Top Quotes: “Doing Good Better” — William MacAskill

Background: This was a life-changing book! I took big issue with the way in which he compared poor people in the U.S. to poor people in developing countries (basically arguing that poor people in the U.S. are doing just dandy relatively and that we should not focus our aid on them — I believe that life really sucks for poor people in the U.S. too because of our shitty blame-the-victim attitude toward the poor and resulting policies), but other than that I really connected to his vision and learned a TON from this book about ethical consumption (Fairtrade and sweatshops), how to have the greatest impact through your donations, and how to use your career (or your earnings) to change the world in a big away — which I now believe is possible for anyone with a solid income. A must-read!

Introduction

“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 do these other conditions. But they do make children sick, and can be cured for pennies: off-patent drugs, developed in the ’50s, can be distributed to teachers, and will cure children of intestinal worms for a year.”

“In an experiment, deworming 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%. In fact, every child treated spent an extra two weeks in school, and every $100 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. When researchers 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% 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.”

“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.”

“One difference between investing in a company and donating to a charity is that the charity world often lacks appropriate feedback mechanism. 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.”

“Effective altruism is about asking: ‘How can I make the biggest difference I can?’ and using evidence and careful reasoning to truly 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.”

“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. Effectiveness is doing the most good with whatever resources you have. Importantly, effectiveness 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 the best ways of doing good are very good indeed.”

“The best charities that fight poverty in developing countries are hundreds of times more effective at improving lives than merely ‘good’ charities.”

“I co-founded Giving What You Can, an organization that encourages people to donate at least 10% of their income to those most cost-effective charities. Around the same time, GiveWell, an organization that does extraordinarily in-depth research to work out which charities do the most good with every dollar they receive, was started. From there, a community developed. We realized that effective altruism can 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.”

“Effective altruism’s five key questions are: 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?”

“French economist Thomas Piketty has suggested that the income inequality in the U.S. is ‘probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.’”

“This internal income inequality can lead those of us who aren’t in the 1% to feel powerless, but this focus neglects just how much power almost any member of an affluent country has. If you earn more than $52,000 per year, then globally speaking, you are the 1%. If you earn at least $28k — that’s the typical income for working individuals in the U.S. — you’re in the richest 5% of the world’s population. Even someone living below the U.S. poverty line, earning just $11k per year, is still richer than 85% of the 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.”

“The extreme poor consume an average of 1,400 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 or anemic. Most [extreme poor] households own radios but lack electricity, toilets, or tap water. Less than 10% of [these] households possess a chair or a table.”

“The benefit you’d get from doubling your $28k income is the same as the benefit a poor Indian farmer would get from a doubled income, an additional $220. This gives us a good theoretical reason for thinking that the same amount of money can do 100 times as much to benefit the very poorest people in the world as it can to benefit typical citizens of the U.S. If you earn as much as the typical American worker, then you are 100 times as rich as the very poorest people in the world, which means additional income can do 100 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.”

“It’s not often you have two options, one of which 100 times better than the other. Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beer for five dollars or someone else a beer for five cents. That’s effectively the situation we’re in all the time.”

“We shouldn’t expect to be able to do so much to benefit others at such little cost ourselves. But we live in an unusual place during an unusual time. 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 200 years, we’ve become 30 times richer. But it’s a time following remarkably unequal economic progress.”

“For almost all of human history — from the evolution of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago until the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago — the average income across all countries was the equivalent of $2 per day or less. Even now, more than half of the world still lives on $4 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.”

“Because of that economic progress, we live at a time in which we have the tech to easily gather info 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. 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 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. 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 problems in Rwanda began to build up decades before, when the early Belgian colonialists had decreed that, of the native population, the minority Tuts 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. 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 Hutus’ resentment toward the Tutsis 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 were being used to categorize fear among the Hutu populace. In 1994, the Rwandan president was assassinated. The extremist Hutus blamed the Tutsi refugee army, giving them the perfect opportunity to initiate their long-planned genocide.”

