and expect
to receive about $2 to 4 million.
Deworm the World Initiative
What do they do? Provide technical assistance to governments in Kenya and
India to help those governments run school-based deworming programs.
Estimated cost-effectiveness? Extremely cost-effective. Because they
provide assistance to governments, rather than running deworming
programs themselves, the cost to DtWI per child treated per year is
extremely low, at about three cents.
Robustness of evidence? Fairly robust. Two major randomized controlled
trials, one of which included long-term follow-up, suggest that deworming
has significant education and economic benefits. However, insofar as DtWI
provides technical assistance to governments, rather than running the
deworming programs themselves, it’s more difficult to know for certain that
these programs wouldn’t have happened were it not for DtWI’s support.
Implementation? Very good. They have been highly transparent about their
operations.
Room for more funding? Not very large. They could use an additional $2
million over both 2015 and 2016, and I expect that they will receive at least
that amount.
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative
What do they do? Provide funding for governments to run school-based and
community-based deworming programs in countries across sub-Saharan
Africa, then provide advisory support and conduct monitoring and
evaluation. (Schistosomiasis is one type of parasitic worm infection;
initially SCI focused just on schistosomiasis, hence the name, but now they
treat other parasitic worm infections, too.)
Estimated cost-effectiveness? Very cost-effective. The cost to SCI of
deworming one child is less than one dollar per year.
Robustness of evidence? Very robust. Two major randomized controlled
trials, one of which included long-term follow-up, suggest that deworming
has significant educational and economic benefits.
Implementation? Fairly good. There have been some concerns from
GiveWell regarding SCI’s transparency and communication about its
activities.
Room for more funding? Fairly large. SCI believes it could productively use
about $8 million in additional donations in 2015; however, it’s not clear
how much revenue it will receive in 2015 and it may become fully funded.
Against Malaria Foundation
What do they do? Provide funding to buy and distribute long-lasting
insecticide-treated bed nets to poor households across sub-Saharan Africa.
Estimated cost-effectiveness? Very cost-effective. It costs six dollars to
provide one bed net that covers two children for two years, for an estimated
one hundred dollars per QALY.
Robustness of evidence? Very robust. There have been multiple randomized
controlled trials and two meta-analyses supporting the efficacy of bed nets.
Implementation? Extremely good. AMF has been extremely transparent and
open in communication.
Room for more funding? Very large. AMF could productively use $20
million in 2015.
Living Goods
What do they do? Run a network of community health promoters in Uganda
who go door-to-door selling affordable health products such as treatments
for malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia; soap; menstrual pads; contraception;
solar lanterns; and high-efficiency cookstoves, and providing health-care
advice.
Estimated cost-effectiveness? Very cost-effective. According to the
estimates from the randomized controlled trial they’re running on their
project, $3,000 spent on their program would save a life and provide a
number of other benefits; GiveWell estimates their cost per life saved at
$11,000.
Robustness of evidence? Fairly robust. A high-quality study has been
conducted by independent investigators on the very program that Living
Goods is running. However, there is no evidence from multiple studies, as
there are for other programs on this list.
Implementation? Fairly good. They have been open and fairly transparent
with providing information. However, they have only limited ongoing
monitoring and evaluation.
Room for more funding? Fairly large. Living Goods’ budget will be about
$10 million per year for the next three years; it is likely to have a shortfall
of about $2 to $3 million per year.
The Iodine Global Network (IGN)
What do they do? Advocate for governments to fortify salt with iodine and
thereafter monitor progress of implemented programs and provide country-
specific guidance.
Estimated cost-effectiveness? Extremely cost-effective. Iodine deficiency is
a major cause of physical and intellectual stunting in developing countries.
Iodine fortification can alleviate these problems at a cost of pennies per
person. One estimate put the economic benefits of these programs at
twenty-seven dollars for every dollar spent.
Robustness of evidence? Fairly robust. Fortification of salt with iodine is a
well-studied program and has been shown to lead to significant
improvements to people’s lives. However, IGN does not implement the
iodine fortification programs themselves. It’s therefore crucial to determine
whether IGN is causing more people to receive iodized salt than they would
otherwise have done. This is not yet clear.
Implementation? Very good. IGN is run by leading experts on micronutrient
deficiencies and has been open and transparent.
Room for more funding? Not very large. Though their budget was only
$500,000 in 2014, GiveWell believes they could productively use $1
million in 2015; they have so far only raised $400,000 toward that goal,
giving $600,000 in room for more funding.
Here’s a table showing all of my ratings in one place.
Estimated Cost-
Effectiveness
Robustness of
Evidence
Quality of
Implementation
Size of Room for
More Funding
GiveDirectly
•• •••• •••• ••••
Development Media
International
•••• •• ••• •••
Deworm the World
Initiative
••• ••• •••
Schistosomiasis
Control Initiative
••• ••• •• ••
Against Malaria
Foundation
••• ••• •••• ••••
Living Goods
••• •• •• ••
Iodine Global Network
••• •• •••
••••-extremely (best/most) and •-not very (least)
EIGHT
THE MORAL CASE FOR SWEATSHOP
GOODS
How can consumers make the most difference?
The clothing retailer American Apparel, known for selling “fashionable
basics” like solid-color T-shirts, proudly claims to be “sweatshop-free.” On
its “about us” webpage, it says:
OUR GARMENT WORKERS ARE PAID UP TO 50 TIMES MORE
THAN THE COMPETITION
A garment worker in Bangladesh earns an average of $600 a year.
An experienced American Apparel garment worker can earn
$30,000+ and receive benefits such as comprehensive health care.
American Apparel garments are created by motivated and fairly
paid employees who don’t just have jobs—they have careers. Our
culture recognizes outstanding performance and promotes from
within. Most importantly, our workers have a voice and influence
the direction of the company. At American Apparel we call it
Sweatshop-Free, a term we coined in 2002.
The popularity of American Apparel is just one example of a trend
toward “ethical consumerism,” where people spend a little more money on
goods that are produced by workers who are treated well, thereby using
their purchasing power to, hopefully, make the world a better place.
This chapter will look at ethical consumerism through the lens of
effective altruism, trying to figure out if it’s an effective way of doing good.
I’ll talk about sweatshops, fair-trade, low-carbon living, and vegetarianism.
Ultimately, I’m going to conclude that ethical consumerism is not all it’s
cracked up to be—at least, not compared to other ways of making a
difference. Let’s start with sweatshops.
• • •
Sweatshops are factories in poor countries, typically in Asia or South
America, that produce goods like textiles, toys, or electronics for rich
countries, under pretty horrific working conditions. Workers often face
sixteen-hour days, six or seven days a week. Sometimes they’re prohibited
from taking breaks to eat or use the bathroom. Air-conditioning is rare, so
factories can be very hot. Health and safety considerations are commonly
neglected, and employers sometimes abuse their workers.
Because conditions in sweatshops are so bad, many people have
pledged to boycott goods produced in them, and a number of organizations
devoted to ending the use of sweatshop labor, such as United Students
Against Sweatshops, National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, SweatFree
Communities, and the ingeniously named No Sweat Apparel, have
proliferated in service to the cause. For this reason, there’s significant
public animosity toward big companies like Nike, Apple, and Disney that
rely on sweatshop labor to manufacture their products.
This movement has noble intentions: the people who campaign against
sweatshops are justifiably horrified that people work in such awful
conditions. However, those who protest sweatshops by refusing to buy
goods produced in them are making the mistake, which we discussed in
chapter five, of failing to consider what would happen otherwise. We
assume that if people refused to buy goods from sweatshops, these factories
would succumb to economic pressure and go out of business, in which case
their employees would find better employment elsewhere.
But that’s not true. In developing countries, sweatshop jobs are the
good jobs. The alternatives are typically worse, such as backbreaking, low-
paid farm labor, scavenging, or unemployment. The New York Times
columnist Nicholas D. Kristof illustrated this well when he presented an
interview with Pim Srey Rath, a Cambodian woman who scavenges plastic
from dumps in order to sell it as recycling. “I’d love to get a job in a
factory,” she said. “At least that work is in the shade. Here is where it’s
hot.”
A clear indicator that sweatshops provide comparatively good jobs is
the great demand for them among people in developing countries. Almost
all workers in sweatshops chose to work there, and some go to great lengths
to do so. In the early twenty-first century, nearly four million people from
Laos, Cambodia, and Burma immigrated to Thailand to take sweatshop
jobs, and many Bolivians risk deportation by illegally entering Brazil in
order to work in sweatshops there. The average earnings of a sweatshop
worker in Brazil are $2,000 per year—not very much, but six hundred
dollars a year more than the average earnings in Bolivia, where people
generally work in agriculture or mining. Similarly, the average earnings
among sweatshop workers are: $2 a day in Bangladesh, $5.50 a day in
Cambodia, $7 a day in Haiti, and $8 a day in India. These wages are tiny, of
course, but when compared to the $1.25 a day many citizens of those
countries live on, the demand for these jobs seems more understandable.
Because conditions in sweatshops are so bad, it’s difficult for us to imagine
that people would risk deportation just to work in them. But that’s because,
as we discussed in chapter one, the extremity of global poverty is almost
unimaginable.
In fact, among economists on both the left and the right, there is no
question that sweatshops benefit those in poor countries. Nobel laureate and
left-wing economist Paul Krugman has stated, “The overwhelming
mainstream view among economists is that the growth of this kind of
employment is tremendous good news for the world’s poor.” Jeffrey Sachs,
Columbia University economist and one of the foremost proponents of
increased efforts to help those in extreme poverty, has said, “My concern is
not that there are too many sweatshops but that there are too few.” The
reason there’s such widespread support among economists for sweatshops is
that low-wage, labor-intensive manufacturing is a stepping-stone that helps
an economy based around cash crops develop into an industrialized, richer
society. During the Industrial Revolution, for example, Europe and America
spent more than one hundred years using sweatshop labor, emerging with
much higher living standards as a result. It took many decades to pass
through this stage because the technology to industrialize was new, and the
twentieth century has seen countries pass through this stage of development
much more rapidly because the technology is already in place. The four
East Asian “Tiger economies”—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and
Taiwan—exemplify speedy development, having evolved from very poor,
agrarian societies in the early twentieth century to manufacturing-oriented
sweatshop countries mid-century, and finally emerging as industrialized
economic powerhouses in recent decades.
Because sweatshops are good for poor countries, if we boycott them we
make people in poor countries worse off. This isn’t just a hypothetical
argument. In 1993, the junior United States senator from Iowa Tom Harkin
brought a child labor bill to Congress. The Child Labor Deterrence Act
would have made it illegal for the United States to import goods from
countries using child labor. Bangladesh had a large number of children
employed in ready-to-wear garment sweatshops at the time. Out of fear that
this act would pass, factories quickly laid off fifty thousand child workers.
According to the US Department of Labor, rather than going to school or
even finding better jobs, “it is widely thought that most of them have found
employment in other garment factories, in smaller, unregistered,
subcontracting garment workshops, or in other sectors.” Considering that
transnational corporations typically pay much higher wages than domestic
sweatshops, the lives of these youths likely became worse. Indeed, an
investigation by UNICEF found that many of these laid-off underage
garment workers had resorted to even more desperate measures to survive,
including street hustling and prostitution.
We should certainly feel outrage and horror at the conditions sweatshop
laborers toil under. The correct response, however, is not to give up
sweatshop-produced goods in favor of domestically produced goods. The
correct response is to try to end the extreme poverty that makes sweatshops
desirable places to work in the first place.
What about buying products from companies that employ people in
poor countries (unlike American Apparel) but claim to have higher labor
standards, like People Tree, Indigenous, and Kuyichi? By doing this, we
would avoid the use of sweatshops, while at the same time providing even
better job opportunities for the extreme poor.
If we really could effectively pass on benefits to the very poor through
consumer pressure, then I would be all in favor of it. In practice, however,
I’m not so sure that “ethical consumption” works as intended. To see this,
let’s look at the most widespread attempt to give the very poor better
working conditions: fair-trade.
• • •
Fairtrade certification is an attempt to give higher pay to workers in poor
countries. It’s commonly used for consumables grown in developing
countries, such as bananas, chocolate, coffee, sugar, and tea. The Fairtrade
license is only given to producers who meet certain criteria, such as paying
their workers a minimum wage and satisfying specified safety
requirements. The Fairtrade license has two benefits. First, the producers
are guaranteed a certain minimum price for the good. For example, coffee
producers are guaranteed to receive $1.40 per pound of coffee, even if the
market rate drops below $1.40. Second, producers are paid a “social
premium” on top of the market rate. For coffee, if the market rate is above
$1.40, the producers are paid an additional twenty cents per pound. This
social premium is used to pay for democratically chosen community
programs.
Demand for fair-trade products has grown rapidly. The Fairtrade label
was launched only in 1988, and in 2014, $6.9 billion was spent on
Fairtrade-certified products worldwide. The fact that so many people are
willing to pay more to ensure that farmers in other countries are paid a fair
wage is heartening. But if we’re thinking about buying fair-trade ourselves,
we need to ask how much we’re actually benefitting people in poor
countries by shelling out a few extra dollars for fair-trade versus regular
coffee. The evidence suggests that the answer is “disappointingly little.”
This is for three reasons.
First, when you buy fair-trade, you usually aren’t giving money to the
poorest people in the world. Fairtrade standards are difficult to meet, which
means that those in the poorest countries typically can’t afford to get
Fairtrade certification. For example, the majority of fair-trade coffee
production comes from comparatively rich countries like Mexico and Costa
Rica, which are ten times richer than the very poorest countries like
Ethiopia. In chapter one we saw how fast money diminishes in value and
how extreme global inequality is. That means that even if buying fair-trade
was a good way of paying farmers more, you might make a bigger
difference by buying non-fair-trade goods that are produced in the poorest
countries rather than fair-trade goods that are produced in richer countries.
Because Costa Rica is ten times richer than Ethiopia, one dollar is worth
more to the average Ethiopian than several dollars is to the average Costa
Rican.
Second, of the additional money that is spent on fair-trade, only a very
small portion ends up in the hands of the farmers who earn that money.
Middlemen take the rest. The Fairtrade Foundation does not provide figures
on how much of the additional price reaches coffee produces, but
independent researchers have provided some estimates. Dr. Peter Griffiths,
an economic consultant for the World Bank, worked out that for one British
café chain, less than 1 percent of the additional price of their fair-trade
coffee reached coffee exporters in poor countries. Finnish professors Joni
Valkila, Pertti Haparanda, and Niina Niemi found out that, of fair-trade
coffee sold in Finland, only 11 percent of the additional price reached the
coffee-producing countries. Professor Bernard Kilian and colleagues from
INCAE Business School found that, in the United States, while fair-trade
coffee would sell for five dollars per pound more than conventional coffee,
coffee producers would receive only forty cents per pound, or 8 percent of
that increased price. In contrast, remember that, if you donate one dollar to
GiveDirectly, ninety cents ultimately reaches the poor.
Finally, even the small fraction that ultimately reaches the producers
does not necessarily translate into higher wages. It guarantees a higher price
for goods from Fairtrade-certified organizations, but that higher price
doesn’t guarantee a higher price for the farmers who work for those
organizations. Professor Christopher Cramer at the University of London
School of Oriental and African Studies led a team of researchers who
conducted a four-year study on earnings of Fairtrade workers in Ethiopia
and Uganda. They found that those Fairtrade workers had systematically
lower wages and worse working conditions than comparable non-Fairtrade
workers, and that the poorest often had no access to the “community
projects” that Fairtrade touted as major successes. Professor Cramer
commented that “the British public has been led to believe that by paying
extra for Fairtrade-certified coffee, tea, and flowers they will ‘make a
difference’ to the lives of poor Africans. Careful fieldwork and analysis in
this four-year project leads to the conclusion that in our research sites
Fairtrade has not been an effective mechanism for improving the lives of
wage workers, the poorest rural people.”
Independent reviews of studies have found much the same thing.
Though the evidence is limited (which is itself worrying), the consistent
finding among the studies that have been performed is that Fairtrade
certification does not improve the lives of agricultural workers. Even a
review commissioned by the Fairtrade Foundation itself concluded that
“there is limited evidence of the impact on workers of participation in
Fairtrade.”
Given this, there is little reason to buy Fairtrade products. In buying
Fairtrade products, you’re at best giving very small amounts of money to
people in comparatively well-off countries. You’d do considerably more
good by buying cheaper goods and donating the money you save to one of
the cost-effective charities mentioned in the previous chapter.
• • •
Another major area of ethical consumerism is “green living.” On a per-
person basis, US citizens emit more greenhouse gasses than any other large
country, with the average American adult every year producing twenty-one
metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. (Remember that carbon dioxide
equivalent, or CO
2eq
, is a way of measuring your carbon footprint that
includes greenhouse gasses other than carbon dioxide, like methane and
nitrous oxide.) As we’ve seen, climate change is a big deal. It’s therefore
natural to want to do something about it, and the obvious way is to move to
a lower-carbon lifestyle.
Sadly, many popular ways of reducing your greenhouse gas emissions
are rather ineffective. One common recommendation is to turn off or shut
down electronic devices when you’re not using them, rather than keeping
them on standby. However, this achieves very little compared to other
things you could do: one hot bath adds more to your carbon footprint than
leaving your phone charger plugged in for a whole year; even leaving on
your TV (one of the worst offenders in terms of standby energy use) for a
whole year contributes less to your carbon footprint than driving a car for
just two hours. Another common recommendation is to turn off lights when
you leave a room, but lighting accounts for only 3 percent of household
energy use, so even if you never used lighting in your house, you would
save only a fraction of a metric ton of carbon emissions. Plastic bags have
also been a major focus of concern, but even on very generous estimates, if
you stopped using plastic bags entirely, you’d cut out one hundred
kilograms CO
2
equivalent per year, which is only 0.4 percent of your total
emissions. Similarly, the focus on buying locally produced goods is
overhyped: only 10 percent of the carbon footprint of food comes from
transportation, whereas 80 percent comes from production, so what type of
food you buy is much more important than whether that food is produced
locally or internationally. Cutting out red meat and dairy for one day a week
achieves a greater reduction in your carbon footprint than buying entirely
locally based food. In fact, exactly the same food can sometimes have a
higher carbon footprint if it’s locally grown than if it’s imported: one study
found that the carbon footprint from locally grown tomatoes in northern
Europe was five times as great as the carbon footprint from tomatoes grown
in Spain, because the emissions generated by heating and lighting
greenhouses dwarfed the emissions generated by transportation.
The most effective ways to cut down your emissions are to reduce your
intake of meat (especially beef, which can cut out about a metric ton of
CO
2eq
per year), to reduce the amount you travel (driving half as much
would cut out two metric tons of CO
2eq
per year and one fewer round-trip
flight from London to New York would eliminate a metric ton of CO
2eq
),
and to use less electricity and gas in the home (especially by installing loft
insulation, which would save a metric ton of CO
2eq
for a detached house).
However, there is an even more effective way to reduce your emissions.
It’s called offsetting: rather than reducing your own greenhouse gas
emissions, you pay for projects that reduce or avoid greenhouse gas
emissions elsewhere.
Environmentalists often criticize carbon offsetting. Here’s the British
journalist George Monbiot:
While the carbon we release by flying or driving is certain and
verifiable, the carbon absorbed by offset projects is less attestable.
Many will succeed, and continue to function over the necessary
period. Others will fail, especially the disastrous forays into tree
planting that some companies have made. To claim a carbon
saving, you also need to demonstrate that these projects would not
have happened without you—that Mexico would not have decided
to capture the methane from its pig farms, or that people in India
would not have bought new stoves of their own accord. In other
words, you must look into a counterfactual future. I have yet to
meet someone from a carbon offset company who possesses
supernatural powers.
At the offices of Travelcare and the forecourts owned by BP,
you can now buy complacency, political apathy, and self-
satisfaction. But you cannot buy the survival of the planet.
Monbiot makes his point somewhat melodramatically, but his concern
is reasonable. For many offsetting programs offered by companies, you
might feel unsure about how effective they really are. For example, many
airline companies give you the option when you purchase a flight to pay an
extra fee to offset your contribution to the greenhouse gasses emitted during
that flight. If you do this, you have to trust the airline to successfully offset
those emissions. But you might worry that the airline won’t do so
effectively: perhaps they pay for a project that was going to happen anyway,
or perhaps they overestimate the greenhouse gas reduction from the projects
they undertake. If so, then the fee you pay to offset your emissions doesn’t
actually offset all of your emissions; it only offsets some of them.
However, Monbiot’s concern doesn’t provide a good argument against
carbon offsetting in general. It just shows we’ve got to do some research in
order to find a way of offsetting that’s genuinely effective. That’s what we
did at my organization Giving What We Can. We considered more than one
hundred organizations that claim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with
donations and tried to figure out which ones most cost-effectively prevent
the release of one metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent. The charity we
ultimately decided was best is called Cool Earth.
Cool Earth was founded in 2007 in the United Kingdom by
businessman Johan Eliasch and MP Frank Field, who were concerned with
protecting the rain forest and the impact that deforestation might have on
the environment. The charity aims to fight global warming by preventing
deforestation, primarily in the Amazon. They use donated money to help
develop rain-forest communities economically to a point where they do
better by not selling their land to loggers. Cool Earth does not buy rain
forest directly; instead, it provides economic assistance to local
communities, helping the people who inhabit the rain forests establish more
profitable ventures than selling trees. This involves working to secure
property rights, improving community infrastructure, and connecting the
inhabitants of the forests with markets where they can sell their produce at
good prices, among other things. The work Cool Earth does therefore
incidentally improves the lives of those living in the rain forest while
working to prevent climate change.
Given this apparently indirect route (via something that looks more like
development aid) you might wonder if this can really be an effective way of
protecting forests. But if a community already wants to preserve the forest
but can’t afford not to sell it, helping that community find an alternative
strategy seems like a promising way to make a big difference for
comparatively low cost. The evidence suggests that Cool Earth’s program
has been effective, with far less deforestation in Cool Earth areas than the
surroundings. Moreover, those at Cool Earth think strategically about which
regions to provide assistance to. By protecting key areas of rain forest, they
can create a “wall” of forest that blocks off a much wider landscape from
illegal logging.
Cool Earth claims it costs them about a hundred dollars to prevent an
acre of rain forest from being cut down, and that each acre locks in 260
metric tons of CO
2
. This would mean that it costs just about thirty-eight
cents to prevent one metric ton of CO
2
from being emitted.
When we assessed Cool Earth, however, we wanted to try to remain
conservative, so we created our own estimates rather than relying on their
figures. After looking at their track record, we estimated it cost Cool Earth
less than $154 to protect one acre of rain forest, which protected a further
four acres by walling off other areas of forest. Thirty percent of similar
areas of rain forest that were not protected by Cool Earth had been logged,
suggesting that they were protecting an acre of rain forest for $103.
However, we realized that, to some extent, it might be that by protecting a
given area of rain forest, Cool Earth simply causes loggers to cut down a
different area of rain forest. We took this consideration into account using
economic data and estimated that every acre protected by Cool Earth would
prevent 0.5 acres from being felled, giving a cost of $206 per acre
protected.
The estimate of 260 metric tons of CO
2
per acre is already low, insofar
as it doesn’t take into account the carbon dioxide stored in the soil and
doesn’t take into account greenhouse gas emissions other than CO
2
. But
there is a risk that the forest will still be logged in the future, and for this
reason we scaled down their estimate to 153 metric tons of CO
2
per acre.
Bringing these numbers together ($206 to prevent 153 metric tons of
CO
2
) gives our best-guess estimate at $1.34 per metric ton. Even after
trying to be conservative in our calculations, this number may still be too
optimistic. So, to play extra safe, we could assume a 300 percent margin of
error and use a figure of five dollars per metric ton of CO
2
emissions
prevented.
Using this figure, the average American adult would have to spend
$105 per year in order to offset all their carbon emissions. This is
significant, but to most people it’s considerably less than it would cost to
make large changes in lifestyle, such as not flying. This suggests that the
easiest and most effective way to cut down your carbon footprint is simply
to donate to Cool Earth.
People sometimes make other objections to carbon offsetting, but
they’re not very compelling. For example, in the article I quoted earlier,
George Monbiot claimed that carbon offsetting is a way of “selling
indulgences,” in reference to the medieval practice in which Christians
would pay the Church in exchange for forgiveness for their sins. On a
similar theme, a satirical website, CheatNeutral.com, offers the following
service: “When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain,
and jealousy in the atmosphere. CheatNeutral offsets your cheating by
funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralizes the
pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.”
However, in both cases the analogies are flawed. In buying
indulgences, you don’t “undo” the harm you’ve caused others or the sins
you’ve done. In contrast, through effective carbon offsetting, you’re
preventing anyone from being harmed by your emissions in the first place:
if you emit carbon dioxide throughout your life but effectively offset it at
the same time, overall your life contributes nothing to climate change.
Similarly, “offsetting” your adultery (even if you genuinely could) would
still affect who is harmed, even if it keeps the total number of adulterous
acts constant. In contrast, carbon offsetting prevents anyone from ever
being harmed by your emissions; it’s the “equivalent” of never committing
adultery in the first place.
• • •
Another area where people try to change their purchasing habits in order to
make a difference is meat eating and vegetarianism. As I mentioned earlier,
cutting out meat (especially beef) is one effective way to reduce your
carbon emissions. However, we’ve also seen that by donating to Cool Earth
you can offset one metric ton of carbon emissions for about five dollars. If
you’d rather pay five dollars than go vegetarian, then the environmental
argument for vegetarianism is rather weak.
The animal welfare argument for vegetarianism is comparatively
stronger. The vast majority of farmed animals are raised in factory farms,
which inflict severe and unnecessary suffering on those animals merely for
the sake of slightly cheaper produce. The living conditions of factory farm
animals have been extensively documented in books, magazines, and
documentaries, so I will spare you the grim details here. I personally
believe it’s important to treat animals humanely, and for that reason I’ve
been a vegetarian for many years.
However, the animal welfare argument is much stronger for some
animals than for others, because some sorts of animal produce involve a lot
more suffering on the part of the animals than others. In fact, eliminating
chicken and eggs removes the large majority of animal suffering from your
diet. This is because of the conditions those animals are kept in, and the
number of animals needed to provide a given number of calories.
Of all the animals raised for food, broiler chickens, layer hens, and pigs
are kept in the worst conditions by a considerable margin. The only
quantitative estimates of farmed animal welfare I’ve been able to find come
from Bailey Norwood, an economist and agricultural expert. He rated the
welfare of different animals on a scale of –10 to 10, where negative
numbers indicate that it would be better, from the animal’s perspective, to
be dead rather than alive. He rates beef cattle at 6 and dairy cows at 4. In
contrast his average rating for broiler chickens is –1, and for pigs and caged
hens is –5. In other words, cows raised for food live better lives than
chicken, hens, or pigs, which suffer terribly.
The second consideration is the number of animals it takes to make a
meal. In a year, the average American will consume the following: 28.5
broiler chickens, 0.8 layer hens, 0.8 turkeys, 0.37 pigs, 0.1 beef cows, and
0.007 dairy cows. These numbers might suggest that cutting out chicken has
a far bigger impact than any other dietary change. However, most broiler
chickens only live for six weeks, so insofar as we care about how long the
animal spends in unpleasant conditions on factory farms, it’s more
appropriate to think about animal years rather than animal lives. In a year,
the number of animal years that go into the average American’s diet are as
follows: 3.3 from broiler chickens (28.5 chickens consumed, each of which
lives 6 weeks = 3.3 animal years), 1 from layer hens, 0.3 from turkeys, 0.2
from pigs, 0.1 from beef cows, and 0.03 from dairy cows.
Combining these two considerations, we arrive at the conclusion that
the most effective way to cut animal suffering out of your diet is to stop
eating chicken, then eggs, then pork: by doing so, you’re taking out the
worst suffering for the most animals for the longest time.
This may have implications for animal-welfare advocates, who often
tout vegetarianism’s environmental benefits (which we’ve already
discussed) and health benefits, pointing to research that those who don’t eat
meat are at reduced risk for cardiovascular diseases. These advocates often
argue for eliminating beef from your diet, since raising cattle produces a lot
of CO
2eq
emissions and red meat is linked to health problems such as heart
disease. However, if people hear the environmental or health arguments and
then decrease their beef consumption but compensate even a little bit by
eating more chicken, those animal-welfare advocates may have caused
more animal suffering than they eliminated.
Earlier, I suggested that offsetting might be an easier and more effective
way of reducing your carbon footprint than making large lifestyle changes.
