11 Quotes by William MacAskill

We very often fail to think as carefully about helping others as we could, mistakenly believing that applying data and rationality to a charitable endeavor robs the act of virtue. And that means we pass up opportunities to make a tremendous difference.

[W]e live at a time in which we have the technology easily to gather information about people thousands of miles away, the ability to significantly influence their lives, and the scientific knowledge to work out what the most effective ways of helping are. For these reasons, few people who have ever existed have had so much power to help others as we have today.

We’re about one hundred times richer than the poorest billion people in the world, and we can do several hundred times more to help them than we can to help others in the rich countries we live in.

The challenge for us is this: How can we ensure that, when we try to help others, we do so as effectively as possible?

If the international response to natural disasters was rational, we would expect a greater amount of funding to be provided to larger disasters and to disasters that occur in poorer countries, which are less able to cope. But that’s not what happens. Funding seems to be allocated in proportion with how evocative and widely publicized the disaster is, rather than on the basis of its scale and severity.

When it comes to doing good, fat-tailed distributions seem to be everywhere. It’s not always true that exactly 80 percent of the value comes from the top 20 percent of activities – sometimes things are even more extreme than that, and sometimes less. But the general rule that most of the value generated comes from the very best activities is very common.

If, for example, encouraging someone to buy fair-trade causes that person to devote less time or money to other, more effective activities, then promoting fair-trade might on balance be harmful.

We don’t usually think of achievements in terms of what would have happened otherwise, but we should. What matters is not who does good but whether good is done; and the measure of how much good you achieve is the difference between what happens as a result of your actions and what would have happened anyway.

We should certainly feel outrage and horror at the conditions sweatshop laborers toil under. The correct response, however, is not to give up sweatshop-produced goods in favor of domestically produced goods. The correct response is to try to end the extreme poverty that makes sweatshops desirable places to work in the first place.