Health

“People on average rate a life with untreated AIDS as 50% as good as a life at full health; people on average rate life after a stroke as 75% as good as life at full health; and people on average rate life with moderate depression as only 30% as good as life in full health.”

“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 12 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 — five times as many lives as world peace would have done.”

“Using the low estimate of the benefits of smallpox, at 60 million lives saved, foreign aid has saved a life with every $40,000 spent. In comparison, government departments in the U.S. will pay for infrastructure to improve safety if doing so costs less than about $7 million per life saved; $9 million for the EPA; $8 million for the FDA; and $6 million for the Department of Transportation. Even if aid had achieved absolutely nothing except eradicating smallpox, it still would have prevented a death for every 1/150th of the cost that the U.S. is currently willing to spend to save the lives of its own citizens.”

“The cost to save a life in the developing world is about $3,400. This is a small enough amount that most of us in affluent countries could donate that amount every year while maintaining 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.”

Disaster Relief

“In 2011, Japan was hit by the 4th 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 8 feet east. Millions of people were left without electricity or water. Thousands died. In 2010, just one year before, an earthquake hit Haiti, also with strong severity and much greater impact. 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 50 miles northwest of Chengdu and killed 87,000 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 less 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, 18,000 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.”

“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 suggest 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.”

Effectiveness

“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 that money, since it provides a larger benefit for the same cost. Not only is $50k enough to cure one person of blindness in the developing world, it’s enough to cure 500 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 $100 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.”

“Every year, cancer kills 8 million people and is responsible for 8% 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% 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. 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 U.S. in 1951.) Each of us can provide a far greater benefit for other people by funding the most effective malaria treatments in the developing world. In the U.S., 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 $50k. 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 $100. This means that you can benefit people in poor countries 500 times more than people in rich countries.”

“When Dr. D.A. Henderson became the leader of the WHO’s Global Smallpox Eradication campaign at 38 years old with only 10 years of clinical experience, he proposed an ambitious goal: to completely wipe smallpox off the face of the planet within 10 years. Astoundingly, the campaign succeeded, and between 1967 and 1971 the number of smallpox-endemic countries plummeted from 31 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.”

“D.A. Henderson 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 can achieve is the difference between what happens as a result of your actions and what would have happened anyway.”

Earning To Give

“Earning to give is 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 there’s no reason to assume the best careers are only those that benefit people directly through the work itself.”

“If someone works as a doctor in a rich country and doesn’t donate a portion of her income, she would do an amount of good equivalent to saving two lives of the course of her career. If she went to work as a doctor in a poor country, she would do an amount of good equivalent to saving four lives every year, or 140 lives over a thirty-five year career. By pursuing a particularly lucrative specialty and donating 50% of annual income (while still having a very comfortable lifestyle) to distribution of antimalarial bed nets, she could save dozens of lives per year, considerably more than she could have done if she’d worked directly in a poor country.”

“A young doctor told me, ‘I started out giving around 10%. But I’ve gradually been increasing that, as I found that I really didn’t miss the money. Now I’m donating about 50% and my life is, if anything, better than it was. I feel like I’m doing justice to my 17-year-old self who wanted to make the world a better place.’ In 2014, he donated 20,000 pounds, enough to save ten lives.”

“Importantly, by earning to give, he 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%). In contrast, by working for an NGO in a poor country, he would be using money from the NGO that would otherwise have been spent on a different doctor’s salary, or on medical supplies. Because he’s making a difference that wouldn’t have happened anyway, he 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.”

“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. And it’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.”

Odds of Success or Failure

“To calculate the expected monetary value of a bet, you can look at all possible outcomes of the bet. Imagine there are two possible outcomes, each with a 50% chance of occurring. The expected monetary value would be (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. This is the best strategy for making decisions when you know the value and the probabilities of each option.”

