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

by William MacAskill

Distributions that look like this are called fat-tailed distributions. (You might have heard of 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. That rule describes a fat-tailed distribution.) Fat-tailed distributions are interesting because they’re marked by extreme events. 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.) That’s why 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: the richest people bring up the average.