0:33 Intro. [Recording date: September 1, 2015.] Russ: We're going to talk about the ideas in your book, Doing Good Better, and the whole concept of effective altruism. But first I want to give a shout out to Marc Gunther, whose article on effective altruism, which we'll link to, got me interested in the idea. So, I want to start with the principles of effective altruism. You list five. What are they? Guest: Yes. So, effective altruism is about using your time and money as effectively as possible to make the world a better place. And taking a scientific approach to doing so. And in the book I list these 5 principles that help you to think in the way that effective altruists tend to think. And as I'm sure your audience will notice, there are lots of similarities to some cool concepts in economic thinking. So, the first one is just to think about the impact of your actions. And in particular, the impact in terms of improvements in people's wellbeing. So, ask: How many people benefit and by how much? Where the idea is, if you can benefit more people or if you can benefit them by a greater amount, then that's a better action to do. If you are giving to charity, for example. The second key question is: Is this the most effective thing I can do? Because there's a lot of talk about making a difference when we are trying to do good; but not so much folks trying to make the most difference. And if you look at the distribution of impact among different sorts of social programs, you find the fairly best social programs are far, far better than even merely very good ones. So that means it's crucial not to just try and do some amount of good, but to try and to do the most good you can. The third question is: Is this area neglected? And that's bringing in the idea of diminishing returns, which again is crucial, I think, if we want to have the biggest impact we can. So, for example, there's a lot of focus on domestic issues and within charity, especially U.S. education or domestic poverty. But if you look at just the scale of the an extremity[?] of global inequality and global poverty, you can do far, far more to benefit the very poor in poor countries, simply because they have so much less than the lowest hanging fruit, in terms of improvements to people's lives till haven't been taken. Like, just simply saying bed nets or deworming children. The fourth question is: What would have happened otherwise? So, in order to do good or make a difference, it's not enough to just have a causal impact. You need to think about the difference of what you have done and what would have happened otherwise. An example of this is if you become a doctor, let's say; and you might think, 'Oh, well I'm saving lives every single week.' But that's not enough to ensure you are actually having a big impact. You've got to think, 'Well, I wasn't the person doing this, what would be happening instead?' And in fact, someone else would be in your position. They'd be doing fairly similar things, performing those life-saving surgeries or life-saving treatments. And so the impact you are having as a doctor is just the difference between the way the world is given that you've become a doctor, and what it would have been like had someone else been in your shoes. And then the final question is: What are the chances of success and how good would success be? And that's bringing in the concept of expected value. And that's crucial because in the book I do talk a lot about concrete measurable ways of doing good, [?] impact by randomized control trials, like deworming, like distributing bed nets. But that's certainly not the only way to do good, and certainly potentially make a very large change by focusing on more speculative, more difficult-to-quantify sorts of activities like trying to make systemic policy change. And there I think the approach you should take is still trying to be rational and reflective about this, and instead just trying to look at, 'Okay, if this were to be successful--if this policy change were successful, for example--how good would that be?' And actually try to get an estimate for that. And then just try and get at least some sort of estimate on, 'Yeah, what's the chance of me actually being able to bring this about?' And then you multiply that low probability by that very large amount of value, and at least sometimes that means it will be even better to pursue this more uncertain path over something that would be more concrete and more certain to make a benefit, but a benefit of smaller magnitude.

5:37 Russ: So, to illustrate the principles, let's start with the two examples you start in the book with--the Playpump and deworming. The latter being a little more controversial when it started; but the Playpump is such a fantastic example, a tragic example of good intentions not paying off as well as one might hope. So, talk about what went wrong with the play pump and what's the potential, at least, for deworming. Guest: Playpump came to, was invented in the 1990s and really got a lot of fame in the 2000s. And it's a way of providing clean water to the people of a village in a poor country like South Africa. And the idea is that it's a children's merry-go-round that doubles as a pump. So, children will play on this merry-go-round, and using the power of children's' play, that will pump clean water from the ground up into a tank, which people can then draw from. So it's this fairly exciting, innovative-seeming idea. And the media really loved it. They loved the opportunity to [?] headlines like 'Pumping Water is Child's Play,' it's the magic roundabout. And it got a huge amount of attention. So, it won--I [?] know-- Russ: It's just so appealing. You can see why. Guest: Exactly. It just seems like a win-win. Children get their first playground [?]-- Russ: It's a free lunch-- Guest: The village gets--yeah, exactly. It seems like that. And it even won the World Bank Development Marketplace Award. Jay-Z was a supporter. The First Lady at the time, Laura Bush, announced that they were going to donate $12 million by USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) with a further $5 million from the Case Foundation to role out playpumps across the country. So it was getting a huge amount of attention. Bill Clinton called it a 'wonderful innovation.' The issue though--it was actually in practice a terrible idea. It was a very sexy idea, but one that was just fairly[?] unfunctional. So, unlike a normal merry-go-round which spins freely once you give it sufficient momentum, this one required constant force in order to pump clean water from the ground. That would mean the children would get very tired very quickly. Some would fall off, some would break limbs, some would vomit from the spinning. But most importantly they wouldn't want to play on this pump all day, every day. And that meant that if people wanted water, it was normally left up to the elderly women of the village to push this pump all hours of the day, a task which they found kind of undignified and demeaning. The pumps would also often break down. They were supposed to have maintenance numbers, so people could phone if there were any problems; but that didn't happen, either. But the crucial thing was just that the communities hadn't actually been asked if they wanted these playpumps. And the pumps often replaced traditional hand pumps that were a third of the cost, much easier to maintain, and pumped several times as much water. So they were much less sexy, Zimbabwe hand pump, but much more functional for the needs of the local community. And thankfully, these problems were noticed. Investigations by a couple of different organizations, including the UN (United Nations), pointed out these flaws. And then there was another big media discussion. And again, thankfully the Case Foundation acknowledged--what's actually quite a rare event--acknowledged that it made a big mistake and withdrew further funding. And the Playpump Organization still does continue but in a much diminished capacity now. Russ: That's an example of altruism, you could say, run amok. Because the effectiveness wasn't--not enough attention was paid to initially in the effectiveness of the scheme. Guest: Yes. It shows that good intentions aren't good enough. It's not merely enough to think, 'Oh, I want to do good.' I think everyone here was well-intentioned. But you need to be careful; you need to be reflective about what you are actually doing. If you actually want to make a big difference.

