Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference
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Last annotated on August 26, 2016
Until 1989, Trevor Field was a typical middle-aged South African manRead more at location 79
he had watched the women of a rural village wait for hours next to a windmill-powered water pump. There had been no wind that day but the women, who had trekked for miles, still needed to bring waterRead more at location 83
There simply must be a better way to do this, he’d thought. Now he was witnessing a potential solution.Read more at location 86
The PlayPump, as it was called, utilised the power of children at play to provide a sustainable water supply for the community.Read more at location 89
In 1995 he secured his first sponsor, Colgate Palmolive, installed the first PlayPump, and quit his job in order to focus full-time on the project,Read more at location 94
His first major breakthrough came in 2000, when he beat 3,000 other applicants to win a World Bank Development Marketplace Award, given to ‘innovative, early stage development projectsRead more at location 97
That award attracted funding and attention, which culminated in a site visit from Steve Case, CEO of internet service provider AOL, and his wife Jean.Read more at location 99
Steve Case used his internet expertise to pioneer new forms of online fundraising.Read more at location 103
The PlayPump became the darling of the international media, who leapt at the opportunity to come up with punning headlines like ‘Pumping water is child’s play’ and ‘The magic roundabout’.Read more at location 105
In an article for Time magazine in 2006, Bill Clinton called the PlayPump a ‘wonderful innovation’.Read more at location 106
Rapper Jay-Z raised tens of thousands of dollars through his ‘Water for Life’ concert tour in 2006.Read more at location 108
First Lady Laura Bush, launching a campaign designed to raise $60 million to fund 4,000 PlayPumps across Africa by 2010.Read more at location 109
Trevor Field was at the centre of it all – a rock star of the charity world.Read more at location 110
By 2009 his charity had installed 1,800 PlayPumps across South Africa, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zambia.Read more at location 114
despite the hype and the awards and the millions of dollars spent, no one had really considered the practicalities of the PlayPump.Read more at location 116
Most playground roundabouts spin freely once they’ve gained sufficient momentum – that’s what makes them fun. But in order to pump water, PlayPumps need constant force, and children playing on them would quickly become exhausted.Read more at location 117
In one village local children were paid to ‘play’ on the pump.Read more at location 119
women of the village ended up pushing the roundabout themselves – a task they found tiring, undignified and demeaning.Read more at location 120
What’s more, no one had asked the local communities if they wanted a PlayPump in the first place.Read more at location 121
many said they preferred the hand pumps that were previously installed.Read more at location 122
hand pump of the same cylinder size as a PlayPump provided 1,300 litres of water per hour – five times the amount of the PlayPump.Read more at location 123
Even when communities welcomed the pumps, they didn’t do so for long. The pumps often broke down within months, but, unlike the Zimbabwe Bush Pump, the mechanism was encased in a metal shell and could not be repaired by the community.Read more at location 126
The billboards on the storage tanks lay bare: the rural communities were too poor for companies to be interested in paying for advertising.Read more at location 129
PBS ran a documentary exposing the PlayPump’s many shortcomings.Read more at location 131
Yet, despite its fall from grace, the PlayPump lives on. Under the name Roundabout Water Solutions, Field’s non-profit organisation continues to install the same model of PlayPumps across South Africa, with backing from corporations including Ford Motor Company and Colgate Palmolive.Read more at location 134
good intentions can all too easily lead to bad outcomes.Read more at location 138
Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennerster launched an organisation of their own, the culmination of decades of research into how to improve the lives of the poorest people in the world.Read more at location 143
When she asked why, they told her to look at some of the ways development projects had backfired.Read more at location 146
Turkana people are basically nomadic, and various development projects had hoped to improve their quality of life by settling them on the lake, so they built a big factory for fish. They managed to get them to settle and fish in the lake, but then the lake got overfished, and the fish stock collapsed … It was depressing.’Read more at location 148
Kremer spoke to Paul Lipeyah, a friend who worked for the Dutch charity International Christian Support (now called Investing in Children and Their Societies, or ICS). ICS’s main programme was child sponsorship, in which a donor paid a regular amount to help an individual child or a small community. ICS had been trying to improve school attendance and test scores.Read more at location 157
new textbooks, additional teachers, school uniforms and so on.Read more at location 160
Kremer urged Lipeyah to test his programme using a method known as a randomised controlled trial:Read more at location 161
Randomised controlled trials are the gold-standard method of testing ideas in other sciences, and for decades pharmaceutical companies have used themRead more at location 164
But before Kremer suggested it, the idea was almost unheard of in the development arena.Read more at location 167
it seemed obvious that providing more textbooks would help students learn. However, when Kremer tested this theory by comparing test scores between schools that received books and those that didn’t, he found no effectRead more at location 169
