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

by William MacAskill

At that point, a friend at the World Bank suggested he test deworming. Few people in developed countries know about intestinal worms: parasitic infections that affect more than one billion people worldwide. They aren’t as dramatic as AIDS or cancer or malaria, because they don’t kill nearly as many people as those other conditions. But they do make children sick, and can be cured for pennies: off-patent drugs, developed in the 1950s, can be distributed through schools and administered by teachers, and will cure children of intestinal worms for a year.

Absenteeism is a chronic problem in schools in Kenya, and deworming reduced it by 25 percent. In fact, every child treated spent an extra two weeks in school, and every one hundred dollars spent on the program provided a total of ten years of additional school attendance among all students. Enabling a child to spend an extra day in school therefore cost just five cents. It wasn’t merely that deworming children “worked” at getting children into school. It worked incredibly well.

Kremer and Glennerster cofounded the nonprofit Deworm the World Initiative, which provides technical assistance to the governments of developing countries, enabling them to launch their own deworming programs. The charity has provided more than forty million deworming treatments, and the independent charity evaluator GiveWell regards them as one of the most cost-effective development charities.

But relying on good intentions alone to inform your decisions is potentially disastrous.

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.

Instead, they tested their ideas before putting them into action.

But by focusing on what was effective rather than what was emotionally appealing, they produced outstanding results, significantly improving the lives of millions of people.

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?

our efforts not on “merely good” activities but on the very best activities. The third question directs us to focus on those areas that receive comparatively little attention, and for which others haven’t taken the outstanding opportunities to make a difference.

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. Because we’re used to judging ourselves in comparison with our peers, it’s easy to underestimate just how well off those of us in rich countries are.

They found that the extreme poor consume an average of fourteen hundred calories per day—about half of what is recommended for a physically active man or a very physically active woman—while spending most of their income on food.

The majority are underweight and anemic. Most households own radios but lack electricity, toilets, or tap water. Less than 10 percent of households possess a chair or a table.

In the United States, because there is no extreme poverty, there is no market for extremely cheap goods. The lowest-quality rice you can buy in the United States is far better than what you could buy in Ethiopia or India.

What’s interesting about this graph is that a doubling of income will always increase reported subjective well-being by the same amount. For someone earning $1,000 per year, a $1,000 pay rise generates the same increase in happiness as a $2,000 pay rise for someone earning $2,000 per year, or an $80,000 pay rise for someone already earning $80,000 per year. And so on.

This is such a typical state of affairs that you might not have thought about how astonishing it is. But imagine if you went into a grocery store and none of the products had prices on them. Instead, the storekeeper asks: “How much would you like to spend at this grocery store today?” When you give the storekeeper some money, he hands over a selection of groceries chosen by him.

This happened to me today.

We can overcome this problem by thinking in terms of improving lives rather than in terms of intermediate metrics like number of schoolbooks provided. In order to truly make comparisons between different actions, we need to measure impact in terms of the size of the benefits we confer through those actions.

In the endnotes, I link to some official lists of quality-of-life estimates, to help you assess the severity of different conditions yourself.

The Cochrane Collaboration, a nonprofit institute that rigorously assesses the evidence behind health and social programs, looked at these studies and found that two of them had no significant effect, while the remaining seven showed increased rates of criminality among juveniles.

In the jargon of academia, that’s just about as harsh a criticism as you can get, claiming that, no matter what way they looked at it, Scared Straight caused more crime than it prevented. In a separate study, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy estimated the value for society, per dollar invested, of a range of preventative social policies, such as psychotherapy and anger management.

How can a program that has been proven to cause harm thrive?

The difference you make isn’t equal to the difference between the United States having 878,194 doctors and the United States having 878,195 doctors (which is how we analyzed it in the previous chapter). It’s the difference you make by becoming a doctor as compared to the difference someone else would make if he or she took your place.

but the difference he’d make by taking someone else’s position would be less than that.

far. I call it earning to give.

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.

Because the social problems in the world are so big, additional resources directed to them diminish in value very slowly.

