The MAp Boutique Consultancy book club is back! And it is back with a bang, because “Doing Good Better” by William MacAskill was a mind-opening and highly-inspirational read for the MAp team. In this blog post, we’re excited to share our top insights so that we can all start embracing this radical new way of making a difference – NOW!
Summary
In his ground-breaking book “Doing Good Better”, MacAskill explains the concept of “Effective Altruism” and asks the question, “How can I make the biggest difference I can?” To answer this question he uses concepts we’ve hardly ever seen so far in the field of doing good: evidence, careful reasoning and a scientific approach. His search for truth shows that so far, many of us “just did good” without assessing if we chose the right investment = if we were using our resources in the most effective way. MacAskill also busts some myths about the concepts of green living, climate offsetting, fairtrade, etc., showing us in a fact-based and impartial way, that what we thought or were told was best for the word, in truth, isn’t.
Key Points
At MAp, we believe in the power and goodness of people. That was one reason why we developed our hotel sustainability platform: to empower hoteliers, consultants, students, business owners, etc. to do good. To make a difference. To make this Planet a more purposeful and hospitable place for all. However, the so-often overlooked challenge William MacAskill addresses in his book is: How can we ensure that, when we try to help others and do good, we do so as effectively as possible? Because the truth is: The best charities are hundreds of times more effective at improving lives than merely “good” charities. This means, by knowing the principles of effective altruism, we all can be hundreds of times more effective in creating positive impact for People and Planet.
Here are the 3 key take-aways you need to know:
#1: The effective altruist’s approach to making a difference consists of five key questions
There are five key questions you should ask yourselves when thinking like an effective altruist:
1. How many People benefit, and by how much?
This implies: we need to make fact-based decisions about how much benefit we can make by doing different charitable activities / supporting different charities.
2. Is this the most effective thing you can do?
Search for science-based evidence and do not go for “merely” very good programmes, if the very best ones are hundreds of times better. HERE is a great resource for identifying the best charities and non-profits.
3. Is this area neglected?
Your money makes the most difference when you invest in a neglected area vs. an area where a lot of funding already goes to. As an example, we could say that investing in malaria health programmes is more effective than in cancer research programmes.
4. What would have happened otherwise?
Looking at evidence, some programmes don’t do good, but cause harm over the long run. Or they don’t create as much impact as you would imagine. For example, this applies to the decisions you take when choosing a career: sometimes you can do good better when you donate money while working at a “normal” job vs. working at an NGO, which often is thought of as the best thing you could do.
5. What are the chances of success, and how good would success be?
Some activities are effective not because they’re likely to make a difference, but because their impact is so great if they do make a difference. To illustrate this, MacAskill uses the example of climate change: “If it is happening and we don’t take action, millions of lives will be lost and the world economy will lose trillions of dollars. If climate change isn’t happening and we do take action, the costs are much lower. We would have wasted some amount of resources developing low-carbon technology and slowed economic progress a bit, but it wouldn’t, literally, be the end of the world.”
#2: The law of diminishing returns implies you focus on long-time tested activities
MacAskill defines the law of diminishing returns in his book as follows: “If we want to do as much good as we can, we’ve got to ask which cause to focus on. The law of diminishing returns provides a useful rule of thumb for comparing causes. If a specific area has already received a great deal of funding and attention, then we should expect it to be difficult for us to do a lot of good by devoting additional resources to that area. In contrast, within causes that are comparatively neglected, the most effective opportunities for doing good have probably not been taken.” MacAskill then outlines that our response to natural disasters is one of the clearest cases of how, when it comes to charity, we mostly follow our gut and not science. When a disaster strikes, we (and every else) think “emergency” and donate money or resources to that cause, forgetting that emergencies happen all the time around us. But we get accustomed to poverty and the fact that, every day, People die from easily preventable diseases like AIDS, malaria, or tuberculosis, which therefore receive less ongoing funding.
#3: Don’t believe everything that sounds good, or let’s bust some myths
Myth 1: Ethical Consumerism is always good and sweatshop products must be avoided
Companies in the fashion industry claim to be “sweatshop free” and other companies ask consumers to practice “ethical consumerism” = to spend more money in order to assure that workers at the factories are treated better. Now, as we’ve learned in point #1, there are five questions we must ask as an effective altruist, one being: What would have happened otherwise?
And MacAskill’s scientific research shows a painful truth: “We assume that if People refuse to buy goods from sweatshops, these factories will succumb to economic pressure and go out of business, in which case their employees will find better employment elsewhere. But that’s not true. In developing countries, sweatshop jobs are the good jobs. The alternatives are typically worse, such as backbreaking, low-paid farm labour, scavenging, or unemployment.”
By looking at this example, we have to realise that to practice effective altruism, we have to leave our “rich-world-perspective” and accept that some things unimaginable to us are better to the world than we expected. Or in this case, sweatshops are good for poor countries and if we boycott them we make People in poor countries worse off.
“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 favour 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,” says MacAskill.
Myth 2: By buying Fairtrade-certified products, we do good
Fairtrade certification is an attempt to give higher pay to workers in poor countries and has been heavily advertised as “the” solution in our western society. Producers get the certification when they meet certain criteria, such as paying workers a minimum wage, complying to safety requirements, etc. What’s less known: Most producers that can meet the criteria are from comparatively rich countries like Mexico and Costa Rica, which are ten times richer than the very poorest countries, like Ethiopia. Knowing about diminishing returns of investment, this means that we do more good buying uncertified coffee from Ethiopia than Fairtrade coffee from Costa Rica. We also should be aware that there are middlemen involved who take a share of the “Faitrade price”, or that we even don’t know how much the higher price translates into higher wages or how much money goes to the farmers who work for the Fairtrade-certified organisations. Furthermore, consistent findings indicate that Fairtrade certification does not even improve the lives of agriculture workers. Given this, there is little altruistic reason to buy Fairtrade products.
Myth 3: Buying locally does work - offsetting does not!
MacAskill states straight away that buying locally-produced goods is overhyped, as only 10% of the carbon footprint of food comes from transportation, whereas 80% comes from production. This means that WHAT type of food you buy is much more important than whether that food is produced locally or internationally.
Taking this into account, the most effective ways to cut down your emissions are:
- To reduce your intake of meat (especially beef)
- To reduce the amount you travel
- To use less electricity and gas in the home
However, MacAskill also mentions that the most effective way to reduce your emissions is called offsetting: rather than reducing your own greenhouse gas emissions, you pay for projects that reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.
MacAskill explains that his organisation, Giving What We Can, studied more than 100 organisations and came to the result that Cool Earth is the most effective organisation when talking about offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions. Cool Earth uses donated money to help economically develop rainforest communities - to a point where they do better by not selling their land to loggers. This means that when you donate to Cool Earth and practice effective carbon offsetting, overall your life contributes nothing to climate change.
Conclusion
We conclude this blog post by answering an important question: What should you do right now?
We’ve compiled our top three suggestions:
1. Establish a habit of regular giving. GiveWell is an organisation MacAskill mentions throughout his book, and its goal is to produce the world’s top research on where to give - free and for everyone. This means you can have a look and find out which charities are the most effective right now and start giving to them on a regular basis.
2. Sign up to the effective altruism mailing list. That way you can learn more about effective altruism and about how to get involved in the community, and read stories of People putting effective altruism into practice.
3. Tell others about effective altruism. Because if you can get one person to make the same changes you make, you’ve doubled your impact.
Thank you for reading until the end, and let’s all move #onwards to do good better!
Your MAp team
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