Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

by William MacAskill

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.

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.

Every day, people die from easily preventable diseases like AIDS, malaria, or tuberculosis. This is a disaster far beyond that of Haiti, or Tohoku, or Sichuan. Every day, eighteen thousand children—more than the number of people who perished in Tohoku—die from preventable causes.

Ironically, the law of diminishing returns suggests that, if you feel a strong emotional reaction to a story and want to help, you should probably resist this inclination because there are probably many others like you who are also donating. By all means, you should harness the emotion you feel when a natural disaster strikes, but remind yourself that a similar disaster is happening all the time—and then consider donating to wherever your money will help the most rather than what is getting the most attention. Diminishing returns also provides a powerful argument for focusing your altruistic efforts on people in poor countries rather than those in rich countries.

For example, it costs about $50,000 to train and provide one guide dog for one blind person, something that would significantly improve that person’s quality of life. However, if we could use that $50,000 to completely cure someone of blindness, that would be an even better use of money, since it provides a larger benefit for the same cost. Not only is $50,000 enough to cure one person of blindness in the developing world, it’s enough to cure five hundred people of blindness if spent on surgery to prevent blindness from sufferers of trachoma (a bacterial infection that causes the eyelids to turn inwards, causing the eyelashes to scratch the cornea). Any program that costs one hundred dollars to cure blindness would have been fully funded in rich countries decades ago. The same is not true in poor countries, which means we can do so much more to help those people than we can at home.

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.

I’ve now introduced the key questions to help you 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?

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.

One common recommendation is to turn off or shut down electronic devices when you’re not using them, rather than keeping them on standby. However, this achieves very little compared to other things you could do: 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. Another common recommendation is to turn off lights when you leave a room, but lighting accounts for only 3 percent of household energy use, so even if you never used lighting in your house, you would save only a fraction of a metric ton of carbon emissions. Plastic bags have also been a major focus of concern, but even on very generous estimates, if you stopped using plastic bags entirely, you’d cut out one hundred kilograms CO2 equivalent per year, which is only 0.4 percent of your total emissions.

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. Cutting out red meat and dairy for one day a week achieves a greater reduction in your carbon footprint than buying entirely locally based food. In fact, exactly the same food can sometimes have a higher carbon footprint if it’s locally grown than if it’s imported: one study found that the carbon footprint from locally grown tomatoes in northern Europe was five times as great as the carbon footprint from tomatoes grown in Spain, because the emissions generated by heating and lighting greenhouses dwarfed the emissions generated by transportation.

The most effective ways to cut down your emissions are to reduce your intake of meat (especially beef, which can cut out about a metric ton of CO2eq per year), to reduce the amount you travel (driving half as much would cut out two metric tons of CO2eq per year and one fewer round-trip flight from London to New York would eliminate a metric ton of CO2eq), and to use less electricity and gas in the home...

However, there is an even more effective way to reduce your emissions. It’s called offsetting: rather than reducing your own greenhouse gas emissions, you pay for projects that re...

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.

Moral licensing shows that people are often more concerned about looking good or feeling good rather than actually doing good.

There are a dizzying number of career paths, each with their positives and negatives. At the same time, the decision is high-stakes. Your choice of career is a choice about how to spend more than eighty thousand hours over the course of your life, which means it makes sense to invest a considerable amount of time in the decision. If you were to spend just 1 percent of your working time thinking about how to spend the other 99 percent, that would mean you’d spend eight hundred hours, or twenty working weeks, on your career decision. I doubt many people spend this much time thinking about their careers, but it might be worth it.

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 percent of students had passions, and 90 percent of these involved sports, music, and art. But by looking at census data, we can see that only 3 percent of jobs are in the sports, 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.

This takes us to our third point against passion, which is that the best predictors of job satisfaction are features of the job itself, rather than facts about personal passion. Instead of trying to figure out which career to pursue based on whatever you happen to be most interested in today, you should start by looking for work with certain important features. If you find that, passion will follow. 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): Independence—To what extent do you have control over how you go about your work? Sense of completion—To what extent does the job involve completing a whole piece of work so that your contribution to the end product is easily visible, rather than being merely a small part of a much larger product? Variety—To what extent does the job require you to perform a range of different activities, using different skills and talents? Feedback from the job—How easy is it to know whether you’re performing well or badly? Contribution—To what extent does your work “make a difference,” as defined by positive contributions to the well-being of other people? As well as job satisfaction, each of these factors also correlates with motivation, productivity, and commitment to your employer.

Tech entrepreneurship and quantitative trading in hedge funds offer even higher expected earnings, though tech entrepreneurship comes with even higher risks (entrepreneurs have less than a 10 percent chance of ever selling their shares in the company at profit) and quantitative trading requires exceptionally strong mathematical skills.

The meat industry is also one of the largest contributors to climate change, amounting to 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.