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

In a paragraph

Effective altruism’s approach is to use evidence and careful reasoning to find how to make the most positive difference.  As affluent countries are 100 times richer, and because the best charities can be 100s of times more effective, we each have the power to save dozens of lives by donating to the most effective development charities.

Key points

• Effective altruism is about asking ‘How can I make the biggest difference?’ and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It is scientific rather than emotional.

• Effective altruism’s five key questions: 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? Base reasoning on QALYs.

• The 100x Multiplier. The bottom billion live on $1.50 per day and we are in the top 1% and typically 100x richer. Resources given to the global poor will typically have 100x the value of spending on ourselves. Few people have had the opportunities we have to help others. The cost of saving a life is around $3,400 so you can be a hero and save dozens of lives.  We can achieve astonishingly good outcomes.

• Although some aid spending may be poor, the best is very effective. Eradicating smallpox alone justified all global aid spending. There is a fat-tailed distribution to the success of altruistic projects with the best being hundreds of times more effective than the average.

• Do not donate for emotional reasons as unfair on those you could have helped more. You shouldn’t donate to disaster relief. $50,000 to provide a guide dog could cure 500 people of blindness through surgery for trachoma.

• Earning to gives seems to be an enormously powerful way to do good. If you earn to give you make a difference that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred. A doctor can make more of a difference through his donations than through his work, unless he is exceptional at his work.

• Expected value should be used to compare high-risk higher-upside outcomes. Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity and a political career can be justified (at least for PPE-ists) on the logic of expected value. As people may neglect the risks of worst-case outcomes, helping to prevent these outcomes might be a particularly effective altruistic activity.

• In evaluating charities consider what the charity does, its cost-effectiveness, robustness of evidence, effectiveness of implementation and need for additional funds. Global Health often stands out for its track record and evidence.

• GiveDirectly can be thought of as the ‘index fund’ of giving and 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.

• The moral case for sweatshops: in developing countries sweatshop jobs are the good jobs. Fairtrade gives little benefit. The easiest and most effective way to cut down your carbon footprint is simply to donate to Cool Earth, with around $100 pa to offset own emissions. the most effective way to cut animal suffering out of your diet is to stop eating chicken, then eggs, then pork.

• Don’t follow your passions. How do I personally fit with this job? What’s my impact while I’m working at this job? How does this job contribute to my impact later on in life? Solid bets are earning to give, working well for an effective organisation and skill-building. High-potential long-shots are entrepreneurship, research, politics and advocacy.

• Consider areas in terms of scale, neglectedness, tractability and (where relevant) personal fit. Includes factory farming, climate change and other global catastrophic risks.

Comments

An impressive statement of the case for effective altruism, particularly concentrating on the good that people in the affluent countries can do by contributing to the most effective charities helping poor people in the developing world.

The Effective Altruism movement has progressed substantially since the book was written, as welcomed by MacAskill.  With funding from Dustin Moskovitz, Effective Altruism is now well established with programmes across global health, farm animal welfare, long-termism and movement building.  The central focus is now more on working out how to do the most good with philanthropic funds.  People and ideas have become more important relative to funding while earning to give and self-sacrifice are encouraged less.  The balance has moved somewhat from well-evidenced interventions to bets with potential high-impact and from global health towards long termism.  A new edition of the book, or a new book, would be helpful.

NOTES

Introduction

PlayPump. As Trevor Field’s story illustrates, 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 inadvertently causing harm and have the greatest positive impact we can?

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.

Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennerster.  A randomised controlled trial. He looked at the efficacy of providing schools with additional textbooks and flipcharts, and decreasing class sizes, but little effect.   But deworming made big difference and can be cured for pennies. Led to Deworm the World Initiative.

When it comes to helping others, being unreflective often means being ineffective.  One difference between investing in a company and donating to a charity is that the charity world often lacks appropriate feedback mechanisms.

In contrast with the PlayPump, the most effective programme turned out to be remarkably boring.  But by focusing on what was effective rather than what was emotionally appealing, they produced outstanding results, significantly improving the lives of millions.

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 I use the term, altruism simply means improving the lives of others. Many people believe that altruism should necessarily 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 best charities are hundreds of times more effective at improving lives than merely ‘good’ charities.