9:57 Russ: And, now, let's turn to deworming, which has had a lot of excitement around it. And some, a bit of pushback lately. But talk about deworming and what happened there. Guest: Yeah. So deworming is a [?]. I tell about Michael Kremer going to Kenya and working with a charity called ICS [Internationaal Christelijk Steunfonds Africa? International Christian Support Fund?], that provided educational programs for local schools. And he suggested to this charity, 'Well, you are doing this stuff, but do you know that it really works? And why don't we test it? Just use the same methods that are used, experimental methods, that are used in all other areas of science?' And again, kind of unusually, the charity is kind of like, 'Okay.' So they took the program ICS was doing, took 7 schools as a control group--so they didn't do anything to those schools but just monitored the educational performance of the children there. And then implemented the program in 7 other schools in order to see what sort of impact it was having. And now, they did find the package that ICS was delivering did have a positive impact on educational outcomes. But ICS were doing a variety of different things. So, they thought: Okay, we are test lots of these different components one by one to see what actually has an impact. And what they found was that some things that would seem like obviously they were going to do good, actually had no discernable impact at all. So, distributing textbooks, for example. They tested that. Most schools have about one textbook per classroom. You'd think, obviously, providing a textbook or providing more books would improve learning among students. But they tested it; they found no impact, in fact. No difference in terms of educational outcomes. They did the same with flip charts. They did the same with class sizes. And again, just found no evidence of these actually improving the education of the people they were assigned to help. So, again, showing[?] actually even things that seem like they are great ideas, when you actually investigate it, may turn out not to be. Then they tried something quite different, something most people in the West have never even heard of, which is deworming school children. So, children have a variety of intestinal worms. In fact these intestinal worms affect over a billion people worldwide. We don't know about them in countries like the United States because they were eliminated in countries like the United States in the 1950s. And they don't kill as many people as HIV/Aids or tuberculosis or malaria. And again, that's why we may not have heard of them. They do make many, many children sick. And you can treat these worms for only about 50 cents per child, so you can just--the drugs, the treatments[?] have no side effects; you can just roll them out among all the schools you want to treat and you just treat absolutely everyone, and that costs about 50 cents per child and will cure them of worms for one year. And they tested this. It's normally thought of as a health program. But when they put this to the test in a landmark study they found it was one of the most cost-effective educational programs. So, one reason why children weren't attending school was simply because they were sick--they were lethargic. And because they suffered from these intestinal worms. And then when this was followed up with, kind of 12 years later, children who had been dewormed, now adults, were working significantly more hours and were earning significantly more as well. So it did seem to have this long-run impact on productivity and earnings. Russ: And it's incredible low-lying fruit, because it's so cheap. The intervention is so--it's a simple intervention. There's not a lot of follow-up. You don't have to watch to make sure that the protocol is being followed, some complicated thing. So it seems like a fabulous improvement. Guest: Yeah. It's exceptionally cheap, it's exceptionally simple. You're using drugs that were developed in the 1950s and are off-patent. It's the sort of thing where--in this country this would have been trivially funded decades ago. And in fact was, in the United States. And that shows, the lesson here is just: We shouldn't make assumptions about what's going to have a really big impact. Playpumps seemed really sexy, seemed really exciting, like it really worked. The thought you'd have about deworming is just--so Grace Hollister, the CEO [Chief Executive Office] of Deworm the World, described deworming as the least sexy intervention there is. And I think that's probably right. It's not something you'd really get very excited about. Russ: It's not even pleasant to talk about for most people. Guest: It's not even pleasant to talk about. It's kind of gross. Russ: Yeah. I can't help but point out though that we did an EconTalk episode with Velasquez-Manoff, talking about the consequences, the possible consequences, of deworming, at least in some parts of the world--that it has perhaps led to an increase in autoimmune disorders. But for most people it's a very good thing. Guest: Yeah. And the thing is--the book is called Doing Good Better; and one of the connotations I want to convey there is that we are never doing good perfectly. And so there has been a recent debate about deworming. Which you can go into if you like. I think it was a bit overblown. Russ: Well, I want to get to it, actually, because I think one of my concerns about effective altruism--on the surface there's nothing to object to in the concept. It's a fabulous idea--the idea of spend your money well rather than just spend it on what appears to be a good cause. And the idea of bringing data and science into that seems like a good idea. The challenge, I think--we will get into this through the entire conversation--is that it's not as straightforward as it might first appear. So, the original enthusiasm for deworming came from RCTs--Randomized Control Trials--which have a scientific aura about them. There was a backlash, though. A recent analysis of deworming by the Cochrane Group has found that in fact its impact may be quite small. Certainly smaller than we originally had thought. And then there's been some pushback against that. So, tell us where you think we're at on it. Guest: Yeah. So, I think the idea that the impact is smaller than the initial buzz I think is correct. However, I still think it's one of the best development programs there is, especially for an individual donor. And that's--in general, just