Good, Better, Best?

Book Review:

William MacAskill, "Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference", 2016, Guardian Books & Faber.

This is a book that introduces the core ideas behind the effective altruism movement. It is also, I think, a book that conveys the principles of good reasoning. Writing with clarity, Will MacAskill tells us how to select a charity to which to donate, how to pick a career or cause area to work in, and how to make the greatest difference as consumers. However, the principles underlying his advice -- the "five key questions of effective altruism" as MacAskill calls them -- could also be adapted to decision-making in general.

Doing Good Better begins by discussing two different approaches to helping others: the first is exemplified by the PlayPump (a kind of water pump that doubles as a roundabout/playground for kids), which caught a lot of attention in the early 2000s and raised millions of dollars. People thought it was a "wonderful innovation" and were driven to support it out of emotion; yet the PlayPump was less effective than the previously installed hand pumps at delivering water, and often broke down. The second approach is exemplified by Kremer and Glennerster's randomized controlled trials of various development projects, which found that treating children for intestinal worms (deworming) using very cheap drugs had a much greater impact on educational results than did additional teachers, textbooks, flipcharts or school uniforms.

What these cases illustrate is that merely having good intentions is not enough; one needs to gather evidence to see which programs are the most effective at improving people's lives. As Will MacAskill says (pp. 14-15):

"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."

The importance of effective altruism becomes apparent when we look at the world's income distribution. Anyone who earns more than US$28,000 (or £18,200) per year is part of the richest 5% in the world, and it takes an income of just $52,000 (£34,000) to be in the global top 1%. This means that for almost everyone in developed Western countries, there is a huge opportunity to do good by donating money to those living in extreme poverty in developing countries like Ethiopia and India. MacAskill estimates that there is a "100x Multiplier" -- in other words, a given sum of money can benefit the very poorest a hundred times as much as it can benefit you, if you are from a rich country.

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In Part I of the book, MacAskill discusses the five key questions of effective altruism. (Chapters 2-6.) They are:

1. How many people benefit, and by how much? We should spend our time and money on activities that actually make people better off. Since we have limited resources, we unfortunately cannot help everyone, which means that we need to be able to compare the impacts of different activities. For health benefits, we can use a metric known as the QALY (i.e. quality-adjusted life-year), which is calculated by multiplying the years of life added times the quality of life during those years. One QALY is equivalent to one year of perfect health.
2. Is this the most effective thing you can do? It's not enough to engage in "merely good" activities, and we should seek out the very best ones. The best programs can be a hundred times as effective as merely good ones. Foreign aid has often been derided as ineffective. However, MacAskill points out that the effectiveness of different aid activities may form a skewed, fat-tailed distribution, meaning that most of the value generated comes from the very best activities (similar to the 80/20 rule). For example, distributing insecticide-treated bed nets to protect against malaria yields 10 QALYs per $1000 whereas doing surgeries to remove Kaposi's sarcoma yields only 0.02 QALYs per $1000. By focusing on the very best programs, like the eradication of smallpox (which has saved an estimated 60 million lives), we can see that development aid has been very cost-effective on average.
3. Is this area neglected? It's best to focus on areas where others haven't already exploited the opportunity. You can have a bigger impact by donating to causes that receive relatively less funding. Disaster relief is an area that receives a lot of attention and funding, in part due to its emotional appeal. However, we need to think at the margin: rather than asking about the average value of a resource, we should ask about its marginal utility, because the law of diminishing returns says that the value of one additional unit of a resource decreases the more of that resource one already has. Therefore, your money will make a larger difference if you donate it to fighting a relatively neglected disease like malaria, instead of something like cancer.
4. What would have happened otherwise? To make a difference, we should do things that wouldn't have happened without us. Sometimes, like in medicine or research, good work would have happened with or without us anyway; whereas this is far less likely to be the case when we earn to give. This principle is also known as assessing the counterfactual. In the case of becoming a doctor, you would probably be replaced by someone else if you did not become a doctor, so the difference you'll make isn't as large as you might think. In some cases, like the "Scared Straight" programs, wherein juvenile delinquents were shown the horrors of life in prison, the difference might actually be negative. (The Scared Straight youth were more likely to become criminals after the intervention.)
5. What are the chances of success, and how good would success be? Sometimes, it is worth it to pursue activities with low odds of success but with very high potential payoffs. Such activities may include voting, entering politics, campaigning for systemic change, or mitigating risks of global catastrophe. Essentially, the advice here is to calculate the expected value of an activity. People often argue that your vote won't affect the outcome of an election. But if getting the better party into power will provide a large net benefit to your country, then even a tiny chance of your vote affecting the outcome can still make voting worth it. The same reasoning can show how the expected value of going vegetarian or trying to prevent climate change can be positive.

