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

by William MacAskill

GiveDirectly isn’t rated by Charity Navigator, but would also do well by these metrics. So far, of every $1 that’s been donated to GiveDirectly, between 87¢ (in Uganda) and 90¢ (in Kenya) has been transferred to the poor, with the rest spent on enrolment, follow-up and transfer costs. With every $1 they spent on fundraising, they raised $100 in donations, a remarkable number compared to the average of $4 of donations raised for every $1 spent on fundraising. They had an overheads ratio of 6%, spending just $124,000 on administration costs out of an expenditure of $2.2 million. Much of the administration spending was on fixed costs, so as GiveDirectly increases the amount of cash they transfer, the percentage spent on overheads is likely to go down considerably.

Given the lessons of the previous chapters, however, we should already understand that this approach to evaluating a charity’s effectiveness is seriously flawed.

Surely, as we discussed in Chapter 2, what we should ultimately care about is the impact charities have. When you give $100 to a charity, what does that charity do with it? How are people’s lives improved as a result?

Given the evidence that we currently have, there’s little ground for thinking that distributing textbooks is a good way to improve educational outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa.

They are based on the criteria used by the charity evaluator GiveWell, which has spent the last eight years investigating which charities improve lives the most with the donations they receive:

Diarrhoea is a major problem in the developing world, killing 760,000 children every year, primarily through dehydration. (For comparison, that’s a death toll equivalent to five jumbo jets crashing to the ground every day, killing everyone on board.) A significant number of those deaths could be avoided through simple improvements to sanitation and hygiene, like more regular hand washing with soap.

The latest evidence suggests that, overall and on average, microlending does have a small positive improvement on people’s lives, but it’s not the panacea that the anecdotes portray.

In the case of mass-media education, we do have a plausible explanation for why it could be more effective than cash transfers: mass-media health education isn’t something individuals can buy, and even if they could, they probably wouldn’t know just how valuable it is. Markets alone cannot provide mass-media health education, so it needs to be funded and implemented by governments or non-profits.

Both GiveDirectly and DMI seem excellent in terms of the quality of their implementation. GiveDirectly is led by a leading development economist; DMI is led by someone with extensive experience and achievements in radio education, and has an advisory board that includes some of the world’s best epidemiologists and development economists. In communication with GiveWell, both charities have openly shared requested information. GiveDirectly even goes so far as to provide information on how many cash transfer recipients reported having to pay bribes to the local agents who transferred them the money (at the time of writing, the figure is 0.4%). This sort of admission is very encouraging: showing that the charity cares about identifying and fixing mistakes, rather than brushing them under the rug.

Top charities

In fact, among economists on both the left and the right, there is no question that sweatshops benefit those in poor countries. Nobel Laureate and left-wing economist Paul Krugman has stated, ‘The overwhelming mainstream view among economists is that the growth of this kind of employment is tremendous good news for the world’s poor.’ Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University economist and one of the foremost proponents of increased efforts to help those in extreme poverty, has said, ‘My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops but that there are too few.’

Dr Peter Griffiths, an economic consultant for the World Bank, worked out that for one British café chain, less than 1% of the additional price of their Fairtrade coffee reached coffee exporters in poor countries.

They found that those Fairtrade workers had systematically lower wages and worse working conditions than comparable non-Fairtrade workers, and that the poorest often had no access to the ‘community projects’ that Fairtrade touted as major successes.

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.

Cool Earth was founded in 2007 in the United Kingdom by businessman Johan Eliasch and MP Frank Field, who were concerned with protecting the rainforest and the impact that deforestation might have on the environment. The charity aims to fight global warming by preventing deforestation, primarily in the Amazon. It uses donated money to help develop rainforest communities economically to a point where they do better by not selling their land to loggers.

Another area where people try to change their purchasing habits in order to make a difference is meat-eating and vegetarianism. As I mentioned earlier, cutting out meat (especially beef) is one effective way to reduce your carbon emissions. However, we’ve also seen that by donating to Cool Earth you can offset one metric ton of carbon emissions for about $5. If you’d rather pay $5 than go vegetarian, then the environmental argument for vegetarianism is rather weak.