statistically speaking, that's actually what you should expect. If you have these, like, initial results that something is just exceptionally good, then you should expect to regress back towards the mean, in light of further evidence. There was--[?] recently of this Kremer and Miguel study, a kind of initial landmark study, and they were blown a little bit out of proportion, I think. Reanalysis done and some of the coverage was saying, 'Oh, this debunks the case for deworming.' And that was kind of overblown. Really, there was some reanalysis, there were like some mistakes in the original analysis: arguably the effect was like a bit smaller than initially claimed. But certainly nothing anything that really undermines the case for deworming. And in the landscape of different sorts of development programs, deworming still seems exceptionally good. And I think one thing we should do is still use sanity checks as well. So, the thought with deworming is it's just a very simple thing. It costs 50 cents per child. And there is at least a significant amount of evidence showing that it does improve earnings and productivity in the long run, which is also something that there's normally very little evidence about with respect to development programs. It seems like just a very good use of money. And then there's a question of how good exactly is that? And then that's just a kind of gray area of debate: maybe it's like should you be funding bed nets and so on? And this isn't a hard science like physics. It does mean that there's going to have to be judgment calls along the way. But the case is still just very strong at least compared to different sorts of development programs.

19:13 Russ: I guess the question is, as you talked about at the end of the book and we'll get to later, is: Compared to other choices you might make with your charitable giving. I want to introduce a fact here that was probably my favorite fact in the book--a lot of interesting things in the book; a lot of thought-provoking ideas about how to spend your time and money. But this one particularly grabs your attention: To get into the global 1% rather than, say, the U.S. 1%, which gets a lot of conversation--to get into the global 1%, you have to earn a little over $50,000. If you earn over $20,000 a year, you are in the top 5%. And the implication of that, is that you can do a lot of good without that much sacrifice on your part. There's a lot of people who are really having a tough life and you can help them. The question is: Is that true? Now, you suggest the potential effect is very large. So I want you to talk about the Hundred Times Multiplier--what you mean by that and why you think the impact will be so large. Guest: Yeah. I think there's a couple of reasons for thinking that the impact you can have through well-targeted donations to the poorest people in the world is absolutely huge. The first is this idea of diminishing returns. So, we can look at how much do the very poor earn compared to us and look at different sorts of estimates of how additional money turns into increases in wellbeing. And approximately, it seems like wellbeing seems to vary with the log of income. That means any percentage increase in earnings generates the same increase in happiness. So, wherever you are in terms of income, doubling your income gives you the same increase in wellbeing. And that might not be exactly right but at least it's approximately right. Now combine that with two further facts. Firstly is that for the typical member of the United States, someone earning about the median income, you are about 40 times richer than the poorest billion in the world. So these are people earning less than $1.50 per day. And where you need to get really clear on what that number means. That means, $1.50 would buy in the United States in financial terms that's about 60 cents in somewhere like Kenya or India. And so that number already takes into account that money goes further overseas. And the second thing is that it's consumption expenditure--so all that it takes into account anything that that person consumes. So, if they grow food on their own farm and then consume it, that's counted as part of their income. If they gather sticks from the woods, that counts as part of their income as well. So we're forty times richer. And then money goes about two and a half times as far, just because of cost of living and the fact that money goes further overseas. So that means that if I were to just halve my income, I could double the income of a hundred people in very poor countries. And, as I said, halving my income will reduce my happiness by a certain amount; doubling the income of a hundred people will increase each person's happiness by the same amount. So that means, there's this kind of general theoretical argument for thinking that we can benefit people by a hundred times as much as we can benefit ourselves. And then that seems to be backed up when we look at specific sorts of programs. Like the cost to save a life. In the United States we're willing to spend--the government will fund a program if it saves a life for about $7 million. If you want to save a life in very poor countries it will cost you about a half-thousand dollars, by distributing bed nets, by giving to the AgainstMalaria Foundation. Then you can also look at [?] and aid as well. So even if you just thought, 'Okay, I'm just only going to be doing as much good as aid has done in the past,' one argument you can look at is just to say: Well, supposing aid did no good at all, except insofar as it eradicated smallpox, a disease that killed 300 million people before we eradicated it in 1973 and saved the lives of 60-120 million people since then. That's more lives than would have been saved than if we'd achieved world peace in that period. If you do the math in terms of how much has been spent in aid in total and then how many lives have been saved--and assumed that aid had no impact at all except insofar as it eradicated smallpox--you get the conclusion that you have a cost of a life saved is about $70,000. Which is an exceptionally good deal. And in fact again 100 times better than the U.S. government is willing to spend to save a life in the United States. So we just have these multiple arguments for thinking that development, and in particular I think global health has the strongest general case, that development in general for the very poorest people in the world is just an exceptionally powerful way to do good.