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Part II of the book is called "Effective Altruism in Action". It comprises four chapters, each one looking at a different domain of altruism.

Chapter 7 is about the charities that do the most good. MacAskill argues against the common approach of looking at overhead costs (like what proportion of your money goes toward administration, marketing and fundraising, CEO pay, etc.). If you don't care about a company's financial information when buying a product for yourself, why would you care when buying something for other people? Instead, MacAskill recommends the framework used by charity evaluator GiveWell, which helps you assess and compare charities on five criteria: (i) What does this charity do? (ii) How cost-effective is each program area? (iii) How robust is the evidence behind each program? (iv) How well is each program implemented? And (v) does the charity need additional funds? Based on this framework, some very cost-effective charities are:

• GiveDirectly (provides direct cash transfers to families in Kenya and Uganda)
• Development Media International (produces educational radio shows about health matters)
• Deworm the World Initiative (helps governments run deworming programs in schools)
• Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (ditto)
• Against Malaria Foundation (distributes antimalarial bed nets)
• Living Goods (sells affordable health products in Uganda)
• Iodine Global Network (advocates for and monitors government programs to fortify salt with iodine)

Chapter 8 looks at the question of ethical consumption. A common approach is to boycott companies that use sweatshop labor; but people neglect to consider the counterfactual. If people in developing countries did not work in sweatshops, they would not have better jobs -- they would be worse off! Therefore, there is a moral case to be made for sweatshop goods. Another popular consumption choice is Fairtrade coffee, tea and chocolate, which is supposed to provide workers in poorer countries with higher pay. However, the evidence suggests that Fairtrade products have little impact, because these products usually come from medium-income countries rather than the poorest ones, and most of the money goes to middlemen rather than farmers. Low-carbon "green" living and vegetarianism are also major areas of ethical consumerism. The most effective ways to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions are to cut down on your meat intake, to reduce the amount you travel, and to use less gas and electricity in the home -- and even better would be to pay about $105 per year to an organization called Cool Earth to protect rainforests from deforestation, which is a form of carbon offsetting. Finally, the majority of animal suffering may be attributed to chickens and eggs (due to their poor living conditions, and the number of animals raised in factory farms). In addition to becoming vegetarian, you can also donate to charities like Mercy for Animals or The Humane League who advocate for more people to stop eating meat.

The general take-away from this chapter is that well-targeted donations to the most effective activities can do much more good than changing your personal consumption habits. In addition, MacAskill warns of the "moral licensing" effect, whereby people who do one good action compensate by doing fewer good actions in the future. Psychology experiments have found that people who buy "green" products feel (subconsciously) like they are licensed to do unethical things like stealing or cheating. This is another reason why it's important to promote effective rather than ineffective means of helping others. Overall, I personally learned the most from chapter 8, because I already knew a lot of the concepts from the other chapters.

Chapter 9 deals with career and volunteering opportunities, and is provocatively titled "Don't 'Follow Your Passion'". Here, the book explains that people have passions that don't fit the work world (like art, music and sports), that passions often lead people into competitive areas, that people's interests change over time, and that personal passion isn't even the best predictor of job satisfaction. The best predictors of job satisfaction, according to psychological research, are: independence, a sense of completion, variety, feedback from the job, and contribution of the job to the well-being of other people. Instead of following your gut, you should let passion grow out of work that has the right characteristics. This might entail trying out different types of work.

MacAskill provides a framework for choosing a career, based on the research of the nonprofit organization 80,000 Hours. There are three questions to ask yourself: (i) How will I personally fit with this job? (ii) What will be my impact while I'm working at this job? And (iii) how would this job contribute to my impact later on in life?

