Doing Good Better
A Radical New Way to Make a Difference
Book Edition Details
Summary
What if your well-meaning efforts to help are missing the mark? "Doing Good Better" peels back the layers of our charitable instincts, revealing eye-opening truths that challenge conventional wisdom. Forget the usual suspects of altruism; this guide urges you to rethink everything—from the products you buy to the charities you support. With a fresh perspective on philanthropy, it argues that sometimes the most unexpected choices—like purchasing sweatshop goods or recognizing the societal role of cosmetic surgeons—can create the most profound impact. Step into a world where small, informed actions ripple into meaningful change, offering not just a better world for others, but a deeply fulfilling life for you.
Introduction
Every year, well-intentioned individuals and organizations pour billions of dollars and countless hours into charitable causes, yet many of these efforts fail to achieve their stated goals or, worse, cause unintended harm. The fundamental challenge lies not in our desire to help others, but in our approach to determining how to help most effectively. Traditional charity evaluation focuses on administrative costs and emotional appeal rather than actual impact, leading donors to support organizations that feel good rather than those that do good. The solution requires a systematic approach that treats altruistic decision-making with the same rigor applied to scientific inquiry or business strategy. By asking critical questions about scale, evidence, neglectedness, and counterfactual impact, we can identify interventions that provide dramatically greater benefits for the same resources. This methodology reveals counterintuitive conclusions: that some widely supported causes receive far more attention than their impact warrants, while other interventions can be hundreds of times more cost-effective. The following analysis examines how this evidence-based framework challenges conventional charitable wisdom and provides practical tools for maximizing the positive impact of our altruistic efforts, ultimately demonstrating that the difference between good intentions and genuinely effective action often determines whether our efforts save dozens of lives or none at all.
The Core Framework: Five Key Questions for Maximum Impact
Effective altruism rests on five fundamental questions that systematically evaluate any proposed intervention's potential for genuine impact. The first question examines scale: how many people benefit, and by how much? This requires moving beyond simple metrics like "number of textbooks distributed" to assess actual improvements in human welfare, often measured through quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) that account for both life extension and quality of life improvements. The second question asks whether a given intervention represents the most effective possible use of resources. Research consistently reveals that the best charitable interventions can be hundreds of times more effective than merely good ones. For instance, while providing surgery for Kaposi's sarcoma costs approximately $50,000 per QALY, distributing insecticide-treated bed nets achieves the same benefit for roughly $100 per QALY. This dramatic variation in cost-effectiveness makes intervention selection crucial rather than incidental. The third question addresses neglectedness: is this area receiving proportionate attention and resources? The principle of diminishing returns suggests that heavily funded causes offer fewer opportunities for additional impact than neglected areas. Disaster relief, despite its emotional appeal, often receives vastly more funding per life at stake than ongoing health crises affecting far more people. The fourth question examines counterfactual impact: what would have happened otherwise? Many well-intentioned interventions simply replace work that would have occurred anyway, generating no net benefit. The fifth question evaluates probability and magnitude: what are the chances of success, and how valuable would success be? This framework enables rigorous comparison between certain small benefits and uncertain large ones, revealing that some low-probability, high-impact opportunities may be more valuable than guaranteed modest improvements.
Evidence-Based Giving: Why Most Charity Evaluation Fails
Current charity evaluation methods focus primarily on financial efficiency metrics like administrative overhead and CEO compensation, fundamentally misunderstanding what determines charitable impact. These metrics assume that spending more money on programs automatically translates to better outcomes, ignoring the vast differences in program effectiveness. A charity that spends ninety percent of its budget on programs may achieve far less than one spending seventy percent if the latter implements more effective interventions. The proper evaluation framework requires examining what charities actually accomplish with donations, not merely how they allocate expenses. This means assessing the cost-effectiveness of specific programs, the quality of evidence supporting these programs, and how well organizations implement them. For health interventions, randomized controlled trials provide gold-standard evidence, while for other areas, the strength of causal reasoning and track record of similar interventions become crucial factors. Program implementation quality often determines whether theoretical effectiveness translates into real-world impact. Organizations must demonstrate transparency, acknowledge past mistakes, monitor outcomes rigorously, and adapt strategies based on evidence. The best charities also show clear room for additional funding, ensuring that marginal donations generate proportional benefits rather than sitting unused or funding less effective activities. Evidence quality varies dramatically across interventions. Cash transfer programs benefit from numerous high-quality randomized studies across multiple countries, providing robust evidence for their effectiveness. In contrast, many educational interventions that seem obviously beneficial, like textbook distribution, show little impact when rigorously tested. This disconnect between intuitive appeal and measured effectiveness explains why evidence-based evaluation consistently yields surprising conclusions about where charitable dollars can accomplish the most good.