“To assess the risk of death from different activities, public health experts use the concept of a ‘micromort,’ where one micromort equals a one-in-a-million chance of dying, equivalent to 30 minutes of life lost if you’re aged 20, or 15 minutes of expected life lost if you’re 50. 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 17,000 micromorts, or a 1.7% chance of dying, which is about as dangerous as attempting to climb Mt. Everest beyond base camp, at 13,000 micromorts or a 1.3% chance.”

“The same concept can be applied to things that increase risk of death later in life as well. Eating 40 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 or reduces life expectancy by five minutes, about the same length of time it takes to smoke it.”

“The risk of a fatal car crash while driving for one hour is about one in ten million. The expected life lost from driving for one hour is therefore three minutes. 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 45 minutes.”

“The authors of the [Japanese nuclear plant’s] 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 the catastrophe was small, it was clearly worth taking substantial safety precautions. 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

“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.”

“The odds of an individual vote swaying the ’08 Presidential election was on average one-in-sixty-million — small odds to be sure. Working out what the stakes are necessarily involves some guesstimation. How much do you personally expect to gain by having your preferred party in power (in taxes, benefits, etc.)? Suppose for the sake of argument you conclude your preferred party getting into power is worth $1,000 to 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 $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 U.S. population of 314 million so $314 billion. The average expected value of voting is the probably of success (1 in 60 million) multiplied by the benefit ($314 billion) which equals about $5,200 of value to the people of the U.S. 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.”

Ethical Consumption

“Suppose someone stops buying chicken breasts, 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. But then we’re left with a paradox: individuals can’t make a difference, but millions of individuals do. How 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 been one higher. (Perhaps they follow a rule like: ‘If fewer than 5,000 chicken breasts were bought this month, decrease stock intake.’) And when that manager does decide to decrease their stock amount, 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 1,000 fewer chicken breasts.”

“Economists have 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 0.5 gallons; if you give up one pound of beef, beef production falls by 0.68 pounds; if you give up one pound of pork, production 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 a political rally. 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 show up, the policy will go through. What difference do you make by showing up to 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. Professors of political science at Harvard analyzed Tea Party rallies held on Tax Day in April 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 protesters’ representatives voted conservatively.”

Careers

“Laura said, ‘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.’ Before making her decision, Laura had been unsure 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. Using the expected value formula, Laura’s expected impact of entering politics is as great as 8 million pounds donated to the most effective causes, even though she’s unlikely to succeed at it because if she does she can make a big difference.”

“If you can find the right area, funding or participating in political campaigns could potentially do even more good than giving to charity. Long shots can be worth it if the payoff is big enough.”

“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. But sometimes this 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 heat wave that wouldn’t have happened.”

Deciding How to Give

“Financial information, like CEO pay, is something we should care far less about than the impact charities have. When you give a hundred dollars to a charity, how are people’s lives improved as a result?”

“The five questions any donor should ask before deciding where to give are: 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? Charity A & B might both be effective at distributing deworming bugs, but if Charity B can do so at half the cost, then a donation to them will do twice as much good

• Find out how much the charity spends per person to run their program. For example, it costs $6 to deliver one antimalarial bend net, which on average protects two children for two years, so it costs $1.50 to protect one child for one year.
• Next, try to figure out how this converts into impact on people’s well-being. How robust is the evidence behind each program? What is the evidence behind the programs the charity runs
• Are there trials showing that the program is effective? Does the charity rigorously monitor and evaluate the success of its programs? 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 study — that’s even better. It’s best 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.
• How well is each program implemented? Do the leaders 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 this charity need additional funds? What would additional funding be used to do? Why haven’t other donors already funded this charity to the point it can’t use the extra money? How much money does the charity expect to receive this year and how much could they productively use? Is there a limit to how much money they can do anything with?
• This framework enables us to genuinely assess charities in terms of their impact, rather than on flawed metrics like administrative overhead.”