But when thinking “merely” in terms of millions of dollars, one can often assume the altruistic value of money stays the same no matter how much of it you have.

Eating forty tablespoons of peanut butter gives you one micromort because you risk ingesting aflatoxin, a fungal toxin that increases your risk of liver cancer later in life. Smoking a single cigarette gives you 0.7 micromorts, increasing your chance of dying of lung cancer many years down the line. Taking this into account, smoking one cigarette reduces life expectancy by five minutes—about the same length of time it takes to smoke it.

The average expected value of voting for the better party, therefore, is the probability of success (one in sixty million) multiplied by the benefit to Americans (which I’m supposing to be $314 billion), which equals about $5,200 of value to the people of the United States. That’s the sense in which voting is like donating thousands of dollars to (developed-world) charities. For all but the ultrarich, that’s a much better use of time than you could get, for example, by working the hour it takes you to vote and donating your earnings.

With every dollar GiveDirectly spent on fund-raising, they raised one hundred dollars in donations, a remarkable number compared to the average of four dollars of donations raised for every dollar spent on fund-raising.

Much of the administration spending was on fixed costs, so as GiveDirectly increases the amount of cash they transfer, the percentage spent on overhead is likely to go down considerably.

You’d probably think about the design and usability of the two computers, the hardware, the software, and the price. You certainly wouldn’t think about how much Apple and Microsoft each spend on administration, and you wouldn’t think about how much their respective CEOs are paid. Why would you? As a consumer you only care about the product you get with the money you spend; details about the financials of the companies who make the products are almost always irrelevant. If Apple spent a lot of money to attract a more talented management team, you might even consider that a good sign that their products were the best on the market!

Would I really have created an amazing charity? Surely, as we discussed in chapter two, what we should ultimately care about is the impact charities have. When you give a hundred dollars to a charity, what does that charity do with it? How are people’s lives improved as a result?

To answer that, we have to know how these different expenditures affect people’s lives.

high-quality evidence regarding the impact of the program that the charity implements.

GiveDirectly even goes so far as to provide information on how many cash transfer recipients reported having to pay bribes to the local agents who transferred them the money (at the time of writing, the figure is 0.4 percent).

explicit cost-effectiveness estimates,

The Fairtrade license is only given to producers who meet certain criteria, such as paying their workers a minimum wage and satisfying specified safety requirements. The Fairtrade license has two benefits. First, the producers are guaranteed a certain minimum price for the good.

For example, coffee producers are guaranteed to receive $1.40 per pound of coffee, even if the market rate drops below $1.40. Second, producers are paid a “social premium” on top of the market rate. For coffee, if the market rate is above $1.40, the producers are paid an additional twenty cents per pound. This social premium is used to pay for democratically chosen community programs.

But if we’re thinking about buying fair-trade ourselves, we need to ask how much we’re actually benefitting people in poor countries by shelling out a few extra dollars for fair-trade

trade versus regular coffee. The evidence suggests that the answer is “disappointingly little.” This is for three reasons.

For example, the majority of fair-trade coffee production comes from comparatively rich countries like Mexico and Costa Rica, which are ten times richer than the very poorest countries like Ethiopia.

Because Costa Rica is ten times richer than Ethiopia, one dollar is worth more to the average Ethiopian than several dollars is to the average Costa Rican.

Fairtrade workers in Ethiopia and Uganda. They found that those Fairtrade workers had systematically lower wages and worse working conditions than comparable non-Fairtrade workers, and that the poorest often had no access to the “community projects” that Fairtrade touted as major successes.

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.

CheatNeutral.com, offers the following service: “When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain, and jealousy in the atmosphere. CheatNeutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralizes the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.”

However, in both cases the analogies are flawed. In buying indulgences, you don’t “undo” the harm you’ve caused others or the sins you’ve done. 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. Similarly, “offsetting” your adultery (even if you genuinely could) would still affect who is harmed, even if it keeps the total number of adulterous acts constant. In contrast, carbon offsetting prevents anyone from ever being harmed by your emissions; it’s the “equivalent” of never committing adultery in the first place.

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