Could you apply the same argument here? Rather than personally cutting
out meat, couldn’t people “offset” their meat consumption by donating to an
animal-advocacy charity, thereby causing some other person to become
vegetarian who wouldn’t otherwise have done so? I don’t think so. There’s
a crucial difference between greenhouse gas emissions and meat
consumption: if you offset your greenhouse gas emissions, then you prevent
anyone from ever being harmed by your emissions. In contrast, if you offset
your meat consumption, you change which animals are harmed through
factory farming. That makes eating meat and offsetting it less like offsetting
greenhouse gas emissions and more like committing adultery and offsetting
it, which we all agree it would be immoral to do.
If you care about animal suffering, you should certainly alter your diet,
either by cutting out the most harmful products (at least eggs, chicken, and
pork), or by becoming vegetarian or vegan. However, there’s no reason to
stop there. In terms of making a difference to the lives of animals, the
impact you can have through your donations seems even greater than the
impact you can have by changing your own behavior. According to Animal
Charity Evaluators (a research charity I helped to set up), by donating to
charities like Mercy For Animals or the Humane League, which distribute
leaflets on vegetarianism, it costs about one hundred dollars to convince
one person to stop eating meat for one year. If you can donate more than
that to animal advocacy charities per year, then your decision about how
much to donate to animal advocacy is even more important, in terms of
impact, than the decision about whether to become vegetarian yourself.
• • •
We’ve seen that, in general, changing your consumption habits is not a very
effective way to make a difference compared to the alternatives (though,
we’ve also seen how the law of expected value demonstrates that it’s still a
good idea to change your behavior in certain cases). Whether our concern is
the global poor, climate change, or animal welfare, we’ve seen that the
decision about how much and where to donate is much greater, in terms of
impact, than the decision about what products to buy.
On reflection, we should expect it to be this way. By donating, you can
ensure that your money is spent only on the most effective activities. Given
the difference between the best activities and merely very good activities,
this is a big deal. In contrast, spending more in order to buy more “ethical”
produce is not a very targeted way of doing good.
Things may even be worse than that, however. There’s some reason to
think that the rise in ethical consumerism could even be harmful for the
world, on balance. Psychologists have discovered a phenomenon that they
call moral licensing, which describes how people who perform one good
action often compensate by doing fewer good actions in the future.
For example, in a recent experiment, participants were told to choose a
product from either a selection of mostly “green” items (like an energy-
efficient lightbulb) or from a selection of mostly conventional items (like a
regular lightbulb). They were then told to perform a supposedly unrelated
visual perception task: a square box with a diagonal line across it was
displayed on a computer screen, and a pattern of twenty dots would flash up
on the screen; the subjects had to press a key to indicate whether there were
more dots on the left or right side of the line. It was always obvious which
was the correct answer, and the experimenters emphasized the importance
of being as accurate as possible, telling the subjects that the results of the
test would be used in designing future experiments. However, the subjects
were told that, whether or not their answers were correct, they’d be paid
five cents every time they indicated there were more dots on the left-hand
side of the line and five cents every time they indicated there were more
dots on the right-hand side. They therefore had a financial incentive to lie,
and they were alone, so they knew they wouldn’t be caught if they did so.
Moreover, they were invited to pay themselves out of an envelope, so they
had an opportunity to steal as well.
What happened? People who had previously purchased a “green”
product were significantly more likely to both lie and steal than those who
had purchased the conventional product. Their demonstration of ethical
behavior subconsciously gave them license to act unethically when the
chance arose.
Amazingly, even just saying you’d do something good can cause the
moral licensing effect. In another study, half the participants were asked to
imagine helping a foreign student who had asked for assistance in
understanding a lecture. They subsequently gave significantly less to
charity when given the chance to do so than the other half of the
participants, who had not been asked to imagine helping another student.
Moral licensing shows that people are often more concerned about
looking good or feeling good rather than actually doing good. If you “do
your bit” by buying an energy-efficient lightbulb, your status as a good
human being is less likely to be called into question if you subsequently
steal a small amount of money.
Often, the moral licensing effect isn’t that decision-relevant. If we’re
encouraging people to engage in effective actions to make the world a better
place, it’s not that big a deal if that means they compensate, to some extent,
by doing less of other altruistic activities. If we encourage people to do a
small action but frame the request as the first step toward a larger
commitment, then the moral licensing effect may not occur. Where it
becomes crucial, however, is when people are encouraged to do fairly
ineffective acts of altruism and, as a result, are less likely to perform
effective ones later. If, for example, encouraging someone to buy fair-trade
causes that person to devote less time or money to other, more effective
activities, then promoting fair-trade might on balance be harmful.
• • •
In this chapter, we’ve seen that the benefits of ethical consumerism are
often small compared to the good that well-targeted donations can do. In the
next chapter, we’ll look at an area where you really can make an
astonishing difference: your career.
NINE
DON’T “FOLLOW YOUR PASSION”
Which careers make the most difference?
As Peter Hurford entered his final year at Denison University, he needed to
figure out what he was going to do with his life. He was twenty-two,
majoring in political science and psychology, and he knew he wanted a
career that would both be personally satisfying and would make a big
difference. Graduate school was the obvious choice for someone with his
interests, but he didn’t know what his other options were, or how to choose
among them.
How should young people like Peter who want to make a difference in
their careers go about their decisions? What if you’re later in your career
but are considering changing jobs so you can have a bigger impact? In
chapter five, we saw that earning to give is one powerful way to make a
difference, but it’s certainly not the only way. There are a dizzying number
of career paths, each with their positives and negatives. At the same time,
the decision is high-stakes. Your choice of career is a choice about how to
spend more than eighty thousand hours over the course of your life, which
means it makes sense to invest a considerable amount of time in the
decision. If you were to spend just 1 percent of your working time thinking
about how to spend the other 99 percent, that would mean you’d spend
eight hundred hours, or twenty working weeks, on your career decision. I
doubt many people spend this much time thinking about their careers, but it
might be worth it.
Over the last few years at 80,000 Hours, we’ve coached hundreds of
people like Peter, as well as people later in their careers, most of whom find
the following framework useful in figuring out what their next career steps
should be. There are many considerations relevant to choosing the right
career for you, and this framework ensures that you give due weight to
what’s most important. You should ask yourself:
How do I personally fit with this job? How satisfied will I be in
this job? Am I excited by the job? Do I think I could stick with it
for a significant period of time? How good am I, or could I
become, at this type of work, compared to other people and
compared to other careers I might choose?
What’s my impact while I’m working at this job? How many
resources can I influence, whether that’s the labor I provide, the
people or budget I manage, the money I earn, or a public platform
I have access to? How effective are the causes to which I can
direct those resources?
How does this job contribute to my impact later on in life? How
well does this job build my skills, connections, and credentials?
How well does this job keep my options open? How much will I
learn in the course of this job about what I might want to do next?
Let’s discuss each of these three key factors in turn.
Personal fit
Personal fit is about how good you’ll be in a particular job. An important
part of this is whether you’ll be happy doing the work. People often want
job satisfaction as an end in itself, but it’s also a crucial factor when
thinking about impact: if you’re not happy at work, you’ll be less
productive and more likely to burn out, resulting in less impact in the long-
term. However, we need to be careful when thinking about how to find a
job you’ll love. There’s a lot of feel-good misinformation out there, and the
real route to job satisfaction is somewhat counterintuitive.
On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs stood in front of the graduating class at
Stanford and gave them his advice on what they should do with their lives:
You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma,
whatever—because believing that the dots will connect down the
road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when
it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the
difference.
You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work
as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of
your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you
believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love
what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t
settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find
it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the
years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.
Jobs’s message is emotionally resonant and appealing, and career
advice is commonly built around slogans like “follow your heart” or
“follow your passion.” The first paragraph of the advice book Career Ahead
ends, “You owe it to yourself to do work that you love. This book will show
you how.” A popular YouTube video, What If Money Was No Object?
narrated by British writer Alan Watts, advises similarly. It suggests that,
unless you ask yourself, “What makes you itch?” and pursue the answer,
you will “spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing
things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing
things you don’t like doing, which is stupid.” At its most extreme, the talk
around career choice sounds similar to the talk around romance: when you
find your perfect fit, you’ll just know.
Taken literally, however, the idea of following your passion is terrible
advice. Finding a career that’s the right “fit” for you is crucial to finding a
career, but believing you must find some preordained “passion” and then
pursue jobs that match it is all wrong. Ask yourself, is following your
passion a good way to achieve personal satisfaction in the job you love?
Should you pick a career by identifying your greatest interest, finding jobs
that “match” that interest and pursuing them no matter what? On the basis
of the evidence, the answer seems to be no.
First, and most simply, most people don’t have passions that fit the
world of work. In one study of Canadian college students, it was found that
84 percent of students had passions, and 90 percent of these involved
sports, music, and art. But by looking at census data, we can see that only 3
percent of jobs are in the sports, music, and art industries. Even if only half
the students followed their passion, the majority would fail to secure a job.
In these cases, “doing what you’re passionate about” can be actively
harmful.
Indeed, often the fact that you’re passionate about something is a good
reason why it will be difficult to find a job in that area, since you have to
compete with all the other people who are passionate about the same thing.
This is the situation in sports and music, where only extremely talented (or
lucky) people can make a steady living. In the United States, fewer than one
in one thousand high school athletes will make it into professional sports.
For the large majority of people who don’t have work-related passions, the
advice to “follow your passion” might merely prompt anxious soul-
searching and send them into the wrong careers.
Second, your interests change. Psychologists Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel
T. Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson have shown that they change much more
than we anticipate, so we overrate their importance. Just think about what
you were most interested in ten years ago. Chances are, it’s completely
different from what you’re interested in today. If you focus only on what
you’re currently passionate about, then you risk committing to projects that
you soon find you’re no longer interested in.
This takes us to our third point against passion, which is that the best
predictors of job satisfaction are features of the job itself, rather than facts
about personal passion. Instead of trying to figure out which career to
pursue based on whatever you happen to be most interested in today, you
should start by looking for work with certain important features. If you find
that, passion will follow.
Research shows that the most consistent predictor of job satisfaction is
engaging work, which can be broken down into five factors (this is known
in psychology as the job characteristics theory):
1. Independence—To what extent do you have control over
how you go about your work?
2. Sense of completion—To what extent does the job involve
completing a whole piece of work so that your contribution to
the end product is easily visible, rather than being merely a
small part of a much larger product?
3. Variety—To what extent does the job require you to perform
a range of different activities, using different skills and
talents?
4. Feedback from the job—How easy is it to know whether
you’re performing well or badly?
5. Contribution—To what extent does your work “make a
difference,” as defined by positive contributions to the well-
being of other people?
As well as job satisfaction, each of these factors also correlates with
motivation, productivity, and commitment to your employer. Moreover,
these factors are similar to those required to develop flow, the pleasurable
state of being so immersed in an activity that you’re completely free of
distractions and lose track of time, which some psychologists have argued is
the key to having genuinely satisfying experiences.
There are other factors that also matter to your job satisfaction, such as
whether you get a sense of achievement from the work, how much support
you get from your colleagues, and “hygiene” factors, such as not having
unfair pay or a very long commute. But again, these factors have little to do
with whether the work involves one of your “passions”—you find them in
many different jobs.
The evidence therefore suggests that following your passion is a poor
way to determine whether a given career path will make you happy. Rather,
passion grows out of work that has the right features. This was even true of
Steve Jobs. When he was young, he was passionate about Zen Buddhism.
He traveled in India, took plenty of LSD, shaved his head, wore robes, and
seriously considered moving to Japan to become a monk. He first got into
electronics only reluctantly, as a way to earn cash on the side, helping his
tech-savvy friend Steve Wozniak handle business deals while also spending
time at the All-One Farm. Even Apple Computers very existence was
fortuitous: while Jobs and Wozniak were trying to sell circuit boards to
hobbyists, the owner of one local computer store said he would buy fully
assembled computers, and they jumped at the chance to make more money.
It was only once they started to gain traction and success that Jobs’s passion
for Apple and computing really bloomed.
What about following your heart, your gut, or your itch to find work
you love? The evidence suggests that won’t work, either, since we’re bad at
predicting what will make us happy.
The way we predict how some event will affect us emotionally is by
running a simulation in our heads: when I imagine feeling anxious while
taking an exam, I’m imagining taking an exam, which makes me feel
anxious. This anxiety is an indicator of the feeling I expect to have when I
actually take the exam. From a psychological perspective, this ability to
simulate the effects of an as-yet-unexperienced event is a remarkably
powerful skill, one that humans possess to a degree far beyond other
animals. But the simulations we run bias us in a number of predictable
ways. For example, our tastes and preferences change considerably over
time, in ways we don’t accurately predict. You might plan your life
believing you’ll never want to have kids, but then find when you’re thirty
that your preferences change dramatically.
Our simulation-based predictions of the future are also often
incomplete. Simulating future events is hard to do, and we can’t possibly
focus on every minute aspect of the event, so our brains just include the
most important details. However, this means we may miss out on some
nonessential features that would make a big difference to our emotional
responses. For example, it’s been found that professors on average end up
much less happy after getting tenure than they predicted they would be
prior to getting tenure. One possible explanation for this is that they focused
too much on the positive features of getting tenure—the sense of
achievement and recognition—at the neglect of others, such as an increased
number of dull departmental meetings. When deciding which career to
pursue, therefore, we are likely to focus our attention on factors that come
to mind easily, such as salary and working hours. This might lead us to
ignore other factors that are actually crucial to predicting happiness. Simply
“following your heart” without paying attention to what really predicts job
satisfaction can easily lead you astray.
For all these reasons, 80,000 Hours prefers to talk about “personal fit”
rather than “following your heart” or “following your passion.” How can
you work out where you have the best personal fit? As we’ve just seen, it’s
difficult to predict where you’ll be most satisfied and where you’ll perform
the best just by thinking about it. Indeed, it’s hard for anyone to know
which job you’ll be best at. Even corporate recruiters regularly make
mistakes, and they have huge amounts of resources at their disposal to find
the people who fit best.
This means it’s best to take an empirical approach, trying out different
types of work and using your track record to predict how well you’ll
perform in the future. At the start of your career, be open-minded about
where you’ll eventually be able to perform best.
Beyond track record, if you want to predict how well you’ll perform,
the first step is to learn as much about the work as you can. Go and speak to
people in the job. Ask what traits they think are most important to success,
and see how you measure up. Ask about the main reasons people end up
leaving the job. Find out how people who are similar to you have performed
in the past. Look at whether you think you’d find the work satisfying based
on the factors mentioned earlier. The “follow your passion” slogan assumes
it’s as easy as looking inward to figure out what you ought to be doing. In
contrast, identifying a job with what we call good “personal fit” involves
finding out as much about a job as you can, because it’s features of the job
itself that are much more important in determining how well you succeed
and enjoy your work than whether that job corresponds with your
preexisting passions.
These considerations affected Peter Hurford’s decision. While at
college, he was most interested in political science and had enjoyed
completing several research projects with a professor there. He had always
presumed he’d go to grad school to study political science. However, after
reading our research on personal fit, he widened his search considerably.
Instead of trying to figure out what career path fitted his current passions
best, he drew up a list of fifteen possible options across a range of areas and
thought about each of them in turn, spoke to people who knew about them,
and thought about which he might perform best in based on his skills and
experience to date. He was able to rule out some of his options after just a
little bit of investigation: consulting would involve a lot of travel, which
he’d hate; medicine would require a lot of retraining, which didn’t seem
worth it. In the end, he was able to narrow his options down to five
plausible candidates. Graduate school stayed on the list but was joined by
options he hadn’t thought as much about previously: law school, nonprofit
work, computer programming, and market research.
He thought he would fit well within any of these five categories, so he
tried to decide primarily on the basis of his long-run potential for impact.
This takes us to the next two aspects of the career effectiveness framework.
Impact on the job
The second issue in our framework is how much impact you’ll have within
the job. Typical advice on making a difference through your career
emphasizes this factor heavily. The most obvious way to do this is to work
in the social sector: social-impact-focused-careers websites list job
opportunities at charities, or in corporate social responsibility. However,
like “following your passion,” this advice can be misleading.
First, to make a difference in the social sector, the organization you
work for must be effective. If your charity job was at PlayPumps
International, then, no matter how enthusiastically or efficiently you
worked, you’d have made very little positive impact. It’s difficult to assess
how effective an organization is, but the frameworks given in the chapters
on effective charities and effective causes can help you, as can the key
questions described in the first part of this book.
Second, you need to provide substantial value over the person who the
charity would have hired instead. If you offer unusual skills or are
particularly good at that job compared to others who would have worked
there, then you can offer significant additional value. If these conditions
don’t hold and you don’t add more value than whoever would have been in
your place, your impact might be small. In the most extreme case, if you are
simply very good at interviewing and not that great an employee, you could
even cause harm by displacing someone better who would have been in
your shoes.
Third, there are many other ways of making a difference. Earlier, we
saw the arguments in favor of earning to give, and helping others through
your donations rather than through your direct labor. As we’ll discuss later
in this chapter, there are also very compelling ways of making a difference
that aren’t in the social sector, such as entrepreneurship, research,
journalism, or politics.
In general, we recommend people think of three primary routes by
which they can have impact on the job. The first is through the labor you
provide. This can be the work you do if you are employed by an effective
organization, or the research you do if you are a researcher. The second is
the money you can give. The third is the influence you can have on other
people. In order to work out the total impact you can have, you should look
at all three of these; whereas advice that solely focuses on the charity sector
only looks at the first.
Next, you need to assess how effective the causes or organizations to
which you can direct these resources are. The more effective the cause or
organization, the more good those resources will do. For your labor, that’s
the effectiveness of the organization you work for. For your donations,
that’s the effectiveness of the organization you donate to. What you’re able
to influence depends heavily on your situation: you might be able to
influence the expenditure of the charity you work for, you might be able to
influence the donations of your coworkers, or you might be able to
influence the general public through a public platform. In each case, the
more effective the causes you’re able to support, the more impact you’ll
have.
The fourth and most important reason why “work in the social sector”
might be bad advice is that if you’re just starting out, it’s much more
important to build skills and credentials than it is to have an impact on the
job. There are a few reasons for this. First, there are many ways of boosting
your potential for influence later that have high return on investment, such
as getting an advanced degree or an MBA, learning to program, or building
your network. Whereas your first position might last a few years, your
subsequent career will last decades. Spending a few years building your
abilities now, therefore, can pay off with increased impact over a much
longer period. In addition, the most senior people within a field generally
have a disproportionate amount of influence and impact within that field.
Maximizing your chances of getting into more senior and influential
positions is therefore a key part of maximizing your impact.
For these reasons, especially when starting out, you should focus on
building up skills, network, and credentials, rather than trying to have an
impact right away. This is how many of the most effective charities we’ve
discussed have been founded. GiveDirectly, Schistosomiasis Control
Initiative, Deworm the World Initiative, and Development Media
International were all founded by academics who discovered innovative
new ways to help the poor. Rob Mather, who founded Against Malaria
Foundation, had spent many years building skills in strategy consulting
before moving into the charity sector. This meant he had a good grasp of
how to run an organization well, and that, once he came to set up AMF, he
didn’t need to take a salary.
Building career capital can be important later in your career as well if
you’re not sure which causes to support. Instead of trying to make an
immediate impact, you can invest in yourself while continuing to learn
about which causes are most important, preparing yourself to make a bigger
difference in the future.
With these considerations in mind, Peter Hurford didn’t place too much
weight on the immediate impact he could have in the job he worked for. If
he looked at immediate impact only, earning to give and nonprofit work
were his best options, with graduate school and law school following.
However, these options differed significantly in terms of the impact they’d
enable him to have later on in his life, and that was more important to him.
This takes us to the final section of the framework.
Impact later in life
There are a number of ways in which a given job can help you have a larger
impact later on in life. Through your initial work, you develop “career
capital”—skills, a network, and credentials—which will help you take a
higher-impact job later on. If you develop organizational skills, then all
other things being equal, you will be more effective in your next job. If you
get to know a large number of people through your work, you are more
likely to be connected with job opportunities. If you work at a high-prestige
firm like Google or McKinsey & Company, that line on your résumé will
make you more attractive to future potential employers.
In addition to career capital, there are two other ways in which your
initial job will affect the impact you have later on in your career. First is
how well it keeps your options open. It’s easier, for example, to transition
from the for-profit sector to the nonprofit sector than vice versa. Similarly,
it’s easier to transition from academia into industry than it is the other way
around; for people who are highly uncertain about whether they want to
leave academia after their PhD, this asymmetry provides a reason for
staying in academia until they have better information. Keeping your
options open also provides a reason for building transferable skills—such as
sales and marketing, leadership, project management, business knowledge,
social skills, personal initiative, and work ethic—rather than highly specific
skills, like piano tuning or knowledge of the shipping industry.
Second, there is “exploration value”: How much do you learn about
what careers you should choose in the future in the course of doing the job?
Especially when you’re just starting out, you won’t know much about what
opportunities are out there and which will fit you best. Your first few jobs
will give you valuable information that will inform your later decisions.
This can provide a reason in favor of trying things that are less well-known
to you at first. Perhaps, after college, you have a good understanding of
what pursuing a masters and a PhD would involve, but you have very little
understanding of the for-profit world, both in terms of how much you’d
enjoy it and in terms of how well you’d fit there. Exploration value
provides a reason in favor of working in the for-profit sector for a year or
two: you might discover that the opportunities there suit you well.
People embarking on their careers often neglect these considerations.
People often tend to think of choosing a career as an all-or-nothing
proposition: a one-off life decision that you make at age twenty-one and
that you can’t change later. A way to combat this mistake is to think of
career decisions like an entrepreneur would think about starting a company.
In both career choice and entrepreneurship, you start out with a tiny amount
of relevant information, but you have to use that information to cope with a
huge number of variables. Moreover, as things progress, these variables
shift: you’re constantly gaining new information; and new, often entirely
unexpected, opportunities and problems arise. Because of this, armchair
reasoning about what will and won’t happen isn’t very useful.
In the case of entrepreneurship, Eric Ries has argued forcefully for this
idea and created the popular Lean Startup movement. The idea behind the
Lean Startup is that many entrepreneurs make the mistake of getting excited
about some product or idea and then doing everything they can to push it
onto the world even before they’ve tested it to see if there’s a market for it.
When companies do this, products often fail because they were reasoning
from the armchair when they should have been experimenting. Ries argues
that entrepreneurs should think of their ideas or products like hypotheses,
and continually test, ultimately letting the potential customers determine
what the product should be.
In the case of career choice, many people make an analogous mistake.
They try to decide, early on, what their career should be and then they
doggedly try to pursue that career, ignoring other possibilities that might
arise and failing to consider that the job might not be right for them.
(Sometimes this is caused by the idea of having a “calling” that you try to
force onto the world, without testing to find out if it’s something that the
world actually needs.) Instead of trying to work out what your calling is and
then forming a rigid plan on the basis of that calling, you should think like a
scientist, testing hypotheses. This has three implications.
First, it means you should think of your career as a work in progress.
Rather than having a fixed career plan, try to have a career “model”—a set
of provisional goals and hypotheses that you’re constantly revising as you
get new evidence or opportunities. It’s better to have a bad plan than no
plan, but only if you’re open to changing it.
Second, find out where you’re uncertain, then reduce that uncertainty.
Before making a decision, don’t merely try to weigh all the pros and cons as
you currently see them (though that is a good thing to do). Ask yourself:
What is the single most important piece of information that would be most
useful for my career decision? Now, what can I do in order to gain that
information?
Third, test yourself in different paths. In science, you try to test
hypotheses. Similarly, if you can, you should try to run “tests” of different
career plans; this is important because it’s often very difficult to predict in
advance what careers will work out and which won’t. For example, one
person we coached started an internship at an asset management firm.
Having no experience in it, she didn’t know whether she’d like it, but she
guessed she wouldn’t. It turned out she hated the job. In a sense, she
“failed.” But that failure meant she could be much more confident in
pursuing a different (academic) path instead. Her bad experience was very
valuable.
Peters decision
For all these reasons, Peter regarded his potential impact later in life as the
most important factor to consider when deciding which career to pursue.
This made law school look considerably worse than he had previously
thought: he’d be committed to one path, learning a very specific set of
skills, ending up after three years with considerable debt.
Similar reasoning made software engineering or market research look
more promising than nonprofit work. Both options would allow him to have
a big immediate impact (via his donations if he was working as a software
engineering or market researcher; via his labor if he was working at a
nonprofit), and he also felt he would gain better long-term skills, and learn
more, if he pursued options in software engineering or market research than
he would if he worked for nonprofits straight out of college.
As a result, in his final year at school, he invested heavily in developing
his computer programming skills, which enabled him to get a job as a
software engineer at a start-up in Chicago that offers online loans to people
with near-prime credit ratings. The organization he’s working for is
certainly improving the world, but it isn’t the most effective organization he
could work for. However, it allows him to build his skills in programming
and statistics and will also allow him to gain business and financial
experience, which will potentially open doors later on. Finally, the job gives
him enough free time to focus on his nonprofit projects, which will further
allow him to work out whether he should ultimately transition into full-time
nonprofit work, or whether he should stick to his current path and focus on
earning to give.
• • •
By using this framework, you can assess the different career options
available to you, but what are some of the best options? There are a huge
number of possible paths, so I’ve used this framework to carve out some
“career strategies” that I and the others at 80,000 Hours think are
particularly promising. (As our research progresses, these are likely to
change somewhat, so it’s worth also looking at the 80,000 Hours website
for more information.) I’ll divide top career options into “solid bets,” where
one is very likely to make a positive impact, and “high-potential long shots”
where one has a smaller chance of making a very large impact.
Solid bets
Direct work for a highly effective organization
We don’t often recommend that people go into nonprofit work straight out
of college, because you will typically build fewer skills and credentials than
you would in for-profit companies, which typically have greater resources
to invest in training. However, there are still many situations where starting
off working in a nonprofit can be a good bet. If you’re considering working
for a nonprofit, ask yourself the following questions:
Is the organization particularly effective?
Will I learn a lot working here?
Is the organization money-rich but talent-poor?
Am I sure I want to work within nonprofits long-term?
Given these conditions, GiveWell is an example of a nonprofit that
could represent an excellent place to work. It’s highly effective; it’s very
well run and gives excellent training to those who work there. It also needs
talent much more than it needs money. One way in which you can assess
whether an organization is money-constrained or talent-constrained is
simply to ask the organization if they would prefer you donate to them or
work for them. For example, in 2011, Alexander Berger had just graduated
from Stanford with an MA in policy, organization, and leadership studies.
He was unsure whether to earn to give or to take up a position at GiveWell.
When he asked them how much they’d be willing to pay to have him as an
employee, he found it was considerably beyond the amount he could donate
if he earned to give.
There are also personal reasons why working for nonprofits might be a
good option. For example, if you are fired up by a specific cause, it might
feel important to you to be in the midst of the action. Alternatively, you
might worry that your values will wane if you pursued something with
either indirect benefits, like earning to give, or later benefits, like building
skills. Perhaps you find it helpful and inspiring to surround yourself with
like-minded people, and working for a place that shares these values will
keep you committed to your ultimate goals. Personal considerations like
these should be taken very seriously.
Finally, it’s worth bearing in mind that nonprofits are not the only
effective organizations you can work for. Most of the incredible progress
that humanity has made over the last few hundred years has not been due to
the activities of nonprofits but through technology and innovation generally
spurred by for-profit companies and governments. If you can find a
company that is benefitting many people, or is correcting market failure in
some way (such as by developing renewable alternatives to fossil fuels),
this might be an effective means to have an impact. I’ll discuss the potential
of for-profits more under the Entrepreneurship section later in this chapter.
Earning to give
Earning to give enables you to start having a significant positive impact via
the very most cost-effective organizations right from the beginning of your
career. Often, it also allows you to build valuable skills and a valuable
network that will prove useful later on in life.
If you’re aiming to pursue earning to give over the long term, it’s
important to work out the long-run earning potential of different careers. On
the Internet, you can often find the pay at a given level of experience within
a field, but it’s harder to find out how difficult it is to get to that level of
experience, and how high-paying the alternatives are for those who move
out of that career type. Moreover, within a given career path the earnings
within specific subfields and from company to company can also vary
dramatically.
We’ve researched this to help make the decision easier. Unsurprisingly,
the very highest-paying careers are extremely competitive, such as finance
in front-office positions, followed by consulting with somewhat lower
earnings. Both of these careers also come with a high chance of dropping
out, since at each stage, if you fail to be promoted, you’ll probably have to
switch into a different job with lower pay. Even taking this into account,
however, they’re still among the career paths with the highest expected
earnings. Tech entrepreneurship and quantitative trading in hedge funds
offer even higher expected earnings, though tech entrepreneurship comes
with even higher risks (entrepreneurs have less than a 10 percent chance of
ever selling their shares in the company at profit) and quantitative trading
requires exceptionally strong mathematical skills.
