Doing Good Better by William Macaskill

Worth Reading 8 out of 10

The overall concept of the book is important and thought provoking.? Macaskill forces us to really think about the value we bring in the “good” that we do.? It shouldn’t be measured, he claims, by what profession you are in or how much money you donate but rather by “effective altruism”.? That is, we must carefully scrutinize the value-added contribution that each of us bring to our altruism - work and charity - and focus our efforts on the biggest impact.

Summary

The overall perspective about how best to view our contributions of time and money are spot on and we would be wise to follow his process. ? He gives a lot of interesting examples where good intentions and incredible inventions were deemed irrelevant and impractical by the facts on the ground of the people who received these gifts/inventions/donations etc.? For example, a really cool water pump that is run by using a swing on a nearby playground.? The inventor wanted to get fresh water easier and closer to small villages in Africa so to reduce the effort of pumping water he created a system that he thought would get villages clean water easier and faster..? In the end, the effort required to use the playground to pump the water took so much longer that it was deemed pointless by those villages.? When you consider the amount of donation money invested into this as well as time and other resources it was a huge debacle.

We must assume that we do NOT know the most effective way of helping people.? We must test our ideas in the field, with the recipients especially, and have an open mind and be flexible to make sure it works for them.? The example I love is for baby incubators, they are extremely expensive to buy as well as repair and even when given to a small hospital in an outlying area if it broke they usually couldn’t afford to fix it or it took an extremely long time to get a repairman.? So, someone developed one exclusively using parts that are sourceable in that part of the world and are able to be repaired by an average technician that lives in the area - huge win.??

Macaskill talks a lot about “effective altruism” - which means asking yourself what is the biggest difference YOU can make.? Is it by donating money or by donating your time and of course once you figure that out where you donate money/time to can have different impacts.? For example, do you become a Dr and help save lives or work a different job and donate your money and the author goes through lengthy calculations as to the average doctor's value-add he brings. Because if someone else would just be a doctor instead of him, then he didn’t really save any additional lives.? Whereas, if he had a special (medical) skill that no one else could do then he would actually save additional lives.? In the first case he can actually help more by donating money to effective/efficient organizations than he would as a doctor.? This is clearly a revolutionary way of looking at things and it makes a lot of sense in my opinion.

He also has a big section about analyzing the best organization to donate to, how we can calculate their impact on “lives saved per dollar donated” and gives some specific ideas.? It’s not clear if he is biased to specific areas which he discusses because I am sure there are plenty of worthy organizations that were not mentioned as well.??

Topics discussed are - should we really be donating to cancer vs malaria if we can save more people per dollar by eradicating malaria for example.??

The Five Key Questions of Effective Altruism

1) How many people benefit and by how much?

2) Is this the most effective thing you can do?

3) Is this area neglected?

4) What would have happened otherwise

5) What are the chances of success and how good would success be?

He also discusses the process of finding the right career which I thought was a bit of a stretch but I understand why he did it.??