BTW - here are is the article I was talking about. (It was actually a side article to a larger piece, which I've also posted)
Posted by
Roger More (aka rogermore)
Jun 21 '18, 11:16
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The "personal story" stuff is pretty shallow, but that's the Economist.
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WHEN Kit Harris was a student at Oxford University, he was not sure what he wanted to do later. He thought about becoming an actuary—decent pay and hours and the chance to use his training in probability theory. But, though Mr Harris enjoyed solving maths puzzles, he also wanted to help the less fortunate. Dilemma resolved! Naturally, he took a job as a derivatives trader.
He reasoned that, though plenty of do-gooders can grab entry-level jobs at non-profit groups, few have the quantitative skills to earn six-figure salaries at a bank. So he could make more of a difference by taking a lucrative job and donating large chunks of salary than by working for a charity directly.
Shunning his own advice, Mr Harris has since left finance to work for the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford. One of its initiatives, 80,000 Hours, advises people on careers they should pick to maximise their impact on the world. It argues such decisions should be based not on how much good a profession does overall, but on how much good an individual would do personally. One woman started her career as a teacher, but doubted she was actually making any impact. Inspired by 80,000 Hours, she decided to work for an investment bank instead, calculating that she would have much more money to donate. Her leftish friends were aghast.
Medicine is another obvious profession for do-gooders. It is not one, however, on which 80,000 Hours is very keen. Rich countries have plenty of doctors, and even the best clinicians can see only one patient at a time. So the impact that a single doctor will have is minimal. Gregory Lewis, a public-health researcher, estimates that adding an additional doctor to America’s labour supply would yield health benefits equivalent to only around four lives saved.
The typical medical student, however, should expect to save closer to no lives at all. Entrance to medical school is competitive. So a student who is accepted would not increase a given country’s total stock of doctors. Instead, she would merely be taking the place of someone who is slightly less qualified. Doctors, though, do make good money, especially in America. A plastic surgeon who donates half of her earnings to charity will probably have much bigger social impact on the margin than an emergency-room doctor who donates none.
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DONORS to charities rarely make the sort of cost-benefit calculations investors, for example, would think obligatory. So charities attract donations with pictures of smiling gap-toothed children, rather than spreadsheets showing how they actually spend their money. Tugging at the heartstrings, however, does little to allay the doubts of economists sceptical about the efficacy of charity. Who is to say whether donating to a homeless shelter is a better use of money than donating to a school?
Yet advances in social science, particularly in development economics, mean donors can now have a reasonably good idea of how far each dollar will go. Empirically minded do-gooders, members of the nascent “effective altruism” movement, argue that it is at last possible to put into practice a “fundamental axiom” of utilitarianism, first invoked in 1776 by Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher: “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”
The vast majority of charitable contributions come not from big foundations, but from individuals. Data from the Giving USA Foundation, a non-profit, show that of the $390bn Americans gave to charity in 2016, $280bn came from individual donors. Of this, around $120bn went to religious organisations and $60bn to educational institutions (mostly universities).
Not all of this money was given with the intention of maximising human welfare. Take, for instance, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which helps children stricken with life-threatening illnesses, by granting “wishes”, such as meeting celebrities or visiting theme parks. The typical wish costs the foundation around $10,000 to fulfil—heartwarming for the recipient but of little help in improving health generally. Yet some charities, notably those active in poor countries, can produce big public benefits for relatively small amounts of money. One estimate finds that surgery that prevents blindness induced by trachoma, an infectious disease, costs a charity just $100 per operation.
William MacAskill, a philosopher at Oxford University, argues that promoting inefficient charities might actually do more harm than good. Competition for donations is acute. Research by the Centre for Effective Altruism, a think-tank he co-founded, finds that every dollar raised by one charity means 50 cents less for others. Mr MacAskill also worries about “moral licensing”. One study found that people tend to treat giving to charity like buying a medieval indulgence—they may believe they have the right to act immorally if they have done something they deem altruistic.
Measuring a charity’s efficiency is not straightforward, however. Effective altruism’s most-cited evaluator is GiveWell, a non-profit group based in San Francisco founded in 2007 by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, two former hedge-fund analysts. Traditionally, charities used to be rated according to their overheads. GiveWell instead calculates standardised returns on investment across charities, as measured by factors such as cost per life saved (see chart). The charities it rates most highly are not all household names.
Toby Ord, another philosopher at Oxford, argues that people from rich countries who are interested in maximising human welfare should focus their charity abroad. A donor who wants to improve educational outcomes, for instance, would do better to donate not to American schools but to charities trying to improve the diets of children in poorer countries. A rough meta-analysis by GiveWell finds that ensuring children in a poor country have enough iodine in their diets can lead to a four-point increase in average IQ.
One of GiveWell’s highest-rated charities is the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), which distributes medically treated bed nets in poor countries. Malaria still kills some 400,000 a year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. There is still no cure for the mosquito-borne disease. But it is relatively easy to prevent its spread. The AMF estimates that it costs $4 to buy and distribute a treated bed net. According to GiveWell’s analysis, the health benefits from this in sub-Saharan Africa are equivalent to a child’s life saved for every $2,000 spent.