Among less risky careers, medicine is probably the highest-earning
option, especially in the United States, though earnings are probably less
than in finance. Law is less appealing than one might think, because unless
you can get into one of the very top law schools such as Harvard, you won’t
likely earn as much as you would in consulting or finance. You also have to
delay your earnings for several years while you complete law school, and
graduate with substantial debt.
Outside of the hypercompetitive fields mentioned, there are still some
very good options. Software engineering is a lucrative career with an
unusually low barrier for entry, and many of the people we’ve coached
chose to pursue that career. Chris Hallquist, for example, completed a
philosophy degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His degree
didn’t naturally lead to other career paths, so he looked at a wide range of
options. He considered law but decided that the market for lawyers was too
poor. Programming, in contrast, was highly promising. He was able to apply
to App Academy, a three-month intensive programming school, and from
there he got a job at a start-up in San Francisco with a six-figure salary.
Sales and marketing can also be good options. As well as being fairly
high paying for a given level of competitiveness, they provide particularly
useful skills if you want to move into the social sector later on in your
career. Accountancy and actuarial work are also high paying for their level
of competitiveness.
For those without a college degree, the highest-paying careers are
usually trade professions, such as electricians, elevator installers and
repairers, or the police force. Other options are pilots, or working in the
energy sector, such as power plant operators. For those with an associate
degree, the highest-paying careers are air traffic control, or within the
medical profession, such as radiation therapists, nuclear medicine
technologists, or dental hygienists.
One important issue to consider for all careers, but especially when
earning to give through trade professions, is whether a job will be around in
the future. A job might be outsourced (as IT support has been to some
extent), or automated as a result of new technology. For example, before the
advent of alarm clocks, people called knocker uppers were employed to
knock on the windows of sleeping people in the morning, so they could get
to work on time. Similarly, computers have decreased the need for jobs that
involve basic number crunching; refrigerators have decreased the need for
milkmen; robotic assemblers have decreased the need for assembly-line
workers. The technology for self-driving cars is already here, so it may be
unwise to become a taxi or a truck driver because there is a good chance
that this industry will become automated over the next couple of decades.
Improvements in technology are reducing demand for clerks and
secretaries. In general, jobs that require social skills (like public relations),
creativity (like fashion design), or precise perception and manipulation (like
boilermaking) are the least likely to become automated. Jobs that require
physical proximity or high levels of training are also unlikely to be
outsourced.
Another important consideration regarding earning to give is the risk of
losing your values by working in an environment with people who aren’t as
altruistically inclined as you are. For example, David Brooks, writing in
The New York Times, makes this objection in response to a story of Jason
Trigg, who is earning to give by working in finance:
You might start down this course seeing finance as a convenient
means to realize your deepest commitment: fighting malaria. But
the brain is a malleable organ. Every time you do an activity, or
have a thought, you are changing a piece of yourself into something
slightly different than it was before. Every hour you spend with
others, you become more like the people around you.
Gradually, you become a different person. If there is a large gap
between your daily conduct and your core commitment, you will
become more like your daily activities and less attached to your
original commitment.
This is an important concern, and if you think that a particular career
will destroy your altruistic motivation, then you certainly shouldn’t pursue
it. But there are reasons for thinking that this often isn’t too great a problem.
First, if you pursue earning to give but find your altruistic motivation is
waning, you always have the option of leaving and working for an
organization that does good directly. At worst, you’ve built up good work
experience. Second, if you involve yourself in the effective altruism
community, then you can mitigate this concern: if you have many friends
who are pursuing a similar path to you, and you’ve publicly stated your
intentions to donate, then you’ll have strong support to ensure that you live
up to your aims. Finally, there are many examples of people who have
successfully pursued earning to give without losing their values. Bill Gates
and the other members of the Giving Pledge (a group of billionaires who
have pledged at least 50 percent of their earnings to charity) are the most
obvious examples, but there are many more. When Jim Greenbaum
graduated from the University of Virginia in the early 1980s, his primary
aim was to make as much money as he could in order to use that money to
make the world a better place. He founded a telecommunications company,
Access Long Distance, in 1985, selling it fourteen years later. Now age
fifty-six, he’s as committed to philanthropy as he ever was, donating more
that 50 percent of his assets. There is certainly a risk of losing one’s values
by earning to give, which you should bear in mind when you’re thinking
about your career options, but there are risks of becoming disillusioned
whatever you choose to do, and the experience of seeing what effective
donations can achieve can be immensely rewarding.
Skill building
Skill building is a short-term strategy, which can be a very good option if
you aren’t sure about what you ultimately want to do. The idea behind this
path is that you build up general-purpose career capital in order to keep
your options open as much as possible, giving you time to figure out your
long-run plans for having an impact and giving you skills that will be useful
in what you choose to do.
Given this strategy, consultancy is a great first step. For example,
Habiba Islam graduated from Oxford with a degree in politics, philosophy,
and economics in 2011. She considered going into politics, and still thinks
of that as a potential long-term aim, but she decided to work in consulting
first. This makes sense: by working in consulting for a few years, you get a
good all-round business education, you get to meet a wide variety of
people, and you get clear evidence on your CV that you’re capable of
working hard and meeting deadlines. You’re also able to earn to give,
having an impact through your donations, in the meantime.
Other areas that are good for skill building are sales and marketing,
because this training seems useful if you want to move into the social
sector, where the ability to advertise particular messages persuasively is
important. Another alternative is to get a PhD in a useful area. This is what
Jess Whittlestone did: having studied math and philosophy previously, she
pursued a PhD in behavioral science at Warwick Business School. This
gives her the option of going into research, but if not she has still gained an
important credential as well as knowledge of statistics and organizational
decision making that will become useful later on. In addition, during a PhD
your time is often more flexible than when employed full-time, which
means you have more opportunity to start or pursue other projects on the
side. Jess, for example, has used the opportunity to write popular science
articles in her spare time, giving her the option to become a full-time writer
after her PhD if she chooses.
High-potential long shots
Working for an effective organization, earning to give, and skill building are
all safe bets because if you pursue them, you can be confident that you will
either have an impact immediately or that you’re putting yourself in a good
position to have an impact later on. However, as we saw in the chapter on
expected value, we should also be interested in lower-probability higher-
payoff activities, and there are some promising careers where your impact
takes this form. Let’s look at them.
Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is an extremely promising option, giving you the potential
to effect massive change, build valuable career capital, and, if pursuing for-
profit entrepreneurship, make large profits that can be donated to effective
causes. Entrepreneurship is also an area with lower barriers to entry than
other careers, and many people without college degrees have become
successful entrepreneurs. However, most start-up enterprises fail, and one
has to be prepared to accept that fact. In addition, entrepreneurship usually
comes with very long working hours and high levels of stress. Not everyone
is cut out to start his or her own business.
To illustrate how valuable nonprofit entrepreneurship can be consider
GiveDirectly, which we discussed in the chapter on effective charities. With
an economics PhD from Harvard, the founder, Paul Niehaus, had very good
earning-to-give options. However, he clearly made the right choice to set up
GiveDirectly. Since its official launch in 2011, GiveDirectly has raised
more than $20 million in donations—an amount that is growing rapidly.
Even after taking into account the fact that most of those donations would
have been donated anyway (albeit probably to less effective charities),
Niehaus has done far more good by founding GiveDirectly than he would
have if he’d earned to give.
If you’re starting a nonprofit, one good strategy is to focus on a
particularly important cause (which we’ll discuss in the next chapter).
Another important question is to ask why the problem your new
organization is addressing has not been solved already, or won’t be solved
in the future. Ask yourself:
Why hasn’t this problem been solved by markets?
Why hasn’t this problem been solved by the state?
Why hasn’t this problem already been solved by
philanthropy?
In many cases, the answers to these questions will suggest that the
problem is very difficult to solve, in which case it may not be the most
effective problem to focus on. In other cases, the answers might suggest that
you really can make good progress on the problem. If the beneficiaries of
your action don’t participate fully in markets and aren’t governed by a well-
functioning state, then there is a clear need for philanthropy. For example,
we should expect the interests of future people to be systematically
underrepresented because they don’t participate in present-day markets or
elections.
For-profit entrepreneurship can be even more compelling as an option
than nonprofit entrepreneurship. Though it generally will be more difficult
to focus your activities on the most important social problem within for-
profit entrepreneurship, there is a much greater potential to grow quickly,
and there is the additional benefit of larger earnings that can be used for
good purposes later on in life. Economists also suggest that innovative
entrepreneurship is undersupplied by the market. Professor William
Nordhaus at Yale University has estimated that innovators only collect 2
percent of the value they generate; that is, for every dollar an innovative
company makes in profit, society has benefitted by fifty dollars. By
becoming an innovative entrepreneur, you are, on average, producing
benefits to society that far exceed your paycheck.
The delightfully named Lincoln Quirk pursued this option, quitting
graduate school in order to found a company called Wave, which makes it
easier and cheaper for immigrants to send remittances to their home
countries. Currently, if immigrants wish to send remittances, they have to
use Western Union or MoneyGram. They have to go to a physical outlet to
make the transfer and pay 10 percent in transfer costs. Lincoln Quirk and
his cofounder, Drew Durbin, have built software that allows transfers from
a mobile phone in the United States to a mobile phone in Kenya, and they
take only 3 percent of the transfer costs. For now, they are just focused on
Kenya, because that has particularly good infrastructure for this project, but
they plan to significantly expand.
The potential positive impact of this idea is huge. Annual global
remittances are over $400 billion, several times the total global foreign-aid
budget. The potential impact Lincoln’s start-up could have, by making the
costs of remittances a few percent cheaper, therefore amounts to tens of
billions of dollars in increased financial flow from rich countries to poorer
countries every year. Even just from Maryland to Kenya, annual
remittances are more than $350 million; within one state Wave could
therefore increase the amount going to Kenya every year by $24 million.
After only a few months of operation, they already have thousands of users
who have collectively transferred millions of dollars to Kenya.
Research
When Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, the
committee suggested that he’d saved one billion lives. Was he a politician?
Or a military leader? Or a superhero? No, he was a fairly regular guy from
Iowa who worked in agricultural research. He wasn’t a typical academic:
his credentials were limited, and he used techniques that had been available
to the Victorians. Moreover, the innovation that made his name was rather
boring—a new type of short-stem disease-resistant wheat. That wheat,
however, was able to radically increase crop yield across poor countries. It
helped to cause the “green revolution.” Even after taking into account the
fact that similar innovations may have happened even if he hadn’t done his
research, Borlaug’s impact should be measured in the prevention of tens of
millions of deaths.
In terms of researchers with impact, Borlaug isn’t a lone example: in
any list of the most influential people of all time, scientists and researchers
make up a large percentage. Scientists who have clearly had a huge positive
effect on the world include Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented
synthetic fertilizer; Karl Landsteiner, who discovered blood groups, thus
allowing blood transfusions to be possible; Grace Eldering and Pearl
Kendrick, who developed the first whooping cough vaccine; and Françoise
Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, who discovered HIV.
In each of these cases, even after taking into account that these
developments would have eventually happened anyway, the good each of
these researchers did should be measured in the millions of lives saved. And
clearly many other researchers, from Isaac Newton to Daniel Kahneman,
have made a huge contribution to human progress even if it’s not easy to
quantify their impact in terms of lives saved.
Like innovative entrepreneurship, research is an area that is drastically
undersupplied by the market because the benefits are open to everyone, and
because much of the benefit of research occurs decades into the future.
Governments try to fix this problem to some extent through state-funded
research, but academic research is very often not as high-impact as it could
be—the incentive facing many academics is work on the most theoretically
interesting questions rather than the most socially important questions. This
means that, by deliberately pursuing research that has a large impact, one
could make a significant difference that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
However, the distribution of achievements in research (as suggested by
a number of publications, awards, and citations) is heavily fat-tailed: a large
proportion of scientific achievement comes from a very small number of
scientists. This suggests that research might be the best option only if it’s an
area you really excel in. But if you might be able to become such a person,
it’s an option you should take seriously.
If you’re thinking about going into research, it’s important to bear in
mind the job prospects: fields vary dramatically in both the difficulty of
getting an academic job post PhD, and in the difficulty of finding jobs
outside of academia. Within philosophy, for example, there are about four
times as many doctoral candidates as there are tenure-track positions; as a
result, many aspiring academic philosophers end up unable to find a job in
academia. In contrast, within economics the number of people who seek
academic employment more closely matches the number of academic jobs.
Another important consideration is the extent to which one can have an
impact outside of academia. Again, an economics PhD is a good bet, being
generally well respected in policy and business.
With these considerations in mind, 80,000 Hours suggests that the areas
with the greatest potential to do high-impact research while simultaneously
gaining career capital that keeps your options open are economics,
statistics, computer science, and some areas of psychology. This, however,
shouldn’t deter you if you have some particular interest or expertise within
an area of research that is relevant to a particularly high-priority cause area.
One good way to have impact within research is to combine fields.
There are far more combinations of fields than there are individual fields,
and research tends to be influenced by traditional disciplinary distinctions,
so research at the intersection of two disciplines is often particularly
neglected and can for that reason be very high-impact. For example, Daniel
Kahneman and Amos Tversky were psychologists who caused a revolution
within economics: they applied methods developed in psychology to test
assumptions about rational choice that were prevalent within economics,
thereby leading to the new field of “behavioral economics.” By giving us a
better understanding of human behavior, this field has improved our ability
to cause desirable behavior change, including in development. Similarly,
effective altruism has made the progress it has by combining concepts from
moral philosophy and economics.
Combining fields can be especially useful when one moves from a
more theoretical area to an area with real-world applications. Within
academia, the most prestigious research fields—which often therefore
attract the best researchers—are often those that have the fewest practical
applications. (A friend of mine has jokingly commented that a Fields Medal
—the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in mathematics—indicates two things
about the recipient: that they were capable of accomplishing something
truly important, and that they didn’t.) If you are a top researcher and are
willing to sacrifice some amount of status within academia, you can have
considerable impact by moving into more applied areas of research.
Politics and advocacy
Politics is another area where one has a small chance of extremely large
influence. For someone entering party politics in the United Kingdom, most
of his or her expected impact comes from the chance of ending up in the
cabinet or as prime minister. Even though the chances of being that
successful are small, your potential influence, if you do succeed, is very
great indeed. As discussed in the chapter on expected value, this was the
reason Laura Brown pursued a career in party politics. Though we only
discussed British politics in that chapter, similar considerations apply
everywhere.
Advocacy also has potentially high payoffs, as one could influence the
behavior of many thousands of people and help to influence debates around
particular policies, though this is particularly difficult to quantify. One
could become an effective advocate through journalism, or by pursuing an
early career in academia and then moving to become a “public intellectual.”
Someone from the effective altruism community who’s pursued this path is
Dylan Matthews. He studied moral and political philosophy at Harvard. He
considered continuing his studies at graduate school but instead pursued
journalism in part because doing so gave him a platform from which to
champion particularly important causes. He worked for The Washington
Post and now works for Vox.com. In this position, he’s been able to
promote and discuss ideas he thinks are important, such as more liberal
immigration policies, a universal basic income, and the idea of earning to
give.
In advocacy, we would expect the distribution of impact to be highly
fat-tailed: it’s a winner-takes-all environment, where a small number of
thought leaders command most of the attention. We don’t have data on
impact through advocacy in general, though the distribution of book sales,
which one could use as a proxy, is highly fat-tailed, as is the distribution of
Twitter follower counts. Again, therefore, this is an area you might only
want to go into if you think you have an unusually good chance of being
successful.
Volunteering
So far I’ve discussed how you can choose a career in order to make a
difference. Similar considerations apply to volunteering, though there’s an
additional challenge. As a volunteer, you’re often not trained in the area in
which you’re helping, which means the benefit you provide might be
limited. At the same time, you’re often using up valuable management
capacity. For that reason, volunteering can in fact be harmful to the charity
you’re volunteering for. Anecdotally, we have heard from some nonprofits
that the main reason they use volunteers is because those volunteers
subsequently donate back to the charity.
This means you should try to volunteer only in ways that cost an
organization relatively little. For example, by contributing high-quality
work to Wikipedia, you can provide a significant benefit to many people at
almost no cost to others. Some organizations also have opportunities that
are designed to take on board volunteers with little cost. Mercy For
Animals, for example, is a vegetarian advocacy organization. It has
volunteers contact people who have commented on videos on factory
farming on Facebook. These volunteers then discuss the option of going
vegetarian with them. This provides a significant benefit while costing the
charity very little in management time. An alternative route to having an
impact without imposing a burden on charities is to work additional hours
instead of volunteering and donate the money you make.
However, you don’t need to limit yourself to this. Instead, I’d
encourage you to think about volunteering primarily in terms of the skills
and experiences you’ll gain, which will enable you to have a greater impact
later in your life. Because the total time you spend volunteering will be only
a tiny fraction of the total time you spend on your career, the impact
volunteering has on other areas of your life will generally be much greater
than the impact you have via the volunteering itself.
For example, as an undergraduate, I went to Ethiopia to teach at a
school. The impact I had there was limited (as far as I can tell, I mainly just
allowed the real teacher to take some time off—which is a benefit, but a
small one compared to other things I could have done with my time and
money, especially given the costly flights). However, the impact that seeing
extreme poverty up close had on me was significant: it shaped the choices I
have made in the years since then, and it helps motivate me when I’m doing
activities that are more abstract than teaching at that school. The main
impact of that trip to Ethiopia was its effect on me.
It might feel odd to volunteer simply because it benefits you, but I think
that, as long as you think of volunteering as the first step toward generally
moving your life in the direction of making a difference, there’s nothing
problematic about this. Like anything, benefitting others requires some
training, and volunteering can be a good way to get experience.
Later career moves
What if you’re later on in your career and want to make a difference?
Later in life, the same framework we introduced at the start applies, but
career capital becomes a lot less important, and facts about your specific
situation (the skills and experience that you’ve developed) become a lot
more important. For people who didn’t set out to build skills that are useful
for making a difference, earning to give can be a particularly good option.
Often, people move from high-paying jobs to something that directly makes
a difference even though they have limited expertise in the area they move
into, when they could have done much more good by keeping their high
salary and earning to give.
For example, after graduating with a PhD in philosophy from Brown
University in the seventies, Frederick Mulder left academia in order to
become an art dealer. He became very successful but progressively wanted
to use his career to make a difference. He thought being an art dealer was of
neutral moral value—or perhaps slightly negative, he told me, because of
the amount of flying he has to do—but realized that moving out of art and
into the nonprofit world wasn’t the best way for him to use his talents.
“There are many things that I’d like to see done in the world,” he said, “but
I can’t do them myself because I don’t have those skills. So what better than
to use the resources I can generate by doing something I love in order to
help someone else do something really important that needs to be done?”
He continued in his career, donating every year between 10 and 80 percent
of his earnings.
If you’ve built up useful skills, on the other hand, then it can be a good
option to contribute those skills directly to an effective area. This is what
Rob Mather of the Against Malaria Foundation did. He had extensive
experience in business and sales, which meant he understood how to run an
organization and pitch ideas, and had developed an incredible capacity to
make things happen. (His first foray into altruism was organizing a
swimming-based fund-raiser and he managed to get one hundred thousand
swimmers to participate.) His background also meant that he doesn’t need
to take a salary, something that impressed donors in the early stages. His
sales skills allowed him to get a huge amount of pro bono support from a
variety of companies. As a result, he has built a charity that is among the
top recommended at GiveWell, has raised more than $30 million, and has
distributed more than ten million long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets,
saving thousands of lives.
• • •
Choosing a career is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make,
and I hope that the framework I’ve presented in this chapter will help you to
think through this decision.
In order to use your career to make a difference, one rule of thumb that
I mentioned is to work on a particularly important cause. However, so far
I’ve primarily discussed only the cause of fighting global poverty. What
about all the other problems in the world? How can we decide which are
most important to focus on? In the next chapter, I tackle this question.
TEN
POVERTY VERSUS CLIMATE CHANGE
VERSUS . . .
Which causes are most important?
In the summer of 2013, President Barack Obama referred to climate change
as “the global threat of our time.” He’s not alone in this opinion. The US
secretary of state, John Kerry, called climate change “the greatest challenge
of our generation”; former Senate majority leader Harry Reid has said that
“climate change is the worst problem facing the world today,” and the
cochair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Thomas F.
Stocker called climate change “the greatest challenge of our time.”
Are Obama and these other commentators correct? Is climate change
the most important cause in the world today—a greater global priority than
extreme poverty? How could we decide?
A lot of people have asked these questions. Though foundations and
social entrepreneurs often talk about trying to maximize their impact, they
normally just focus on maximizing their impact within the cause or causes
that they’re personally passionate about (like poverty, or education, or
climate change), rather than thinking strategically about which causes they
should focus on. If we’re really trying to do the most good we can,
however, then we need to think carefully about cause selection. We’ll be
able to help more people to a greater degree within some cause areas than
we will in others, which means that, in order to have the biggest impact we
can, we have to think carefully about what causes we choose to focus on.
So far the organizations I’ve recommended as extremely cost-effective
have all been focused on global poverty. We can have a high degree of
confidence that these charities do a substantial amount of good. However,
you might reasonably think that the very best way of helping others isn’t to
fight global poverty, or that the best way of fighting global poverty is
through activities whose benefits are more difficult to quantify than those of
the charities I’ve mentioned. Moreover, you might want to do good with
your time (whether through volunteering or your work) rather than your
money. In which case, your own particular skills, experiences, and
opportunities become a lot more important and these might not fit as well
with global poverty as they do with other areas. This means we need to
think about cause selection.
In this chapter, I’m not going to attempt to definitively answer the
question of what cause is most important to focus on, which would be
impossible to do in a whole book let alone a single chapter. Instead, I’m
going to introduce a framework for thinking about the question and then use
that framework to suggest some causes that, on the basis of research at
GiveWell and the Centre for Effective Altruism, I think should be given
high priority. Again, bear in mind that decisions about cause selection
involve value judgments to an even greater degree than some of the other
issues I’ve covered in this book, so the conclusions you reach might be
quite different from the ones I reach. Though effective altruism aims to take
a scientific approach to doing good, it’s not exactly physics: there is plenty
of room for differences of opinion. This doesn’t, however, make thinking
rigorously about which cause one chooses to focus on any less important.
• • •
On the framework I propose, you can compare causes by assessing them on
how well they do on each of the following three dimensions:
First, scale. What’s the magnitude of this problem? How much does it
affect lives in the short run and long run?
Second, neglectedness. How many resources are already being
dedicated to tackling this problem? How well allocated are the resources
that are currently being dedicated to the problem? Is there reason to expect
this problem can’t be solved by markets or governments?
Third, tractability. How easy is it to make progress on this problem, and
how easy is it to tell if you’re making progress? Do interventions within this
cause exist, and how strong is the evidence behind those interventions? Do
you expect to be able to discover new promising interventions within this
cause?
If we’re thinking about contributions of time rather than just money,
then there is a fourth important dimension:
Personal fit. Given your skills, resources, knowledge, connections, and
passions, how likely are you to make a large difference in this area?
We discussed personal fit in the previous chapter on career choice, and
most of that discussion applies equally well to the choice of causes. This
chapter will therefore focus on the first three criteria, but you should keep
in mind that, if you’re thinking about working or volunteering in an area,
the considerations I give need to be mediated by your personal fit with the
cause.
• • •
Scale refers to the size of the problem, which should usually be measured in
terms of total actual or potential impact on others’ well-being. For example,
cancer, as I noted earlier, is a bigger problem than malaria because it is
responsible for 7.6 percent of all ill health (measured in QALYs lost)
worldwide, whereas malaria is responsible for 3.3 percent of ill health
worldwide.
All other things being equal, the larger the problem, the higher priority
the cause should be. This is for a couple of reasons. First, many activities
make a proportional impact on a problem. If you can develop a new cheap
treatment for either cancer or malaria, you should probably develop the
cheap treatment for cancer. Cancer causes more ill health and death than
malaria, so, when that treatment is rolled out, it will have a larger total
benefit. Political change is another area where you can have a proportional
effect on a problem: if you can improve the health-care policy of either
New Jersey or the whole of the United States, the fact that the US policy
would affect a far larger number of people is clearly relevant.
Second, the scale of a problem also determines how long we should
expect the problem to persist. There’s no point in investing significant time
and resources into learning about a cause if that problem will be resolved a
few years later. Similarly, if the problem is very big, then it will take a large
amount of resources before the most effective opportunities are used up.
The second aspect of the framework is tractability, which means the
long-run average of people’s ability to turn resources into progress toward
solving the problem. Even if a problem is hugely important and highly
neglected, that doesn’t mean it’s an important cause to focus on. There
might simply be very little we can do about it. For example, aging is a
problem that is huge in scale: almost two-thirds of global ill health is a
result of aging. It’s a problem that’s highly neglected: there are only a tiny
number of research institutes focused on trying to prevent the causes of
aging (rather than to treat its symptoms, like cancer, stroke, Alzheimers,
and so on). However, the reason it’s neglected is because many scientists
believe it to be highly intractable. Preventing the aging process is just a
very difficult problem to solve.
In previous chapters, I discussed explicit cost-effectiveness estimates
(e.g., one QALY costs one hundred dollars). This is useful when thinking in
the short term. If we have good evidence on specific interventions, we can
compare cost-effectiveness directly. But these estimates only apply to
specific interventions, and the estimated cost-effectiveness of specific
programs within a cause area will change over time. This means that, when
thinking about investing time and effort into a cause, it’s important not just
to look at our current best-guess estimates but to make estimates about the
long-run tractability of the cause as well.
The third aspect of the framework is neglectedness, which refers to how
many resources are being invested into this cause, relative to its scale.
Because of diminishing returns, all other things being equal, the more
resources that have been invested in a specific cause, the more difficult it
will be to make progress within that cause with a given amount of
resources, because typically many of the most cost-effective opportunities
will have already been taken.
This is an easy consideration to forget. If something seems like a huge
problem—perhaps the biggest problem in the world—it is natural to think
one should focus on it. But if that problem already has a large amount of
resources invested in it, then additional resources might be better spent
elsewhere. For example, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria traditionally
received much more attention than conditions like intestinal worms. One
reason for this, I think, is that these other conditions cause a much greater
amount of ill health (measured in number of deaths, or QALYs lost) than
intestinal worms do, and thereby attracted a disproportionate share of
attention. However, precisely because intestinal worms had much less
attention, the cheapest and most effective ways of treating them were still
available. In fact, it wasn’t until Alan Fenwick, executive director of the
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, coined the term neglected tropical
diseases that these conditions became more prominent in the discussion of
global health. The term had two benefits: first, it classified a wide range of
conditions under one heading. This meant that, even though the burden of
disease from schistosomiasis, for example, was small compared to the
global burden from HIV/AIDS, the global burden of disease from all
neglected tropical diseases was comparable to the global burden from
HIV/AIDS. Second, the name highlighted the fact that these diseases were
neglected.
When you read the rest of this chapter, you might be surprised that you
haven’t heard much about many of the causes I suggest are high-priority.
That just shows the importance of considering neglectedness when
choosing a cause. The causes we hear the most about are precisely those
where it will be harder to make a big difference; the causes that get less
attention are those where we may be able to have a massive impact.
To illustrate the framework of scale, tractability, and neglectedness,
let’s see how it provides a strong case for focusing on global poverty rather
than domestic poverty. The scale of global poverty is much larger, in both
numbers and extremity, than domestic poverty within first world countries.
There are 46.5 million Americans living in relative poverty, defined as
living on less than $11,000 per year, but there are 1.22 billion people
worldwide living in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $550 per
year. Second, global poverty is much more neglected than domestic poverty.
In 2014, $500 billion was spent on welfare in the United States, whereas
total aid and philanthropy to poor countries was only $250 billion in that
year. Most important, as we’ve seen, extreme poverty is far more tractable
than domestic poverty, with current cost-effectiveness estimates suggesting
that you can do one hundred times as much to provide the same size of
benefit to someone in extreme poverty as you can to someone domestically.
