William MacAskill’s book initially caught my attention because of its title, Doing Good Better. As an academic working in the field of corporate strategy, I have come up with two postulates for making corporate strategies more effective:
“Make good even better” (i.e., focus on incrementally improving on a given strategy)
“Strategy means choice” (i.e., focus on setting priorities; you cannot simply pursue everything)
Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism addresses these two issues of managing incremental improvements and becoming better at setting priorities, and surprisingly, the field of altruism faces these two key challenges too!
Steven Pinker recently stated that “effective altruism represents one of the great new trends of the twenty-first century,” but altruism is, of course, not new. So let us first define what effective altruism might entail—something MacAskill did not attempt in his book. My own definition of altruism encompasses the following:
Giving (money and/or time)
Development aid
Social entrepreneurship
Doing Good Better deals first with five main questions regarding effective altruism, followed with four key issues about the effective implementation of altruism, that is, “altruism in action.”
In a brief introduction, MacAskill sets much of the stage for what is to come: How can one do the most good? Why does one need to be mindful in this process and do the necessary research and analysis? Answering these matters requires us to address five main questions:
First, in terms of making difficult trade-offs, how many people might benefit and by how much? The so-called QUALY metric—a simple cost-benefit analytical approach – helps us cope with such trade-offs. Despite its simplicity, this metric indicates that choosing one good cause is essential and that, consequently, other causes must be ignored.
The second question relates to effectiveness: Is one’s decision the most effective use of one’s resources? Issues such as corruption, ineffectiveness and donations that are too small arise at this point.
A logical question follows: Is this specially chosen area a neglected one? According to MacAskill, the most neglected areas often yield the most tangible results, with typically higher QUALY scores. Relief of most natural disasters, for instance, would not necessarily qualify for our aid under this criterion. Rest assured, others will still provide aid to high-profile causes. MacAskill calls our attention to the possibility of dealing with counter-intuition here: Our humanistic instinct of wanting to offer help might at times be heavily challenged!
The following question is then about counterfactuals: What would have happened otherwise? In other words, what would have happened if support were to be given ten years later, or before, or not at all? Ironically, we often do not see much difference. In fact, giving might often lead to unintended dysfunctional effects, such as increased criminality.
The final question MacAskill raises relates to probabilities: What are the chances of success? For that matter, how definite would success actually be? Expected value calculations might help here. Let us all remember that according to the Fukushima atomic energy plant manual, “from an engineering standpoint,
an accident occurring is practically unthinkable!” Even if this statement were correct, the potential negative effect of such an accident should be calculated using expected value.
The book’s first half concludes with this call for attention, which wraps up MacAskill’s discussion of effective altruism. In the book’s second part, the author elaborates further on this concept to discuss four aspects of how effective altruism might be seen in an implemental context.
The first issue MacAskill tackles is to come up with a way to delineate which actual charities might make the most difference. A first attempt at this evaluation might be to assess how much a given charity might spend on administration and on compensation for the charity’s CEO. How large a percentage of any donation will actually end up in a given project? The organization Charity Navigator has developed such an approach, which has generated much controversy among recipients. Another organization, Give Well, has developed a possibly more meaningful method for evaluating the effectiveness of donations, along the following five qualifications:
What does this charity do?
How cost-effective is each program area?
How robust is the evidence behind each program?
How well is each program implemented?
Does this charity need additional funds?
The author then goes on to review what he considers to be seven good charities after applying these five criteria. No automatic conclusion is reached regarding which charity is the very best. It is up to each donor to assess how to weight each of these five criteria. I personally find the fifth criterion particularly interesting. This very issue is central in my assessment when making the go-ahead for any commercial venture.
Difficult moral issues may arise when trying to give, as well. For instance, aid sometimes entails controversial topics around sweatshops, child labor, animal cruelty, rain forest depletion, as well as pollution-enhancing projects. The crux of the problem here is that poor communities may often benefit from such activities. The fact that we, in the more economically developed part of the world, see these activities as unacceptable does not automatically make this dilemma go away. Realism, more than emotion or dogmatism, is thus called for when assessing these types of projects.
The next chapter focuses on career choices. To me, the rationale for including this chapter in the book remains unclear. While a well-conceived chapter, it simply does not seem to fit in with the rest of the book. Several criteria are given for young people’s choices in educational direction so that youths can be well prepared to play effective roles in today’s altruism movement. More interestingly, the discussion of career choice areas that may be particularly meaningful in an altruistic context, such as entrepreneurship, research and/or politics, makes good sense.
The conclusion of MacAskill’s book is both concise and clear. An effective altruist must accept grappling with four key issues:
Proper analysis, research and evaluation should be a habit of regular giving.
Write down how to incorporate effective altruism in one’s own context.
Join the community of effective altruism—there is ample room for discussing how to cope with dilemmas here.
Tell others about effective altruism; that is, be explicit and avoid an overly discreet profile.
This book is well worth the read and possesses many strengths:
It is explicit about “how to be this effective altruist.”
It sets out and discusses a good list of key dilemmas around giving in a forthright way.
It highlights the importance of “what might be most meaningful for me” (i.e., tailored rather than general approaches of giving, which some opinion leaders might falsely apply to us all).
All in all, Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism is a great book we should all read.
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