“There’s a lot of health knowledge that we have without even realizing it. For example, everyone in the U.S. knows to wash their hands regularly, to use soap, and that just because our hands look clean 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 handwashing. This can have severe consequences. Diarrhea is a major problem in the developing world, killing 760,000 children every year. (For comparison, that’s a death toll equivalent to five jumbo jets crashing to the ground and killing everyone on board every day.) A significant number of those deaths could be avoided through simple improvements to sanitation and hygiene, like more regular handwashing with soap.”

“One of the most damning examples of low-quality evidence concerns microcredit (lending small amounts of money to the very poor). 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 healthcare 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.”

Which Charities to Support

“Global health stands out as a cause because it has a proven track record of improving lives, strong evidence behind health interventions, and the same solution can generally be applied across cultures. If a drug kills a worm in the U.S., we can safely conclude it will kill that some 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.”

“GiveDirectly provides direct unconditional cash transfers to poor households in Kenya and Uganda. One dollar in donations results in 90 cents delivered to households; this leads to increases in investment, consumption, education spending, and subjective well-being

• Extremely robust evidence by independent evaluators with randomized trials
• Run by a leading development economist; very open, transparent, and self-skeptical
• Could productively use an additional $20-$30 million in 2015 and expect to receive $10 in that time. The potential for them to scale up beyond that in future years is very high.

Development Media International produces and runs radio shows to educate people in Burkina Faso on basic health matters, with plans to cover the DRC, Mozambique, Cameroon, and Cote d’Ivoire

• Their cost-effectiveness is on the order of $10 per QALY — huge! Fairly robust evidence so far based on self-reporting but more in the works
• They work with leading epidemiologists to monitor their effectiveness; they’re open, transparent, and self-skeptical
• In order to scale up to four more countries, they believe they could use $10 million in 2015 and expect to receive $2-$4 million

Deworm the World Initiative provides technical assistance to governments in Kenya & India to help those governments run school-based deworming programs

• The cost to them per child treated per year is extremely low, about 3 cents
• Two major randomized studies with robust evidence, but it’s more difficult to know whether the governments would run the programs anyway without them
• Highly transparent
• Not much room for funding — will receive what they need in 2015

Schistosmiasis Control Initiative provides 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.

• The cost to them of deworming one child is less than $1/year
• ery robust randomized controlled studies
• Some concerns about transparency
• Could productively use about $8 million in additional funds in 2015, unclear how much it will receive

Against Malaria Foundation provides funding to buy & distribute long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets to poor households across sub-Saharan Africa

• $6 to provide one bed net that covers 2 children for 2 years
• Robust randomized trials
• Very transparent
• Could productively use $20 million in 2015

Living Goods Runs, 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 healthcare advice

• $3,000 spent would save a life
• Robust evidence from just one study Transparent but limited ongoing monitoring and evaluation
• Likely to have a shortfall of $2-$3 million per year

The Iodine Global Network advocates for governments to fortify salt with iodine and thereafter monitor progress of implemented programs and provide country-specific guidance

• Iodine deficiency is a major cause of physical and intellectual stunting in developing countries and fortification can alleviate these problems at a cost of pennies per person
• Robust studies but unclear whether they’re causing more people to receive iodized salt than they otherwise would have done
• Transparent and led by experts
• About halfway toward their 2015 goal, which is only $1 million”

