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

by William MacAskill

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.