GiveWell’s approach to evaluation has its limitations. It is hard to make like-for-like comparisons of the efficacy of different charities with different goals. An alternative approach is simply to give money to poor people. A proliferation of mobile-payment apps has made this easier than ever before. GiveDirectly, a charity founded by a group of development economists in 2008, facilitates direct transfers to people in Kenya and Uganda. Mr Hassenfeld likens the organisation to an index—it serves as a baseline against which other charities can be judged. GiveWell reckons that in order for a charity to be more cost-efficient than GiveDirectly, it would have to provide goods or services that people cannot readily purchase by themselves.
Inevitably, even effective altruists have to accept a degree of uncertainty about the impact of their donation. The question is how much? GiveWell is relatively conservative when it comes to recommending charities, listing just nine organisations under its list of “top charities”. The Open Philanthropy Project, a research group spun out of GiveWell, is more willing to back ventures with only a small chance of success provided the potential benefits are big enough. An extreme example is its recommendation that donors finance research on the safe use of artificial intelligence (AI). The increasing economic importance of AI, and the fact that it is so poorly understood, have led many altruists to believe it may soon become one of the biggest threats to society.
It is hard to gauge quite how big the effective-altruism movement has become. But it does have some serious backers. Good Ventures, a non-profit group founded by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, and his wife, Cari Tuna, makes donations based almost exclusively on the Open Philanthropy Project’s recommendations. It does not accept outside donations, but is dedicated to spending Mr Moskovitz’s and Ms Tuna’s wealth, which Forbes reckons to be $15bn. Last year, Good Ventures gave out over $300m in grants.
Effective altruists fret that their movement might, in fact, have very limited appeal. Utility-maximising automatons might see the sense in buying mosquito nets over the internet for distant strangers. Human beings might find, say, volunteering at a local soup kitchen more satisfying emotionally. Ari Kagan, a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Hindsight, a think-tank at Duke University, points out that many people find the idea of applying quantitative reasoning to altruism repugnant—like charging family members for a meal. Surveys show that while the effective-altruism movement has grown quickly, it has mainly done so within a limited group of people—ie, young white men with degrees in science and philosophy.
Effective altruism can be a hard sell, even for the rationally minded. Silicon Valley-types have been keener to embrace the philosophy than those working on Wall Street, for instance. Mr Hassenfeld reckons that this is partly because programmers who get rich tend to do so at a young age, and are hence more open-minded about charity. Bankers, in contrast, start to make real money only in their 40s, by which time they may already have formed their charitable habits. With many potential donors, Mr Hassenfeld says, “it’s easy to get intellectual agreement, but harder to get action.” As utilitarians have long found, and Bentham himself lamented, “the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.”
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IMAGINE you are walking in a park and come across a boy drowning in a pond. Chances are, you would not hesitate to jump in to save him, even if it meant ruining an expensive pair of shoes. Yet, if you read a news report about thousands of children drowning because of a flood in a distant country, you may not feel compelled to act at all. What could explain this seemingly incongruous gap in empathy? One reason is that you, as a human, are simply hard-wired to care more about those in your immediate vicinity. But another is that you might believe that you have no ability to meaningfully affect the lives of distant strangers. The "effective altruism" movement, a group of scientifically minded do-gooders, argue that this view is too pessimistic. They reckon that social science has advanced to the point where it is possible for individuals to do a tangible amount of good.
The most obvious way to affect the world is to choose the right career. Teaching is considered a natural vocation for a would-be do-gooder, but it is not clear that it should be. Effective altruists argue that if you are choosing a career and want to help the world, you should not worry about how much good a profession does overall—rather, you should focus on the impact you would make if you join them. If you become a teacher, chances are you would not actually increase the total number of teachers in your country. Instead, you would simply be taking a spot away from another candidate with a CV that looks a lot like yours. A better option might be to get a job on Wall Street. If you become a derivatives trader and commit to giving a large portion of your salary to charity, you might make a very positive impact on the world since you would be taking a job away from someone who probably would not donate the same amount of money.
One of the biggest intellectual achievements of the effective-altruism movement has come in the form of charity evaluation. GiveWell, a non-profit firm, has taken research from development economics and used it to calculate how much good each dollar donated to a number of charities can do. It measures a charity’s success not in financial returns, but rather by factors such as how much it costs the charity to save a life. For example, the Against Malaria Foundation distributes antimalarial bednets in sub-Saharan Africa. GiveWell reckons that the benefits of its work add up to the equivalent of a life saved for every $2,000 spent by donors.
A typical household in America makes around $58,000 a year. Suppose it commits 10% of that, every year, to efficient charities. Over the course of a 40-year working life, this would add up to $232,000. GiveWell’s analysis implies that such a family would be responsible for saving the lives of 116 children if it were to give to the Against Malaria Foundation. Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher who first came up with the drowning-child argument, notes that the efficiency of the charity to which one gives is as important as the amount given. This is true for many causes. For instance, if you are interested in maximising the public enjoyment of art, you could choose to buy an expensive picture for a museum. Or you could spend just $100 and help someone living in a poor country get surgery to prevent blindness from trachoma. They could then spend their entire life gazing upon paintings.
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