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December 20 - December 27, 2018
believe that by combining the heart and the head—by applying data and reason to altruistic acts—we can turn our good intentions into astonishingly good outcomes.
When it comes to helping others, being unreflective often means being ineffective.
We very often fail to think as carefully about helping others as we could, mistakenly believing that applying data and rationality to a charitable endeavor robs the act of virtue.
In fact, almost no one is foolish enough to invest in a company that is pitched to them on the street—which is why the imaginary situation I described here never occurs. Yet, every year, hundreds of thousands of people donate to charities they haven’t heard of simply because a well-spoken fund-raiser whom they didn’t know asked them to. And they normally have no way of knowing what happened to the money they donated.
One difference between investing in a company and donating to a charity is that the charity world often lacks appropriate feedback mechanisms. Invest in a bad company, and you lose money; but give money to a bad charity, and you probably won’t hear about its failings.
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.
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?
If you earn more than $52,000 per year, then, speaking globally, you are the 1 percent.
Let’s look at that bottom 20 percent of the world’s population: that’s 1.22 billion people who earn less than $1.50 per day, and thereby count as members of the “extreme poor.”
You might wonder: How can anyone live on such little money? Surely they’d die? And the answer is . . . they do. At least, they die much more regularly than those of us who live in developed countries do.
could buy in the United States in 2014.” In the United States, because there is no extreme poverty, there is no market for extremely cheap goods.
The fact that we’ve found ourselves at the top of the heap, globally speaking, provides us with a tremendous opportunity to make a difference. 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.
What the conclusions from the economic studies suggest is that the benefit you get from having your salary doubled is the same as the benefit an extremely poor Indian farmer gets from having his salary doubled.
If you earn as much as the typical American worker, then you are one hundred times as rich as the very poorest people in the world, which means additional income can do a hundred times as much to benefit the extreme poor as it can to benefit you or me.
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.
$42,000. In a mere two hundred years, we’ve become thirty times richer. But it is a time following remarkably unequal economic progress.
through some outstanding stroke of luck, we have found ourselves as the inheritors of the most astonishing period of economic growth the world has ever seen, while a significant proportion of people stay as poor as they have ever been.
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.
It’s the size of the drop that matters, not the size of the bucket, and, if we choose, we can create an enormous drop.
As a result of your choices, someone is made better off and someone else is not.
The fact that he had to make a choice, and that not choosing would itself be a decision, was inescapable. That we are not directly confronted with the competing beneficiaries
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”),
you have limited resources, then, other things being equal, you should spend those resources in whatever way will provide the most QALYs.
The difficulty of comparing different sorts of altruistic activity is therefore ultimately due to a lack of knowledge about what will happen as a result of that activity, or a lack of knowledge about how different activities translate into improvements to people’s lives.
It might be difficult, both emotionally and practically, to weigh different people’s interests against each other, but it’s not impossible in principle.
a vivid firsthand demonstration of the severity of the problems in the world. This was a cause I had a personal connection with.
It was arbitrary that I’d seen this problem close up rather than any of the other problems in the world.
By all means, we should harness the sadness we feel at the loss of a loved one in order to make the world a better place. But we should focus that motivation on preventing death and improving lives, rather than preventing death and improving lives in one very specific way.
When we take into account the fact that the $1 trillion in aid spending must be divided among a very large number of people over many decades, we see that the amount of aid spent per recipient is very small indeed.
In 1950, life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa was just 36.7 years. Now it’s 56 years, a gain of almost 50 percent.
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.
(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.
because the best programs are so good, they make aid very effective on average.
We can deliberately choose to fund only the very best programs, which allows us to do a tremendous amount of good.
This “water and diamonds” paradox shows the importance of what economists call thinking at the margin: assessing the value of an additional thing—what is known in economics as its marginal utility—rather than thinking about the average value of that thing.
The value can even become negative if you already have lots of sweaters. In fact, it’s true of most good things (though not all of them all the time), that their value diminishes as their quantity increases.
Both resulted in destruction on a massive scale. But in two ways they were very different, which should make us wonder why the international aid response was so similar.
Japanese earthquake caused fifteen thousand deaths. The Haitian earthquake, by comparison, caused 150,000. Second, Japan is the fourth richest country in the world and had the resources to deal with a disaster on that scale. Haiti didn’t. Per person, Japan was thirty times richer than Haiti.
Funding seems to be allocated in proportion with how evocative and widely publicized the disaster is, rather than on the basis of its scale and severity.
Because it received so much less, donations would have probably made a bigger impact.
For every death the Japanese earthquake caused, aid organizations received $330,000 in donations. In contrast, for every person who dies from poverty-related causes worldwide, only $15,000 on average is spent in foreign aid and philanthropy.
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.
Because disasters are new and dramatic events, they inspire deeper and more urgent emotions, causing our subconscious to mistakenly assess them as more important or worthy of attention.
Cancer treatment receives so much more funding than malaria treatment because malaria is such a cheap problem to solve that rich countries no longer suffer from it.
That means that, with a given amount of money, you can benefit people in poor countries five hundred times more than people in rich countries.
We’re about one hundred times richer than the poorest billion people in the world, and we can do several hundred times more to help them than we can to help others in the rich countries we live in.
a QALY is equivalent to providing someone with one additional year of healthy life.)
Health economists estimate that, on average, the benefit of “saving a life” is the same as the benefit of providing 36.5 QALYs. Based on this calculation, therefore, a doctor provides health benefits equivalent to saving seventy lives over the course of his or her career.