It is relatively easy to compare global and domestic poverty, because
the former seems more promising on all three dimensions. In other cases,
it’s not so easy: one cause might be better on one dimension but worse on
another. In what follows I’ll give a number of examples of what seem like
highly promising causes. As with the chapter where I discussed charities,
I’ll score each cause from “not very” to “extremely,” on each dimension of
scale, neglectedness, and tractability. We’ll see that it’s difficult to find
causes that score very highly on each dimension. Criminal justice reform
seems unusually tractable, but comparatively low on scale. Increasing
international labor mobility scores highly on scale but does very poorly on
tractability. Which cause to focus on is therefore something that involves
difficult judgment calls: it’s not clear how to weigh these different criteria
against one another, and people may reasonably disagree on how to do so.
A couple of caveats before we begin. First, in each case, I’m going to
be able to describe only the cause and why, in short, I think it’s promising (I
provide further reading in the endnotes for those who are interested). This
chapter should therefore be taken as an invitation to explore causes other
than extreme poverty, with recommendations rather than a definitive
argument for why these are the most important causes. Second, for some of
these causes, it’s not as easy for casual donors to make a big difference in
the same way they can if they donate to the charities listed in chapter seven;
some of these causes are more in need of good people than more money.
With those caveats in mind, let’s look at some high-priority causes.
US criminal justice reform
What’s the problem? At any one time, 2.2 million people are incarcerated in
the United States. That’s 0.7 percent of its population, giving it one of the
highest incarceration rates in the world. As a comparison, the United
Kingdom has an incarceration rate of 0.14 percent; Canada’s is 0.1 percent;
Japan’s is 0.05 percent. At the same time, the United States has the highest
level of intentional homicide (which is a good proxy for rates of criminality
in general) in the developed world, at 4.7 per 100,000 people per year (in
comparison, the United Kingdom’s homicide rate is 1 per 100,000 people
per year; Canada’s is 1.6; Japan’s is 0.3). This suggests that the high
incarceration rate is not deterring crime, and may even be increasing it.
Since the 1990s, incarceration rates in the United States have increased
dramatically despite a fall in violent crime in that period. According to
expert criminologists, incarceration rates could be reduced (especially for
low-risk offenders) by 10 percent or more while keeping levels of
criminality the same, or even reducing them.
In this book, I’ve argued that the highest-impact ways of doing good
typically won’t be aimed at providing benefits to people in rich countries,
so it might seem surprising to see criminal justice reform on this list. But
though opportunities to make a truly massive difference domestically are
rarer than opportunities to make a massive difference abroad, that doesn’t
mean they’re nonexistent. What distinguishes criminal justice reform from
other sorts of domestic issues is that, while being fairly great in scale, it is
an issue that is both neglected and unusually tractable at this point in time.
Scale: Fairly large. A reduction of the prison population by 10 percent
would have a variety of benefits. It would of course greatly benefit all the
people (more than two hundred thousand each year) who would not have to
spend time in prison (often for crimes such as drug possession, which does
not pose as great a threat to society as violent crime). As well as the misery
of life in prison itself, costs of a prison sentence include: forgone earnings,
the reduction of future income, and the costs borne by families, especially
children, of having a family member in prison.
Incarceration also costs the government about $25,000 per person per
year, whereas parole costs only about $2,000 per year, meaning the
government could save billions annually. If larger reductions in
incarceration rates were feasible (remembering that even a 50 percent
reduction in incarceration rate would still mean that the US incarceration
rate is 3.5 times as high as Canada’s), then the scale would be considerably
greater again.
Neglectedness: Fairly neglected. GiveWell estimates that only about $20
million is spent per year by organizations other than governments on prison
reform to substantially reduce incarceration rates. (A further $40 million per
year is spent on other sorts of prison reform, such as campaigning to abolish
the death penalty.)
Tractability: Extremely tractable. Due to a combination of declining rates of
criminality and a particularly poor economy following the recession, there
appears to be an unusual level of bipartisan support for prison reform. The
Pew Charitable Trusts provides on example of progress in this area: as of
summer 2014, it had assisted with twenty-nine reform packages in twenty-
seven states since 2007, at a cost of just $25 million, with a forecasted
reduction in prison population in those states of 11 percent. On the
assumption that these forecasts are accurate and that these reforms would
not have happened without Pew’s intervention, the cost per year of life in
prison averted would be as low as twenty-nine dollars.
What promising organizations are working on it? The Pew Charitable
Trusts Public Safety Performance Project aims to make criminal justice
policy more effective and evidence-based by providing technical assistance
to states, doing policy evaluations, providing information on what works,
and fostering broad political support for specific policies.
BetaGov (accepts donations via GiveWell), led by Professor Angela
Hawken of Pepperdine University, is a start-up center that provides tools to
help practitioners conduct experimental trials of policies.
The University of Chicago Crime Lab (accepts donations) runs
randomized controlled trials to provide evidence-based criminal justice
policy advice to governments.
International labor mobility
What’s the problem? Increased levels of migration from poor to rich
countries would provide substantial benefits for the poorest people in the
world, as well as substantial increases in global economic output. However,
almost all developed countries pose heavy restrictions on who can enter the
country to work.
Scale: Very large. Eighty-five percent of the global variation in earnings is
due to location rather than other factors: the extremely poor are poor simply
because they don’t live in an environment that enables them to be
productive. Economists Michael Clemens, Claudio Montenegro, and Lant
Pritchett have estimated what they call the place premium—the wage gain
for foreign workers who move to the United States. For an average person
in Haiti, relocation to the United States would increase income by about
680 percent; for a Nigerian, it would increase income by 1,000 percent.
Some other developing countries have comparatively lower place
premiums, but they are still high enough to dramatically benefit migrants.
Most migrants would also earn enough to send remittances to family
members, thus helping many of those who do not migrate. An estimated six
hundred million people worldwide would migrate if they were able to.
Several economists have estimated that the total economic gains from
free mobility of labor across borders would be greater than a 50 percent
increase in world GDP. Even if these estimates were extremely optimistic,
the economic gains from substantially increased immigration would be
measured in trillions of dollars per year. (I discuss some objections to
increased levels of immigration in the endnotes.)
Neglectedness: Very neglected. Though a number of organizations work on
immigration issues, very few focus on the benefits to future migrants of
relaxing migration policy, instead focusing on migrants who are currently
living in the United States.
Tractability: Not very tractable. Increased levels of immigration are
incredibly unpopular in developed countries, with the majority of people in
Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom
favoring reduced immigration. Among developed countries, Canada is most
sympathetic to increased levels of immigration; but even there only 20
percent of people favor increasing immigration, while 42 percent favor
reducing it. This makes political change on this issue in the near term seem
unlikely.
What promising organizations are working on it? ImmigrationWorks
(accepts donations) organizes, represents, and advocates on behalf of small-
business owners who would benefit from being able to hire lower-skill
migrant workers more easily, with the aim of “bringing America’s annual
legal intake of foreign workers more realistically into line with the
country’s labor needs.”
The Center for Global Development (accepts donations) conducts
policy-relevant research and policy analysis on topics relevant to improving
the lives of the global poor, including on immigration reform, then makes
recommendations to policy makers.
Factory farming
What’s the problem? Fifty billion animals are raised and slaughtered in
factory farms every year. Relatively small changes to farming practices
could substantially improve these animals’ welfare. Raising animals for
consumption also produces substantial greenhouse gas emissions.
Scale: Up to very large, depending on value judgments. The scale of the
problem depends on how much weight you put on the interests of
nonhuman animals. Many people regard the suffering of non-human
animals as morally important. Given these values, the scale of the problem
of factory farming would seem very great. The meat industry is also one of
the largest contributors to climate change, amounting to 14.5 percent of
global greenhouse gas emissions.
Neglectedness: Extremely neglected. Total expenditure from nonprofits on
factory farming practices is less than $20 million per year.
Tractability: Fairly tractable. Rates of meat consumption are decreasing,
and there appear to be reliable ways to persuade people toward a vegetarian
diet. In Europe there have been moves to improve conditions in factory
farms, such as a ban on battery hen cages. In the United States, however,
there is a strong farming lobby that opposes political change on the issue.
What promising organizations are working on it? Mercy For Animals
(accepts donations) conducts investigations to expose animal cruelty in
farming and engages in education and outreach such as online videos and
advertisements related to animal welfare.
The Humane League (accepts donations) engages in education and
outreach, primarily through online videos and advertisements, on-the-
ground leafleting, and Meatless Mondays campaigns.
The Humane Society of the United States Farm Animal Protection
Campaign (accepts donations) aims to end the most extreme confinement
practices in factory farming by working with farmers to improve the
treatment of animals in food production, and lobbying for better laws and
against antiwhistleblower legislation.
Mercy For Animals and the Humane League are top recommended by
the independent evaluator Animal Charity Evaluators; the Humane Society
of the United States Farm Animal Protection Campaign is rated as a
standout organization.
2 to 4ºC climate change
What’s the problem? Greenhouse gas emissions will probably lead to a 2 to
4ºC rise in average global temperatures. This will cause trillions of dollars
of economic damage, the loss of hundreds of thousands or millions of lives,
and significant reductions in biodiversity.
Scale: Fairly large. Economists typically estimate that a 2 to 4ºC rise in
temperature would cause a reduction in GDP by about 2 percent. However,
most of the damage from climate change will occur in the future, when
people even in poor countries are considerably richer than they are now. For
example, according to the second-most-pessimistic model in the Stern
Review (a particularly grave assessment of climate change published in
2006), by 2100 the economic costs from climate change will amount to
$400 per person, reducing the average GDP per person in developing
countries from $11,000 to $10,600.
Economic assessments of the costs of climate change typically only
look at human costs. If you also value preservation of the natural
environment, you should regard climate change as considerably worse than
the economists’ models suggest. For example, climate change may
potentially lead to the extinction of 20 to 30 percent of species.
Neglectedness: Not very neglected. Climate change is well-known as a
major social issue. The US government spends about $8 billion per year on
climate change efforts, and several hundred million dollars are spent each
year by foundations.
Tractability: Fairly tractable. There are reliable ways in which individuals
can reduce the amount of global greenhouse gas emissions. The opportunity
to effect political change is unclear, however, as political progress has been
slow. For example, the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in
Copenhagen was the largest meeting of the heads of state in history, but it
achieved very little.
What promising organizations are working on it? Cool Earth (accepts
donations) helps indigenous peoples in Peru and the Democratic Republic
of the Congo protect the rain forest in which they live from illegal logging.
ClimateWorks (accepts donations) campaigns for public policies that
will decrease the output of greenhouse gas emissions.
Catastrophic climate change
What’s the problem? Given current climate models, we are unable to rule
out the possibility that greenhouse gas emissions will lead to what I call
catastrophic climate change, with temperature rises of 10ºC or more.
Though the chance of this occurring is very small, the outcome would be
very grave, which means the expected value of preventing this possibility
may be very high.
Scale: From fairly large to extremely large, depending on value judgments.
How one evaluates risks of global catastrophe depends crucially on how
much value one places on maintaining a flourishing civilization long into
the future. The chances of such bad outcomes are very small, but if you
regard civilizational collapse as extremely bad, then it could be very
important to prevent these worst-case scenarios.
Neglectedness: Fairly neglected. Most focus on climate change is on
reducing emissions. This is a good thing whether or not the best-guess
climate-change predictions are correct. However, there has been
comparatively little research done into the likelihood of catastrophic climate
change, or into mitigation and adaption strategies in extreme warming
scenarios. About $11 million per year is spent on research into
geoengineering (see below).
Tractability: Fairly tractable. The most pressing need is to fund further
research into both assessing the likelihood of worst-case scenarios and to
developing strategies to reduce the chance of the worst-case scenarios. One
potential opportunity is research into geoengineering, which could be used
as a measure of last resort. Geoengineering is the attempt to deliberately
cool the planet, for example by pumping sulfates (which are gasses that
reflect sunlight and in turn cool the planet) into the stratosphere.
Geoengineering itself may pose significant risks such as depletion of the
ozone layer, but if it turns out we’re facing very large temperature
increases, then the risks may be justified. Moreover, geoengineering is
cheap enough that in the future, individual countries could unilaterally
undertake risky geoengineering projects. It would therefore be desirable to
have a good understanding of the impacts and risks of geoengineering
ahead of time. However, it may be that increased research into this area
could detract from other mitigation and adaptions strategies.
What promising organizations are working on this? The University of
Oxford Geoengineering Programme advocates to conduct transparent and
socially informed research into the social, ethical, and technical aspects of
geoengineering.
The Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative provides
advice on the regulation of geoengineering, seeking to ensure that research
into solar radiation management (one form of geoengineering) is conducted
in a responsible manner.
General mitigation of climate change is also a way to reduce
catastrophic risk, so Cool Earth and ClimateWorks, previously mentioned,
are also promising charities in this area.
Other global catastrophic risks
What’s the problem? There are a number of low-probability risks that could
have disastrous outcomes. These include risks of nuclear war, pandemics,
and bioterrorism.
Scale: From fairly large to extremely large, depending on value judgments.
As with catastrophic risk from climate change, how one evaluates risks of
global catastrophe depends crucially on how much value one places on
maintaining a flourishing civilization long into the future.
Neglectedness: Fairly neglected. Because global catastrophes are
unprecedented and unlikely, they may not receive the attention they
deserve. The amount of philanthropic funding on these issues is
comparatively small: about $30 million per year on nuclear security, and
only a few million per year on biosecurity. However, there is considerable
funding and involvement from governments. Only a very small amount of
funding ($1 to $2 million) is spent on global catastrophic risks in general,
such as research to identify currently overlooked risks of global catastrophe.
Tractability: Fairly tractable. There are opportunities for funding academic
research into catastrophic risks in general, and there are some opportunities
for increasing policy influence. However, none of these activities have as
clear a path to impact as, for example, donating to fight extreme poverty.
What promising organizations work in this area? The Nuclear Threat
Initiative (accepts donations) works on a variety of projects to reduce the
spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
The Future of Humanity Institute and the Centre for the Study of
Existential Risk (both accept donations) are interdisciplinary research
institutes at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge that assess the
magnitudes of global catastrophic risks and try to develop risk-mitigation
strategies.
In summary, here’s a table of top causes:
Scale Neglectedness Tractability
Extreme Poverty
••• •• ••••
US Criminal Justice Reform
•• ••••
International Labor Mobility
••• •••
Factory Farming
Up to ••• depending on value
judgments
•••• •••
2-4ºC Climate Change
•• ••
Catastrophic Climate Change
•• to •••• depending on value
judgments
•• ••
Other Global Catastrophic
Risks
•• to •••• depending on value
judgments
••• ••
••••-extremely (best/most) and •-not very (least)
CONCLUSION
BECOMING AN EFFECTIVE ALTRUIST
What should you do right now?
This book has presented effective altruism’s approach to making a
difference. By outlining the five key questions of effective altruism and the
frameworks for choosing a charity, a career, and a cause (all restated in the
appendix), I hope that I have given the tools to help you increase your
impact in all areas of your life. The next time you reach for your wallet
after seeing a charity fund-raiser, think about signing up to volunteer, or go
shopping and wonder whether to buy ethically produced goods, I hope you
will bear this perspective in mind.
We’ve seen that, by employing effective altruism’s way of thinking, we
each have the power to do a tremendous amount of good. A donation of
$3,400 can provide bed nets that will save someone’s life, deworm seven
thousand children, or double the income of fifteen people for a year. Those
charities with less concretely measurable benefits, like those working on
criminal justice reform, or more relaxed immigration policy, or catastrophic
climate change, may, in terms of expected value, do even more good again.
The film Schindlers List tells the story of the war hero Oskar Schindler,
a Polish entrepreneur who ran munitions factories for the Nazis. Initially, he
was an opportunist, happy to take advantage of the war for his own gain.
But as he saw the horrors that the Nazis inflicted on the Jews, he realized he
couldn’t simply stand by and watch. So he bribed officials to spare his
Jewish workers, ultimately saving more than a thousand of them.
Though Schindlers story is inspiring, you might think that war is a
particularly unusual time, and therefore stories like Schindlers aren’t really
that relevant to our lives. What we’ve seen in this book is that this isn’t true.
Every one of us has the power to save dozens or hundreds of lives, or to
significantly improve the welfare of thousands of people. We might not get
books or films written about us, but we can each do an astonishing amount
of good, just as Schindler did.
If you feel empowered by this, by far the most important thing for you
to do is ensure that this feeling doesn’t dissipate over the coming weeks or
months. Here are some ideas about how best to do that.
1: Establish a habit of regular giving.
Go onto the website of a highly effective charity and sign up to make a
regular donation, even if it’s just ten dollars per month. This is the easiest
and most tangible way of having a massive immediate positive impact.
Even if you think that the main way you’ll help others in life won’t be
through your donations, starting to give is a good way of solidifying your
intentions, and of proving to yourself that you mean business.
Some of the top charities I’ve mentioned in this book are Against
Malaria Foundation, Cool Earth, Development Media International,
Deworm the World Initiative, GiveDirectly, and the Schistosomiasis
Control Initiative. Pick whichever you believe to be best and begin a habit
of effective donations. Even a relatively small monthly donation to these
charities will have a big impact.
2: Write down a plan for how you’re going to incorporate effective
altruism into your life.
Get a pen and paper, or open up a document, and make some notes about
the changes you plan to make. Make the plan specific and concrete. If you
think you’re going to start giving, write down what proportion you intend to
start giving and when. If you’re going to change what you buy, write down
what changes you plan to make and by when. If you’re going to pursue a
career that makes a difference, write down which dates you’re going to set
aside in order to find out more information relevant to your next steps.
3: Join the effective altruism community.
Go onto efffectivealtruism.org and sign up to the effective altruism mailing
list. That way you can learn more about effective altruism and about how to
get involved in the community, and read stories of people putting effective
altruism into practice. You can also talk with others in the Effective
Altruism Forum, and there you can find out more about issues that I haven’t
been able to cover in this book, like whether to give now or invest and give
later, or the impact of giving on your personal happiness.
4: Tell others about effective altruism.
Go on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or your blog, and write some of your
thoughts about what you’ve read. If you found the arguments in this book
convincing, then your friends, family, and colleagues might do so, too. If
you can get one person to make the same changes you make, you’ve
doubled your impact.
It can be awkward to raise the idea of effective altruism—you don’t
want to come across as holier-than-thou, or critical of projects that are less
effective—but there are ways to do so naturally. For your birthday, instead
of presents, you could ask for donations to a highly effective charity,
creating a webpage on Causevox.com; Charity Science, a fund-raising
website set up by two people in the effective altruism community, helps you
to do this on their Take Action page. If it’s the holiday giving season, you
could offer to match any donations made by your colleagues up to a certain
amount. You could organize discussion groups on career choice, or cause
selection, or ethical consumerism.
If you want to go further than these actions, you might wish to take
Giving What We Can’s pledge to donate 10 percent of your income. You
could read the career advice on 80,000 Hours, or apply for one-on-one
career coaching there. Or you might wish to set up a local meet-up group,
starting discussions about effective altruism in your area, with your friends
or through your church or university. Further information on all these things
is available at effectivealtruism.org.
Whatever you choose to do, think of today as a pivotal step on your
journey to making the world a better place. Each of us has the potential to
have an enormous positive impact. I hope this book has both inspired you to
do so and given you the tools you need to get there.
APPENDIX
THINKING LIKE AN EFFECTIVE
ALTRUIST
The five key questions of effective altruism.
1. How many people benefit, and by how much?
Like James Orbinski, the doctor who engaged in triage during the Rwandan
genocide, we need to make hard decisions about who we help and who we
don’t; that means thinking about how much benefit is provided by different
activities. The quality-adjusted life year, or QALY, allows us to compare the
impact of different sorts of health programs.
2. Is this the most effective thing you can do?
The very best health and education programs are hundreds of times better
than “merely” very good programs. Smallpox eradication did so much good
that it alone shows development aid to be highly cost-effective on average.
3. Is this area neglected?
Natural disasters get far more funding than ongoing causes of death and
suffering such as disease; for that reason, disaster relief usually isn’t the
most effective use of funds. Diseases, like malaria, that affect people in the
developing world get far less funding than conditions like cancer; for that
reason you have a much bigger impact treating people with malaria than
with cancer.
4. What would have happened otherwise?
After going through Scared Straight, juveniles were more likely to commit
crimes than they would have been otherwise, so the program did harm
overall. In careers like medicine, you’re sometimes simply doing good
work that would have happened anyway; if you earn to give, however, you
make a difference that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred.
5. What are the chances of success, and how good would success be?
Some activities—such as voting, entering politics, campaigning for
systemic change, or mitigating risks of global catastrophe—are effective not
because they’re likely to make a difference but because their impact is so
great if they do make a difference.
Which charity should you donate to?
What does this charity do? How many different types of programs does it
run? For each of these programs, what exactly is it that this charity does? If
it runs more than one program, why is that?
How cost-effective is each program area? Is the charity focused on one of
the most important causes? How cost-effective does the evidence suggest
the program to be?
How robust is the evidence behind each program? What is the evidence
behind the programs that the charity runs? Are there trials showing that the
program is effective? Does the charity rigorously monitor and evaluate the
success of its programs?
How well is each program implemented? Do the leaders of the charity have
demonstrated success in other areas? Is the charity highly transparent? Does
it acknowledge mistakes that it’s made in the past? What are the alternative
charities you could give to? Are there good reasons for supposing that this
charity is better than others?
Does the charity need additional funds? What would additional funding be
used to do? Why haven’t other donors already funded the charity to the
point it can’t use extra money?
Which career should you pursue?
How do I personally fit with this job? How satisfied will I be in this job?
Am I excited by the job? Do I think I could stick with it for a significant
period of time? How good am I, or could I become, at this type of work,
compared to other people and compared to other careers I might choose?
What’s my impact while I’m working at this job? How many resources can I
influence, whether that’s the labor I provide, the people or budget I manage,
the money I earn, or a public platform I have access to? How effective are
the causes to which I can direct those resources?
How does this job contribute to my impact later on in life? How well does
this job build my skills, connections, and credentials? How well does this
job keep my options open? How much will I learn in the course of this job
about what I might want to do next?
Which cause should you focus on?
Scale. What’s the magnitude of this problem? How much does it affect lives
in the short run and long run?
Tractability. How easy is it to make progress on this problem, and how easy
is it to tell if you’re making progress? Do interventions to make progress
within this cause exist, and how strong is the evidence behind those
interventions? Do you expect to be able to discover new promising
interventions within this cause?
Neglectedness. How many resources are already being dedicated to tackling
this problem? How well allocated are the resources that are currently being
dedicated to the problem? Is there reason to expect that markets or
governments can’t solve this problem?
Personal fit. Given your skills, resources, knowledge, connections, and
passions, how likely are you to make a large difference in this area?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has benefitted from the input of very many people, sufficiently so
that I’m not sure I can really call it “my” book. For helping make effective
altruism actually happen, and for providing volumes of online discussion of
the key ideas that I present in this book, I thank everyone in the effective
altruism community, and especially everyone at the Centre for Effective
Altruism; I also particularly thank the staff at GiveWell, whose research
underpins substantial parts of this book.
For very helpful feedback on the manuscript, I thank Alexander Berger,
Jason Boult, Niel Bowerman, Uri Bram, Ryan Carey, Nick Cooney, Roman
Duda, Sam Dumitriu, Sebastian Farquhar, Austen Forrester, Iason Gabriel,
Evan Gaensbauer, Daniel Gastfried, Eric Gastfriend, Aaron Gertler, Josh
Goldenberg, Alex Gordon-Brown, Katja Grace, Topher Hallquist, Elie
Hassenfeld, Roxanne Heston, Hauke Hillebrandt, Jacob Hilton, Ben
Hoskin, Chris Jenkins, Holden Karnofsky, Greg Lewis, Amanda MacAskill,
Larissa MacFarquhar, Georgie Mallett, Michael Marcode de Freitas, Sören
Mindermann, David Moss, Luke Muehlhauser, Sally Murray, Vipul Naik,
Anthony Obeyesekere, Rossa O’Keeffe-O’Donovan, Toby Ord, Michael
Peyton Jones, Duncan Pike, Alex Richard, Jess Riedel, Josh Rosenberg,
Matt Sharp, Carl Shulman, Peter Singer, Imma Six, Pablo Stafforini,
Shayna Strom, Tim Telleen-Lawton, Derek Thompson, Ben Todd, Helen
Toner, Robert Wiblin, Boris Yakubchik, Vincent Yu, Pascal Zimmer, and
the many others with whom I’ve discussed these ideas.
I owe an enormous debt to my research assistant, Pablo Stafforini, who
is rapidly becoming part of my extended mind. I thank Roxanne Heston,
Mihnea Maftei, and Robin Raven for providing interview transcriptions.
For financial support toward effective altruism outreach, of which this book
is a project, I’m grateful to Markus Anderljung, Ryan Carey, Austen
Forrester, Tom Greenway, Sam Hilton, George McGowan, William
Saunders, Chris Smith, Pablo Stafforini, and Matt Wage. For the final-year
DPhil stipend and postdoctoral research fellowship that paid my bills while
I wrote this, I thank, respectively, the Society for Applied Philosophy and
Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
For all his encouragement and advice, I thank my agent, William
Callahan of Inkwell Management, without whom the literary world would
have utterly confounded me. For their extraordinarily in-depth comments
and suggestions on multiple drafts of the manuscript, which improved the
book in every way, I thank my editors, Brooke Carey and Laura Hassan.
For their ongoing love and support I thank my parents, Mair and Robin
Crouch; my brothers, Iain and Thomas Crouch; and my partner, Amanda
MacAskill.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
“African [kids] have almost nothing”: Private conversation with Trevor Field, September 2014.
“innovative, early-stage development projects”: “Development Marketplace,” World Bank,
http://wbi.worldbank.org/wbi/content/development-marketplace-1, accessed July 2014.
“They thought the PlayPump was incredible”: Private conversation with Trevor Field, September
2014.
launched a bottled water brand called One Water: One Difference, http://onedifference.org/.
became the official bottled water of the Live 8 concerts and the Make Poverty History campaign:
Ralph Borland, “Radical Plumbers and PlayPumps: Objects in Development,” (PhD thesis,
Trinity College, Dublin), 2011, 37.
PUMPING WATER IS CHILD’S PLAY: “Why Pumping Water Is Child’s Play,” BBC News, April 25, 2005.
THE MAGIC ROUNDABOUT: Kevin Bloom, “Playing for Real,” Mail & Guardian (South Africa), March
26, 2004.
“wonderful innovation”: Bill Clinton, Laura Bush, and Jean Case, “How the New Philanthropy
Works,” Time, September 25, 2006.
Jay-Z raised tens of thousands of dollars: “Jay-Z Helps U.N. Focus on Water Crisis,” USA Today,
August 9, 2006.
a $16.4 million grant: Amy Costello, “PlayPump Project Receives Major U.S. Funding,”
FRONTLINE/World, September 20, 2006.
“When I first looked at this water pump”: Mark Melman, “The Making of a ‘Philanthropreneur,’”
The Journal of Values Based Leadership, March 15, 2008,
http://www.valuesbasedleadershipjournal.com/issues/vol1issue2/field_melman.php.
“It really rocks me”: John Eastman, “Trevor Field of PlayPumps International,” Black and White,
April 14, 2008, http://www.blackandwhiteprogram.com/interview/trevor-field-playpumps-
international.
one by UNICEF: UNICEF, An Evaluation of the PlayPump Water System as an Appropriate
Technology for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Programs, October 2007, http://www-
tc.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/southernafrica904/flash/pdf/unicef_pp_report.pdf.
one by the Swiss Resource Centre and Consultancies for Development (SKAT): Ana Lucía Obiols and
Karl Erpf, Mission Report on the Evaluation of the PlayPumps Installed in Mozambique, The
Swiss Resource Center and Consultancies for Development, April 29, 2008, http://www-
tc.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/southernafrica904/flash/pdf/mozambique_report.pdf.
women of the village ended up pushing the merry-go-round themselves: “When children are not
available, adults (especially women) have no choice but to operate the PlayPump. While some
women in South Africa and Mozambique reported that they did not mind rotating the ‘merry-go-
round,’ in Mozambique they also reported that they got embarrassed where the people watching
them did not know the linkage between the ‘merry-go-round’ and the water pumping (e.g.,
where the pump is near a public road). All women interviewed in Zambia reported that they did
not like operating the pump.” UNICEF, An Evaluation, 10.
“From five A.M.”: Amy Costello, Southern Africa: Troubled Water, PBS video 23:41, June 29, 2010,
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/southernafrica904/video_index.html.
One reporter estimated: Andrew Chambers, “Africa’s Not-So-Magic Roundabout,” The Guardian,
November 24, 2009.
The pumps often broke down within months: Borland, Radical Plumbers, 49–82.
at $14,000 per unit: UNICEF, An Evaluation, 13.
PBS ran a documentary: Costello, Troubled Water.