The animal welfare argument for vegetarianism is comparatively stronger. The vast majority of farmed animals are raised in factory farms, which often inflict severe and unnecessary suffering on those animals merely for the sake of slightly cheaper produce. The living conditions of factory farm animals have been extensively documented in books, magazines and documentaries, so I will spare you the grim details here. I personally believe it’s important to treat animals humanely, and for that reason I’ve been a vegetarian for many years.

In fact, eliminating chicken and eggs removes the large majority of animal suffering from your diet.

Of all the animals raised for food, broiler chickens, layer hens and pigs are kept in the worst conditions by a considerable margin.

Bailey Norwood, an economist and agricultural expert. He rated the welfare of different animals on a scale of –10 to 10, where negative numbers indicate that it would be better, from the animal’s perspective, to be dead rather than alive.

The second consideration is the number of animals it takes to make a meal. In a year, the average American will consume the following: 28.5 broiler chickens, 0.8 layer hens, 0.8 turkeys, 0.37 pigs, 0.1 beef cows, and 0.007 dairy cows; in the UK people eat less meat on average but, like Americans, consume far more chickens and hens than cows.

Combining these two considerations, we arrive at the conclusion that the most effective way to cut animal suffering out of your diet is to stop eating chicken, then eggs, then pork:

According to Animal Charity Evaluators (a research charity I helped to set up), by donating to charities like Mercy for Animals or The Humane League, which distribute leaflets on vegetarianism, it costs about $100 to convince one person to stop eating meat for one year.

Peter Hurford

First, and most simply, most people don’t have passions that fit the world of work. In one study of Canadian college students, it was found that 84% of students had passions, and 90% of these involved sport, music and art. But by looking at census data, we can see that only 3% of jobs are in the sport, music and art industries. Even if only half the students followed their passion, the majority would fail to secure a job. In these cases, ‘doing what you’re passionate about’ can be actively harmful.

Research shows that the most consistent predictor of job satisfaction is engaging work, which can be broken down into five factors (this is known in psychology as the ‘job characteristics theory’):

For all these reasons, 80,000 Hours prefers to talk about ‘personal fit’ rather than ‘following your heart’ or ‘following your passion’. How can you work out where you have the best personal fit? As we’ve just seen, it’s difficult to predict where you’ll be most satisfied and where you’ll perform the best just by thinking about it. Indeed, it’s hard for anyone to know which job you’ll be best at. Even corporate recruiters regularly make mistakes, and they have huge amounts of resources at their disposal to find the people who fit best.

In general, we recommend people think of three primary routes by which they can have impact on the job. The first is through the labour you provide. This can be the work you do if you are employed by an effective organisation, or the research you do if you are a researcher. The second is the money you can give. The third is the influence you can have on other people. In order to work out the total impact you can have, you should look at all three of these; whereas advice that is focused solely on the charity sector looks only at the first.

For these reasons, especially when starting out, you should focus on building your skills, network and credentials, rather than trying to make an impact right away. This is how many of the most effective charities we’ve discussed have been founded. GiveDirectly, Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, Deworm the World Initiative and Development Media International were all founded by academics who discovered innovative ways to help the poor. Rob Mather, who founded Against Malaria Foundation, had spent many years building skills in strategy consulting before moving into the charity sector. This meant he had a good grasp of how to run an organisation well, and that, once he came to set up AMF, he didn’t need to take a salary.

In the case of entrepreneurship, Eric Ries has argued forcefully for this idea and created the popular Lean Startup movement. The idea behind the Lean Startup is that many entrepreneurs make the mistake of getting excited about some product or idea and then doing everything they can to push it onto the world even before they’ve tested it to see if there’s a market for it. When companies do this, products often fail because they were reasoning from the armchair when they should have been experimenting. Ries argues that entrepreneurs should think of their ideas or products as hypotheses, and continually test, ultimately letting the potential customers determine what the product should be.

First, it means you should think of your career as a work in progress. Rather than having a fixed career plan, try to have a career ‘model’ – a set of provisional goals and hypotheses that you’re constantly revising as you acquire new evidence or opportunities. It’s better to have a bad plan than no plan, but only if you’re open to changing it. Second, find out where you’re uncertain, then reduce that uncertainty. Before making a decision, don’t merely try to weigh up all the pros and cons as you currently see them (though that is a good thing to do). Ask yourself: ‘What is the single most important piece of information that would be most useful for my career decision? Now, what can I do in order to gain that information?’ Third, test yourself in different paths.