Career Choice and Cause Selection: Strategic Approaches to Altruism
Career decisions represent one of the highest-leverage opportunities for social impact, given that most people spend over 80,000 hours working during their lifetimes. However, conventional advice to "follow your passion" or seek jobs in the nonprofit sector often leads to suboptimal outcomes. Research shows that job satisfaction derives more from autonomy, skill variety, clear feedback, and sense of contribution than from pre-existing interests, which change unpredictably over time. The most effective career strategies balance three considerations: personal fit, immediate impact, and long-term impact through skill and network development. Personal fit encompasses both job satisfaction and comparative advantage—how well someone performs in a role relative to others who might fill it. Early career decisions should prioritize learning and credential-building over immediate impact, since senior positions typically offer disproportionate influence and the best opportunities often require specific preparation. Earning to give represents one powerful career strategy, exploiting the fact that donations to highly effective charities can often accomplish more than direct work at less effective organizations. A doctor earning $200,000 annually and donating fifty percent could fund interventions saving dozens of lives yearly—potentially more than direct medical practice would accomplish. This approach works because the most effective interventions are dramatically more cost-effective than typical ones. However, other high-impact career paths may offer even greater expected value despite lower probability of success. Political careers, research positions, and entrepreneurship all enable potentially enormous positive impact for those with suitable skills and opportunities. The key insight is matching individual capabilities to positions where the marginal contribution can be largest, rather than assuming that nonprofit work automatically maximizes social impact. Strategic career planning treats impact as the primary objective while recognizing that achieving maximum impact often requires building specific forms of career capital first.
Addressing Objections: Passion, Values, and Practical Concerns
Critics argue that quantitative approaches to altruism reduce complex moral questions to cold calculations, ignoring the importance of personal passion and cultural context in charitable giving. However, this objection conflates method with values. Effective altruism does not dictate which outcomes to value, but rather provides tools for achieving whatever outcomes one considers important as efficiently as possible. Someone who values animal welfare, environmental protection, or global development can apply the same analytical framework while pursuing entirely different causes. The "personal connection" objection suggests that people should support causes they have direct experience with or emotional attachment to. While these connections provide valuable motivation, they represent arbitrary factors that should not determine resource allocation if the goal is maximizing positive impact. Supporting cancer research because a family member died of cancer privileges some suffering over other equally tragic but less personally familiar hardships. Effective altruism argues for channeling emotional motivation toward whatever interventions can prevent the most suffering or create the most benefit, regardless of personal familiarity. Concerns about moral licensing—that calculating approaches might reduce overall charitable behavior—appear overblown. Evidence suggests that people who engage seriously with effective altruism typically increase rather than decrease their charitable contributions and commitments. The framework provides structure and feedback that sustain long-term engagement rather than replacing it with one-off efficient donations. The scalability objection argues that if everyone adopted these approaches, the most effective interventions would become saturated and their effectiveness would decline. This concern proves the framework's validity rather than undermining it. As resources flow to the most effective interventions, their marginal effectiveness does decline, but this simply means the framework would identify different interventions as optimal—exactly the dynamic that ensures resources reach their highest-value uses across all causes and intervention types.
Summary
The central insight of effective altruism is that good intentions, while necessary, are insufficient for achieving maximum positive impact—what matters is not whether we help others, but how much we help others per unit of time or money invested. By applying systematic evaluation methods that prioritize evidence over emotion and cost-effectiveness over conventional wisdom, individuals can achieve dramatically greater impact than traditional charitable approaches allow. This framework transforms altruism from an exercise in moral expression into a rigorous optimization problem, revealing that the difference between moderately effective and highly effective interventions often means the difference between helping dozens of people versus helping thousands, making the stakes of these methodological choices far higher than they initially appear.
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By William MacAskill
