Wow! eBook
Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Help Others, