The Clean and Green Club

What happens next if you win your biggest battle?

Whether you’re in business, running a nonprofit, or spearheading a community campaign, you need to know the answer to that question.

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (Gotham/Penguin Random House, 2015)

I don’t usually recommend books that annoy me as much as this one did, but I do recommend it. MacAskill raises crucial questions for anyone in the nonprofit or social responsibility spaces: how are our time and money best spent to make the world better? I agree that we have to be willing to dive deep enough to discover that sometimes, things that seem terrific at the macro level crumble in our hands when we look closely.

Yes, we want our resources to make the maximum impact—to hold our social impact projects and charity partners responsible for their actions AND their outcomes. And seeking fact-based answers about which of our actions do the most objective good is well-worth the effort. He’s an advocate of a scheme called QALY, which imposes a quantitative framework on decisions by looking at the outcomes. In theory, QALY should tell us whether it’s better to increase lifespan or increase quality of life, whether we best serve a greater number in less depth or a lesser number in greater depth, and how to measure costs and benefits of any initiative. And MacAskill remembers to factor in a lot of subtleties, such as how much improvement would occur without your help.

As an example, if a student is deciding whether to go into medical school, MacAskill suggests looking at how much impact this particular person would have as a doctor, versus someone else who would fill the medical school slot; there are always more people wanting to study medicine than available slots, so a doctor will be created regardless. That involves a whole host of questions: would the doctor be working in a developed country where services provided would not have great impact on the larger social picture but the potential for charity donation is enormous, or a developing country facing a massive health crisis, where that doctor could save many lives? Would another doctor have a social conscience? But despite MacAskill’s best efforts, a lot of it would be guess work.

Sometimes the answers may be extremely counter-intuitive; he cites cases where the most effective thing certain individuals can do is to go into a high-paying profession and live simply enough to donate large portions of that pay to well-vetted causes.

But I have a problem with his Bean-Counters Uber Alles approach. He tends to ignore a lot of the human factors, and I think that’s the kind of attitude that got us into trouble with our planet in the first place. It was actually a big relief to read that he became a vegetarian out of concern for animal rights, because it showed a caring persona that’s largely absent from the text. Yet he scorns the little actions we can all take to live more in our values, which I strongly feel make a big cumulative difference. In fact, I’ve written an ebook, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life–With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle, offering 111 simple and no-cost/low-cost steps we can take as individuals. If everyone did even 50, I think it would make a tremendous difference.

Doesn’t something go missing when we worry so much about the numbers and so little about the human factors? Is working at a job you hate for 20 years so you can donate more money and then be financially secure enough to take an executive position with a charity really better than working at lower pay in a meaningful career right off the bat? Are there tradeoffs in the massive improvement you can make in one person’s life through some kind of direct intervention versus the benefit of eradicating some scourge that affects many more lives? And how do you predict which of the people you help might go on to find the cure for cancer? It makes a lot of sense to reduce malaria deaths at a cost per life saved of $40,000, while the US spends millions per life saved on highway safety—and this aligns with his theory that we do the most good when we focus on the more neglected areas. But then again, I am alive today because improvements in vehicle safety allowed me to walk away from a 60-mph crash. So, in some ways, the whole set of questions and assumptions is absurd.

MacAskill gets even more absurd, with obnoxious positioning like a chapter called “The Moral Case for Sweatshop Goods” (he says they provide better jobs than the indigenous industries. I say that’s not good enough).

But in other areas, he’s spot on. As big a supporter of peace as I am, it’s hard to argue with his math that eradicating smallpox has saved more lives over the past 40 years than creating world peace would have over the same time frame. And it’s certainly important to choose to give to charities at the top of the curve, who consistently achieve far more with less and significantly outperform average charities. He names several of his favorites.

And one area where I’m in total agreement is how much impact one person can have, especially when joining with others, and especially in poor countries, where a dollar goes so much farther. Most human advances—in medicine, technology, agriculture, even human behavior—were because one person had an idea and nurtured it.

Bottom line: if you come in to the book as an engaged and questioning reader, willing to mentally dialogue with him about what makes sense and what doesn’t, you’ll find tremendous value. If you either accept it all at face value or throw the whole thing out, I’d say you’re making a mistake.