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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.
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.
aid’s inefficiencies by focusing on 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
using the low estimate of the benefits of eradicating smallpox, at 60 million lives saved, foreign aid has saved a life with every
$40,000 ...
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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 more good – 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.
estimates, 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.
This ‘water and diamonds’ paradox shows 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, it’s 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.
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!
Scared Straight caused more crime than it prevented.
earning to give.
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.
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 – about the same length of time it takes to smoke it.
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 an expected three hours and forty-five minutes.
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.
If many people did this thing, then change would happen. But any individual person doesn’t make a difference. Holding that combination of views is usually a mistake when we consider expected value.
if you give up one pound of beef, beef production falls by 0.68lb;
‘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,’