24:41 Russ: So, that's a very provocative, fascinating, and really interesting--there's a lot there to think about. I want to try to unpack in maybe a couple of different steps. So, one challenge of course is most people would struggle to cut their income in half--emotionally, which would just be a difficult sell, even if you could tell them they are going to save 100 lives. But maybe not--I think if you could actually save a hundred lives, you might be more interested in it. Doubling the income of excessively poor people, to take them from, say, near-starvation and possible death to a more comfortable standard of living, that's starting to get a little more realistic, I think, and a little more appealing. And obviously we don't all have to cut our income in half to make that difference: we could cut it by, say, 10%, which is a proportion you have advocated for and I personally think is a good thing as well. We'll talk later about whether that's a good general rule or not. But let's talk about that. Let's take the 50% case. So, I voluntarily tax myself 50%--that is, I give half of my income away to effective organizations that help transform people's lives. It's not--of course, it's only once, that payment. So you have to think about that as an ongoing payment, to continue to transform their lives, unless you thought that by getting them over the hump or out of the subsistence case, they could start to stand on their own better. So let me make the case in an unappealing way: By cutting your income in half you can work for a hundred people and allow them to lead a better life, assuming they don't respond to that opportunity by reducing their own work effort. A lot of people have suggested--we had a fascinating episode with Chris Blattman on this, who suggested we should give cash rather than bed nets, rather than trying to build infrastructure, all kinds of different approaches we've taken. So, let's give cash. I'm not convinced that that would be such a great, transformative thing. Just like I wouldn't if some rich people came to me and said--and of course I'm in the global 1%--and said, 'We're doing even better than you, so we're going to cut our income and you can'--you can what? Live better even, take it easy? I don't see that transforming people's lives, just giving them money. I like saving them from starvation. But spending the rest of my life working 50% for a hundred poor people to keep them from starvation, if in fact that's the only impact, and I worry about the consequences of that--isn't it a little more complicated? Guest: Very. Yeah, I'm really glad you asked this. Because I actually think it's something a lot of people are confused about when they think about the source of concrete, measurable programs. They say, 'Okay, this is just a short-term thing. You cure someone of worms, but then that doesn't have this long-lasting impact.' But the evidence suggests it's the opposite. Let's just talk about cash. So, Give Directly is a charity I endorse very highly. And it just transfers cash to the poorest people in the world. So about a thousand dollars will double the income of a very poor household for one year. And the question is: Okay, well, what do they do with that? Is it that they spend money on consumption and then they go back to the kind of status quo, just back to where they were? In which case, that's great; they've, you've benefited them for a year, but not had a long-lasting change. And that would be true if there were this thing called a poverty trap, where you can just be so poor that actually earning more doesn't get you out of that trap, because you just need to keep spending money even to stay afloat. But as far as I know, the evidence for that seems to be--there doesn't seem to be much evidence that there is such a thing as a poverty trap, in the way you'd expect--you have better opportunities to improve your income. And in particular when you look at Give Directly, that certainly seems to be the case. So, when they make these cash transfers, they look at how people spend their money. And some of the money goes in consumption. But in fact the majority of it goes on investment, effectively savings, where they spend the money on tin rooves, is the most common single purchase. So, they only give money to people in thatched rooves, because that's fairly good indicator of extreme poverty. Thatched rooves need to be replaced every couple of years. And it's just an ongoing expense. Whereas if they buy a tin roof, they effectively get a return on their investment of about 14% a year. So, way better than anything we can get by putting it in the bank or even investing in the stock market. They also buy livestock as well, which is another sort of asset with ongoing returns. And so, given the way they spend that, it doesn't look at all like they are just doing this thing that just makes them a bit better off for the year. In fact, it's this thing with this long-lasting compounding effect. And I think people often ignore this because it's much harder to see. So, you can see immediately the consumption benefits: they are able to eat more, have better quality food, more micronutrients. But then you don't see the ripple effects from that. You don't see the fact that they are now going to be earning more over the course of their life, in [?], which then has like a multiplier effect on the whole economy. Because that's much more diffuse. But that, it just has to be an effect. And the evidence we've got from Give Directly seems to support that as well. And so I think if you think about this as just a short term thing that doesn't have any long-lasting change, that's misunderstanding the situation.

