Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference

by William MacAskill

The five key questions of effective altruism How many people benefit, and by how much? Like James Orbinski, the doctor who engaged in triage during the Rwandan genocide, we need to make hard decisions about who we help and who we don’t; that means thinking about how much benefit is provided by different activities. The quality-adjusted life year, or QALY, allows us to compare the impact of different sorts of health programmes. Is this the most effective thing you can do? The very best health and education programmes are hundreds of times better than ‘merely’ very good programmes. Smallpox eradication did so much good that it alone shows development aid to be highly cost-effective on average. Is this area neglected? Natural disasters get far more funding than ongoing causes of death and suffering such as disease; for that reason, disaster relief usually isn’t the most effective use of funds. Diseases such as malaria that affect people in the developing world get far less funding than conditions like cancer; for that reason you have a much bigger impact treating people with malaria than with cancer. What would have happened otherwise? After going through the Scared Straight programme, juveniles were more likely to commit crimes than they would have done otherwise, so the programme did harm overall. In careers like medicine, you’re sometimes simply doing good work that would have happened anyway; if you earn to give, however, you make a difference that wouldn’t otherwise have...