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December 20 - December 27, 2018
What’s the difference you make as a result? Well, those 878,194 will have already plucked all the low-hanging fruit in terms of easy ways to save lives, so you, as the 878,195th doctor, will have only hard-to-realize opportunities to improve health.
the conclusion that one additional doctor in the United States provides a benefit equivalent to about four lives saved over the course of their career. That is still awesome. But it’s also less than you probably thought before, all because of diminishing returns.
If you aim to become a doctor in a rich country, you’re adding only your labor to the already very large pool of doctors who are working in that country. That means that becoming a doctor probably does less good than you’d intuitively think.
Greg did some more statistics to work out how much good he’d do if he upped roots and went to work in a very poor country like Ethiopia. He found that he’d make a much larger difference, providing an extra three hundred
the most popular causes are, precisely for that reason, the ones where it will be difficult to have a big impact. Because of diminishing returns, we can make a much bigger difference if we focus our efforts on areas on which comparatively fewer resources have been spent, like less-publicized disasters, or global poverty rather than domestic poverty.
We don’t usually think of achievements in terms of what would have happened otherwise, but we should. What matters is not who does good but whether good is done; and the measure of how much good you achieve is the difference between what happens as a result of your actions and what would have happened anyway.
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.
time and money are normally interchangeable—money can pay for people’s time, and your time can be used to earn money—so there’s no reason to assume the best careers are only those that benefit people directly through the work itself.
Because he’s making a difference that wouldn’t have happened anyway, Greg will do even more good by earning to give than he would have done if he worked directly in poor countries.
It’s the cosmetic surgeon’s decision about how to spend his money that really matters.
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.
Would you be willing to spend an hour on a motorbike if it was perfectly safe but caused you to be unconscious later for three hours and forty-five minutes?
This means that low-probability high-payoff activities can take priority over sure bets of more modest impact.
The total spending of the US government is $3.5 trillion per year: that’s $14 trillion over four years, or $44,000 per person. If that money is spent 2.5 percent more effectively, then the benefits amount to $1,000 per person.
individuals can’t make a difference, but millions of individuals do. But the actions of millions of people are just the sum of the actions of many individual people.
Perhaps your decision against purchasing chicken breast will have an effect on the supermarket only one in a thousand times, but in that one time, the store manager will decide to purchase approximately one thousand fewer chicken breasts.
The chance of you being the person who makes the difference is very small, but if you do make the difference, it will be very large indeed.
The point is simply that long shots can be worth it if the payoff is big enough.
Those activists who campaigned for equal rights for women, black people, and the LBGT community were right to do so, not because they had a good chance of succeeding in the short term, but because the benefit was so great if they did succeed.
In cases where people seem to neglect the risks of worst-case outcomes, helping to prevent these outcomes might be a particularly effective altruistic activity.
and disaster prevention, we can still think rigorously, in an evidence-based manner, about how good those activities are. We just need to assess the chances of success and how good success would be if it happened.
think like an effective altruist: 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?
GiveDirectly uses satellite images to find households with thatched roofs (a strong indicator of poverty, compared to iron roofs) and then contacts those households to discuss the program.
In contrast, Development Media International’s overhead amount to 44 percent of its total budget, and there is little financial information on its website.
It’s supposedly “efficient” for having low administrative costs, but what’s really important is how much good is done per dollar spent on the program the charity implements.
Rather than starting new companies, microloans are typically used to pay for extra consumption like food and healthcare, and the rate of interest on them is usually very high.
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 same way, one might think, it’s only worth it to donate to charitable programs rather than simply transfer cash directly to the poor if the other programs provide a benefit great enough to outweigh the additional costs incurred in implementing them.
we should only assume we’re in a better position to help the poor than they are to help themselves if we have some particularly compelling reason for thinking so.
When should you pursue an activity with more robust evidence of more limited impact, versus an activity with much weaker evidence of potentially much greater impact?
by its nature, the evidence behind health interventions is more robust.
However, those who protest sweatshops by refusing to buy goods produced in them are making the mistake, which we discussed in chapter five, of failing to consider what would happen otherwise.
Similarly, the average earnings among sweatshop workers are: $2 a day in Bangladesh, $5.50 a day in Cambodia, $7 a day in Haiti, and $8 a day in India. These wages are tiny, of course, but when compared to the $1.25 a day many citizens of those countries live on, the demand for these jobs seems more understandable.
“it is widely thought that most of them have found employment in other garment factories, in smaller, unregistered, subcontracting garment workshops, or in other sectors.”
If we really could effectively pass on benefits to the very poor through consumer pressure, then I would be all in favor of it. In practice, however, I’m not so sure that “ethical consumption” works as intended.
That means that even if buying fair-trade was a good way of paying farmers more, you might make a bigger difference by buying non-fair-trade goods that are produced in the poorest countries rather than fair-trade goods that are produced in richer countries.
In contrast, remember that, if you donate one dollar to GiveDirectly, ninety cents ultimately reaches the poor.
one hot bath adds more to your carbon footprint than leaving your phone charger plugged in for a whole year; even leaving on your TV (one of the worst offenders in terms of standby energy use) for a whole year contributes less to your carbon footprint than driving a car for just two hours.
Similarly, the focus on buying locally produced goods is overhyped: only 10 percent of the carbon footprint of food comes from transportation, whereas 80 percent comes from production, so what type of food you buy is much more important than whether that food is produced locally or internationally.
Using this figure, the average American adult would have to spend $105 per year in order to offset all their carbon emissions. This is significant, but to most people it’s considerably less than it would cost to make large changes in lifestyle, such as not flying. This suggests that the easiest and most effective way to cut down your carbon footprint is simply to donate to Cool Earth.
In contrast, through effective carbon offsetting, you’re preventing anyone from being harmed by your emissions in the first place: if you emit carbon dioxide throughout your life but effectively offset it at the same time, overall your life contributes nothing to climate change.
Of all the animals raised for food, broiler chickens, layer hens, and pigs are kept in the worst conditions by a considerable margin.
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. He rates beef cattle at 6 and dairy cows at 4. In contrast his average rating for broiler chickens is –1, and for pigs and caged hens is –5.
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.
if you offset your greenhouse gas emissions, then you prevent anyone from ever being harmed by your emissions. In contrast, if you offset your meat consumption, you change which animals are harmed through factory farming.
it costs about one hundred dollars to convince one person to stop eating meat for one year.
Amazingly, even just saying you’d do something good can cause the moral licensing effect.
Moral licensing shows that people are often more concerned about looking good or feeling good rather than actually doing good.
for example, encouraging someone to buy fair-trade causes that person to devote less time or money to other, more effective activities, then promoting fair-trade might on balance be harmful.