Sweatshops

“Sweatshop workers often face 16-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 are so bad, many people have pledged to boycott goods produced in them, and a number of orgs are devoted to ending the use of sweatshop labor. There’s significant public animosity toward big companies like Nike, Apple, and Disney that rely on sweatshop labor to manufacture their products. The movement has noble intentions. However, those who protest sweatshops by refusing to buy goods produced in them are making the mistake of failing to consider what would happen otherwise. In developing countries, sweatshop jobs are the good jobs. The alternatives are typically worse, such as backbreaking, low-paid farm labor, scavenging, or unemployment. 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 2000s, nearly four million people from Laos, Cambodia, & Burma immigrated to Thailand to take sweatshop jobs, and many Bolivians risk deportation by illegally entering Brazil in order to work in the sweatshops there. The average earnings of a sweatshop worker in Brazil are $2,000/year — not very much, but $600/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/day in Bangladesh, $5.50/day in Cambodia, $7/day in Haiti, and $8/day in India. These wages are tiny, but when compared to the $1.25 a day many citizens of these countries live in, the demand for these jobs seem more understandable. It’s difficult for us to imagine that people would risk deportation just to work in sweatshops. But that’s because the extremity of global poverty is almost unimaginable. Among economists, there’s no question that sweatshops benefit those in poor countries and that they are ‘tremendous good news for the world’s poor.’ One said, ‘My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops but that there are too few.’ Low-wage, labor-intensive manufacturing is a stepping-stone that helps an economy based around cash crops develop into an industrialized, rich country. During the Industrial Revolution, for example, Europe and America spent more than 100 years using sweatshop labor, emerging with much higher living standards as a result. It took many decades to pass through this stage because the tech to industralize was new, and the 20th century has seen countries pass through this stage of development much more rapidly because the tech 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 20th 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. We should certainly feel outrage and horror at the conditions sweatshop laborers toll under. The correct response, however, is not to give 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 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.”

Fairtrade

“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 label 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 that. Second, producers are paid a ‘social premium’ on top of the market rate — an additional twenty cents per pound for coffee. 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 these products worldwide. But the evidence suggests that we’re benefiting people in poor countries very little by shelling out a few extra dollars for Fairtrade. This is for three reasons. 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. The majority of fair-trade coffee production comes from comparatively rich countries like Mexico & Costa Rica, which are ten times richer than the very poorest countries like Ethiopia. That means that even if buying far-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 poor 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. Of the additional money that is spent on fair-trade, only a very small portion ends up in the hands of farmers who earn that money. Middlemen take the rest. Independent researchers have worked out that for one British cafe chain, less than 1% of the additional price of their fair-trade coffee reached coffee exporters in poor countries. Finnish professors found that only 11% of Finnish fair-trade coffee sold reached the coffee-producing countries. In the U.S., while fair-trade coffee would sell for $5 per pound more, coffee producers would receive only forty cents per pound, or 8% of the increased price. Even the small fraction that ultimately reaches the producers does not necessarily translate into higher wages. In a four-year study of Fairtrade workers in Ethiopia & Uganda, researchers found that Fairtrade workers had systemically lower wages and worse working conditions than comparatively non-Fairtrade workers, and that the poorest often had no access to the ‘community projects’ that Fairtrade touted as major successes.”

Carbon Footprints

“”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 your lights when you leave a room, but lighting accounts for only 3% of household energy use, so even if you never used lighting in your house, you would save only a fraction of of a metric ton of carbon emissions. If you stopped using plastic bags entirely, you’d cut out 100kg CO2 equivalent per year, which is only 0.4% of your total emissions. Similarly, the focus on buying locally produced goods is overhyped: only 10% of the carbon footprint of food comes from transportation, whereas 80% comes from production so what type of food you buy is much more important than whether the 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 CO2 per year), to reduce the amount you travel (driving half as much would cut out two metric tons of CO2 per year and one fewer round-trip flight from London to New York would eliminate a metric ton of CO2), and to use less electricity and gas in the home (especially by installing loft insulation, which would save a metric ton of CO2 for a detached house.)”

“However, there is an even more effective way to reduce your emissions called offsetting: rather than reducing your own greenhouse gas emissions, you pay for projects that reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.”

“Cool Earth is an org that most cost-effectively prevents the release of one metric ton of CO2 equivalent. The charity aims to fight climate change by preventing deforestation, primarily in the Amazon. They use donated money to help rainforest communities economically to a point where they do better by not selling their land to loggers. Cool Earth does not buy rainforest directly; instead, it provides economic assistance to local communities, helping the people who inhabit the rainforests 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 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 rainforest, they can create a ‘wall’ of forest that blocks off a much wider landscape from illegal logging. Cool Earth claims it costs them about $100 to prevent an acre of rainforest from being cut down, and that each acre locks in 260 metric tons of CO2. That would mean it costs just about 38 cents to prevent one metric ton of CO2 from being emitted. 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.”

