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May 5 - May 8, 2020
If you earn more than $52,000 per year, then, speaking globally, you are the 1 percent. If you earn at least $28,000—that’s the typical income for working individuals in the United States—you’re in the richest 5 percent of the world’s population. Even someone living below the US poverty line, earning just $11,000 per year, is still richer than 85 percent of people in the world.
You might wonder: How can anyone live on such little money? Surely they’d die? And the answer is . . . they do.
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.
This gives us a good theoretical reason for thinking that the same amount of money can do one hundred times as much to benefit the very poorest people in the world as it can to benefit typical citizens of the United States.
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.
In order to make comparisons between actions, we need to ask: How many people benefit, and by how much? This is the first key question of effective altruism.
They have developed a metric called the quality-adjusted life year, or QALY (pronounced “kwalee”), in order to help make decisions about how to prioritize among different health programs.
The idea behind the QALY is that there are two ways you can give a health benefit to someone. First, you can “save someone’s life.”
The second way to benefit someone is to improve the quality of their life during the time they are alive.
The QALY combines these two benefits into one metric, using survey data about the trade-offs people are willing to make in order to assess how bad different sorts of illnesses or disabilities are.
Since the goal of effective altruism is to do the most good we can, health is a good place to start.
If you add up all the wars, genocides, and terrorist acts that occurred since 1973, the death toll is a staggering twelve million. 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.
Our response to natural disasters is one of the clearest cases of how, when it comes to charity, most people follow their gut and respond to new events rather than ongoing problems.
How much good does one doctor do?
Asking, “Is this area neglected?” and trying to focus only on those areas that truly are neglected can be counterintuitive. It means that the most popular causes are, precisely for that reason, the ones where it will be difficult to have a big impact.
We don’t usually think of achievements in terms of what would have happened otherwise, but we should.
Looking at what would have happened otherwise is a fundamental piece of scientific reasoning, referred to as assessing the counterfactual. But the mistake of neglecting the counterfactual is rife within the world of altruism, and this mistake can have terrible consequences.
Earning to give means exactly what it sounds like: rather than trying to maximize the direct impact you have with your job, you instead try to increase your earnings so you can donate more, improving people’s lives through your giving rather than your day-to-day work.
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.
Is it worth it to stop eating meat?
However, this debate is strange for another reason: even if scientists had not already shown that man-made climate change is happening, the mere fact that man-made climate change might be happening is enough to warrant action.
If climate change is happening and we don’t take action, millions of lives will be lost and the world economy will lose trillions of dollars. If climate change isn’t happening and we do take action, the costs are much lower.
TOP CHARITIES
Because conditions in sweatshops are so bad, it’s difficult for us to imagine that people would risk deportation just to work in them. But that’s because, as we discussed in chapter one, the extremity of global poverty is almost unimaginable.
Because sweatshops are good for poor countries, if we boycott them we make people in poor countries worse off. This isn’t just a hypothetical argument.
First, when you buy fair-trade, you usually aren’t giving money to the poorest people in the world.
Second, of the additional money that is spent on fair-trade, only a very small portion ends up in the hands of the farmers who earn that money.
If you’d rather pay five dollars than go vegetarian, then the environmental argument for vegetarianism is rather weak.
The animal welfare argument for vegetarianism is comparatively stronger.
Of all the animals raised for food, broiler chickens, layer hens, and pigs are kept in the worst conditions by a considerable margin.
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: by doing so, you’re taking out the worst suffering for the most animals for the longest time.
In terms of making a difference to the lives of animals, the impact you can have through your donations seems even greater than the impact you can have by changing your own behavior.
Things may even be worse than that, however. There’s some reason to think that the rise in ethical consumerism could even be harmful for the world, on balance.
What happened? People who had previously purchased a “green” product were significantly more likely to both lie and steal than those who had purchased the conventional product.
Taken literally, however, the idea of following your passion is terrible advice.
Since the 1990s, incarceration rates in the United States have increased dramatically despite a fall in violent crime in that period.
A donation of $3,400 can provide bed nets that will save someone’s life, deworm seven thousand children, or double the income of fifteen people for a year.
Though Schindler’s story is inspiring, you might think that war is a particularly unusual time, and therefore stories like Schindler’s aren’t really that relevant to our lives. What we’ve seen in this book is that this isn’t true. Every one of us has the power to save dozens or hundreds of lives, or to significantly improve the welfare of thousands of people.
For your birthday, instead of presents, you could ask for donations to a highly effective charity, creating a webpage on Causevox.com; Charity Science, a fund-raising website set up by two people in the effective altruism community, helps you to do this on their Take Action page.