Your "personal fit" depends on things like how excited you are by the job, and how good you are at the type of work compared to other people and compared to other jobs you could pursue. Your impact on the job can be based on your labor, the money you can give, and the influence you can have on other people. Your initial job can also influence the impact you have later on in your career, by giving you career capital (i.e. skills, credentials and a network), by keeping your options open, and by allowing you to explore other opportunities that you might have missed. Based on this framework, MacAskill suggests some promising career strategies:

• Direct work for a highly effective organization (e.g. GiveWell)
• Earning to give (e.g. quantitative trading, tech entrepreneurship, consulting, medicine, software engineering, accountancy, sales and marketing)
• Skill-building (e.g. consulting, sales and marketing, or a PhD)
• Entrepreneurship (for-profit or non-profit)
• Research (e.g. economics, statistics, computer science, psychology)
• Politics and advocacy (e.g. party politics and journalism)

Chapter 10 asks which problems and cause areas are most important to focus on. A framework for thinking about this question is introduced, with three components: (i) What is the scale or magnitude of this problem? (ii) How neglected is this problem currently? And (iii) what is the tractability of the problem, i.e. how easy is it to make progress and how can we tell? An additional fourth question applies if you are contributing your time: (iv) how likely are you to make a large difference in this area given your personal fit (skills, resources, knowledge, connections and passions)?

While the most important cause to focus on will depend on value judgments, MacAskill suggests some high priorities, including: U.S. criminal justice reform, international labor mobility, factory farming, 2-4 degree Celsius climate change, catastrophic climate change, and other global catastrophic risks (like nuclear war, pandemics and bioterrorism). These are all in addition to the issue of extreme poverty that much of the rest of the book has focused on.

Doing Good Better concludes with a call to action, urging readers to establish a regular habit of giving to highly effective charities, to write down how they are going to incorporate effective altruism into their lives, to join the Effective Altruism community online, and to tell others about effective altruism. One can even take Giving What We Can's pledge to donate 10% of one's income. MacAskill reiterates the point that each of us can have an enormous positive impact.

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Now, the perfunctory criticism. While Doing Good Better is an excellent introduction to effective altruism for the unacquainted, it leaves something to be desired for those who already know the core ideas (as in my case). Much of the book's content is covered, for example, in The Effective Altruism Handbook (edited by Ryan Carey), which is available for free online, and which I have summarized at this link.
That being said, MacAskill's explanations tend to be more in-depth and address more potential counterarguments. He illustrates the ideas with examples, walking us step-by-step through the career selection process of graduates like Laura Brown and Greg Lewis (see chapters 4 & 5). The upshot is that the reader is likely to be persuaded and feel like the ideas are actionable.

MacAskill seems to steer clear of too much controversy in the book. Certainly, defending sweatshop goods, telling readers not to follow their passion, calling for more open immigration policies, and dismissing the overhead ratio of charities are all non-mainstream ideas (at least outside economics) and already somewhat controversial among popular audiences. However, I think MacAskill could have gone even further, and that he didn't do so suggests that he knew he already made a number of counterintuitive claims and didn't want to push it too far. I can understand this reasoning, and the book does not have to address everything that has ever been said about effective altruism. But here are some things it could have talked about:

• Risks from Artificial Intelligence. Never once does MacAskill mention AI safety as a cause area -- not even in the section on "other global catastrophic risks" toward the end. The Open Philanthropy Project, which is similar to GiveWell, includes "potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence" as one of their current priorities (see here). If you want more information on how and why AI might pose an existential threat, see my own research on this page.
• Other potentially high-impact areas. For example, the Global Priorities Project has a flowchart (link) that includes: preventing wild animal suffering, human rights lobbying, research into better values and morals ("moral enhancement"), building better institutions, cause prioritization research, and even anti-aging research.

MacAskill does mention aging as a problem on page 228, but quickly dismisses it as "highly intractable". However, this ignores recent progress that has been made (examples) and the fact that we haven't yet found a reason to think it impossible. You may be very unlikely to help cure aging in your lifetime, but this is another one of those low-probability high-value activities: it might still be worth pursuing.

Although I don't agree with MacAskill on everything, I do agree with most of what is written in the book. And as I said in the beginning, Doing Good Better is important to read not only for its exposition of effective altruism, but also for teaching a general style of thinking.

The principles of maximizing expected value, thinking about marginal utility (instead of average utility), and using counterfactual reasoning, can all be used for everyday decisions or in the business world. Many phenomena might follow the fat-tailed distribution of philanthropic programs, and hence some version of the 80/20 rule. Whenever we can, it is good to quantify outcome variables so that we can measure progress and compare alternatives. Using evidence, like the results of randomized controlled trials, is better than relying on intuition alone. Human intuitions are driven by emotions, native-country bias and quirky psychological phenomena like moral licensing.

These are important concepts to understand when trying to get things done -- whether altruistic acts or anything else.

My rating: 5/5 stars.