22 December 2016
Doing Good Better – Creative Altruism
by William MacAskill
reviewed by Frank O’Nomics
As a sixth former I was encouraged to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M Pirsig, a book that was supposed to change the way I thought and felt about my life. Sadly, it was a road trip story that proved beyond the levels of my teenage attention and I gave up on it relatively quickly. Maybe it is time to revisit, but I feel more comfortable recommending Doing Good Better to provoke a similar self-examination. While it is not a novel, this book, in introducing us to effective altruism, gives a very solid grounding in how best to make a positive difference. A sentiment well worth exploring at this time of year.
Even if you earn somewhat less than the average for the UK, around £20,000, you are in the top 5% of global incomes, with the bottom billion of the world living below the poverty line. We need to ask ourselves what we can do about this and this book helps us to answer the question in the most efficient manner. With the use of economic analysis, MacAskill demonstrates the best way to help the poor and disadvantaged in society, or our environment. Overall it seems that giving to good causes, rather than devoting our working lives to doing good, is the right course to take. Clearly this is different if you are one of the few that is capable of producing the research to provide cures for disease, but even if you are bright enough to be able to join one of the caring professions, there is no need to do so if you are going to be happier doing something else – all you will be doing is taking a role that many others can do – whereas, if you become a successful business person, you can do more good by giving a proportion of your earnings to good causes. Think about how many lives are saved by donating a few pounds to buy mosquito nets, compared to the cost of educating a doctor or nurse. We undoubtedly need people to work in the caring professions, but we also need income generators to support causes.
At its heart, this book is about working out which causes are the most deserving of your hard earned cash and some of the results are quite surprising. As an example MacAskill cites the development of a children’s roundabout in Africa that channelled the energy of play into pumping water when there was insufficient wind to drive wind pumps. It sounds like a win-win situation and the charity behind the idea was able to raise a huge amount of money for the cause, which, by 2009, had resulted in the installation of 1800 “PlayPumps”. However, the problem was that children got tired (or injured) and adults had to push the roundabouts. What was worse was that old fashioned hand pumps were in fact 5 times more efficient, but many had been abandoned due to poor maintenance or construction. So the $60 million programme was very sub-optimal and anyone that donated would feel very frustrated. From examples such as this MacAskill introduces the concept of quality-adjusted life years, which is a way of measuring, for a range of different charities, the added benefit that results from each additional £1 that we donate. The calculation takes account of both the increase in life expectancy generated by a charity, as well as the improvement in the quality of life. Clearly, there is a big difference if yours are the last few pounds that provide a cure for a particular form of cancer, instead of just launching the research process, or your money helps save a starving child with a potentially long life expectancy, rather than prolongs that of a ninety-year old. Further, there is a danger that some charities (particularly those that help animals) will lose out from the use of such analysis. There are some arguments presented that are clearly calculated to provoke debate, such as suggesting why we should not contribute to disaster relief funds (in fact it is an argument for giving to aid agencies and letting them decide where to allocate the cash according to need). Nevertheless, this is a very stimulating book that does provide a valuable framework to help us to take the right option when we want to make a difference.
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