“money down the drain”: Chambers, “Africa’s Not-So-Magic Roundabout.”
I got sent down to big projects that had failed”: Private conversation with Rachel Glennerster, May
2014.
it’s illegal to market a drug: Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, Regulatory Information and
Legislation, US Food and Drug Administration, section 505.
Kremer tested the different ICS programs: For a general overview, see Michael Kremer,
“Randomized Evaluations of Educational Programs in Developing Countries: Some Lessons,”
American Economic Review, 93, no. 2 (May 2003): 102–6.
he looked at the efficacy of providing schools with additional textbooks: Paul Glewwe, Michael
Kremer, and Sylvie Moulin, “Many Children Left Behind? Textbooks and Test Scores in
Kenya,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association 1,
no. 1 (January 2009).
Kremer looked at providing flip charts: Paul Glewwe, Michael Kremer, Sylvie Moulin, and Eric
Zitzewitz, “Retrospective vs. Prospective Analyses of School Inputs: The Case of Flip Charts in
Kenya,” Journal of Development Economics 74, no. 1 (June 2004): 251–68.
he found no discernible improvement from decreasing class sizes: Abhijit Banerjee and Michael
Kremer, “Teacher-Student Ratios and School Performance in Udaipur, India: A Prospective
Evaluation” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2002).
parasitic infections that affect more than one billion people worldwide: “More than 1.5 billion
people, or 24 percent of the world’s population are infected with soil-transmitted helminth
infections worldwide.” (“Soil-transmitted Helminth Infections,” World Health Organization,
Fact sheet no. 366, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs366/en/).
“We didn’t expect deworming”: Private conversation with Michael Kremer, November 2014.
deworming reduced it by 25 percent: Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer, “Worms: Identifying
Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities,” Econometrica 72,
no. 1 (January 2004): 159–217.
Enabling a child to spend an extra day in school: Miguel and Kremer, “Worms.”
Deworming decreases all these risks: The extent of the health gains, however, is a matter of some
controversy. For discussion, see “Combination deworming (mass drug administration targeting
both schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminths),” GiveWell, December 2014,
http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/deworming.
compared to those who had not been dewormed: Sarah Baird, Joan Hamory Hicks, and Edward
Miguel, “Worms at Work: Long-run Impacts of Child Health Gains,” working paper, 2011.
deworming was such a powerful program: Michael Kremer, “The Origin and Evolution of
Randomized Evaluations in Development,” talk at J-PALs tenth-anniversary event, December
7, 2013, http://youtu.be/YGL6hPgpmDE.
more than forty million deworming treatments: “Where we work,” Evidence Action, Deworm the
World Initiative, http://www.evidenceaction.org/dewormtheworld.
an extreme example of a much more general trend: David Anderson of the Coalition for Evidence-
Based Policy comments that “1) the vast majority of social programs and services have not yet
been rigorously evaluated, and 2) of those that have been rigorously evaluated, most (perhaps 75
percent or more), including those backed by expert opinion and less-rigorous studies, turn out to
produce small or no effects, and, in some cases negative effects.” “Guest Post: Proven Programs
Are the Exception, Not the Rule,” GiveWell Blog, December 18, 2008,
http://blog.givewell.org/2008/12/18/guest-post-proven-programs-are-the-exception-not-the-
rule/.
If it weren’t for the independent investigations: In fact, the feedback that the still-operating
Roundabout Water Solutions gets from the schools they work with is very positive. The
headmaster of one school says: “I hereby use the opportunity to heartily thank you for the
round-about which you donate[d] to our school. You have enable[d] us to get access to water for
our learners as well as our community. . . . Allow me to also say may the Good Lord bless you
for services rendered by you. WATER IS LIFE !!!!!!!!!!” Why is the feedback that they receive
so positive, even though the PlayPump itself is of dubious value? A second letter provides a
clue: “We are so grateful for the clean running water. We used to drink with beasts in the river.
We are children of a struggling school / government having abandoned her work of providing
schools with basic services. We the learners of the aforesaid school can be very glad for any
other project like painting our buildings and/or our grade R to grade 6 are still learning in mud
structures, if we could get another sponsor, even if you could refer or recommend us to other
sponsors in this regard.” That is, it would be in the interest of schools to provide extensive
gratitude to Roundabout Water Solutions even if the PlayPump did no good at all. There’s little
cost to writing a thank-you letter, and if the recipients of PlayPumps do so, they might later
receive other gifts that are more useful.
This just shows the sheer difficulty of ensuring that you’re having an impact. Another
example comes from Canadian engineer Owen Scott, who wrote: “Each time I’ve visited a
PlayPump, I’ve always found the same scene: a group of women and children struggling to spin
it by hand so they can draw water. I’ve never found anyone playing on it. But, as soon as the
foreigner with a camera comes out (aka me), kids get excited. And when they get excited, they
start playing. Within five minutes, the thing looks like a crazy success.” (“The Playpump III
—‘The challenge of good inquiry,’” Owen in Malawi (blog), November 3, 2009,
http://thoughtsfrommalawi.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/playpump-iii-challenge-of-taking-
photos.html). That is, you’ll get positive feedback from installing PlayPumps almost no matter
how good or bad it is.
“deworming is probably the least sexy development program there is”: Private conversation with
Grace Hollister, June 2014.
I helped to develop the idea of effective altruism: Toby and I were both heavily influenced by Peter
Singers arguments for the moral importance of giving to fight poverty, made in “Famine,
Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 229–43 and The
Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009). On
the basis of his arguments, we both made commitments to donate everything we earn above
£20,000 per year—about £1 million pounds each over our careers, or 50 percent of our lifetime
earnings. Because we were putting so much of our own money on the line, the importance of
spending that money as effectively as possible seemed imperative. Peter Singer has since
become a powerful advocate for effective altruism: see The Most Good You Can Do: How
Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (New Haven, CT: Yale University,
2015).
(the number of hours you typically work in your life): If you work forty hours per week, fifty weeks a
year for forty years that’s exactly 80,000 hours. For many careers, the real number of hours
worked will be quite a bit more than that.
ONE
The term came from a popular statistic: Dawn Turner Trice, “How the 1 Percent Live, and Give,”
Chicago Tribune, December 29, 2011; Social Security Administration, “Measures of Central
Tendency for Wage Data,” http://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html. In an effort to avoid
technical vocabulary whenever possible, throughout this book I use “typical” to refer to
“median,” and “average” to refer to “mean.”
while typical household income: Congressional Budget Office, Trends in the Distribution of
Household Income Between 1979 and 2007, October 2011,
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/10-25-HouseholdIncome_0.pdf.
“probably higher than in any other society”: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 265.
Consider this graph of global income distribution: The data on world income distribution is drawn
from several sources. The figures for between the richest 1 percent and the richest 21 percent are
based on microdata from national household surveys carried out in 2008, kindly provided by
Branko Milanovic. The figures for the poorest 73 percent are based on the 2008 data from
PovcalNet (http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/index.htm?1), adjusted based on the
approximation that the surveys covered unbiased samples of the poorest 80 percent of the
world’s population. The figure of $70,000 for the top 0.1 percent is from Milanovic’s book The
Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York:
Basic Books, 2011). All figures have been adjusted for the Consumer Price Index measure of
inflation. To find out how rich you are, you can use the Giving What We Can calculator at:
http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i.
That spike goes off the chart: According to Equilar, the data provider for The New York Times, the
highest-paid CEO in 2014 was Charif Souki, president and CEO of Cheniere Energy, who took
home $141,949,280 (“Equilar 200 Highest-Paid CEO Pay Ranking Released,”
http://www.equilar.com/nytimes/the-new-york-times-200-highest-paid-ceos). Assuming that the
distance on the page between $0 and $100,000 is 2 inches (the next graph has the y axis
labeled), the spike would be 2,839 inches, or 237 feet. At ten feet per story, that’s more than
twenty-three stories high. That’s only looking at income, however. If we included changes in net
wealth on this graph, the spike would be considerably longer again. In 2014, the person with the
greatest gain in net wealth was Zhang Changhong, whose wealth increased by $982.5 million
(“The World’s Billionaires,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#tab:overall; “#864
Zhang Changhong,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/zhang-changhong/; true as of
December 9, 2014). If we put him on this graph, the spike would be 1,638 feet, a full four
hundred feet taller than the Empire State Building.
the typical income for working individuals: Social Security Administration, “Measures of central
tendency for wage data.”
that’s 1.22 billion people who earn less than $1.50 per day: “Poverty Overview,” World Bank,
http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview. This figure is true as of 2010. The
extreme poverty line is usually expressed as $1.25 per day. However, that’s $1.25 per day in
2005 prices. In order to make the figure more easily understandable, I’ve updated the figure in
line with inflation: $1.50 in 2014 prices is approximately the same as $1.25 in 2005 prices.
they live on an amount of money equivalent to what $1.50 could buy in the United States: Martin
Ravallion, Shaohua Chen, and Prem Sangraula, “Dollar a Day Revisited,” Policy research
working paper 4620 (World Bank, May 2008). Extreme poverty is generally understood as
referring to earnings below $1.25 per day in 2005 prices, or equivalently, as earnings below a
dollar per day in 1996 prices.
According to the way these figures are calculated: “Millennium Development Goal Indicators,”
United Nations Statistics Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations,
http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Metadata.aspx?IndicatorId=0&SeriesId=580.
in poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa it is only fifty-six years: “Life Expectancy at Birth, Total
(Years),” World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN/countries/LS-ZF-
XN?display=graph&hootPostID=cc8d300b9308f8acab94418eff2132ac.
Professors Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo: “The Economic Lives of the Poor,” Journal of
Economic Perspectives 21, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 141–67.
I’ll discuss just one method: The reliability of this method is discussed in Alan B. Krueger and David
A. Schkade, “The Reliability of Subjective Well-being Measures,” Journal of Public Economics
92, no. 8–9 (August 2008): 1,833–45.
Estimates via other methods: For an overview of these methods, see Ben Groom and David
Maddison, “Non-identical Quadruplets: Four New Estimates of the Elasticity of Marginal Utility
for the UK,” London School of Economics and Political Science, Grantham Research Institute
on Climate Change for the Envornment, working paper no. 121, August 2013.
Their results are given in this graph: Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Subjective Well-Being
and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?” American Economic Review 103, no. 3 (May
2013): 598–604. In this graph, each line represents how levels of subjective well-being within a
country change with changes in income. For example, a Brazilian earning $3,000 per year will,
on average, report a score of 6.5 in life satisfaction, whereas a Brazilian earning $8,000 will on
average report a score of 7. Note that the same income level is associated to different levels of
reported life satisfaction in different countries. Nonetheless, it remains true for all countries that,
as incomes rise, so does life satisfaction. The graph is plotted on a logarithmic scale: each
increment on the horizontal axis represents a doubling of income. The graph thus shows that it
takes increasingly more income to attain an increase in subjective well-being.
Subjective well-being is measured by asking subjects to rate how satisfied they are with
their lives as a whole. Although this is one accepted measure of happiness, it is not the only one.
An alternative way of measuring how happy people are, known as the experience sampling
method, involves asking subjects to rate how well they are feeling at the present moment. See
Reed Larson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Experience Sampling Method,” New
Directions for Methodology of Social and Behavioral Science 15 (March 1983): 41–56. An
advantage of the experience sampling method over reports of subjective well-being is that it
does not ask subjects to recollect and aggregate past experience—tasks which humans are not
very good at. See Barbara L. Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman, “Duration Neglect in
Retrospective Evaluations of Affective Episodes,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 65, no. 1 (July 1993): 45–55. Using this method, it’s been found that with more than
a household income of $75,000—which, given the average US household size of 2.5 people,
equals a personal income of $30,000—additional income makes people no happier. This method
would therefore considerably strengthen my conclusion: for many people, giving up additional
money is of no loss, in terms of happiness, at all.
the 100x Multiplier: One point to clarify—the 100x Multiplier refers to the discrepancy in the benefit
of one dollar to you as a member of an affluent country versus the benefit of one dollar to
someone in extreme poverty. That doesn’t yet entail, however, that we should prefer to give one
dollar to someone in extreme poverty rather than ninety-nine dollars to the typical US citizen.
This is because increases in income have effects on the wider economy. If I give ninety-nine
dollars to Jo Bloggs in the United States, doing so benefits her, but it also benefits others, such
as the people who Jo Bloggs buys goods from using that money (and these others may live in
other, much poorer, countries). The same is true of the dollar given to the person in extreme
poverty. But, importantly, nothing I’ve said so far shows that the ratio of the benefits from those
wider effects is also 100:1. That’s why we can’t yet conclude that it does a hundred times as
much good in general to give one dollar to the extreme poor than to give one dollar to someone
in an affluent country. We can just conclude that, when thinking about me versus the person in
extreme poverty (considered in isolation from the rest of the world), giving the extremely poor
person one dollar provides one hundred times as large a benefit as giving me one dollar.
For those of us living in rich countries: Note that the figure of one hundred is a baseline. I believe
that if we try hard, we should be able to do even more good for even less personal cost. This is
for two reasons. First, we’ve only looked at one problem: global poverty. As discussed in
chapter ten, there may be even better opportunities for helping others, in which case the 100x
Multiplier is an underestimate. Second, while I just described giving in terms of choosing
between a benefit to yourself or others, that’s not a good way of thinking about it because giving
benefits the giver as well as the receiver. If anything, my life has become happier since I’ve
started donating some of my income. That’s the upside of the “warm glow” effect. Indeed,
academic studies suggest I’m not alone. In one case, experimental subjects ended up more
satisfied when they were given money and told to use that money to benefit others, than when
they were told to use that money to benefit themselves. (See Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin, and
Michael Norton, “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness,” Science 319, no. 5,870
[March 21, 2008]: 1,687–8.) So in fact we should expect that, if we focus on the most effective
activities, the benefits to others will be greater and the costs to ourselves will be less than the
100x Multiplier would suggest. (For an overview, see Andreas Mogensen, “Giving without
Sacrifice? The Relationship between Income, Happiness, and Giving,” unpublished paper,
http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/files/attachments/giving-without-
sacrifice.pdf.)
In a mere two hundred years: Louis Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson, “What Was the U.S. GDP
Then?” MeasuringWorth, 2014, http://www.measuringworth.com/usgdp/, accessed July 2014.
this graph of gross domestic product per person: Angus Maddison, “Statistics on world population,
GDP and per capita GDP, 1–2008 AD,” University of Groningen,
http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/content.shtml.
For almost all of human history: See also Maddison’s Contours of the World Economy 12030 AD
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University, 2007).
more than half of the world: Using the data from the Global Income Distribution graph, given on
page 16.
transform the lives of thousands of people: For further discussion of global inequality and economic
progress over time, see Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots, and Gregory Clark, A
Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University,
2007).
TWO
The problems in Rwanda began to build up decades before: For a summary of the main events of the
Rwandan genocide, see Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
(New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1995), 119–22. A comprehensive discussion may be found in
Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University,
1995).
“There were so many, and they kept coming”: James Orbinski, An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian
Action for the Twenty-first Century (New York: Walker, 2008), 226.
How many people benefit . . . : Is this just utilitarianism? No. Utilitarianism is the view, roughly
speaking, that one is always required to do whatever will maximize the sum total of well-being,
no matter what. The similarity between effective altruism and utilitarianism is that they both
focus on improving people’s lives, but this is a part of any reasonable moral view. In other
respects, effective altruism can depart significantly from utilitarianism. Effective altruism
doesn’t claim that you are morally required to do as much good as you can, only that you should
use at least a significant proportion of your time or money to help others. Effective altruism
doesn’t say that you may violate people’s rights for the greater good. Effective altruism can
recognize sources of value other than happiness, like freedom and equality. In general, effective
altruism is a much broader and more ecumenical philosophy than utilitarianism.
the “fifty dollars for five books” figure is accurate: Charities’ claims about what your donation will
buy are often highly misleading, representing a best-case figure, or a figure that doesn’t take
into account “hidden” costs. I talk about this more in chapter 7. Moreover, even if it does cost
fifty dollars to buy and provide five books, it’s not really true that if you donate fifty dollars you
will cause five additional books to be bought. United Way of New York City spends its money
on a wide variety of different programs, spending $55 million in total in 2013. Your fifty dollars
will be added to its total income and, in effect, will be distributed across all its program areas.
For the purpose of this discussion, however, I assume that an additional fifty dollars donated to
United Way of New York City will provide an extra five books.
provide a larger benefit by saving five lives: Some philosophers have argued that, in cases of this sort,
we should decide by tossing a coin, or by using a lottery that gives more weight to the greater
number. See, for example, John M. Taurek, “Should the Numbers Count?” Philosophy and
Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (Summer 1977), 293–316, and F. M. Kamm, Morality, Mortality, Volume
I: Death and Whom to Save from It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). I am not
persuaded by these arguments. If we think that all people matter equally, we should save more
people rather than fewer. As the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit writes: “Why do we save the
larger number? Because we do give equal weight to saving each. Each counts for one. That is
why more count for more.” (“Innumerate Ethics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 7, no. 4
[Summer 1978], 301.)
For health benefits, economists: In this discussion I’ve left out the most common metric used by
economists to measure harms and benefits, which is called willingness to pay. According to this
metric, the size of a benefit of something to a person is measured by how much that person is
willing to pay for it. If Jones is willing to pay a dollar for an apple, but Smith is willing to pay
ten dollars for an apple, then, if we used this metric, we would conclude that giving Smith an
apple provides ten times as great a benefit as providing Jones with an apple. The reason I don’t
rely on this metric is that it treats an additional dollar as being of equal worth no matter who has
it. But this is clearly wrong. If Smith is a multimillionaire, whereas Jones is poor, then one
dollar will be much less valuable to Smith than a dollar is to Jones. This problem becomes
particularly severe if we try to compare activities that benefit people in rich countries with
activities that benefit people in poor countries. For example, Americans are on average willing
to pay fifteen times as much as Bangladeshis to reduce their risk of dying by 1 percent (John
Broome, Weighing Lives, [Oxford, UK: Oxford University, 2004], 263). If we used the
willingness-to-pay metric, we’d have to conclude that American lives are worth fifteen times as
much as Bangladeshi lives. But that’s clearly wrong. The real reason Americans are willing to
pay much more to avoid risks of death than Bangladeshis is simply that they have much more
money that they can spend.
people on average rate a life with untreated AIDS: “Global Burden of Disease 2004 Update:
Disability Weights for Diseases and Conditions,” World Health Organization,
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/GBD2004_DisabilityWeights.pdf.
official lists of quality-of-life estimates: Estimates are provided in Joshua A. Salomon et al.,
“Common Values in Assessing Health Outcomes from Disease and Injury: Disability Weights
Measurement Study for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010,” Lancet 380 (2012) table 2,
2,135–7; available at http://www.jefftk.com/gbdweights2010.pdf; the 2004 estimates (created
using a slightly different methodology) are available at
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/GBD2004_DisabilityWeights.pdf. In both
articles, the authors talk about disability-adjusted life years, or “DALYs”: very approximately,
one DALY is just the negative of one QALY. (So it’s good to gain QALYs and bad to gain
DALYs.) QALYs tend to be used in domestic settings, whereas DALYs are used in global
health. Note that the disability weight estimates should be taken as exactly that: estimates, which
may be too high or too low in a given context. For that reason, we shouldn’t slavishly follow
explicit estimates of cost per QALY that rely on these numbers; instead we should think of them
as one important tool in our attempt to do the most good.
quality of life with AIDS: In this example I use the disability weights from the 2004 WHO Global
Burden of Disease, available at
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/GBD2004_DisabilityWeights.pdf.
academics continue to debate: An overview of the QALY, and issues in defining it and measuring
how bad different conditions are, is given in Milton C. Weinstein, George Torrance, and Alistair
McGuire, “QALYs: The Basics,” Value in Health 12, supplement 1 (2009): S5–S9. Note that
these problems should not cause us to reject entirely the attempt to think in terms of quantitative
harms and benefits. David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk
at the University of Cambridge, puts the point nicely: “Of course the QALY approach is not
perfect, but some mechanism is needed to provide consistent comparisons across different
medical interventions, based on aggregate benefit and cost. Otherwise the money could go to
those with the most appealing emotional argument.” (“Experts Dismiss Claims NHS Drug
Decisions Are ‘Flawed,’” National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, January 25, 2013,
https://www.nice.org.uk/news/article/experts-dismiss-claims-nhs-drug-decisions-are-flawed.)
We could use these methods: This has been suggested by both philosophers and economists: see, for
example, Broome, Weighing Lives, 261.
$50,000 to train and provide: See “FAQ,” Guide Dogs of America,
http://www.guidedogsofamerica.org/1/mission/#cost.
a critical piece on effective altruism: Ken Berger and Robert M. Penna, “The Elitist Philanthropy of
So-Called Effective Altruism,” Stanford Social Innovation Review (blog), November 25, 2013,
available at
http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/the_elitist_philanthropy_of_so_called_effective_altruism.
They objected that: They clarified this as their position in personal communication, November 2013.
I came across the Fistula Foundation: More information about the Fistula Foundation and about
obstetric fistula can be found at www.fistulafoundation.org.
THREE
“aid is malignant”: Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better
Way for Africa (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 47.
“So there we have it”: Ibid.
wrote a book: William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest
Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin, 2006).
“The other tragedy”: Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 4.
The total annual economic output of the world is $87 trillion: World GDP for 2013 was $87.25
trillion in terms of purchasing power parity, and $74.31 trillion in nominal terms. Central
Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, 2014, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-
world-factbook/geos/xx.html.
the United States spends about $800 billion on social security: Congressional Budget Office,
“Monthly Budget Review—Summary for Fiscal Year 2013,” November 7, 2013,
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/44716-%20MBR_FY2013_0.pdf.
a decade of cosmetics sales amounts to $1.7 trillion: Perry Romanowsky, “A Cosmetic Industry
Overview for Cosmetic Chemists,” Cosmetics Corner, April 14, 2014,
http://chemistscorner.com/a-cosmetic-market-overview-for-cosmetic-chemists/.
lost track of $2.3 trillion: Aleen Sirgany, “The War On Waste,” CBS Evening News, January 29,
2002.
the average population of sub-Saharan Africa during that time period: The total population of sub-
Saharan African was 177 million in 1950 and 815 million in 2010. (Dominique Tabutin and
Bruno Schoumaker, “The Demography of Sub-Saharan Africa from the 1950s to the 2000s: A
Survey of Changes and a Statistical Assessment,” Population 59, no. 3–4 [2004], 525.)
Assuming a constant growth rate of 2.58 percent, we sum the estimated population for every
year in this period and take the mean.
Now it’s 56 years: Tabutin and Schoumaker, “Sub-Saharan Africa,” 538; “Sub-Saharan Africa,”
World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org/region/sub-saharan-africa.
the eradication of smallpox: For details, see David Koplow, Smallpox: The Fight to Eradicate a
Global Scourge (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), and D. A. Henderson, Smallpox: The
Death of a Disease—The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer (New York:
Prometheus, 2009).
smallpox killed 1.5 to 3 million people every year: Koplow, Smallpox, 1; Henderson, Smallpox, 13.
The eradication of smallpox is one success story from aid: I owe this argument for the cost-
effectiveness of aid on average to Toby Ord. Critics may question whether the smallpox
campaign was a form of overseas development aid (ODA) understood as the flow of funds from
donor to recipient nations. But note that smallpox is usually included as a success story in
studies about the effectiveness of aid, even those written by aid skeptics. See, e.g., Roger C.
Riddell, Does Foreign Aid Really Work? (Oxford: Oxford University, 2007), 184. More to the
point, the WHO Smallpox Eradication Unit was partially funded by official aid funds:
international donors supplied one-third of the funding for the program. And it appears that these
contributions played a key role in the success of the program, which would probably not have
succeeded without international funding (Ruth Levine, Case Studies in Global Health: Millions
Saved [Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2007], 1–8). But even if we credit foreign aid with
only one-third of the benefits that resulted from the smallpox eradication program, that would
still leave us with at least a life saved per $225,000 spent in aid.
The total aid spending of all countries: Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 4.
if doing so costs less than about $7 million per life saved: Binyamin Appelbaum, “As U.S. Agencies
Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret,” The New York Times, February 17, 2011.
it still would have prevented a death: The die-hard aid critic might suggest that non–health aid hasn’t
just been ineffective, but that it’s been downright harmful. However, if so, we need to ask just
how harmful it’s been. Even just given the example of smallpox, in order for foreign aid to have
been harmful overall, the costs must have exceeded 122 million lives lost—which, as we noted,
is greater than that of all war. No respectable development economist would suggest that foreign
aid has been this harmful. For example, Professor Adrian Wood at the University of Oxford’s
Department for International Development comments that: “The one thing we can be clear about
is the evidence that almost certainly aid does not reduce growth.” (Select Committee of
Economic Affairs, House of Lords, The Economic Impact and Effectiveness of Development
Aid: 6th report of session 201012 (London: Stationery Office, 2012) 23, n. 45.
Moreover, studies published since Moyo’s and Easterly’s books indicate a positive
relationship between aid and economic growth. (See Arndt Channing, Sam Jones, and Finn
Tarp, “Aid, Growth, and Development: Have We Come Full Circle?” Journal of Globalization
and Development, vol. 1, no. 2 [2010], and Camelia Minoiu and Sanjay G. Reddy,
“Development Aid and Economic Growth: A Positive Long-Run Relation,” Quarterly Review of
Economics and Finance, vol. 50, no. 2 [2010].) This is so even, though, given the small size of
aid that flows to poor countries, one would not expect a detectable impact on economic growth.
As Owen Barder of the Center for Global Development comments: “Given the modest volumes
of aid, we should not expect an impact on growth [that] is bright enough to shine through the
statistical fog.” (Select Committee of Economic Affairs, The Economic Impact and
Effectiveness of Development Aid, 23, n. 42.)
“there are well-known and striking donor success stories”: William Easterly, “Can the West Save
Africa?” Journal of Economic Literature 47, no. 2 (June 2009): 406–7.
“even those of us labeled as ‘aid critics’”: William Easterly, “Some Cite Good News on Aid,” Aid
Watch, February 18, 2009, http://aidwatchers.com/2009/02/some-cite-good-news-on-aid/.
Look at the following graph: This graph uses the same data as for the one in chapter one.
most people live in a small number of cities: For this and the other examples mentioned, see Mark E.
J. Newman, “Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipfs Law,” Contemporary Physics 46, no.
5 (2005), 323–51.
The effectiveness of different aid activities forms a fat-tailed distribution: Ramanan Laxminarayan,
Jeffrey Chow, and Sonbol A. Shahid-Salles, “Intervention Cost-Effectiveness: Overview of
Main Messages,” in Dean Jamison et al. (eds.), Disease Control Priorities in Developing
Countries, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University, 2006), 41–42.
the estimated cost-effectiveness of different health programs: Laxminarayan, Chow, and Shahid-
Salles, “Intervention Cost-Effectiveness,” 62 (for Kaposi’s sarcoma); Omar Galárraga et al.,
“HIV Prevention Cost-Effectiveness: A Systematic Review” (for condom promotion and
antiretroviral therapy); “Against Malaria Foundation (AMF),” GiveWell, November 2014,
http://www.givewell.org/files/DWDA%202009/Interventions/Nets/GiveWell%20cost-
effectiveness%20analysis%20of%20LLIN%20distribution%202014.xls (for distribution of bed
nets). To be conservative, I’ve rounded down GiveWell’s estimate of QALYs per $1,000
provided by bed-net distribution through donations to the Against Malaria Foundation (they
give six estimates of the cost per QALY, the harmonic mean of which is $68.90). Their estimate
is also only an estimate of the QALYs per dollar as a result of prevention of death of children
under the age of five. It doesn’t take into account prevention of death of children over the age of
five, or prevention of illness. GiveWell are keen to emphasize, however, that these are only
estimates. The real number may be higher or lower than their model suggests.
costing less than the governments of the United States or the United Kingdom are willing to spend to
provide one QALY: Laxminarayan, Chow, and Shahid-Salles, “Intervention Cost-Effectiveness,”
62.
the cost to save a life in the developing world: “Against Malaria Foundation,” GiveWell.
FOUR
“I want to study medicine”: Private conversation with Greg Lewis, April 2014.
According to one study: Oliver Robinson, “Planning for a Fairer Future,” The Guardian, July 14,
2006.
“jobs that make a difference”: “5 More Do-Good Jobs You’ve Never Considered,” Oprah, April 19,
2012, http://www.oprah.com/money/Jobs-That-Make-a-Difference-in-the-World.