In 2009 Toby and I co-founded Giving What We Can.  Holden Karnowski and Elie Hassenfeld started GiveWell. In 2011 I co – founded 80,000 Hours.

Effective altruism’s five key questions: 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?

What I hope to convey is not a series of facts, but a new way of thinking about helping others.  The guiding question of effective altruism: ‘How can I do the best?’

1: You Are the 1%

How much power almost any member of an affluent country has. If you earn above $52,000 (£34,000) per year, then, speaking globally, you are part of the 1%.  Global income distribution by percentile and income. The bottom 20 % of the world’s population, that’s 1.22 billion people who earn less than $1.50 per day.  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 real cost.

What’s interesting about this graph is that a doubling of income will always increase reported subjective wellbeing by the same amount (note that the $ amounts double at each division).  There is good theoretical reason for thinking that the same amount of money can be of at least one hundred times as much benefit to the very poorest people in the world as it can be to typical citizens of the West.  It’s like a 99 % off sale.  The 100x Multiplier.

Graph of gross domestic product per person, over the last 2000 years.  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, over half of the world still lives on $4 per day or less.  Yet, through some outstanding stroke of luck, we in the developed world have found ourselves the inheritors of the most astonishing period of economic growth the planet 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 easily to 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 splash. 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.

Part I: The Five Key Questions of Effective Altruism

2: Hard Trade-offs

Rwanda. James Orbinski.  Patients were taped with a 1, 2 or 3 on their foreheads. Tough choices: who did he save, and who did he leave to die?

Of all the ways in which we could make the world a better place, which will do the best?  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.

Quality-adjusted life-year, or QALY (pronounced ‘kwalee’).  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. Doubling someone’s income gives a 5% increase in reported subjective wellbeing. On this measure, doubling someone’s income for twenty years would provide one WALY.

Should I have donated to the Fistula Foundation, even knowing I could do more to help people if I donated elsewhere? I do not think so.  It would be privileging the needs of some people over others for emotional rather than moral reasons. That would be unfair to those I could have helped more.

3: How You can Save Hundreds of Lives

Aid scepticism from inefficiencies of typical aid programmes. 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 programmes.

A good contender for the best aid programme ever is the eradication of smallpox. 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. The total aid spending of all countries over the last five decades is $ 2.3 trillion. At 60 million lives saved, foreign aid has saved a life with every $ 40,000 spent.

The ‘80 / 20’ rule: that 80 % of the value of an entire set of activities can be achieved by performing the best 20 % of those activities. Fat-tailed distributions. 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:

In Figure 10, the best healthcare programme is estimated to be five hundred times more effective than the worst (which, remember, is still a good programme). Thinking carefully about how you can do the most to benefit others doesn’t just allow you to do a bit better – it enables you to do vastly more than you might have done otherwise.

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.  The cost to save a life in the developing world is about $ 3,400 (or $ 100 for one QALY).  Through the simple act of donating to the most effective charities, we have the power to save dozens of lives.

4: Why You Shouldn’t Donate to Disaster Relief

This ‘water and diamonds’ paradox show the importance of what economists call thinking at the margin.  Within causes that are comparatively neglected, the most effective opportunities for doing good have probably not been taken.

It costs about $ 50,000 to train and provide one guide dog for one blind person.  Not only is $ 50,000 enough to cure one person of blindness in the developing world, but it’s also enough to cure 500 people of blindness if spent on surgery to prevent blindness caused by trachoma

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.  The total benefits from medicine in the US is about 7 QALYs per person.  That includes both benefits through saving lives and benefits through improving quality of life

The marginal value they would provide by becoming a doctor.

5: The Best Person Who Ever Lived is an Unknown Ukrainian Man

In 1966 Ohio born doctor D. A. Henderson became the leader of the WHO’s Global Smallpox Eradication Campaign. Viktor Zhdanov, a Ukrainian virologist

We don’t usually think of achievements in terms of what would have happened otherwise, but we should. The good I do is not a matter of the direct benefits I cause. Rather, it is the difference I make. Looking at what would have happened otherwise is a fundamental piece of scientific reasoning, referred to as ‘assessing the counterfactual’.

Scared Straight caused more crime than it prevented.