31:18 Russ: Yeah. I think part of the challenge here--I want to go back to the original deworming study and the failed interventions--the textbooks, the changes in class size, etc. And I think a lot of people make mistakes in thinking about development or reforming education--in a developed country, in a rich country, even. Because they misunderstand the organic nature of life. In particular, you'd think, if you only have one textbook per class, 10 would be better. Twenty would be better. Well, it's not if the teacher doesn't show up. It's not if the teacher doesn't teach anything valuable when they do show up. And it's not, if there aren't any jobs in the country because the labor market is messed up and there's bad roads for trade, and so on. And a lot of times correlations that we observe between certain interventions--not interventions--certain facts, certain correlated things in life, is because they all tend to move together because there is underlying thing that's helping. Such as, well, markets or whatever--civil society, other culture, things that we can't intervene on. We can't switch the lever in one piece of it by itself and hope it's going to make any kind of a difference at all. You need to have all the stuff happen at once. And you can't do it at once because it's stuff that has to emerge in its own time. It comes back to an example we've been talking about, I seem to be obsessed with, which is the example of the prairie: that to create a prairie you have to have a set of things that happen at the right pace and in the right order. And to just put one of them in place doesn't get you closer. And so, when I think about prosperity or getting out of poverty or avoiding a subsistence life, I think about this classic--you know, the classic story: If you give a person a fish, they eat for a day; if you teach him how to fish, they eat for a lifetime. But as one of our listeners, I think, pointed out--and I've forgotten who it is; I'm sorry--but somebody pointed out: If you can teach somebody to fish and give them access to markets, where they can trade their fish for other things, you won't just have them eat well: they'll do more, or they'll flourish. And, I'm not sure that any of these individual pieces--I worry that--they are not necessarily--it doesn't mean they are not worth doing. Obviously. So I don't mean to be so pessimistic. But it seems to me that some of the value and return from it are going to be grossly overstated. Because we don't have all the pieces at once. Guest: Yeah. So, I think you are on to a really good point. I actually--that 'teach a man to fish'--I hate that slogan. Russ: Why? Guest: Well, so Rachel Glennerster is the CEO of the Poverty Action Lab, and again it involves this way of randomized control trials. One of her early experiences was going to Kenya and seeing a travesty that there was a nomadic tribe and they tried to settle them on this Lake Turkana, I think it was. Taught them to fish. And then there was overfishing and the fish were depleted. Russ: There you go. It was a complicated place. Guest: And the lake dried up. If you gave them fish, they could just sell the fish, and then use the money for whatever was actually best for them. So, I think teaching a man to fish is as problematic as giving them fish. Russ: I think it's a metaphor. It's a metaphor. Giving them skill. But the question is: What skill? That's the challenge. And if you say, well, why haven't they? What's stopping people from acquiring the skills they would need to thrive? And the answer--there are many possible answers. But if you don't know the answer to that, you probably can't help them so effectively. Guest: Yeah. So, one thing is just--so, I think extreme poverty is just very different than domestic poverty. Where, extreme poverty--people living on that income level just don't have productive opportunities, the same sort of productive opportunities in rich countries. And it's not because the poor--because there are things to do with them [?]. It's not like mental illness or substance abuse issues--which can be the case among very poor domestically. Instead, it's just like they've got this starting, like very small amount of income; and they have, if you give them more income, these amazing opportunities to invest that and improve their lives. And I guess you do get some effect where, they are also in a country with often-poor institutions or infrastructure; and so maybe the multiplier effect that you get just by adding $1 of wealth to that country is less than it is in the United States. But it's still significant. It's still not the case that just by making them a little bit richer then you are just kind of return to the status quo ante. And I think it's true that we don't really know what drives growth. That's an unsolved problem. But overall if you think, look, people are just going to know, on average, on balance, what's better for them, and if they are made richer, especially through something like, GiveDirectly has, cash [?] have extensive evidence behind them, many different currencies--then that, I'm sure it's something you'll be sympathetic to--that normal operation of markets where they are able to just use their money and spend it in whatever way will be best, that will organically solve these kind of, these problems of only solving one part of the pie at one time, that you can refer to with respect to textbooks not being useful if teachers don't show up, and so on. That's because there's just so much local knowledge. There's a failure of knowledge on the part of people trying to help. Whereas if you are just giving cash to the very poor people, they have that local knowledge and they can take that into account when they are spending their money. Russ: No, I agree with that. I think, obviously, and you cleverly played to my biases. That was very skillful. But I think the--I think, for me, I think the realistic upside is ameliorating suffering. Trying to reduce the amount of suffering. I think it's overly optimistic to think that giving people cash--I like the idea of giving people cash rather than giving them a play pump. I think that's a big step forward. I think giving people cash in ways that they will use it in ways that will enhance their productivity and prosperity is going to be limited by the inherent situation that many poor people find themselves in. I think it's got some positives. But I also worry about, you know, again, the incentive effects that will have. But certainly to keep people from starving to death it's a good thing. I'm all for that. Guest: Yeah. And if you just look at the history of aid, people often talk about it having no impact. But over the course of the last 50, 60 years, we've spent what's comparatively a tiny amount of money, like $20 per person, per year. So really a very small amount of money. And life expectancy has increased by a third. Childhood mortality is like absolutely minuscule compared to what it was. And aid can't really account for, can't claim credit for all of that--not for most of it, either. But actually if you just look at the history of economic progress, it's been overall and on average, an incredible success story among poor countries. The percentage of people living in extreme poverty is half what it was just a few decades ago. And so I think that gives us ground for optimism, as well. This isn't just an ongoing problem.