Which is more valuable: water or diamonds?: The apparent difficulty in answering this question is
known as the paradox of value. It was discussed by Nicolaus Copernicus and John Locke,
among others, but the most influential presentation appears in a passage of Adam Smith’s The
Wealth of Nations:
The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in
exchange; and, on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently
little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce anything;
scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value
in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.” (book
I, chapter 4)
why the cost of a gallon of water from the tap in New York City: “Residential Water Use,” New York
City Department of Environmental Protection,
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/residents/wateruse.shtml.
they are therefore scarce in the way that water isn’t: Diamonds aren’t, in fact, as rare as you might
think. They are so expensive because for most of the twentieth century the supply of them has
been artificially restricted by the De Beers monopoly, in order to keep prices high. For more
information, see Eric Goldschein, “The Incredible Story of How De Beers Created and Lost the
Most Powerful Monopoly Ever,” Business Insider, December 19, 2011,
http://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-de-beers-2011-12?op=1&IR=T.
the Tohoku region of Japan was hit: Richard Hindmarsh, ed., Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima
Daiichi: Social, Political and Environmental Issues (New York: Routledge, 2013); Kevin Voigt,
“Quake Moved Japan Coast 8 Feet, Shifted Earth’s Axis,” CNN, April 20, 2011.
an earthquake hit Haiti: Clarens Renois, “Haitians Angry Over Slow Aid,” The Age (Australia),
February 5, 2010; “Haiti Quake Death Toll Rises to 230,000,” BBC News, February 11, 2010.
the total international aid: Report of the United Nations in Haiti 2011, Chapter 7, www.onu-
haiti.org/Report2011/Chapter7.html; “Disaster donations top ¥520 billion,” Japan Times, March
8, 2012, p. 1. Haiti has continued to receive aid support; now the total pledged is $13.3 billion
(Office of the Special Envoy to Haiti, “International assistance to Haiti key facts as of December
2012”).
“The Japanese Red Cross Society”: “Japan and Pacific: Earthquake and Tsunami,” International
Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, information bulletin no. 2, March 12,
2011, p. 1.
it only raised $500 million in international aid: The various sources of international aid are listed at
“Reactions to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake,” Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_2008_Sichuan_earthquake.
For every death the Japanese earthquake caused: As mentioned in the text, $5 billion was raised for
the Japanese earthquake, which caused fifteen thousand deaths. $5 billion ÷ 15,000 $330,000.
for every person who dies from poverty-related causes worldwide: According to the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development, globally, $135 billion was spent on foreign aid in
2013 (Claire Provost, “Foreign Aid Reaches Record High,” The Guardian, April 8, 2014). US
private philanthropy is $37.3 billion (Carol Adelman, Jeremiah Norris, and Kacie Marano, The
Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances: 2010 [Washington, DC: Hudson Institute, 2010],
12). Non-US private philanthropy is $15.3 billion (Ibid., 41). This brings total overseas aid and
philanthropy to approximately $188 billion per year. A rough conservative estimate of total
poverty-related deaths can be determined by adding up from leading poverty-related causes of
death, giving 12.7 million poverty-related deaths (giving $15,000 of overseas aid and
philanthropy per poverty-related death). The causes of death I used in this calculation (with
corresponding number of deaths in parentheses) are: malnutrition (3.1 million); lower
respiratory infections (3.1 million); tuberculosis (1.5 million); HIV/AIDS (1.5 million);
diarrheal diseases (1.5 million); preterm birth complications (1.1 million); malaria (600,000);
maternal conditions (280,000). See World Health Organization, fact sheets nos. 94, 104, 310,
330, 348 360 (2014), and “Hunger Statistics,” World Food Programme, 2014,
http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats.
“emergency health interventions”: Claude de Ville de Goyet, Ricardo Zapata Marti, and Claudio
Osorio, “Natural Disaster Mitigation and Relief,” in Jamison, Disease Control Priorities, 1,153.
it costs about $50,000: See http://www.guidedogsofamerica.org/1/mission/#cost.
Not only is $50,000 enough: Matthew J. Burton and David C. W. Mabey, “The Global Burden of
Trachoma: A Review,” PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 3, no. 10 (October 27, 2009), e460.
The authors give estimates of cost per surgery ranging from $6.13 to $41; to be conservative,
I’ve rounded this up to $100. Even still, we should bear in mind that both of the cost for a guide
dog and the cost for a trachoma surgery are only estimates, and that the estimates for cost-
effectiveness of a given program in published articles or on charity’s websites may be more
optimistic than the real cost-effectiveness of programs when actually implemented. Correcting
for this won’t, however, change the central point.
Per year, $217 billion is spent on cancer treatment: “Breakaway: The Global Burden of Cancer—
Challenges and Opportunities,” The Economist, 2009, 25,
http://graphics.eiu.com/upload/eb/EIU_LIVESTRONG_Global_Cancer_Burden.pdf. This figure
does not include costs due to loss of productivity, which amount to $69 billion per year.
Malaria is responsible for 3.3 percent of QALYs lost worldwide: These figures come from the Global
Burden of Disease website, http://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/. The Global Burden of
Disease measures the health cost of different illnesses in “DALYs”: very approximately, these
are the same as QALYs, but where one QALY = one negative DALY. So it’s a good thing to gain
QALYS; it’s a bad thing to gain DALYs.
(It was eliminated from the United States in 1951): Margaret Humphreys, Malaria: Poverty, Race,
and Public Health in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2001), 140–54.
any program that provides one QALY for less than $50,000: Milton C. Weinstein, “How Much Are
Americans Willing to Pay for a Quality-Adjusted Life Year?” Medical Care 46, no. 4 (April
2008), 343–5; Scott D. Grosse, “Assessing Cost-Effectiveness in Healthcare: History of the
$50,000 per QALY Threshold,” Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research 8,
no. 2 (April 2008), 165–78; Chris P. Lee, Glenn M. Chertow, and Stefanos A. Zenios, “An
Empiric Estimate of the Value of Life: Updating the Renal Dialysis Cost Effectiveness
Standard,” Value in Health 12, no. 1 (January/February 2009), 80–87.
providing the same benefit in poor countries: “Combination Deworming (Mass Drug Administration
Targeting Both Schistosomiasis and Soil-transmitted Helminths),” GiveWell, December 2014.
This is what Greg did initially: Gregory Lewis, “How Much Good Does a Doctor Do?” unpublished
paper.
878,194 doctors in the United States: Aaron Young, Humayun J. Chaudhry, Jon V. Thomas, and
Michael Dugan, “A Census of Actively Licensed Physicians in the United States, 2012,”
Journal of Medical Regulation 99, no. 2 (2013), 11–24.
work by an epidemiologist named John Bunker: “The Role of Medical Care in Contributing to Health
Improvements within Societies,” International Journal of Epidemiology 30, no. 6 (December
2001), 1,260–3.
FIVE
“The 75 Best People in the World”: “The 75 Best People in the World,” Esquire, January 2012,
http://www.esquire.com/features/best-people-1009#slide-1.
Ohio-born doctor D. A. Henderson: For background, see D. A. Henderson and Petra Klepac,
“Lessons from the Eradication of Smallpox: An Interview with D. A. Henderson,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 368, no. 1,623 (August 5, 2013), 1–7.
Viktor Zhdanov, a Ukrainian virologist: For biographical details about Zdhanov, see Alice
Bukrinskaya, “In Memory of Victor Zhdanov,” Archives of Virology 121, no. 1–4 (1991), 237–
40.
“I avail myself of this occasion”: Cited in Frank Fenner, “Development of the Global Smallpox
Eradication Program,” in Smallpox and Its Eradication (Geneva: World Health Organization,
1988), 366–418.
the paramedic would have been able to do the same thing: Unlike in TV shows, in the real world,
paramedics are almost never able to restart someone’s heart using defibrillation. However, for
the purposes of the thought experiment, let’s assume that the defibrillation was certain to work.
an episode of Beyond Scared Straight: “Oakland County, Michigan,” Beyond Scared Straight, Season
2, Episode 2, A&E, 2011.
Nine high-quality studies: Anthony Petrosino, Carolyn Turpin-Petrosino, Meghan E. Hollis-Peel, and
Julia G. Lavenberg, “Scared Straight and Other Juvenile Awareness Programs for Preventing
Juvenile Delinquency: A Systematic Review,” Campbell Systematic Reviews 9, no. 5 (2013).
“The analyses show”: Ibid., 7.
In a separate study: Steve Aos, Roxanne Lieb, Jim Mayfield, Marna Miller, and Annie Pennucci,
“Benefits and Costs of Prevention and Early Intervention Programs for Youth,” Washington
State Institute for Public Policy, September 17, 2004,
http://www.wsipp.wa.gov/ReportFile/881/Wsipp_Benefits-and-Costs-of-Prevention-and-Early-
Intervention-Programs-for-Youth_Summary-Report.pdf.
(only one-third of kids): Petrosino, Turpin-Petrosino et al., “Scared Straight,” 31.
I suspect the apparent effectiveness of Scared Straight: Another part of the explanation may be that
juveniles are simply less likely to offend as they get older; this effect is well documented. See
Thomas P. Locke, Glenn M. Johnson, Kathryn Kirigin-Ramp, Jay D. Atwater, and Meg Gerrard,
“An Evaluation of a Juvenile Education Program in a State Penitentiary,” Evaluation Review 10,
no. 3 (June 1986), 282.
one hypothesis is that the inmates: Thomas Dishion, Joan McCord, François Poulin, “When
Interventions Harm. Peer Groups and Problem Behavior,” American Psychologist 54, no. 9
(September 1999), 755–64.
The average salary of a doctor in the UK: “Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2013 Provisional
Results,” Office of National Statistics, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-
tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77328216. Average salaries are considerable higher in the United
States, at about $250,000 per year. See “Occupational Outlook Handbook: Physicians and
Surgeons,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/physicians-and-
surgeons.htm#tab-5.
By pursuing a particularly lucrative specialty: For discussion, see Ryan Carey, “Increasing Your
Earnings as a Doctor,” 80,000 Hours, July 17, 2014, https://80000hours.org/2014/06/increasing-
your-earnings-as-a-doctor/#fn:3.
(the average is about 2 percent): “Charitable Giving in America: Some Facts and Figures,” National
Center for Charitable Statistics, http://nccs.urban.org/nccs/statistics/Charitable-Giving-in-
America-Some-Facts-and-Figures.cfm.
SIX
“The possibility of a severe accident occurring”: Phred Dvorak and Peter Landers, “Japanese Plant
Had Barebones Risk Plan,” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2011.
“the root cause of the Fukushima crisis”: Mari Yamaguchi, “Gov’t Panel: Nuke Plant Operator Still
Stumbling,” Associated Press, July 23, 2012.
one ecstasy session: Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, MDMA (“Ecstasy”): A Review of Its
Harms and Classification Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (London: Home Office, 2009).
going scuba diving: Richard D. Vann and Michael A. Lang (eds.), Recreational Diving Fatalities
Workshops Proceedings, April 810, 2010 (Durham: Divers Alert Network, 2011),
http://www.diversalertnetwork.org/files/Fatalities_Proceedings.pdf.
going skydiving: “Skydiving safety,” United States Parachute Association,
http://www.uspa.org/AboutSkydiving/SkydivingSafety/tabid/526/Default.aspx.
Flying in a space shuttle: Out of 833 crew members on space shuttle flights (with some flying
multiple times), fourteen people have died (Tariq Malik, “NASAs Space Shuttle by the
Numbers: 30 Years of a Spaceflight Icon,” Space.com, July 21, 2011,
http://www.space.com/12376-nasa-space-shuttle-program-facts-statistics.html).
climb Mount Everest beyond base camp: Firth, PG, et al., “Mortality on Mount Everest, 1921–2006:
descriptive study,” BMJ, 337 (2008), 1,430.
The same concept: Richard Wilson, “Analyzing the Daily Risks of Life,” Technology Review 81, no.
4 (February 1979), 45.
Whereas an hour on a train: Many of these facts also appear in the excellent book The Norm
Chronicles: Stories and Numbers About Danger and Death by Michael Blastland and David
Spiegelhalter (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
Psychologists have found: See George F. Loewenstein, Eike U. Weber, Christopher K. Hsee, and Ned
Welch, “Risk as Feelings,” Psychological Bulletin 127, no. 2 (March 2001), 267–86.
“Nobody in their right mind”: “Your FREAK-quently asked questions, answered,” Freakonomics
(blog), January 20, 2011, http://freakonomics.com/2011/01/20/freakonomics-radio-your-freak-
quently-asked-questions-answered/.
the odds of an individual vote swaying the outcome of the 2008 presidential election: Andrew
Gelman, Nate Silver, and Aaron Edlin, “What Is the Probability Your Vote Will Make a
Difference?” Economic Inquiry 50, no. 2 (April 2012), 321–6. The authors reached this estimate
by using election forecasts to calculate the probability that (1) a given state is necessary for an
electoral college to win, and that (2) the election for that state is exactly tied—the two quantities
that jointly determine whether a single vote is decisive in a US presidential election.
Although this $1,000-per-citizen figure is hypothetical: This is also the hypothetical figure used in
Aaron S. Edlin, Andrew Gelman, and Noah Kaplan, “Vote for Charity’s Sake,” Economists’
Voice 5, no. 6 (October 2008).
economists estimate: F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk, Compassion, by the Pound: The
Economics of Farm Animal Welfare (New York: Oxford University, 2011), 223.
Professors of political science at Harvard and Stockholm Universities: Andreas Madestam, Daniel
Shoag, Stan Veuger, and David Yanagizawa-Drott, “Do Political Protests Matter? Evidence from
the Tea Party Movement,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, no. 4 (2013), 1,633–85.
“expect to fail”: Private conversation with Laura Brown, July 2014.
work by my organization 80,000 Hours: Carl Shulman, “How Hard Is It to Become Prime Minister of
the United Kingdom?” 80,000 Hours, February 17, 2012, https://80000hours.org/2012/02/how-
hard-is-it-to-become-prime-minister-of-the-united-kingdom/.
The way we estimated this: Paul Christiano, “An Estimate of the Expected Influence of Becoming a
Politician,” 80,000 Hours, February 12, 2014, https://80000hours.org/2014/02/an-estimate-of-
the-expected-influence-of-becoming-a-politician/.
£732 billion: “Total Managed Expenditure is expected to be around £732 billion in 2014–15,” Budget
2014, 5
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/293759/37630_B
udget_2014_Web_Accessible.pdf.
influence by half: Our belief that these assumptions are conservative is based on surveys of the
British politics literature and discussions with Westminster sources. Qualitative discussions of
the roles of different aspects of the political system (such as Parliament, civil service, and
international bodies) in determining policy, on which these estimates are partially based, can be
found in: Dennis Kavanagh, et al., British Politics: Continuities and Change, 5th edition,
(Oxford: Oxford University, 2006); Martin Smith, The Core Executive in Britain (London:
Palgrave MacMillan, 1999); Gillian Peele, Governing the UK: British Politics in the 21st
century, 4th edition (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004).
in part on the basis: As discussed in chapter nine, considerations like “personal fit” are also very
important when considering choice of a career.
“it is extremely likely that human influence”: IPCC, “Summary for policymakers,” in Climate
Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University,
2014), 3.
“97.1 percent endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming”: John
Cook et al., “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific
Literature,” Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 2 (April–June 2013). Even people whom the
media label as “climate skeptics” agree. “It is quite odd that so much of the argument on global
warming had been on whether or not a human influence can be seen,” wrote Bjørn Lomborg,
perhaps the most famous “climate skeptic,” in the chapter on global warming of his
controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist: “Even with lots of countervailing (negative
feedback) climate effects, it would seem unlikely that there would not be some form of warming
coming from increased CO2.” (The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the
World [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2001], 265–6.) Later, he made his position even
clearer, stating that climate change is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world
today.” (Quoted in Matthew Moore, “Climate ‘Skeptic’ Bjørn Lomborg Now Believes Global
Warming Is One of World’s Greatest Threats,” Telegraph, August 31, 2010.) What I’m saying
here in this secant is not that the jury is out on climate change, but that even if it were, we should
still be taking action.
millions of lives will be lost: The World Health Organization estimates that without significant action
to reduce carbon emissions, climate change will be causing approximately 250,000 additional
deaths due to climate change per year between 2030 and 2050. These deaths are primarily
caused through climate change’s impacts on heat exposure in elderly people, diarrhea, malaria,
and childhood undernutrition. See Simon Hales, Sari Kovats, Simon Lloyd, and Diarmid
Campbell-Lendrum, eds., Quantitative Risk Assessment of the Effects of Climate Change on
Selected Causes of Death, 2030s and 2050s, World Health Organization, 2014,
http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/134014/1/9789241507691_eng.pdf?ua=1.
the world economy will lose trillions of dollars: Estimates of the economic costs of climate change
range from a benefit to the global economy of a couple percent of GDP, to a decrease of 20
percent of global GDP or more. Most estimates suggest climate change will damage the global
economy by a few percent of global GDP. (Richard S. J. Tol and Gary W. Yohe, “A Review of
the Stern Review,” World Economics 7, no. 4 [December 2006].) As global GDP is currently
approximately $80 trillion and growing (CIA World Factbook, 2014,
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html), the damage from
climate change to the global economy is expected to be trillions of dollars.
the costs are much lower: Nicolas Stern et al., The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2007).
low-carbon technology: Some of the money invested in low-carbon technology would have been
beneficial, such as the investments into solar photovoltaics, which are a useful technology for
producing electricity in remote regions, and in the future potentially for generating electricity at
low cost. Other investments, such as investments into carbon capture and storage technologies
to bury carbon dioxide emissions under the ground, would probably have been less beneficial in
the absence of climate change (though these investments would probably still have had some
positive impact in improving our ability to do activities such as enhanced oil recovery).
slowed economic progress a bit: The Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change estimates
that mitigating climate change would cost approximately 1 percent of GDP every year, which is
money that we would otherwise be spending on other things, which currently would be
approximately one trillion dollars per year. See Stern et al., Economics of Climate Change.
half a billionth of a degree Celsius: Current estimates of the warming caused per trillion metric tons
of carbon emitted are between 0.8 and 2.5ºC (IPCC, Climate Change 2013: The Physical
Science Basis, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 1,033). The average emissions
per capita for someone living in the United States are approximately five metric tons of carbon
(Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center,
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/top2009.cap). Current life expectancy in the United States is
about eighty years (World Health Organization, World Health Statistics 2013 [Geneva: World
Health Organization, 2013]). If we assume lifetime emissions at this average rate, then an
average US citizen would contribute approximately half a billionth of degree of warming.
that increase of half a billionth of a degree: Scientists are unable to say whether a given extreme
weather event was caused by climate change, but they can say whether a given event was made
more likely by climate change. So we should expect a small increase in carbon emissions will
slightly increase the chances of certain types of extreme weather events occurring. See IPCC,
Climate Change 2013, 867–952.
the expected harm of raising global temperatures: The amount by which your individual emissions
would increase the chance of a given extreme event occurring is very small. However, there are
many possible extreme events that could occur as a result of increased climate change, and so
the chances of your individual emissions causing an extreme event at some point are
nonnegligible.
Most estimate that climate change will cost only a couple percent of global gross domestic product
(GDP): Estimates of the economic costs of climate change range from benefiting the global
economy by a couple percent of GDP to decreasing it by 20 percent of global GDP or more.
Typical estimates suggest climate change will damage the global economy by a couple percent
of global GDP (Tol and Yohe, “A Review of the Stern Review”).
Economic growth per person over the last decade: Gross world product has grown at rate of 3.5
percent over the past nine years (“World Economic Outlook Databases,” International Monetary
Fund, 2014, http://www.imf.org/external/ns/cs.aspx?id=28), while the global population growth
rate over this period has been 1.2 percent (United Nations Department of Economic and Social
Affairs Population Division, “World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision,” 2012,
http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-
Data/EXCEL_FILES/1_Population/WPP2012_POP_F01_1_TOTAL_POPULATION_BOTH_S
EXES.XLS). Dividing gross world product growth by global population growth yields an
average economic growth rate per person of 2.2 percent.
one metric ton of methane produces as much warming as twenty-one metric tons of carbon dioxide:
“Overview of Greenhouse Gases,” United States Environmental Protection Agency,
http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html.
the social cost of one metric ton of CO
2eq
is about thirty-two dollars: The median of 311 published
estimates of the social cost of carbon is $116 per metric ton of carbon (Richard Tol, “An
Updated Analysis of Carbon Dioxide Emission Abatement as a Response to Climate Change,”
2012, http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/climateemissionsabatement.pdf).
Note that this is measured in metric tons of carbon, and so to convert to metric tons of carbon
dioxide we need to multiply this figure by the ratio of their relative molecular masses, 12/44,
giving a social cost of carbon of thirty-two dollars per metric ton of carbon dioxide. If we were
to use the mean rather than the median estimate, we would get a social cost of carbon of forty-
eight dollars per metric ton of CO
2
.
The average American emits about twenty-one metric tons of CO
2eq
every year: This figure does not
include emissions from land-use change or forestry. (World Resources Institute, 2014,
http://cait2.wri.org/wri/Country%20GHG%20Emissions?
indicator[]=Total%20GHG%20Emissions%20Excluding%20Land-
Use%20Change%20and%20Forestry%20Per%20Capita&year[]=2011&sortDir=desc&chartTyp
e=geo).
people in the United Kingdom: Department of Energy and Climate Change, “2013 UK greenhouse
gas emissions, final figures.”
even acknowledges a small risk of catastrophic climate change: I’m using the term catastrophic
climate change to refer to warming significantly beyond the usual 2 to 4ºC range. Most
scenarios in which this occurs involve one or more tipping points in the climate system that may
increase global warming more than otherwise anticipated. We should distinguish this from
runaway climate change, which astronomers refer to as a situation where a planet such as Earth
heats so much that the water on the planet boils off. That’s considerably more extreme (and very
considerably less likely) than what I’m referring to by catastrophic climate change.
the consequences would be disastrous: The chances of climate change bringing an end to the human
race are extremely small, but the consequences of such an extinction event would be so severe
as to warrant further thinking. In order for runaway climate change to happen, a number of
feedbacks in the climate system would need to push temperatures considerably higher than we
expect. The sorts of feedbacks that could contribute include: frozen methane trapped in melting
arctic ground ice; extensive forest fires in rain forests; frozen methane on deep-sea beds; and ice
melting and revealing darker ground, which absorbs more sunlight. To cause human extinction,
this extreme climate change would probably need to give rise to societal collapse, perhaps
triggered by water or crop shortages. The situation could be exacerbated if geoengineering,
previously used to cool the planet, was discontinued during the societal collapse, which could
cause even more warming. Even in a situation of this sort it is unlikely that the human race
would end, however.
(the death tolls from disasters form a fat-tailed distribution): A comprehensive overview is given by
Anders Sandberg, “Power Laws in Global Catastrophic and Existential Risks,” unpublished
paper, 2014.
(Nassim Taleb describes these as Black Swans): Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact
of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007).
most people who’ve died in war have died in the very worst wars: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels
of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).
This is what the Skoll Global Threats Fund focuses on: “About Us/Mission & Strategy,” Skoll Global
Threats Fund, http://www.skollglobalthreats.org/about-us/mission-and-approach/.
GiveWell is currently investigating these sorts of activities: Alexander Berger, “Potential Global
Catastrophic Risk Focus Areas,” GiveWell Blog, June 26, 2014,
http://blog.givewell.org/2014/06/26/potential-global-catastrophic-risk-focus-areas/.
SEVEN
“Most African children who attend school”: “Why books?,” Books For Africa,
https://www.booksforafrica.org/why-books.html.
“Books For Africa is a simple idea”: “Home,” Books For Africa, http://www.booksforafrica.org/.
“6.3 million children worldwide die under the age of five every year”: “Priority Issues,”
Development Media International, http://www.developmentmedia.net/priority-issues, and
“Demand creation,” http://www.developmentmedia.net/demand-creation.
“Recipients use transfers for whatever is most important to them”: “Operating Model,” GiveDirectly,
https://www.givedirectly.org/howitworks.php.
“Savvy donors know”: “Top 10 Best Practices of Savvy Donors,” Charity Navigator,
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=419&print=1.
Development Media International’s overhead amount to 44 percent of its total budget: Conversation
with Will Snell, of Development Media International, July 2014. As came up in conversation,
what counts as “overhead” is fairly arbitrary. He comments:
The overhead calculation all depends on definitions:
Defined at the minimum level (London office rent and associated expenditure, non-
project staff, non-project-related travel, IT/comms), our overhead is around 16 percent of
total expenditure.
Defined at the mid-level (all HQ expenses, including staff who work directly on project
delivery from London, such as our research manager), our overhead is around 44 percent
of total expenditure.
Defined at the maximum level (the [randomized controlled trial]), our overhead is 100
percent of total expenditure because we do not currently have any other live projects!
In 2012, their site received a total of 6.2 million visits: “Where We Are Headed (2013 and Beyond),”
Charity Navigator, http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?
bay=content.view&cpid=1193#.VJddHsAA.
this approach to evaluating a charity’s effectiveness is seriously misguided: There are many other
problems with focusing on overhead; some of these are described in Holden Karnofsky, “The
Worst Way to Pick a Charity,” GiveWell Blog, December 1, 2009,
http://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a-charity/; Dean Karlan, “Why
Ranking Charities by Administrative Expenses Is a Bad Idea,” Freakonomics (blog), June 9,
2011, http://freakonomics.com/2011/06/09/why-ranking-charities-by-administrative-expenses-
is-a-bad-idea/; and Dan Pallotta, Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their
Potential (Medford, MA: Tufts University, 2008), 128–176. One crucial problem is that it’s
often highly indeterminate what counts as overhead and what doesn’t. There is one aspect of the
“overhead” metric that it’s potentially important to maintain, however, which is the focus on
keeping fund-raising costs low. The reason that low fund-raising costs should be encouraged in
general involves the “what would have happened otherwise” consideration. When one charity
raises money, in part it’s creating new philanthropic money, and in part it’s merely causing
donors to donate to them rather than to other charities. This is the same as all other marketing:
when Coca-Cola runs a marketing campaign, in part it will get people to buy more fizzy drinks
than they otherwise would have, but in part it will just get people to buy Coke rather than Pepsi.
Adrian Sargeant, professor of fund-raising at the University of Plymouth, commented to me:
“On the issue of charities and whether expenditure grows the pie, I think the answer there is no
—it doesn’t” (private communication, August 2014). This creates a risk: if charities keep
spending more and more on fund-raising, battling against each other, then they’ll reduce the
overall size of the charitable pie, because a larger amount of money will have been squandered
on negative-sum fund-raising. If we have a social norm against charities spending too much of
their budget on fund-raising, we can avoid this bad outcome to some extent.
providing textbooks has either no discernible effect on children’s school performance: Glewwe,
Kremer, and Moulin, “Many Children Left Behind?”; Maria Kuecken and Anne-Marie Valfort,
“When Do Textbooks Matter for Achievement?” Economic Letters, 2013; Glewwe and Kremer,
“Schools, Teachers, and Education Outcomes in Developing Countries,” in Eric A. Hanushek
and F. Welch (eds.), Handbook of the Economics of Education, vol. 2, (New York: Elsevier,
2006), 945–1017; Patrick McEwan, “Improving Learning in Primary Schools of Developing
Countries: A Meta-Analysis of Randomised Experiments,” unpublished paper.
The American Cancer Society spends: American Cancer Society, “Stewardship Report,” 2013, 44,
http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@corporatecommunications/documents/document/acs
pc-041227.pdf.
The ALS Association (of ice-bucket-challenge fame) spends: ALS Association, “Annual Report,”
2014, 3, http://www.alsa.org/assets/pdfs/annual_report_fy2014.pdf. The figures have been
recalculated to exclude administration and fund-raising costs.
it costs DMI between forty and eighty cents per listener per year: Private conversation with Will
Snell, December 2014. For example, their program in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is
$1 million per year, and through that they will reach 2.5 million people.
What do the recipients of these cash transfers do with the money?: Private conversation with Paul
Niehaus, August 2014; Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro, “Policy Brief: Impacts of
Unconditional Cash Transfers,” unpublished paper, October 24, 2013, 16–17,
http://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Haushofer_Shapiro_Policy_Brief_2013.pdf.
Diarrhea is a major problem: “Diarrhoeal Disease,” WHO Fact Sheets,
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs330/en/. Diarrhea is also a leading cause of
malnutrition.