“Through effective carbon offsetting, you’re preventing anyone from being harmed by your emissions in the first place: if you emit CO2 throughout your life but effectively offset it at the same time, overall your life contributes nothing to climate change.”

Animal Rights

“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 the 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 produce 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. On a scale from -10 to 10 where negative numbers indicate it’d be better to be dead than alive, beef cattle are 6, dairy cows are 4, broiler chickens are -1, and pigs and caged hens are -5. In a year, the average American will consume 28.5 broiler chickens, 0.8 layer hens, 0.8 turkeys, 0.4 pigs, 0.1 beef cows, and 0.007 dairy cows., suggesting 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: 3.3 from broiler chickens, 1 from layer hens, 0.3 from turkeys, 0.2 from pigs, 0.1 from beef cows, and 0.03 from dairy cows. The most effective way to cut animal suffering out of your diet is therefore 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.”

“The impact you can have on animal suffering through your donations seems even greater than the impact you can have by changing your own behavior. Donating to charities like Mercy for Animals or the Humane League, which distribute leaflets on vegetarianism costs about $100 to convince one person to stop eating meat for one year. 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.”

Ethical Consumption

“There’s some reason to think that the rise in ethical consumption could even be harmful for the world on balance. Psychologists have discovered a phenomenon called moral licensing, which describes how people who perform one good action often compensate by doing fewer good actions in the future. In a recent experiment, participants were told to choose a product from either a selection of ‘green’ items (like energy-efficient lightbulbs) or regular items. People who purchased a ‘green’ product were significantly more likely to lie and steal in later stages 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 of 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 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.”

Choosing a Career

“Most people don’t have passions that fit the world of work. In one study of Canadian college students, it was found that 84% of students had passions, and 90% of those involved sports, music, and art, but only 3% of jobs are in the sports, music, and arts industries. The vast majority would fail to secure a job if they followed their passion; in these cases, ‘doing what you’re passionate about’ can be actively harmful. 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.”

“Plus, your interests change. Psychologists have shown that they change much more than we anticipate, so we overrate their importance. If you only focus on what you’re currently passionate about, then you risk committing to projects that you soon find you’re no longer interested in.”

“The best predictors of job satisfaction are features of the job itself, rather than the facts about personal passion. Instead of trying to figure out which career to pursue based on whatever you happen to be interested in today, you should start by looking for work with certain important features. If you find that, passion will follow. The most consistent predictor of job satisfaction is engaging work, which can be broken down into five factors

• Independence — to what extent do you have control over how you go about your work?
• 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 merely a small part of a much larger product?
• Variety — To what extent does the job require you to perform a range of different activities, using different skills and talents?
• Feedback from the job — How easy is it to know whether you’re performing well or badly?
• 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 distraction 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 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.”

“We recommend people think of three primary routes by which they can have impact on the job.

• Through the labor you provide — like if you’re employed by an effective organization or do influential research
• The money you can give with your income
• The influence you can have on other people”

“When starting out, you should focus on building up skills, network, and credentials, rather than trying to have an impact right away, which is more easily done in senior positions by people with experience.”

“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.”

Volunteering

“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’ve heard from some nonprofits that the main reason they use volunteers is because volunteers subsequently donate back to the charity.”

“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.”

Choosing a Cause

“You can compare causes by assessing them on how well they do on each of the following three dimensions:

• Scale. What’s the magnitude of this problem? How much does it affect lives in the short term and long run?
• Neglectedless. 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 solved by markets or governments? The causes we hear 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.
• 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 thinking about contributions of your time) Personal fit. Given your skills, resources, knowledge, connections, and passions, how likely are you to make a large difference in this area?”

“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 info on what works, and fostering broad political support for specific policies.”

“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 30% increase in GDP. The economic gains from substantially increased immigration would be measured in trillions of dollars per year.”

Conclusion

“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 7,000 children, or double the income of 15 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.”