As a result, in his final year at university he invested heavily in developing his computer programming skills, which enabled him to get a job as a software engineer at a start-up in Chicago that offers online loans to people with near-prime credit ratings.

Direct work for a highly effective organisation

Earning to give

Programming, in contrast, was highly promising. He was able to apply to App Academy, a three-month intensive programming school, and from there he got a job at a start-up in San Francisco with a six-figure salary. Sales and marketing can also be good options. As well as being fairly high paying for a given level of competitiveness, they provide particularly useful skills if you want to move into the social sector later in your career. Accountancy and actuarial work are also high paying for their level of competitiveness.

Skill-building

Habiba Islam

Another alternative is to get a PhD in a useful area. This is what Jess Whittlestone did: having studied maths and philosophy previously, she pursued a PhD in the behavioural sciences at Warwick Business School.

Entrepreneurship

If you’re starting a non-profit, one good strategy is to focus on a particularly important cause (which we’ll discuss in the next chapter). Another important question is to ask why the problem your new organisation is addressing has not been solved already, or won’t be solved in the future. Ask yourself: Why hasn’t this problem been solved by markets? Why hasn’t this problem been solved by the state? Why hasn’t this problem already been solved by philanthropy? In many cases, the answers to these questions will suggest that the problem is very difficult to solve, in which case it may not be the most effective problem to focus on.

Economists also suggest that innovative entrepreneurship is undersupplied by the market. Professor William Nordhaus at Yale University has estimated that innovators only collect 2% of the value they generate; that is, for every $1 an innovative company makes in profit, society has benefited by $50. By becoming an innovative entrepreneur, you are on average producing benefits to society that far exceed your paycheck.

Research

When Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, the committee suggested that he’d saved one billion lives. Was he a politician? Or a military leader? Or a superhero? No, he was a fairly regular guy from Iowa who worked in agricultural research. He wasn’t a typical academic: his credentials were limited and he used techniques that had been available to the Victorians. Moreover, the innovation that made his name was rather boring – a new type of short-stem disease-resistant wheat. That wheat, however, was able to radically increase crop yield across poor countries. It helped to cause the ‘green revolution’. Even after taking into account the fact that similar innovations may have happened even if he hadn’t done his research, Borlaug’s impact should be measured in the prevention of tens of millions of deaths.

However, the distribution of achievements in research (as suggested by number of publications, awards and citations) is heavily fat-tailed: a large proportion of scientific achievement comes from a very small number of scientists. This suggests that research might only be the best option if it’s an area you really excel in. But if you might be able to become such a person, it’s an option you should take seriously.

With these considerations in mind, 80,000 Hours currently suggests that the areas with the greatest potential to do high-impact research while simultaneously gaining career capital that keeps your options open are economics, statistics, computer science and some areas of psychology. This, however, shouldn’t deter you if you have some particular interest or expertise within an area of research that is relevant to a particularly high-priority cause-area.

For example Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were psychologists who caused a revolution within economics: they applied methods developed in psychology to test assumptions about rational choice that were prevalent within economics, thereby leading to the new field of ‘behavioural economics’.

Within academia, the most prestigious research fields – which often therefore attract the best researchers – are often those that have the fewest practical applications. (A friend of mine has jokingly commented that a Fields Medal – the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in mathematics – indicates two things about the recipient: that they were capable of accomplishing something truly important, and that they didn’t.) If you are a top researcher and are willing to sacrifice some amount of status within academia, you can have considerable impact by moving into more applied areas of research.

Politics and advocacy

For example by contributing high-quality work to Wikipedia, you can provide a significant benefit to many people at almost no cost to others.

It might feel odd to volunteer simply to benefit yourself, but I think that, as long as one is thinking of volunteering as the first step towards generally moving your life in the direction of making a difference, there’s nothing problematic about this. Like anything, benefiting others requires some training, and volunteering can be a good way to get experience.