A significant number: “The pooled relative risk of diarrhoeal disease associated with not washing
hands from the intervention trials was 1.88 [i.e., not washing hands increases risk of diarrhea by
88%] . . . implying that hand washing could reduce diarrhoea risk by 47%.” Val Curtis and
Sandy Cairncross, “Effect of Washing Hands with Soap on Diarrhoea Risk in the Community: A
Systematic Review,” Lancet Infectious Diseases 3, no.5 (May 2003), 275–81.
The ads that DMI runs are terribly corny: “Audio: Burkina Faso breastfeeding spot A,” Development
Media International, 2013, http://www.developmentmedia.net/audio-burkina-faso-breastfeeding-
spot-2013.
“one $10 bed net can mean the difference between life and death”: “Saving Lives,” Nothing But
Nets, http://www.nothingbutnets.net/new/saving-lives/.
But when high-quality studies were conducted: See, for example, David Roodman, Due Diligence:
An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development,
2012). Roodman comments: “On current evidence, the best estimate of the average impact of
microcredit on poverty is zero. . . . The commonsense idea that credit is a useful tool that
sometimes helps and sometimes hurts appears close to the truth.”
(http://www.cgdev.org/doc/full_text/DueDiligence/Roodman_Due_Diligence.html). Initially,
there were academic studies conducted on microfinance that did seem to show strong impact,
summarized in Nathanael Goldberg, Measuring the Impact of Microfinance: Taking Stock of
What We Know, Grameen Foundation, December 2005, http://files.givewell.org/files/Cause1-
2/Independent%20research%20on%20microfinance/GFUSA-MicrofinanceImpactWhitepaper-
1.pdf. However, these studies weren’t randomized; when randomized controlled trials came out,
they changed the picture dramatically. This example illustrates just how important getting high-
quality evidence is: low-quality evidence can include highly cited academic studies, not just
anecdotes. For an overview of the “hierarchy of evidence,” see Trisha Greenhalgh, “How to
Read a Paper: Getting Your Bearings (Deciding What the Paper Is About),” BMJ 315, no. 7,102
(July 26, 1997), 243–6. Note that microcredit is only one form of microfinance; other forms of
microfinance, such as microsavings (providing secure places for the very poor to save money),
have shown promise.
Rather than starting new companies: In an interview with Time, David Roodman from the Center for
Global Development commented that “there are a fair number of stories where women cannot
pay back their loans but they’re in [community borrowing groups]. So people come and take
their roofs, flashlights, everything.” For this and the other problems listed, see “Why We Don’t
Recommend Microfinance,” Giving What We Can (blog), November 29, 2012,
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/2012-11-29/why-we-don%E2%80%99t-recommend-
microfinance; Sam Donald, “Why We (Still) Don’t Recommend Microfinance,” Giving What
We Can (blog), March 12, 2014, http://www.givewell.org/international/economic-
empowerment/microfinance; Holden Karnofsky, “6 Myths About Microfinance Charity That
Donors Can Do Without,” GiveWell Blog, October 23, 2009,
http://blog.givewell.org/2009/10/23/6-myths-about-microfinance-charity-that-donors-can-do-
without/.
The latest evidence suggests: Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman, “Six
Randomized Evaluations of Microcredit: Introduction and Further Steps,” September 11, 2014,
http://karlan.yale.edu/p/AEJ%20Intro.pdf.
Cash transfers are one of the most well-studied development programs: See the list of studies in
“Cash Transfers in the Developing World: Program Track Record,” GiveWell, November 2014,
http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cash-transfers#ProgramTrackRecord.
Innovations for Poverty Action has run a randomized controlled trial on GiveDirectly: Johannes
Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro, “Household Response to Income Changes: Evidence from an
Unconditional Cash Transfer Program in Kenya,” November 15, 2013,
http://www.princeton.edu/~joha/publications/Haushofer_Shapiro_UCT_2013.pdf.
may be optimistic: It’s very difficult to know how to adjust one’s estimates of cost-effectiveness in
order to take this into account. GiveWell has tried to make adjustments to the estimate in order
to take into account the facts that the program may not work as well in countries other than
Burkina Faso, and that self-reporting may overstate the benefits of the program. According to
their revised estimate, the cost per child life saved is $5,200 (this figure doesn’t include non-
lifesaving health benefits). DMI, however, thinks these adjustments are inappropriate and stand
by an estimate of approximately $1,100 per life saved (again not including non-lifesaving health
benefits, which the ten-dollars-per-QALY figure does include). “Development Media
International (DMI): What Do You Get for Your Dollar?” GiveWell, December 2014,
http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/DMI#cea.
a study of bed nets distributed by the Kenyan government: Noboru Minakawa, Gabriel O Dida, Gorge
O Sonye, Kyoko Futami, and Satoshi Kaneko, “Unforeseen Misuses of Bed Nets in Fishing
Villages Along Lake Victoria,” Malaria Journal 7, no. 165 (2008).
(figure is 0.4 percent): “Quality of Service,” GiveWell, https://www.givedirectly.org/quality-of-
service.html, accessed January 2015.
These programs also receive substantial support from Gavi: “Gavi Pledging Conference June 2011,”
Gavi: The Vaccine Alliance, http://www.gavi.org/funding/resource-mobilization/process/gavi-
pledging-conference-june-2011/.
GiveDirectly could productively use an additional $25 to $30 million: “GiveDirectly,” GiveWell,
December 2014, http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give-directly.
DMI could productively use $10 million: “Development Media International,” GiveWell, December
2014, http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/DMI.
such as polio, measles, diarrheal disease, and guinea worm disease: See Levine, Case Studies, 33–
40, 57–64, 81–88, 127–34.
the link between aid and economic growth is less clear: For a nontechnical overview, see David
Roodman, “Macro Aid Effectiveness Research: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Center for Global
Development, working paper 135, December 2007, http://www.cgdev.org/publication/macro-
aid-effectiveness-research-guide-perplexed-working-paper-135.
GiveDirectly: https://www.givedirectly.org/; “GiveDirectly,” GiveWell, December 2014,
http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give-directly.
Development Media International: http://developmentmedia.net/; “Development Media
International,” GiveWell, December 2014, http://www.givewell.org/international/top-
charities/DMI.
Deworm the World Initiative: http://www.evidenceaction.org/; “Deworm the World Initiative (DtWI),
Led by Evidence Action,” GiveWell, December 2014,
http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/deworm-world-initiative.
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/schisto; “Schistosomiasis Control
Initiative (SCI),” GiveWell, November 2014, http://www.givewell.org/international/top-
charities/schistosomiasis-control-initiative.
Against Malaria Foundation: https://www.againstmalaria.com/Default.aspx; “Against Malaria
Foundation (AMF),” GiveWell, November 2014, http://www.givewell.org/international/top-
charities/AMF.
Living Goods: http://livinggoods.org/; “Living Goods,” GiveWell, November 2014,
http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/living-goods.
The Iodine Global Network (IGN): http://www.ign.org; another “standout” charity, as listed by
GiveWell in December 2014, is Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition: Universal Salt
Iodization (GAIN-USI) program (http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/GAIN).
Like IGN, GAIN-USI focuses on increasing the coverage of salt iodization. I didn’t include
them in the body text because of their similar focus to IGN and because, at the time of writing,
details of how GAIN-USI would use additional funding were not available.
Another charity worthy of note is Project Healthy Children (PHC),
http://projecthealthychildren.org. PHC works with developed world governments to fortify
foods like flour, sugar, rice, and oil with micronutrients such as folic acid, iodine, iron, vitamin
A, and zinc, at a cost of between five and ten cents per person. This is a top-recommended
charity by Giving What We Can; however, PHC declined to participate in GiveWell’s review
process. For consistency, I list only GiveWell recommendations in this chapter.
One estimate put the economic benefits of these programs at twenty-seven dollars for every dollar
spent: For an overview of the relevant estimates, see “Micronutrients,” Giving What We Can,
2013, https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/research/charities-area/micronutrients.
EIGHT
“Our Garment Workers Are Paid Up to 50 Times More Than the Competition: “About Us,”
American Apparel, http://www.americanapparel.net/aboutus/. I use American Apparel as an
example of a supposedly “ethical” company because of their emphasis on “sweatshop-free.”
Independently of this, however, other aspects of the company are problematic. Dov Charney, the
founder and former CEO of the company, has been the subject of numerous allegations of
misconduct and sexual harassment, which in part led to his termination in early 2014 (see
http://www.buzzfeed.com/sapna/exclusive-read-ousted-american-apparel-ceo-dov-charneys-
term#.lgZarE7Wz). American Apparel’s advertising campaigns have also come under criticism
for sexualizing minors (see http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/features/american-
apparels-most-controversial-moments-following-ban-on-back-to-school-ad-9712735.html).
under pretty horrific working conditions: Lucy Ash, “Inside China’s Sweatshops,” BBC News, July
20, 2002.
columnist Nicholas D. Kristof illustrated this well: Nicholas D. Kristof, “Where Sweatshops Are a
Dream,” The New York Times, January 14, 2009.
nearly four million people from Laos, Cambodia, and Burma immigrated to Thailand: Marc
Margolis, “Roads to Nowhere: More and More Migrants from Poor Countries Are Heading to
Other Former Backwaters for Work,” Newsweek, September 11, 2006.
Bolivians risk deportation by illegally entering Brazil: Jack Chang, “Bolivians Fail to Find Better
Life in Brazil,” Miami Herald, December 28, 2007. Cited in Benjamin Powell, Out of Poverty:
Sweatshops in the Global Economy (New York: Cambridge University, 2014), 60.
The average earnings of a sweatshop worker in Brazil are $2,000 per year: Powell, Out of Poverty,
60–61.
the average earnings among sweatshop workers are: Ibid.
“The overwhelming mainstream view among economists”: Quoted in Allen R. Myerson, “In
Principle, a Case for More ‘Sweatshops,’” The New York Times, June 22, 1997.
“My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops but that there are too few”: Ibid.
low-wage, labor-intensive manufacturing is a stepping-stone: Powell, Out of Poverty, 120–121.
“it is widely thought that most of them”: Bureau of International Labor Affairs, By the Sweat & Toil
of Children: The Use of Child Labor in American Imports (Washington, DC: US Deptartment of
Labor, 1994), 30.
an investigation by UNICEF: UNICEF, The State of the World’s Children (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University, 1997), 60.
We should certainly feel outrage and horror at the conditions sweatshop laborers toil under: Note
that none of the arguments I’ve given apply to the use of forced labor: there is no argument that
involuntary work benefits the workers. (Though chattel slavery, where people are bought and
sold as if they were commodities, is thankfully now very rare, debt bondage, where a person
pledges their labor in return for a loan, and where that debt can be passed down through
generations, still exists.) If a company contracts with factories that use involuntary workers, we
should utterly condemn this and demand that the situation is rectified.
in favor of domestically produced goods: Nor is the solution to buy secondhand clothes, as is advised
by, for example, the Institute for Humane Education
(http://humaneeducation.org/blog/2013/04/03/5-tips-keeping-sweatshop-free-closet/) and Labor
Behind the Label (http://www.labourbehindthelabel.org/jobs/item/980). This would have the
same effect of reducing employment opportunities for the very badly off in poor countries.
$6.9 billion was spent on Fairtrade-certified products worldwide: Rebecca Smithers, “Global
Fairtrade Sales Reach £4.4bn Following 15% Growth During 2013,” The Guardian, September
3, 2014.
fair-trade coffee production comes from comparatively rich countries: Paul Griffiths, “Ethical
Objections to Fairtrade,” Journal of Business Ethics 105, no. 3 (February 2012): 364.
less than 1 percent of the additional price of their fair-trade coffee reached coffee exporters:
Griffiths, “Ethical Objections,” 359–60.
only 11 percent of the additional price reached the coffee-producing countries: Joni Valkila, Pertti
Haaparanta, and Niina Niemi, “Empowering Coffee Traders? The Coffee Value Chain from
Nicaraguan Fair Trade Farmers to Finnish Consumers,” Journal of Business Ethics 97, no. 2
(December 2010): 257–70.
coffee producers would receive only forty cents per pound: Bernard Kilian, Connie Jones, Lawrence
Pratt, and Andrés Villalobos, “Is Sustainable Agriculture a Viable Strategy to Improve Farm
Income in Central America? A Case Study on Coffee,” Journal of Business Research 59, no. 3
(March 2006): 322–30. For further discussion of these estimates, see Griffiths, “Ethical
Objections,” 359–60.
a four-year study on earnings of Fairtrade workers in Ethiopia and Uganda: Fairtrade, Employment
and Poverty Reduction Project, Fair Trade, Employment and Poverty Reduction in Ethiopia and
Uganda, April 2014, http://ftepr.org/wp-content/uploads/FTEPR-Final-Report-19-May-2014-
FINAL.pdf.
“the British public has been led to believe”: Carl Mortished, “Fairtrade Coffee Fails to Help the
Poor, British Report Finds,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 26, 2014.
Fairtrade certification does not improve the lives of agricultural workers: Fairtrade, Employment
and Poverty Reduction Project, “Response to Fairtrade Statement on FTEPR Final Report 31st
May 2014,” http://ftepr.org/wp-content/uploads/Response-to-Fairtrade-Statement-on-FTEPR-
Final-Report-Posted.pdf.
“there is limited evidence of the impact on workers of participation in Fairtrade”: Valerie Nelson
and Barry Pound, The Last Ten Years: A Comprehensive Review of the Literature on the Impact
of Fairtrade, September 2009, 35,
http://www.fairtrade.net/fileadmin/user_upload/content/2009/about_us/2010_03_NRI_Full_Lite
rature_Review.pdf.
many popular ways of reducing your greenhouse gas emissions: These facts come from David JC
MacKay, Sustainable Energy—without the Hot Air (Cambridge, UK: UIT, 2009), 68–72.
you would save only a fraction of a metric ton of carbon emissions: US domestic energy use has been
estimated at thirteen metric tons of CO
2eq
(Christopher M. Jones and Daniel M. Kammen,
“Quantifying Carbon Footprint Reduction Opportunities for U.S. Households and
Communities,” Environmental Science & Technology 45, no. 9 [2011], 4,088–95). UK domestic
energy use is approximately five metric tons per year per household. (Department for Energy
and Climate Change, Great Britain’s Housing Energy Fact File, 2011,
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/48195/3224-
great-britains-housing-energy-fact-file-2011.pdf.)
if you stopped using plastic bags entirely, you’d cut out one hundred kilograms CO
2
equivalent per
year: “Plastic Bags and Plastic Bottles—CO
2
Emissions During Their Lifetime,” Time for
Change, April 2009, http://timeforchange.org/plastic-bags-and-plastic-bottles-CO2-emissions;
“Facts About the Plastic Bag Pandemic,” Reuseit, http://www.reuseit.com/facts-and-
myths/facts-about-the-plastic-bag-pandemic.htm. What about other reasons to reduce the use of
plastic bags, such as cutting down on landfill? In reality, plastic bags only account for a tiny
amount of the trash that we produce (Joseph Stromberg, “Why Our Environmental Obsession
with Plastic Bags Makes No Sense,” Vox, October 4, 2014,
http://www.vox.com/2014/10/4/6901299/plastic-bags-environment).
only 10 percent of the carbon footprint of food comes from transportation, whereas 80 percent comes
from production: Sarah DeWeerdt, “Is Local Food Better?” World Watch 22, no. 3 (May/June
2009), 6–10; “The Tricky Truth About Food Miles,” Shrink that Footprint,
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-miles.
Cutting out red meat: Christopher Weber, and Scott Matthews, “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate
Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,” Environmental Science & Technology 42, no. 10
(2008), 3,508–13.
locally grown tomatoes: Annika Carlsson-Kanyama, “Food Consumption Patterns and Their
Influence on Climate Change,” Ambio 27, no. 7 (November 1998), 528.
(beef, which can cut out about a metric ton of CO
2eq
per year): Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin,
“Diet, Energy, and Global Warming,” Earth Interactions 10, no. 9 (April 2006).
(driving half as much would cut out two metric tons of CO
2eq
per year): “Greenhouse Gas Emissions
from a Typical Passenger Vehicle,” United States Environmental Protection Agency, May 2014,
http://www.epa.gov/otaq/climate/documents/420f14040.pdf.
(one fewer round-trip flight from London to New York would eliminate a metric ton of CO
2eq
):
Christian N. Jardine, “Calculating the Carbon Dioxide Emissions of Flights,” Environmental
Change Institute, University of Oxford, February 2009,
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/energy/downloads/jardine09-carboninflights.pdf.
(loft insulation, which would save a metric ton of CO
2eq
for a detached house): “Our Calculations,”
Energy Saving Trust, 2014, http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/content/our-calculations.
“While the carbon we release by flying or driving is certain and verifiable”: George Monbiot,
“Selling Indulgences,” The Guardian, October 18, 2006.
Cool Earth was founded in 2007 in the United Kingdom: “The Team,” Cool Earth,
http://www.coolearth.org/the-team/.
improves the lives of those living in the rain forest: In the late 2000s, there was some criticism of
Cool Earth as “neo-colonialism” or of engaging in a “land grab” via buying up significant
chunks of the rain forest (e.g., Juliette Jowit, “Amazon Tribe Hits Back at Green ‘Colonialism,’”
The Guardian, October 14, 2007; Conor Foley, “Not Cool,” Comment Is Free, The Guardian,
June 12, 2008, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jun/12/brazil.climatechange).
These criticisms, however, seem to misunderstand what the organization is doing: Cool Earth
doesn’t own any land in the Amazon rain forest; it simply works with locals to provide them
with better economic opportunities so that they aren’t forced to sell their land to loggers.
with far less deforestation in Cool Earth areas: Katja Grace, “Less Burn for Your Buck (Part II),”
Giving What We Can (blog), November 14, 2013, https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/2013-
11-14/less-burn-for-your-buck-part-ii.
it costs them about a hundred dollars to prevent an acre of rain forest from being cut down: “Save an
Acre,” Cool Earth, http://www.coolearth.org/save-an-acre.
each acre locks in 260 metric tons of CO
2
: “Rainforest Facts,” Cool Earth, July 12, 2013,
http://www.coolearth.org/rainforest-facts/rainforest-fact-22-260-tonnes-of-co2.
suggesting that they were protecting an acre of rain forest for $103: $154 to protect five acres from
30 percent logging = $154 ÷ (5 × 0.3) = $103.
Monbiot claimed that carbon offsetting: Monbiot, “Selling Indulgences.”
“When you cheat on your partner”: CheatNeutral, http://www.cheatneutral.com/.
I will spare you the grim details here: If you’re interested in further reading, I recommend picking up
a copy of Peter Singer and Jim Mason, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (New
York: Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2006).
Of all the animals raised for food: In this discussion, I don’t talk about fish, for two reasons. First,
the data on both the number of fish used for human consumption and their quality of life is
much more limited than the corresponding data for land animals. Second, there’s more
uncertainty about the sentience of fish relative to that of land animals than there is about the
sentience of different land animals. Still, from the data that does exist, I suspect that cutting out
fish is of comparable importance to cutting out chicken: the fish people eat have often been fed
other fish, so the total number of fish deaths indirectly resulting from human consumption is
very high, and it appears that the lives of factory-farmed fish are very bad, too.
The only quantitative estimates of farmed animal welfare: Norwood and Lusk, Compassion, 227–9.
Although the book is cowritten by Norwood and Lusk, the estimates are only Norwood’s.
According to Animal Charity Evaluators: This uses the “lower-bound” estimate for the effectiveness
of leafleting given in the “Leafleting Impact Calculator” provided by Animal Charity Evaluators
(http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/research/interventions/leafleting/leafleting-calculator/).
Even though I’ve used the “lower-bound” estimate in the spirit of being conservative, it should
be borne in mind that the evidence on leafleting is of considerably lower quality than the
evidence on other programs discussed elsewhere in this book. The true cost to change
someone’s dietary habits through leafleting may therefore be quite different from this estimate.
Further studies on this issue are currently under way.
a phenomenon that they call moral licensing: For an overview, see Anna C. Merritt, Daniel A. Effron,
and Benoît Monin, “Moral Self-licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad,” Social and
Personality Psychology Compass 4, no. 5 (May 2010), 344–57.
in a recent experiment: Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, “Do Green Products Make Us Better
People?” Psychological Science 21, no. 4 (April 2010), 494–8.
the moral licensing effect may not occur: For discussion of when the licensing effect does and
doesn’t occur, see Merritt, Effron, and Monin, “Moral Self-licensing.”
NINE
As Peter Hurford entered his final year at Denison University: “My Careers Plan,” Everyday
Utilitarian (blog), June 19, 2013, http://everydayutilitarian.com/essays/my-careers-plan/; private
conversation with Peter Hurford, June 2014.
if you’re not happy at work, you’ll be less productive: For the link between happiness and
productivity, see Ivan Robertson and Cary L. Cooper, eds., Well-being: Productivity and
Happiness at Work (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Andrew J. Oswald, Eugenio
Proto, and Daniel Sgroi, “Happiness and Productivity,” IZA discussion papers, no. 4,645 (2009),
http://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/35451.
“You have to trust in something”: “‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says,” Stanford Report,
June 14, 2005. For criticism, see Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills
Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (New York: Business Plus, 2012), 3–11.
“You owe it to yourself to do work that you love”: Jenny Ungless and Rowan Davies, Career Ahead:
The Complete Career Handbook (London: Raleo, 2008).
A popular YouTube video: “What If Money Was No Object?”: https://vimeo.com/63961985. The
video, which reached two million views on YouTube before it was taken down for copyright
infringement, consists of a brief excerpt, with added background music, from a lecture delivered
by Alan Watts and later published as Do You Do It or Does It Do You?: How to Let the Universe
Meditate You, Sounds True, 2005.
In one study of Canadian college students: Robert J. Vallerand et al., “Les passions de l’âme: On
obsessive and harmonious passion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, no. 4
(October 2003), 759, table 1.
fewer than one in one thousand high school athletes will make it into professional sports:
“Probability of Competing Beyond High School,” NCAA, September 24, 2013,
http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/probability-competing-beyond-high-school.
Psychologists Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson: Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T.
Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson, “The End of History Illusion,” Science 339, no. 6,115 (January
4, 2013), 96–98.
(this is known in psychology as the job characteristics theory): These are probably the most widely
accepted and solid predictors of job satisfaction in current psychology. For discussion, see
Thomas A. Judge and Ryan Klinger, “Promote Job Satisfaction through Mental Challenge,” in
Edwin Locke, ed., Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior: Indispensable
Knowledge for Evidence-Based Management, 2nd edition, (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2009),
107–21, and Stephen E. Humphrey, Jennifer D. Nahrgang, and Frederick P. Morgeson,
“Integrating Motivational, Social, and Contextual Work Design Features: A Meta-analytic
Summary and Theoretical Extension of the Work Design Literature,” Journal of Applied
Psychology 92, no. 5 (September 2007), 1,332–56.
each of these factors also correlates with motivation, productivity, and commitment to your employer:
Benjamin Todd, “How to Find a Job You’ll Love,” 80,000 Hours (blog), August 16, 2012,
https://80000hours.org/2012/08/how-to-find-a-job-you-ll-love/.
which some psychologists have argued is the key to having genuinely satisfying experiences: Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row,
1990).
There are other factors that also matter to your job satisfaction: See the information and references
cited in “Predictors of Job Satisfaction,” 80,000 Hours, August 28, 2014,
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/framework/job-satisfaction/job-satisfaction-
research/#predictors-of-job-satisfaction.
He traveled in India: See Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 39–50.
while Jobs and Wozniak were trying to sell circuit boards to hobbyists: Jeffrey S. Young and William
L. Simon, iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (Hoboken, New
Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 35–36.
it’s been found that professors: Daniel T. Gilbert et al., “Immune Neglect: A Source of Durability
Bias in Affective Forecasting,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, no. 3
(September 1998), 617–38.
it’s difficult to predict where you’ll be most satisfied: “Don’t Go with Your Gut Instinct,” 80,000
Hours, March 8, 2013, https://80000hours.org/career-guide/big-picture/dont-go-with-your-gut-
instinct/.
it’s hard for anyone to know which job you’ll be best at: For a general overview, see Frank L.
Schmidt and John E. Hunter, “The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel
Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Dindings,”
Psychological Bulletin 124, no. 2 (September 1998), 262–74.
there are many ways of boosting your potential for influence later: Benjamin Todd, “Should You Do
a Degree?” 80,000 Hours (blog), February 18, 2014, https://80000hours.org/2014/02/should-
you-do-a-degree/.
think of career decisions like an entrepreneur would think about starting a company: Jess
Whittlestone, “Your Career Is Like a Startup,” 80,000 Hours (blog),
https://80000hours.org/2013/07/your-career-is-like-a-startup/. This idea was independently
proposed by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and entrepreneur Ben Casnocha in their book
The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (New
York: Crown Business, 2012).
the popular Lean Startup movement: Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use
Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (New York: Crown Business,
2011).
(entrepreneurs have less than a 10 percent chance of ever selling their shares in the company at
profit): Ryan Carey, “The Payoff and Probability of Obtaining Venture Capital,” 80,000 Hours
(blog), June 25, 2014, https://80000hours.org/2014/06/the-payoff-and-probability-of-obtaining-
venture-capital/.
Chris Hallquist, for example: Private conversation with Chris Hallquist, July 2014.
App Academy, a three-month intensive programming school: Marcus Wohlsen, “Tuition at Learn-to-
Code Boot Camp is Free—Until You Get a Job,” Wired, March 15, 2013.
whether a job will be around in the future: For an in-depth analysis, see Carl B. Frey and Michael A.
Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” Oxford
Martin School, University of Oxford, September 17, 2013,
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf.
David Brooks, writing in The New York Times: Brooks, David, “The Way to Produce a Person,” The
New York Times, June 3, 2013.
GiveDirectly has raised more than $20 million: “Financials,” GiveWell,
https://www.givedirectly.org/financials.html.
Professor William Nordhaus at Yale University has estimated: William D. Nordhaus, “Schumpeterian
Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement,” NBER working paper no. 10,433
(April 2004), 22.
Annual global remittances are over $400 billion: “Migration and Development Brief 23,” World
Bank, October 2014, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPROSPECTS/Resources/334934-
1288990760745/MigrationandDevelopmentBrief23.pdf. Official development assistance was
$135 billion in 2013 (“Net Official Development Assistance from DAC and Other Donors in
2013: Preliminary Data for 2013,” OECD,
http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/documentupload/ODA%202013%20Tables%20and%20Charts%2
0En.pdf).
Wave could therefore increase the amount going to Kenya every year by $24 million: Note that even
if Wave transfers only a fraction of this money, they might also have an impact by eventually
driving down the prices of competitors.
a large proportion of scientific achievement comes from a very small number of scientists: Alfred J.
Lotka, “The frequency distribution of scientific productivity,” Journal of the Washington
Academy of Sciences 16, no. 12 (June 19, 1926), 317–24.
the difficulty of finding jobs outside of academia: Jordan Weissmann, “How Many Ph.D.’s Actually
Get to Become College Professors?” TheAtlantic.com, February 23, 2013,
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-many-phds-actually-get-to-become-
college-professors/273434/.
Within philosophy, for example, there are about four times as many doctoral candidates as there are
tenure-track positions: Carolyn Dicey Jennings, quoted in “To Get a Job in Philosophy,”
Philosophy Smoker (blog), April 18, 2012, http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com.ar/2012/04/to-
get-job-in-philosophy.html.
within economics the number of people who seek academic employment more closely matches the
number of academic jobs: Richard B. Freeman, “It’s Better Being an Economist (But Don’t Tell
Anyone),” Journal of Economic Perspectives 13, no. 3 (Summer 1999), 139–45.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were psychologists who caused a revolution within economics:
For an excellent overview of this pathbreaking research, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast
and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
this field has improved our ability to cause desirable behavior change: For examples, see “Poor
Behaviour: Behavioural Economics Meets Development Policy,” The Economist, December 6,
2014, and Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel, More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics Is
Helping to Solve Global Poverty (New York: Dutton, 2011).
the distribution of book sales: Newman, “Power Laws,” 5.
as is the distribution of Twitter follower counts: State of the Social Media Marketing Industry,
HubSpot, January 2010, http://www.hubspot.com/Portals/53/docs/01.10.sot.report.pdf.
the main reason they use volunteers: See Holden Karnofsky, “Is Volunteering Just a Show?”
GiveWell Blog, November 12, 2008, http://blog.givewell.org/2008/11/12/is-volunteering-just-a-
show/.