38:31 Russ: I'm not convinced. Although I would have to admit that your example of smallpox did give me pause. That was a great example. Your basic argument, to restate it, is that: Sure, maybe a lot of aid money is wasted. Maybe it could be worse than wasted. It could be enhancing dictators' power and worse. But let's just say it's wasted. But one success can have such an enormous impact that it's worth it. And I think the natural thought that comes through your book and I think comes to people's minds is, 'Well, so let's just do the good ones.' And that's the hope: that a more scientific approach, a more evidence-based approach I would call it, we could always spend our money, might lead us to be more optimistic. But it might not be true. It reminds me a little bit of when people talk about indexed mutual funds. You buy an indexed mutual fund: you are buying a whole bunch of stocks. Some of them go up a lot; some of them go up a little; some go down. A naive person says, 'Well, let's just pick the ones that are good. Let's just pick the good ones.' Well, we don't know how to do that in the stock market. And I wonder if we are able to do it in the development world. And in particular, maybe the smallpox thing was just lucky. What's the evidence that we are going to do better with the next trillion dollars or that we are going to achieve--now that smallpox, thank God, is eradicated, mostly--that we are going to be able to find something like that again? Now, I'm on your side for sure in saying that it's a small amount of money toward a big possible improvement and it's worth spending because that's your expected value. Which I find very persuasive. It's just not obvious to me we know a lot about how to do that well. Guest: Yeah. I think there's a couple of responses. One is the fact that we do have many [?] examples--so, the progress on measles--especially in global health. It's just so clear in global health. And even the aid skeptics--even chief among the aid skeptics, Bill Easterly, [?] his book, White Man's Burden, why aid has done so much harm and so little good. And he just lambasts it over and over and over again. And then spends a couple of pages on global health; and he's like, 'Yeah, yeah, global health is awesome and it's amazing and it's changed millions of people's lives for the better.' And then moves on again to being critical. And so even the chief among the aids skeptics are just fairly positive about global health. And we can look at progress on measles, polio, and getting dewormed. Also malaria, tuberculosis. And we've made vast improvements. Public funding like the World Health Organization, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is clearly a part of that. And then as to whether like we can just pick the best: I really like the stocks example. I think we should be very humble about our ability to do things that are best. I think we should always have the understanding that what we are doing, perhaps it turns out to be not at all effective. But there is a difference because the stock market is an efficient market. The reason you can't pick the winners is because there's already so many people out there who are already trying to pick the winners. And that means that the price reflects the value of the stock. In contrast, when it comes to charity or doing good, there just isn't really the same sort of efficient market. There's some people who are out there trying to do loads of good--Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that's saying. And that means I think that you can't pick the very best. So I think maybe immunization programs like polio vaccination--if no one else were funding them they'd perhaps be even more effective than just [?] bed nets or deworming. So, to some extent you can't pick the very, very best winners. But that's okay--they have already been funded. That's a good thing for the world. That is not the case for the vast amount of funders all wanting to do as much good as they could. Instead there just does seem to be this low-hanging fruit on the ground, and it's because the charity world and the philanthropic aid spending just doesn't have the same sort of efficient market as the stock market has. Russ: Yeah; and one of the reasons is that we don't have the data that we have for stocks, that allow us to arbitrage. We don't have earnings data. We don't have the equivalent of it. And again, it's a complexity issue. I'm going to pick on bed nets for a second. Bed nets are things that help people stop being--keep them from being bitten by mosquitoes that carry malaria. And that's a wonderful thing. But for better or for worse, a lot of people who are given bed nets use them as fishing nets, because they think that's the best use: that's the local knowledge, for some people. We don't know what the numbers are. I have no problem with giving people a fishing net, if that's what they think is best to do with it--there may be some issues there. But, you know--children, etc. I think most people love their children and they are probably more worried about feeding them than keeping them malaria-free, I guess. But I do think there is this complexity issue that relentlessly makes this challenging.