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? His donations would save dozens of lives each year, considerably more than would have been the case if he’d worked directly in a poor country.  ‘I feel that I’m doing justice to my seventeen-year-old self who wanted to make the world a better place.’  By earning to give Greg is making a difference that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Earning to give seems to be an enormously powerful way of doing good.

6: Why Voting is Like Donating Thousands of Dollars to Charity

We therefore need a way to compare higher-risk but higher-upside actions with actions that are certain to have an impact.  Expected value.

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.  Smoking one cigarette reduces life expectancy by five minutes.  The risk of a fatal car crash while driving for an hour is about 1 in 10 million (so 0.1 micromorts). For a twenty-year-old, that’s a 1 in 10 million chance of losing sixty years. The expected life lost from driving for one hour is therefore three minutes. An hour on a train costs you only twenty expected seconds of life, an hour on a motorbike costs you more than three hours

The average expected value of voting for the better party, therefore, is the probability of success (1 in 60 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 US. That’s the sense in which voting is like donating thousands of dollars to (developed – world) charities.

When we consider expected value, it is usually a mistake to think that If many people acted change would happen but that I will not make a difference.

‘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,’ These statistics represent some disappointing facts about political mobility and equal representation in the UK. However, for someone who is altruistically minded and happened to study PPE at Oxford, they also represent a powerful opportunity.

The death tolls from disasters form a fat-tailed distribution. Nassim Talab describes these as ‘Black Swans’: very rare events that have a very great impact.). 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,

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. [This chapter is tangential and takes a debated position .]

Part II: Effective Altruism in Action

7: Overhead Costs, CEO Pay and Other Confusions

Comparison of Books for Africa (BFA). Development Media International (DMI). GiveDirectly.

Charity Navigator.  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?

What does this charity do? How cost-effective is each programme area? How robust is the evidence behind each programme? How well is each programme implemented?  Does the charity need additional funds?

Because transferring cash is such a simple idea, and because the evidence in favour of cash transfers is so robust, we could think of them as the ‘index fund’ of giving. 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.

Global health stands out for a couple of reasons. It has a proven track record and the evidence behind health interventions is robust.

8: The Moral Case for Sweatshop Goods

‘Ethical consumerism.’  In developing countries, sweatshop jobs are the good jobs.  Fairtrade certification does not improve the lives of agricultural workers.

Using this figure, the average American adult would have to spend $ 105 per year in order to offset all their carbon emissions.  The easiest and most effective way to cut down your carbon footprint is simply to donate to Cool Earth. 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.

On life satisfaction 10 to -10, beef cattle have been rated at 6, dairy cows at 4, broiler chickens – 1, and pigs and caged hens – 5.  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.  Animal years lived to feed a person for a year: 3.3 from broiler chickens (28.5 chickens consumed, each of which lives six 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. [Perhaps the short life of the chicken is a moral issue on its own.] The most effective way to cut animal suffering out of your diet is to stop eating chicken, then eggs, then pork

Psychologists have discovered a phenomenon that they call ‘moral licensing’ that describes how people who perform one good action often compensate by doing fewer good actions in the future. Moral licensing shows that people are often more concerned about looking good or feeling good rather than actually doing good.

9: Don’t ‘Follow Your Passion’

How do I personally fit with this job? What’s my impact while I’m working at this job? How does this job contribute to my impact later on in life?

Steve Jobs. Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart.  The idea of following your passion is terrible advice.  Most people don’t have passions that fit the world of work. Your interests change. Passion grows out of work that has the right features.  Talk about ‘personal fit’ rather than ‘following your heart.

First, to make a difference in the social sector, the organisation you work for must be effective. Second , you need to provide substantial value over the person the charity would have hired instead .  And, 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.

Entrepreneurs should think of their ideas or products as hypotheses, and continually test.

Solid bets.  Direct work for a highly effective organisation. Earning to give – but the risk of losing your values by working in an environment with people who aren’t as altruistically inclined as you are.  Skill–building

High-potential long-shots.  Entrepreneurship. Research. Politics and advocacy.

10: Poverty vs Climate Change

Scale. Neglectedness. Tractability. Personal fit.

US criminal justice reform. International labour mobility [Very controversial.] Factory farming. 2 – 4 ° C climate change. Catastrophic climate change. Other global catastrophic risks.