“There are many things that I’d like to see done in the world”: Private conversation with Frederick
Mulder, December 2014.
has distributed more than ten million long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets:
https://www.againstmalaria.com/
TEN
In the summer of 2013: Barack Obama, Pariser Platz, Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, Germany, June 19,
2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/19/remarks-president-obama-
brandenburg-gate-berlin-germany; John Kerry, “Remarks on Climate Change,” Jakarta,
Indonesia, February 16, 2014, http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2014/02/221704.htm;
Kate Sheppard, “Harry Reid: ‘Climate change is the worst problem facing the world today,’”
The Huffington Post, June 3, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/06/harry-reid-
climate-change_n_4914683.html; Gillis, Justin, “U.N. climate panel endorses ceiling on global
emissions,” The New York Times, September 27, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/science/global-climate-change-report.html.
a framework for thinking about the question: This “three-factor model” of cause evaluation was first
proposed by GiveWell as part of the Open Philanthropy Project. It was later expanded by 80,000
Hours to cover career decisions, and made mathematically precise by Owen Cotton-Barratt.
Note that sometimes the term importance is used instead of scale, and crowdedness is used
instead of tractability. See Holden Karnofsky, “Narrowing Down U.S. Policy Areas,” GiveWell
Blog, May 22, 2014, http://blog.givewell.org/2014/05/22/narrowing-down-u-s-policy-areas/;
Benjamin Todd, “A Framework for Strategically Selecting a Cause,” 80,000 Hours (blog),
December 19, 2013, https://80000hours.org/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-
cause/; and Owen Cotton-Barratt, “Estimating Cost-Effectiveness for Problems of Unknown
Difficulty,” Future of Humanity Institute, December 4, 2014,
http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/estimating-cost-effectiveness/.
Preventing the aging process is just a very difficult problem to solve: A minority of experts would
disagree with this assessment. British researcher Aubrey de Gray, for instance, has proposed an
approach to the problem of aging that requires no understanding of the intricacies of human
metabolism. On this approach, aging is a relatively tractable problem, constrained by public
funding rather than human ignorance. See Aubrey de Gray and Michael Rae, Ending Aging: The
Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in our Lifetime (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2007).
defined as living on less than $11,000 per year: Again, I’m inflation-adjusting, so I’m using a
“$1.50/day” poverty line, using 2014 US dollars.
US criminal justice reform: For an overview, see “Criminal Justice Reform,” GiveWell, May 2014,
http://www.givewell.org/labs/causes/criminal-justice-reform.
Incarceration also costs the government about $25,000: John Schmitt, Kris Warner, and Sarika
Gupta, “The high budgetary cost of incarceration,” Center for Economic and Policy Research,
June 2010, http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/incarceration-2010-06.pdf.
“A further $40 million per year”: “Criminal Justice Reform,” GiveWell.
the cost per year of life in prison averted would be as low as twenty-nine dollars: “Pew Public Safety
Performance Project,” GiveWell, July 2014, http://www.givewell.org/labs/causes/criminal-
justice-reform/Pew-Public-Safety-Performance-Project.
Eighty-five percent of the global variation in earnings: For an overview, see Bryan Caplan and Vipul
Naik, “A Radical Case for Open Borders,”
http://www.depts.ttu.edu/freemarketinstitute/docs/ARadicalCaseforOpenBorders.pdf.
Economists Michael Clemens, Claudio Montenegro, and Lant Pritchett have estimated: “The Place
Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers Across the U.S. Border,” Center for Global
Development, working paper 148, July 2008,
http://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/16352_file_CMP_place_premium_148.pdf.
greater than a 50 percent increase in world GDP: For a comprehensive list of these estimates, see
“Double World GDP,” Open Borders: The Case, http://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/.
Readers interested in open borders are encouraged to explore this excellent resource.
You might have some concerns about this idea. Won’t mass immigration be politically
disruptive? Won’t it cause a “brain drain,” resulting in all the best talent from poor countries
leaving, making those left behind worse off than before? Won’t it harm the native workers of the
rich country, depressing wages and increasing unemployment?
There are good responses to each of these worries. Let’s take the objections in turn.
Regarding political disruption, it would improve politics in poor countries: dictators and corrupt
governments would have far less power over their people, because those people would have a
much easier opportunity to leave the country. For the rich countries, the evidence is ambiguous.
For example, most social scientists detect little effect of immigration on the size of government,
even though immigrants are more in favor of the welfare state: there is a delay before they are
eligible to vote, and even when they do have the vote, their turnout at elections is very low.
Regarding the “brain drain,” immigration from poor countries to rich countries would
significantly benefit those who choose to remain in the poorer country. Immigrants send
substantial remittances back to their home countries—where total global remittances are several
times larger than total foreign-aid spending and can be as much as a third of a poor country’s
GDP. A larger diaspora increases trade between the home country and the country to which
immigrants move. Immigrants often return to their home countries, and when they do, they
bring back valuable skills. Puerto Rico provides a good illustration of this. More than half of
Puerto Ricans live abroad, but the very fact that Puerto Ricans have been able to emigrate to the
United States means that the standard of living of those who still live in Puerto Rico has
increased sixfold since 1980, and is now comparable with countries like the United Kingdom
and Italy.
Regarding effects on natives’ wages and employment, the evidence is ambiguous as to
whether immigration would help or harm: a recent survey by David Roodman, commissioned by
GiveWell, suggests that immigration would either help or be only mildly harmful. (“The
Domestic Economic Impacts of Immigration,” David Roodman (blog), September 3, 2014,
http://davidroodman.com/blog/2014/09/03/the-domestic-economic-impacts-of-immigration/).
Immigrants “take” jobs, but they often take jobs that natives are unwilling to do (such as fruit
picking), and they also create jobs, because they demand services in the economy. Moreover,
they need to be managed and supervised, and these positions normally go to natives, who
usually have better education and a better grasp of English. In areas in the United States where
immigration is higher, more women enter the workforce because childcare is cheaper. Among
those who estimate that immigration would have a negative effect on the incomes of natives, the
effect is very small. A review by Professors Rachel Friedberg and Jennifer Hunt, for example,
found that a 10 percent increase in the fraction of immigrants in the population reduces native
wages by about 1 percent, and found no evidence of significant reductions in native employment
(“The Impact of Immigrants on Host Country Wages, Employment and Growth,” The Journal of
Economic Perspectives 9, no. 2 [Spring 1995]: 23–44).
Canada is most sympathetic to increased levels of immigration: Lant Pritchett, Let Their People
Come: Breaking the Gridlock on International Labor Mobility (Washington, DC: Center for
Global Development, 2006), 74.
“bringing America’s annual legal intake of foreign workers”: “Principles,” ImmigrationWorks USA,
http://www.immigrationworksusa.org/index.php?p=50.
amounting to 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions: “Key Facts and Findings,” Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,
http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/.
Total expenditure from nonprofits on factory farming practices is less than $20 million per year:
“Treatment of Animals in Industrial Agriculture,” GiveWell, September 2013,
http://www.givewell.org/labs/causes/treatment-animals-industrial-agriculture.
a 2 to 4ºC rise in temperature would cause a reduction in GDP by about 2 percent: Tol and Yohe,
“Review of the Stern Review.”
according to the second-most-pessimistic model in the Stern Review: Nebojsa Nakicenovic and Rob
Swart, eds., Special Report on Emissions Scenarios: A Special Report of Working Group III of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University,
2000), sect. 4.4.4, table 4–6.
Geoengineering itself may pose significant risks: One potential bad consequence of extreme climate
change is that a single country that was going to be particularly harmed by the changing climate
may unilaterally attempt geoengineering. (Geoengineering strategies would probably cost only a
few billion dollars, easily enough for a small country to pay for.) If this was attempted without
sufficient preparation and risk assessment, and it went wrong, the consequences could be
catastrophic.
Other global catastrophic risks: For an overview, see “Global Catastrophic Risks,” GiveWell,
February 2014, http://www.givewell.org/labs/causes/global-catastrophic-risks.
INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take
you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the
corresponding reference on your e-reader.
Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
academia, careers in, 171–73
accounting careers, 165
actuarial careers, 165
administrative costs of charities, 106, 107–8
advocacy careers, 174–75
Against Malaria Foundation
cost effectiveness of, 53
and expected values, 81–82
founder of, 157, 177
funding needs of, 118
GiveWell’s endorsement of, 125, 127, 197
and program implementation, 117
AIDS, 35, 38, 60
aid skeptics/critics
on best aid programs, 47
critiques of sums spent, 44
and Easterly, 43
on ineffectiveness of aid, 45–46
ALS Association, 110
Amazon jungle, 138
American Apparel, 128–29, 132
American Cancer Society, 110
Animal Charity Evaluators, 143, 190
animal welfare, 141–43, 189–90
Annan, Kofi, 104
antiretroviral therapy, 52, 52, 53
Apple, 129, 152
automation of jobs, 165
Banerjee, Abhijit, 19
Bangladesh, 128, 130, 131–32
Barré-Sinoussi, Françoise, 171
bed nets
and Against Malaria Foundation, 125
cost effectiveness of, 52, 53
and evidence behind claims, 113–14
implementation of, 117
beef consumption, 136, 141, 142
bereavement, 42
Berger, Alexander, 162
Berger, Ken, 40
best aid programs, 47, 50, 52–53
BetaGov, 187
Black Swan events, 98
blindness, 37–38, 47, 61
Bolivia, 130
Books for Africa (BFA), 103–4, 106, 107, 108–9
Borlaug, Norman, 171
Bosch, Carl, 171
Brazil, 130
Brooks, David, 166
Brown, Laura, 89–94, 174
Bunker, John, 63
Burkina Faso, 104, 116, 122
Burma, 130
Bush, Laura, 3, 9
Cambodia, 130
Cameron, David, 90
Cameroon, 104, 123
Canada, homicide rate in, 185
cancer
scale of problem, 182
treatment costs and funding, 61–62
carbon dioxide (CO
2
), 98, 138–40
carbon dioxide equivalent (CO
2eq
), 97, 135, 136
carbon footprint, 135–40
career choices, 147–78
and altruistic motivation, 166–67
and building career capital, 157, 158, 173
and career coaching, 199
and doctoral studies, 167–68
and entrepreneurship, 168–71
and exploration value, 158–59
and following one’s passion, 149–53, 154
and impact on later career, 158–60
and impact on the job, 155–57
and job satisfaction, 151
in later life, 176–77
and law of diminishing returns, 62–66
in medicine, 55–56, 62–66, 74–75, 164
and outsourcing or automation of jobs, 165
and personal fit, 148–55, 181
in politics and advocacy, 89–94, 174–75
with for-profit companies, 163
in research, 171–73
and skill building, 167–68
and volunteering, 175–76
working for effective organizations, 162–63
See also earning to give
Case, Steve and Jean, 2–3
Case Foundation, 5, 9
cash transfers to aid recipients, 106, 111, 113, 115–16, 122
cattle, 141–42
Causevox.com, 198
Center for Global Development, 189
Centre for Effective Altruism, 180
Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, 194
CEOs of charities, 106, 107–8
Charity Navigator, 40, 105–7
Charity Science, 198–99
CheatNeutral.com, 140
chickens, 141–42, 143, 189–90
Child Labor Deterrence Act, 131–32
child workers, 131–32
China’s earthquake disaster of 2008, 59–60
Clemens, Michael, 188
climate change
between 2 to 4°C, 190–91
catastrophic climate change, 191–92
evaluation of cause, 195
and expected values, 95–99
severity of, 179
Climate Works, 191, 193
Clinton, Bill, 3, 9
Cochrane Collaboration, 70–74
coffee, 133
Colgate Palmolive, 2, 5
Colorado, 86
condom promotion, 52, 52, 53
consumerism, ethical, 128–46
and fair-trade products, 132–35
and food choices, 87–88, 141–43, 189–90
and green living, 135–40
and moral licensing, 144–46
and sweatshop laborers, 129–32
Cool Earth, 138–40, 191, 193, 197
Costa Rica, 133
cost effectiveness
and evaluation of aid programs, 109, 110–13, 119–20
in poor vs. rich countries, 62, 121
costs associated with saving a life, 54
cows, 141–42
Cramer, Christopher, 134
criminality, 70–74
criminal justice reform, 185–87, 194
dairy, 136
Dead Aid (Moyo), 43
deforestation, 138–40
dehydration, 112
Democratic Republic of the Congo, 104, 123, 191
depression, 35
Development Media International (DMI)
cost effectiveness of, 111–13, 119–20
and evidence behind claims, 115–17, 119–20
financial overview of, 106, 108
founder of, 157
funding needs of, 118–19
GiveWell’s endorsement of, 122–23, 127, 197
implementation of, 117–18
mission of, 104
deworming school children, 8–9, 51, 51
Deworm the World Initiative
cost effectiveness of, 9, 11, 123–24
founder of, 157
GiveWell’s endorsement of, 9, 123–24, 127, 197
dialysis, 38
diamonds paradox, 57
diarrhea
deaths associated with, 47, 112
and effectiveness of aid programs, 121
disasters and disaster relief
and effective uses of funding, 120
expected harm from disasters, 98
and law of diminishing returns, 58–61
Disney, 129
District of Columbia, 87
doctoral studies, 167–68
doctors
as career choice, 64–66, 74–78
and lives saved, 63–66, 74–75
Doctors Without Borders, 30–31
Duflo, Esther, 19
Durbin, Drew, 170
earning to give
and altruistic motivation, 166
and career choices, 74–78, 162, 163–67
and Giving Pledge, 166
political career compared to, 90, 93
earthquakes, 58–59
Easterly, William, 43, 47
economic empowerment aid programs, 121
economic perspectives on climate change, 97–98
economics degrees, 172
Edlin, Aaron, 85
education
and attendance, 51, 51
best programs for, 50
and deworming programs, 8–9, 51, 51
testing effectiveness of programs benefiting, 7–9
and textbook availability, 7, 108
effective altruism
and choosing causes to support, 32–33
community of, 198
definition of, 11–12
five key questions of, 13
telling others about, 198–99
effectiveness of aid programs
and aid skeptics, 46–47
cost effectiveness compared to, 110–11
definition of, 12
and financial health of charities, 107–8
and regression to the mean, 73–74
of Scared Straight program, 70–74
See also cost effectiveness
80,000 Hours organization, 13, 153, 173, 199
80/20 rule, 49
Eldering, Grace, 171
electricity, 135, 136
Eliasch, Johan, 138
emotional appeal of causes, 9–10, 11, 60–61
employment, 55. See also career choices
entrepreneurship, 168–71
Esquire, 67
ethicalcareers.org, 55
ethical consumerism, 128–46
and fair-trade products, 132–35
and food choices, 87–88, 141–43, 189–90
and green living, 135–40
and moral licensing, 144–46
and sweatshop laborers, 129–32
Ethiopia
cheap goods in, 20
extreme poverty of, 19
and fair-trade products, 133, 134
and Fistula Foundation, 41–42
and lives saved by doctors, 66
and volunteering, 176
Europe
and carbon footprint, 136
and factory farms, 189
and sweatshop laborers, 131
evaluating charites, 103–27
cost effectiveness of programs, 109, 110–13, 119–20
and evidence behind claims, 109, 113–17, 119–20
with financial information, 105–8
five key questions for, 109–10
funding needs of charity, 109, 118–19
implementation of charity, 109, 117–18
mission of the charity, 109, 110
evaluating problems and causes
climate change, 190–91, 195
criminal justice reform, 185–87, 194
extreme poverty, 194
factory farms, 189–90, 194
framework for, 181–85
international labor mobility, 187–89, 194
various low-probability events, 193–94, 195
evidence behind claims of aid programs, 109, 113–17, 119–20
expected values, 80–84
of climate change, 95–99
of ethical consumption, 87–88
of political careers, 89–94
of political rally participation, 88
of voting, 84–87
extreme poverty
and cheap goods, 20
and evaluation of causes, 194
and nutrition, 19–20
and sweatshop laborers, 130, 132
and value of charitable giving, 22–23
factory farms, 141, 142, 189–90, 194
Fairtrade Foundation, 134, 135
fair-trade products and practices, 87, 132–35
fat-tailed distributions, 49–50, 53
feedback mechanisms, lack of, 11
Fenwick, Alan, 183
Field, Frank, 138
Field, Trevor, 1–5, 9–10
financial information for charities, 105–8
Finland, 134
Fistula Foundation, 41–42
food choices
and animal welfare, 141–43
and carbon footprint, 136, 141–43
and fair-trade products, 132–35
and vegetarianism, 87–88, 141–43
Ford Motor Company, 5
forests and deforestation, 138–40
framework for evaluating problems and causes, 181–85
Franklin, Benjamin, 94
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, 79–80, 83–84
funding needs of charities, 109, 118–19
Future of Humanity Institute, 194
Gates, Bill, 166
Gavi, 118
Gelman, Andrew, 85
geoengineering, 192
Gilbert, Daniel T., 150–51
GiveDirectly
cost effectiveness of, 111–13, 119–20, 134
and evidence behind claims, 115–17, 119–20
financial overview of, 106, 108
founder of, 157, 169
funding needs of, 118–19
GiveWell’s endorsement of, 122, 127, 197
implementation of, 117–18
mission of, 105
GiveWell
and Against Malaria Foundation endorsement, 125, 127, 197
as career choice, 162
and criminal justice reform, 186
criteria for evaluating programs, 109
and Development Media International endorsement, 122–23, 127, 197
and Deworm the World Initiative endorsement, 9, 123–24, 127, 197
and disaster responses, 99
and funding needs of charities, 118
and GiveDirectly endorsement, 122, 127, 197
health-based aid emphasis of, 121
and the Iodine Global Network endorsement, 126–27
and Living Goods endorsement, 125–26
mission of, 12
and priority causes, 180
and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative endorsement, 124–25, 127, 197
Giving Pledge, 166
Giving What We Can, 12, 41, 138, 199
Glennerster, Rachel, 5–6, 9, 11
global warming. See climate change
good intentions, 10
governments, careers with, 163
graduate degrees, 172
Grameen Bank, 114–15
Greenbaum, Jim, 166–67
greenhouse gases
and carbon dioxide equivalent (CO
2eq
), 97
emitted in US, 135
and factory farms, 189
general reduction of, 135–36
offsetting of, 137–40
green living, 135–40
Griffiths, Peter, 134
gross domestic product (GDP), 23, 24, 97
The Guardian, 5
Guinea worm disease, 47, 121
Haber, Fritz, 171
habit, charitable giving as, 197
Haiti, 58–59, 60, 130, 188
Hallquist, Chris, 164
Haparanda, Pertti, 134
Harkin, Tom, 131–32
Hassenfeld, Elie, 12
Hatamura, Yotaro, 80
Hawken, Angela, 187
Head, Roy, 123
health-based aid programs
and evidence behind claims, 116
GiveWell’s emphasis on, 121
and hygiene standards, 111–12
and the Iodine Global Network, 126–27
and Living Goods, 125–26
See also Development Media International; Deworm the World Initiative
Henderson, D. A., 67–68
Hong Kong, 131
Humane League, 143, 190
Humane Society of the United States Farm Animal Protection Campaign, 190
Hurford, Peter, 147, 154–55, 157, 160–61
Idealist, 55
immigration, 187–89
immunization programs, 46–47
impact of causes, measurement of, 34
implementation of charities, 109, 117–18
improving lives as measure of impact, 34
income
and food purchases, 20
global average of, 49
global income distribution, 48–49, 49
income inequality, 15–25, 16, 18, 50
pledging ten percent of, 199
richest 10 percent of world, 23
and well-being, 21, 21–23
India, 20, 123, 130
Indigenous, 132
Industrial Revolution, 131
inefficiencies of aid, 45–46
Innovations for Poverty Action Lab, 9, 105, 115
insulation and carbon footprint, 136
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 95, 98, 179
International Christian Support (now called Investing in Children and Their Societies; ICS), 6–7
international labor mobility, 187–89, 194
intestinal worms, 8–9, 183
Iodine Global Network (IGN), 126–27, 127
Islam, Habiba, 167
Ivory Coast, 104, 123
Japan
earthquakes and tsunamis in, 58–59
and Fukushima disaster, 79–80, 83–84
homicide rate in, 185
Japanese Red Cross Society, 59
Jay-Z, 3
Jenner, Edward, 69
Jobs, Steve, 149, 152
juvenile crime, 70–74
Kahneman, Daniel, 173
Kaposi’s sarcoma, 52, 52–53
Karnofsky, Holden, 12
Kendrick, Pearl, 171
Kenya, 105, 122, 123, 170–71
Kerry, John, 179
Kilian, Bernard, 134
Kremer, Michael, 5–9, 11, 108
Kristof, Nicholas D., 130
Krugman, Paul, 131
Kuyichi, 132
Laos, 130
law of diminishing returns, 58–61, 62–66
Lean Startup movement, 159
legal profession as career choice, 164
Levitt, Steven, 84–86
Lewis, Greg
and earning to give, 74–78
on impact of medicine, 62–66, 74–75, 76
medical ambitions of, 55, 56
life expectancies, 19, 45
Lipeyah, Paul, 6–7
literacy, 103–4
lives saved by doctors, 63–66, 75
Living Goods, 125–26, 127
lower-bound reasoning, 91
low-probablity events, 83–84
malaria
and bed nets, 52, 53, 112, 113–14, 117
deaths from, 46–47, 60
and expected values, 81–82
funding dedicated to, 61–62
and program implementation, 117
See also Against Malaria Foundation
marginal utility, 57–58
marketing careers, 165, 167
Massachusetts, 87
Mather, Rob, 157, 177
Matthews, Dylan, 174
measles, 121
meat and meat consumption, 136, 141–43
media coverage of disasters and causes, 59–60
medicine as career choice, 164
mega-charities, 120
Mercy for Animals, 143, 175, 190
Mexico, 133, 137
microcredit/microloans, 114–15
micromorts, 82–83
migrants, 187–89
Miliband, Ed, 90
missions of charities, 109, 110
Monbiot, George, 137–38, 140
Montagnier, Luc, 171
Montenegro, Claudio, 188
monthly donations, 197
moral licensing, 144–46
motivation, altruistic, 166–67
Moyo, Dambisa, 43, 44, 45, 46, 50
Mozambique, 3, 104, 123
M-Pesa system, 105
Mulder, Frederick, 177
National Area Health Education Center Organization, 63
National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, 129
natural disasters, 80
natural gas, 136
neglectedness of problems/causes, 181, 183
neglected tropical diseases, 183
Net Impact, 55
New Hampshire, 86
Niehaus, Paul, 169
Niemi, Niina, 134
Nigeria, 188
Nike, 129
Noda, Yoshihiko, 80
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 77
Nordhaus, William, 170
normal distributions in statistics, 47–48, 48
Norwood, Bailey, 141–42
No Sweat Apparel, 129
Nothing But Nets, 113–14
Nuclear Threat Initiative, 194
Obama, Barack, 179
objections to charitable giving, 40–41
Occupy Wall Street, 15
offsetting greenhouse gases emissions, 137–40
One Foundation, 3
100x Multiplier, 15–25, 62, 66
“the 1 percent,” 15–18
One Water, 3
Orbinski, James, 29–34
Ord, Toby, 12
outsourcing of jobs, 165
overhead costs of charities, 106
Oxfam, 120
Parliament (MP), value of career in, 90–94
passion and career choices, 149–53, 154
Penna, Robert M., 40
People Tree, 132
personal fit with problems/causes, 41–43, 148–55, 181
Peru, 191
Pew Charitable Trusts, 187
pigs and pork, 141–42, 143
Piketty, Thomas, 15
plastic bags, 136
PlayPumps, 1–5, 9–10, 47
PlayPumps International, 2–3, 11
polio, 121
political careers, 89–94, 174
political causes, 182
political rally participation, 88
poor countries
and career choices, 76–78
cost effectiveness of programs in, 62, 121
and fair-trade products, 133
and law of diminishing returns, 61
lives saved by doctors in, 66
and sweatshop laborers, 131–32
presidential election of 2008, 85
preventable diseases, deaths from, 46–47, 60
Pritchett, Lant, 188
programming skills, 161, 164
Public Broadcasting System (PBS), 5
quality-adjusted life years (QALYs)
concept of, 34–39
and cost-effectiveness evaluations, 112
and evidence behind claims of programs, 116–17
graphs illustrating, 35, 36
and lives saved by doctors, 63, 65
Quirk, Lincoln, 170
Quoidbach, Jordi, 150–51
Rath, Pim Srey, 130
regression to the mean, 73–74
Reid, Harry, 179
research, funding spent on, 110
research careers, 171–73
rich countries
cost effectiveness for programs in, 62
and easily preventable diseases, 62
lives saved by doctors in, 66
Ries, Eric, 159
Round-about Water Solutions, 5
Rumsfeld, Donald, 44
Rwandan genocide, 29–32
Sachs, Jeffrey, 131
sacrifices in altruism, 12
sales careers, 165, 167
Salvation Army, 32–33
scale of problems/causes, 181
Scared Straight program, 70–74, 114
Schindlers List (1993), 196–97
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative
founder of, 157
GiveWell’s endorsement of, 124–25, 127, 197
and neglected tropical diseases, 183
scientific research careers, 171–73
Shapiro, Arnold, 70–71
Silver, Nate, 85
Singapore, 131
SKAT, 11
Skoll Global Threats Fund, 99
slavery, 94–95
smallpox, eradication of, 45–46, 47, 67–69, 121
social cost of greenhouse gas emissions, 97–98
software engineering, 164
Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, 193
Somalia, 68
South Africa, 2, 3
South Korea, 131
Soviet Union, 68–69
Spain, 136
Stern Review, 190–91
Stocker, Thomas F., 179
strokes, 35
Stuiver, Ronnie, 1
sub-Saharan Africa
health education in, 104
life expectancy in, 45
and Against Malaria Foundation, 125
and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, 124
supply and demand, law of, 87–88
Swaziland, 3
SweatFree Communities, 129
sweatshops, 128–32
alternatives to, 132
conditions in, 129, 130
desirability of jobs in, 130–31
economic pressures of, 130
and extreme poverty, 130, 132
Swiss Resource Centre and Consultancies for Development (SKAT), 3–4
Taiwan, 131
Taleb, Nassim, 98
Teach for America, 55
Tea Party rallies, 89
technology oriented careers, 163, 164
tenure, 153
testing effectiveness of programs, 74
textbooks, 7, 103–4, 108–9
Thailand, 130
Theroux, Louis, 78
thinking at the margin, 57
Time magazine, 3
tractability of problems/causes, 181, 182–83
trade professions, 165
travel, carbon foot print from, 136, 137–38
Trigg, Jason, 166
tsunamis, 58, 79
tuberculosis, 60
Tversky, Amos, 173
Uganda
and fair-trade products, 134
and GiveDirectly, 105, 122
and Living Goods, 125
Under the Knife (2007), 78
UNICEF, 3–4, 11, 120, 132
United Kingdom
affluence of, 17
homicide rate in, 185
medical students in, 55
political careers in, 174
and social cost of greenhouse gas emissions, 97
value of political careers in, 90–94
United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, 191
United States
benefits from medicine in, 63, 65
career choices in, 164
and climate change, 191
cost effectiveness for programs in, 62
and factory farms, 190
and fair-trade products, 134
greenhouse gases of, 135
homicide rate in, 185
income and income inequality in, 15–16, 17, 22
and Industrial Revolution, 131
infrastructure costs in, 46
lives saved by doctors in, 75
medical students in, 55
poverty in, 18, 184
and presidential election of 2008, 85
and quality of goods, 20
and social cost of greenhouse gas emissions, 97
social security spending of, 44
and sweatshop laborers, 131–32
and value of charitable giving, 22
voting in, 84–87
United Students Against Sweatshops, 129
United Way, 33–34
University of Chicago Crime Lab, 187
University of Oxford Geoengineering Programme, 193
US Department of Labor, 132
US Department of Transportation, 46
US Environmental Protection Agency, 46
US Food and Drug Administration, 46
vaccination programs, 118
Valkila, Joni, 134
vegetarianism, 87–88, 141–43, 175
Virginia, 86
volunteering, 175–76
voting, expected value of, 84–87
Washington State Institute for Public Policy, 72
water, 1–5, 56–57
Watts, Alan, 149–50
Wave, 170–71
well-being, subjective assessments of, 21, 21–23, 39–40
Well-Being-Adjusted Life Years (WALYs), 39–40
What If Money Was No Object (YouTube video), 149
The White Man’s Burden (Easterly), 43
Whittlestone, Jess, 168
Wikipedia, 175
Wilson, Timothy, 150–51
Winfrey, Oprah, 55
World Bank, 60, 134
World Bank Development Marketplace Award, 2
World Health Organization (WHO), 60, 69
WorldVision, 120
World War II, 98
Wozniak, Steve, 152
Yunus, Muhammad, 114
Zambia, 3
Zhdanov, Viktor, 68–69
Zimbabwe Bush Pump, 4
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