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

by William MacAskill

Trevor Field

Ronnie Stuiver,

World Bank Development Marketplace Award,

Steve Case,

Most playground roundabouts spin freely once they’ve gained sufficient momentum – that’s what makes them fun. But in order to pump water, PlayPumps need constant force, and children playing on them would quickly become exhausted. According to the UNICEF report, children sometimes fell off and broke limbs, and the spinning motion made some of them vomit. In one village local children were paid to ‘play’ on the pump. Much of the time, women of the village ended up pushing the roundabout themselves – a task they found tiring, undignified and demeaning.

With less effort, a Zimbabwe Bush hand pump of the same cylinder size as a PlayPump provided 1,300 litres of water per hour – five times the amount of the PlayPump.

The PlayPump was inferior in almost every way to the unsexy but functional hand pumps it competed with. Yet, at $14,000 per unit, it cost four times as much.

Many people want their lives to make a difference and, if you’re reading this book, you’re probably one of them. As Trevor Field’s story illustrates, however, 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?

Michael Kremer

Rachel Glennerster

‘I got sent down to big projects that had failed,’ Glennerster told me. ‘I went to Lake Turkana, up in the north of Kenya. The Turkana people are basically nomadic, and various development projects had hoped to improve their quality of life by settling them on the lake, so they built a big factory for fish. They managed to get them to settle and fish in the lake, but then the lake got overfished, and the fish stock collapsed … It was depressing.’ Disenchanted about the potential to have an impact in global development, she moved into domestic policy, taking a job at the British Treasury.

While there, Kremer spoke to Paul Lipeyah, a friend who worked for the Dutch charity International Christian Support (now called Investing in Children and Their Societies, or ICS).

Kremer urged Lipeyah to test his programme using a method known as a randomised controlled trial: he would monitor and collect data for fourteen local schools, implementing the programme in seven of them, while leaving the other seven to go about their business as usual. By comparing data from the two groups he could find out whether his programme actually worked.

Over and over again, Kremer found that seemingly obvious programmes to improve education just weren’t working. But he persisted. He refused to believe there was simply no way to improve the education of children in Kenya.

At that point a friend at the World Bank suggested he test deworming.

But they do make children sick, and can be cured for pennies: off-patent drugs, developed in the fifties, can be distributed through schools and administered by teachers, and will cure children of intestinal worms for a year.

The results were striking. ‘We didn’t expect deworming to be as effective as it was,’ Kremer told me. ‘It turned out to be one of the most cost-effective ways of increasing school participation.’

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 anaemia, intestinal obstruction and a suppressed immune system that can increase the likelihood of contracting other diseases like malaria. Deworming decreases all these risks. Moreover, when Kremer’s colleagues followed up with the children ten years later, those who had been dewormed were working on average 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 programme that it paid for itself through increased tax revenue.

Meanwhile, Glennerster had quit her job and become the executive director of the newly founded Poverty Action Lab at MIT, where she used her knowledge of policy to ensure the research Kremer and his colleagues were conducting would have real-world impact.

When it comes to helping others, being unreflective often means being ineffective.

But this is an excellent example of how relying on good intentions alone to inform your decisions can be potentially disastrous.

It would be nice if the PlayPump were an isolated example of unreflective altruism, but sadly it’s just an extreme example of a much more general trend.

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

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.

Kremer and Glennerster exemplify a way of thinking I call effective altruism. 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 the phrase suggests, effective altruism has two parts, and I want to be clear on what each part means. 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 second part is effectiveness, by which I mean doing the most good with whatever resources you have. Importantly, effective altruism is not just about making a difference, or doing some amount of good. It’s about try...

Rather, it’s simply to work out which ways of doing good are best, and to do those first.

We discovered that 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, an organisation that encourages people to donate at least 10% of their income to these most cost-effective charities. Around the same time, two New York hedge-fund analysts, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, quit their jobs to start

GiveWell, an organisation that conducts extraordinarily in-depth research to calculate which charities do the most go...

From there, a community developed. I and others in this community realised that effective altruism could 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. On the basis of this, in 2011 I co-founded 80,000 Hours (a name that refers to the number of hours you typically work in your life), which ...

Part I comprises five chapters, each exploring one of 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? In each case, asking the question can help us to avoid a common pitfall when thinking about doing good:

Taken together, these five questions help us to answer the guiding question of effective altruism: ‘How can I do the most good?’ They form the core of effective altruism’s approach to making a difference.

Before we begin, let me emphasise why these considerations are so important. In the next chapter, I’ll explain why each and every one of us has the power, if we so choose, to do extraordinary things.

$28,000 earned by the typical American worker.

You might be feeling sceptical at this point. I certainly was when I first heard these facts. ‘Sure,’ you might say, ‘the poor in developing countries might not have much money, but that money can pay for so much more because the cost of living in those places is cheaper.’

You might assume that ‘$1.50/day’ means that every day the extreme poor live on the equivalent of $1.50 in their local currency. But it actually means they live on an amount of money equivalent to what $1.50 could buy in the US in 2014. What can $1.50 buy you in the United States? A candy bar? A bag of rice?

You might wonder how anyone can live on so little money. Surely they’d die? And the answer is … they do.

In order to get a full picture of what life is like for the extreme poor, Professors Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, economists at MIT, conducted a survey of thirteen countries. They found that 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.

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.

It’s a basic rule of economics that money is less valuable to you the more you have of it.

Economists have sought to answer this question through a variety of methods. We’ll look at some of these in the next chapter, but for now I’ll just discuss one, which is to ask people directly about their wellbeing. (Estimates via other methods would support my conclusion at least as well as this one does.)

The vertical axis of Figure 3 represents self-reported wellbeing. Those interviewed had to say how satisfied they were with their lives on a scale from 0 to 10. Rating yourself at 10 means you consider yourself maximally happy: you think that, realistically, life couldn’t get any better. Rating yourself at 0 means you consider yourself maximally unhappy: you think that, realistically, life couldn’t get any worse. Most people fall in the middle of this range. The horizontal axis represents annual income.

This graph allows us to determine just how much greater a benefit the extreme poor receive from $1 than you or I do. Imagine if your boss called you in and told you your salary would double for the next year. You’d be pretty pleased, right? What the conclusions from the economic studies suggest is that the benefit you would get from having your salary doubled is the same as the benefit an extremely poor Indian farmer earning $220 a year would get from an additional $220.

This isn’t to say that income is all that matters to wellbeing – of course other factors such as safety and political freedom are involved.

Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beer for $5 or buy someone else a beer for 5¢.

This idea is important enough that I’ve given it a name. I call it 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.

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.