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June 17 - June 24, 2019
When it comes to helping others, being unreflective often means being ineffective.
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.
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.
Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, quit their jobs to start GiveWell, an organization that does extraordinarily in-depth research to work out which charities do the most good with every dollar they receive.
If people focus exclusively on American inequality, they’re missing an important part of the bigger picture.
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. We can therefore do a huge amount of good at relatively little cost.
It’s not often you have two options, one of which is one hundred times better than the other. Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beer for five dollars or buy someone else a beer for five cents.
For our purposes, however, it’s often not important for us to have precise numbers on how good or bad different conditions are. As we’ll see in the next chapter, programs differ dramatically in how great an impact they have, so even a rough idea of how many people are affected, and by how much, is often enough to show that one program has a much larger impact than another.
Responding to bereavement by trying to make a difference is certainly admirable. But it seems arbitrary to raise money for one specific cause of death rather than any other.
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. Any other decision would be unfair to those whom we could have helped more.
In reality, a tiny amount of aid has been spent, and there have been dramatic increases in the welfare of the world’s poorest people.
In comparison, government departments in the United States will pay for infrastructure to improve safety if doing so costs less than about $7 million per life saved; the precise figures are $9.1 million for the Environmental Protection Agency, $7.9 million for the Food and Drug Administration, and $6 million for the Department of Transportation.
This means that, even if aid had achieved absolutely nothing except eradicating smallpox, it still would have prevented a death for 1/150th of the cost that the United States is currently willing to spend to save the lives of its own citizens.
thinking carefully about how you can do the most to benefit others doesn’t just allow you to do a bit more good—it enables you to do vastly more than you might have done otherwise.
The law of diminishing returns provides a useful rule of thumb for comparing causes. If a specific area has already received a great deal of funding and attention, then we should expect it to be difficult for us to do a lot of good by devoting additional resources to that area.
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.
We forget there is an emergency happening all the time, because we’ve grown accustomed to everyday emergencies like disease and poverty and oppression.
Health economists estimate that, on average, the benefit of “saving a life” is the same as the benefit of providing 36.5 QALYs.
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.
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.
If an amateur chemist created a pill he claimed would reduce crime, we would never administer it to thousands of children without rigorous testing because it would be dangerous, not to mention illegal, to do so. Yet new social programs like Scared Straight can be rolled out without any good evidence behind them.
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.
We shouldn’t dismiss more speculative or high-risk activities out of hand, though, because when successful, they can have an enormous impact. We therefore need a way to compare higher-risk but higher-upside actions with actions that are certain to have an impact.
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.
The point is simply that long shots can be worth it if the payoff is big enough.
However, this debate is strange for another reason: even if scientists had not already shown that man-made climate change is happening, the mere fact that man-made climate change might be happening is enough to warrant action.
RIGHT!!
Our predicament with climate change is no different. If climate change is happening and we don’t take action, millions of lives will be lost and the world economy will lose trillions of dollars. If climate change isn’t happening and we do take action, the costs are much lower. We would have wasted some amount of resources developing low-carbon technology and slowed economic progress a bit, but it wouldn’t, literally, be the end of the world.
Diarrhea is a major problem in the developing world, killing 760,000 children every year, primarily through dehydration. (For comparison, that’s a death toll equivalent to five jumbo jets crashing to the ground every day, killing everyone on board.)
Even if a charity has chosen an extremely cost-effective program with very robust evidence supporting it, it still might implement that program badly.
Many effective programs are fully funded precisely because they are so effective.
We assume that if people refused to buy goods from sweatshops, these factories would succumb to economic pressure and go out of business, in which case their employees would find better employment elsewhere. But that’s not true.
among economists on both the left and the right, there is no question that sweatshops benefit those in poor countries. Nobel laureate and left-wing economist Paul Krugman has stated, “The overwhelming mainstream view among economists is that the growth of this kind of employment is tremendous good news for the world’s poor.”
Because sweatshops are good for poor countries, if we boycott them we make people in poor countries worse off.
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 versus regular coffee. The evidence suggests that the answer is “disappointingly little.”
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.
Cool Earth claims it costs them about a hundred dollars to prevent an acre of rain forest from being cut down, and that each acre locks in 260 metric tons of CO2. This would mean that it costs just about thirty-eight cents to prevent one metric ton of CO2 from being emitted.
Psychologists have discovered a phenomenon that they call moral licensing, which describes how people who perform one good action often compensate by doing fewer good actions in the future.
Building career capital can be important later in your career as well if you’re not sure which causes to support. Instead of trying to make an immediate impact, you can invest in yourself while continuing to learn about which causes are most important, preparing yourself to make a bigger difference in the future.
We don’t often recommend that people go into nonprofit work straight out of college, because you will typically build fewer skills and credentials than you would in for-profit companies, which typically have greater resources to invest in training.
One way in which you can assess whether an organization is money-constrained or talent-constrained is simply to ask the organization if they would prefer you donate to them or work for them.
Instead, I’d encourage you to think about volunteering primarily in terms of the skills and experiences you’ll gain, which will enable you to have a greater impact later in your life.
The meat industry is also one of the largest contributors to climate change, amounting to 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
If you also value preservation of the natural environment, you should regard climate change as considerably worse than the economists’ models suggest. For example, climate change may potentially lead to the extinction of 20 to 30 percent of species.