44:54 Russ: I want to segue to a related point; you can come back on that if you want, but I want to make sure we touch on this. When you talk about your career choice, you make the point, which is a beautiful point, that you have 80,000 hours, approximately, of work to do in your life: why don't you put some into making sure it's time well spent and not just for yourself but for other people? And one of the options that you suggest is what you call 'earning to give.' So, talk about that, and then I'll circle back on these issues of uncertainty. Talk about what earning to give is and why it may be a good idea. Guest: Terrific. So, earning to give is the idea of deliberately taking a lucrative career in order that you can do good through your ability to donate rather than through your direct contribution of your labor. So, when most people think about careers that make a difference, they think about careers in the non-profit sector or maybe in social work. They think about careers where you are directly helping people. And I just think that's too narrow. There's--sure you can benefit people through direct impact of your labor. You could also benefit people by your ability to advocate in a position--so, Martin Luther King didn't work for charity but he had standing that led him to advocate for this incredibly important cause. And you can do good through your ability to donate. And for some people, I think maybe 15% of people or something, it might well be the best path for them to take this higher-earning career, doing good through your donations. In particular, if you have a comparative advantage in just earning more, and particular skills are very well paid but not that useful in charity sector. And I think there are a few other arguments for this as well. One is that you can target your money to the very most effective charities. Second is that your money has a flexibility that direct contributions of your labor doesn't have. So, if the evidence changes in 10 years' time and suddenly different things are most effective, then with money you can switch that quite easily. With labor, it's much more difficult. And then finally is just this boring, pragmatic reason: even if you want to work in the nonprofit sector, I think a very good thing to do in the short term is to build up your business skills in for-profit organizations. And that's not that contrarian a view. I've interviewed a large number of leaders of non-profit organizations and the majority of them say a similar thing--is that when you are coming out of college you just don't have that many skills. What you need is first get a level up [?]-- Russ: Tool up. Guest: Yeah, exactly. And so that means I think it's often a good idea to try this for a few years. You can work in some elite organization, working consulting or in some areas of finance, or programming or a variety of other careers. You can do good through your ability to donate in the meantime. And then also build amazing skills. And then, depending on how things look after a few years you can then take those skills to the non-profit sector or the public sector. Or you can continue in that path, doing good just through your donations. Russ: Well, what leads to optimism from me is that if you think about you can take that earning-to-give idea and you can just say, 'Look, you didn't choose earning to give. You chose a career that you just liked. Forget whether it was in the non-profit sector. You just chose what you enjoyed. So you took that job. But you are still free to increase the amount you donate.' And to come back to our earlier discussion--I've talked about this before--according to Jewish law, you should give 10% of your income to charity. And unless you are rich you shouldn't give more than 20%. You could push against that. But there's a chance that you could fall back being needy yourself, is the argument that's made. Guest: Okay. Russ: But so, most people don't give 10%. So, if we could get people to give 10%, my first thought is: Well, is that really going to change the world? And I think, the answer I get from you is: Well, it could if you spent it smartly. If you just continue to spread it at things that sound okay--so, even if--take my skepticism with a grain of salt. Take my grain of salt with a grain of salt. It's okay: so it won't be quite--if we double the amount that we spend deworming; if we double the amount on bed nets or quadruple it even or five-fold increase it because we can get people to give more, maybe it won't have the impact that we hope, but we'd learn from that ideally, according to the approach you are encouraging, and we'd do something else with it. I think that's a really positive vision. Guest: Oh, yeah. Thank you. I think that's right. Russ: I do say some nice things from time to time. Guest: I was like, where's the kind of decisive objection going to come. Russ: Well, not that time. Guest: One thing you said is: Is giving 10% going to change the world? And I think that's not--again, there's a framing that is quite common of just: 'Well, that's not going to solve the problem.' And this is again I think a failure to think on the margin. When I say people should give 10% or more of their income to causes the fight poverty, people often say, 'Well, what if everyone did that? Would that be the best thing overall?' And that's like an interesting thing to think about. But when you are making a decision, you should just think, 'Well, what's the best thing to do given how everyone else is,' rather than asking, 'What if everyone did this?' Russ: If they all do it, you can consider cutting back to 9%. Guest: Yeah. Maybe that's exactly right. If everyone is doing this then--if everyone in the United States was giving 10% to the most effective charities, that probably also means that you could easily pass through a whole bunch of legislation that would also benefit people in very poor countries in a way that would be extremely difficult to do just now. And so the way things look when everyone does something is often quite different than how things look when it's just one person adding your piece. And the fact that a certain action will solve the problem is totally irrelevant. It's not the size of the bucket that matters. It's how big a drop in that bucket you are making. And if you can save hundreds of lives over your lifetime, that's really a massive drop, a massive impact. And the second thing I thought was just, again in terms of funding: if everyone started to donate 10%, then we'd get through the available room for funding bed nets and deworming very quickly, in fact. And then it would be moving on to the next thing, and the next thing. And probably a large chunk of that would be wanting to fund significant [?] research to try to find more of these opportunities that allows good. But one of things that's most exciting about cash transfers is just how much room for scale they have. So, I think after a few billion dollars, we'll get very quickly through the number of bed nets--everyone will be dewormed; everyone will have a bed net over their heads. Maybe it's tens of billions of dollars. With cash transfers you could scale that up massively, almost indefinitely, I think. And that's one of these things that's really exciting about Give Directly as a program. It's got the potential to really change the landscape of international development. Russ: Again, I'd worry a little bit, or a lot, about what the consequences of that are that maybe are not so obvious when you are just doing it on a very small scale. But it might be worth finding out.