Next, Kremer looked at providing flipcharts. The schoolchildren couldn’t understand the textbooks, but having flipcharts would allow teachers to tailor lessons to the specific needs of the students. Perhaps these would work better? Again, however, no effect.Read more at location 172
increasing the number of teachers would? After all, most schools had only one teacher, catering to a large class. But, again, he found no discernible improvement from decreasing class sizes.Read more at location 175
At that point a friend at the World Bank suggested he test deworming.Read more at location 178
They aren’t as dramatic as AIDS or cancer or malaria because they don’t kill nearly as many people as those other conditions. But they do make children sick, and can be cured for pennies: off-patent drugs, developed in the fifties, can be distributed through schools and administered by teachers, and will cure children of intestinal worms for a year.Read more at location 179
The results were striking. ‘We didn’t expect deworming to be as effective as it was,’Read more at location 183
Absenteeism is a chronic problem in schools in Kenya, and deworming reduced it by 25%.Read more at location 184
What’s more, deworming didn’t merely have educational benefits. It had health and economic benefits, too.Read more at location 188
when Kremer’s colleagues followed up with the children ten years later, those who had been dewormed were working on average an extra 3.4Read more at location 190
In 2007, on the basis of this research, Kremer and Glennerster co-founded the non-profit Deworm the World Initiative,Read more at location 196
When it comes to helping others, being unreflective often means being ineffective.Read more at location 199
Trevor Field and everyone who supported him were driven by emotions – the appeal of seeing happy children provide their communities with clean water through the simple act of playingRead more at location 200
The Case Foundation, Laura Bush and the Clinton Global Initiative supported the PlayPump not because there was good evidenceRead more at location 201
Imagine, for example, that you’re walking down your local high street. An attractive and frighteningly enthusiastic young woman leaps in front of you, barring your way. She clasps a tablet and wears a T-shirt that says ‘Dazzling Cosmetics’. You agree to speak to her and she explains that she represents a beauty products company that is looking for investment. She tells you how big the market for beauty products is, and how wonderful the products they sell are, and how, because the company spends over 90% of its money on making the products, and less than 10% on staff, distribution and marketing, the company is extremely efficient and therefore able to generate an impressive return on investment. Would you invest? Of course you wouldn’t.Read more at location 208
If you wanted to invest in a company, you would consult experts or investigate different companies and compareRead more at location 213
almost no one is foolish enough to invest in a company that is pitched to them on the streetRead more at location 215
Because we don’t get useful feedback when we try to help others, we often don’t get a meaningful sense of whether we’re really making a difference.Read more at location 223
Kremer and Glennerster succeeded in part because they didn’t assume they knew what the most effective way of helping people was.Read more at location 224
They were willing to revise their beliefs about what worked in light of the evidenceRead more at location 226
‘deworming is probably the least sexy development programme there is’.Read more at location 228
Kremer and Glennerster exemplify a way of thinking I call effective altruism. Effective altruism is about asking ‘How can I make the biggest difference I can?’Read more at location 230
effective altruism consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s best for the world, and a commitment to do what’s best, whatever that turns out to be.Read more at location 233
Many people believe that altruism should necessarily denote sacrifice, but if you can do good while maintaining a comfortable life for yourself, that’s a bonus,Read more at location 235
It’s about trying to make the most difference you can.Read more at location 238
We discovered that the best charities are hundreds of times more effective at improving lives than merely ‘good’ charities.Read more at location 244
two New York hedge-fund analysts, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, quit their jobs to start GiveWell, an organisation that conducts extraordinarily in-depth research to calculate which charities do the most good with every dollar they receive.Read more at location 247
How many people benefit, and by how much? Is this the most effective thing you can do? Is this area neglected? What would have happened otherwise? What are the chances of success, and how good would success be?Read more at location 256
Question 1 (Chapter 2) helps us to think concretely about how different actions improve people’s lives, so that we don’t squander our time or money on activities that don’t, ultimately, make people better off. Question 2 (Chapter 3) ensures we try to spend our efforts not on ‘merely good’ activities, but on the very best activities. Question 3 (Chapter 4) directs us to focus on those areas which receive comparatively little attention, and for which others haven’t taken the outstanding opportunities to make a difference. Question 4 (Chapter 5) helps us to ensure that we’re not trying to do good works that would happen with or without our involvement. Question 5 (Chapter 6) helps us to think about uncertainty correctly, so that we can know when to pursue activities that have low odds of success but large potential payoffs instead of activities with guaranteed smaller benefits.Read more at location 259
In Part II I apply these questions to specific considerations:Read more at location 270
I provide a framework for thinking about the issue, and a checklist of questions to help you ensure that you think through all the most important issues.Read more at location 272
