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When it comes to helping others, being unreflective often means being ineffective.
Because we don’t get useful feedback when we try to help others, we often don’t get a meaningful sense of whether we’re really making a difference.
‘deworming is probably the least sexy development programme 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.
We discovered that the best charities are hundreds of times more effective at improving lives than merely ‘good’ charities.
GiveWell, an organisation that conducts extraordinarily in-depth research to calculate which charities do the most good with every dollar they receive.
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
Anyone earning this much is one hundred times as rich as the very poorest people in the world, which means one additional unit of income can do a hundred times as much to benefit the extreme poor as it can to benefit you or I.
Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beer for $5 or buy someone else a beer for 5¢. 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% off sale, or buy one, get ninety-nine free. It might be the most amazing deal you’ll see in your life.
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.
In 1800 the gross domestic product per person per year in America was only $1,400 (in today’s money), whereas now it’s over $42,000. In a mere 200 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.
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.
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.
Over time, 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 catalyse fear among the Hutu populace.
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.
When making decisions, whether that’s where to volunteer, what career to pursue, or whether to buy ‘ethical’ produce, we should therefore consider (1) the cost of the activity, in terms of time or money, (2) the number of people it benefits and, crucially, (3) how much it improves people’s lives.
much need. I’ve since realised that I was thinking about development in entirely the wrong way. The picture that aid sceptics paint is highly misleading and, even more importantly, isn’t particularly relevant for people who want to do good.
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%. 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.
The eradication of smallpox is one success story from aid, saving five times as many lives as world peace would have done.
Thanks to immunisation, 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.
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.)
The effectiveness of different aid activities forms a fat-tailed distribution, and this fact is very important if we want to make a difference.
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.
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.
Are the most popular ways to make a difference through one’s work really the most effective ones?
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.
Funding seems to be allocated in proportion with how evocative and widely publicised the disaster is, rather than on the basis of its scale and severity.
‘Emergency health interventions are more costly and less effective than time-tested health activities.’
When a disaster strikes, the emotional centres 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.
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.
Viktor Zhdanov, a Ukrainian virologist
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.
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.
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 maximise the good you do directly via 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.
But time and money are usually 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.
‘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.’
Greg will do even more good by earning to give than he would have done if he’d worked directly in poor countries. And he can do so without having to give up the comforts of home.
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.
If many people did this thing, then change would happen. But any individual person doesn’t make a difference.
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.
Cutting out red meat and dairy for one day a week achieves a greater reduction in your carbon footprint than buying entirely locally produced food.
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 CO2eq per year), to reduce the amount you travel (driving half as much would cut out two metric tons of CO2eq per year and forgoing a round-trip flight between London and New York would eliminate a metric ton of CO2eq), and to use less electricity and gas in the home (especially by installing loft insulation, which would save a metric ton of CO2eq for a detached house).
By protecting key areas they can create a ‘wall’ of rainforest 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. This would mean that it costs just about 38¢ to prevent one metric ton of CO2 from being emitted.
In fact, eliminating chicken and eggs removes the large majority of animal suffering from your diet.