52:55 Russ: While I'm on the cheerful side, why don't you talk about what's good about sweatshops? One of the more, I suspect, controversial chapters in your book. Guest: Yeah. So, there's a lot of--a number of campaigns about boycotting sweatshops. So, sweatshops are pretty horrific places to work. Basically, everyone agrees on that. People there work 14 hour days and it's fairly hot conditions. You often do get kind of meal breaks. And people--and they are making clothes that are bought in the West. And people very naturally feel quite horrible about that: they think, 'How terrible it is that anyone has to work in those conditions.' And then they want to respond by removing themselves from that situation, have no part it in, by not buying those clothes and instead buying from somewhere like American Apparel, which can boast to be sweatshop free, only use workers in the United States who are kind of paid very well, comparatively. But I think that's a mistake. And the mistake is to not appreciate just how bad extreme poverty is. And in fact it's so bad that these sweatshop jobs are actually really desirable places to work-- Russ: Tragically-- Guest: compared to the alternatives. Tragically. Absolutely tragically. These horrific conditions can be the best options. Because the alternatives are: unemployment, which can mean starvation; prostitution; back-breaking farm labor, that's far more poorly paid. Russ: Scavenging in garbage dumps. Guest: Scavenging in dumps. Exactly. And when you actually ask the very poor, they say, 'Yeah, well at least this is a job. I'm not out in the sun all day where it's sweltering. I'm being paid much more.' And you can look at the evidence of this: the people who are choosing to work there, and not only choosing to work there but also emigrating across borders, risking deportation in order to take these jobs because they are higher paying--and I think that urge to say, 'Oh, I don't want to have any part of that' is not appreciating that in doing so you are taking away the best job opportunities that these people have. And so I think the right response is to try to end the underlying poverty that makes these sweatshop conditions, these sweatshop factories comparatively desirable places to work. And I think that means engaging in trade with very poor countries. And then secondly, yeah, using our position, our wealth, in order to fight poverty, to try and end those conditions. Boycotting is just going to be counterproductive.

55:55 Russ: So, effective altruism has gotten a lot of criticism from the left, both the mild left and the hard left: that if you spend all this energy giving away money and trying to solve the world's problems through cooperative means--private, uncoerced, voluntary cooperative means--you are going to discourage political solutions that might otherwise be more effective. Now, I'm even more skeptical about that, so one of the things I love about effective altruism is it does at least open the possibility of a civil society, of solutions, of cooperative voluntary solutions to problems that, if they don't work, we can change the approach--as we've talked about. But what have been your dealings with the people who urge, who criticize the movement on those political grounds? What's your response to them? Guest: Yeah. So, this is an objection that we have received a bunch. So, I'm intuitively a big leftie; I remember attending meetings of the Socialist Workers Party as a recent graduate and so on. And that makes me just personally very inclined to really understand this objection. And I think--so there's a few things I can say. One is like, yeah, maybe political change is even better. But if you think of that as easy then you are definitely mistaken. If you think political change is obvious-- Russ: You're ruining my utopian pipe dream! Don't publish that book. Guest: Yeah. If we think--like, looking at the history of Communism and the starkest example of that, where you have a certain vision, which is maybe a very compelling vision and you try to bring that about, the consequence is disastrous. And so, I'm worried about unintended consequences when it comes to these very simple things like deworming school children. When it comes to political change, there's much greater potential there. So that's the first thing: it's just not obvious. Secondly, and this isn't often explicitly stated but I do think actually underlies often a lot of the disagreement, is what you think about the causes of poverty. And what you think about--so, I hate ever using the word 'capitalism' because it seems to be so multiply ambiguous. But what you think about the sorts of economies we have, like the United Kingdom and the United States--mixed economies but with a strong free market element, private property, and so on. And if you look at the history of human progress, the fact that there's any countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, is just a sort of miracle. The state of the world, for most of human history, is everyone living on less than $2 a day. And then it's only in the last few hundred years that some countries have been able to escape that. And were these monkeys walking around in suits trying to make our lives better, the fact that we got to this stage, this actually miraculous thing. Russ: Yeah. Absolutely. Guest: And moreover, in the last 50 years--if you look at China, India; if you look at South Korea, Taiwan--so many countries that then escaped the global poverty and are now these kind of economic powerhouses--and that's been through the same sort of economic development happening in the United States and United Kingdom. So I think often the kind of criticism on the left, they see--and I really don't want to [?] around the position, but this is maybe the conclusion I came to through deeper conversations--they see things as a fixed pie, where you've got the rich countries just being rich by taking from poor countries. And I just think that misrepresents the situation, which is that, to begin with everyone's really poor. Then, some countries have had amazing economic success. And for sure some of that was based on really very horrific-- Russ: Exploitation-- Guest: Yeah, exploitation. That's right. Every country has a horrific past. And I think that gives a strong argument for us to think that the resources we earn are not really our own and we should redistribute them. But we've had amazing economic success. And the question is just how can we get more of that? And so I think the objection does come down to deep--an empirical one, actually, about what you think is going on with capitalism. So when I see all the problems in the world, I think of the ability of markets in some or many circumstances to do a huge amount of good. And then when I think, 'What are the big problems with the current world order that we need to change?' that's like quite low down on the list. Whereas they see this as: This is the problem--capitalism is just taking from the poor countries and feeding the rich countries. And I just think that's a mistake--the default state[?] is being [?]--actually the trades that happens such as using sweatshops is benefiting both parties.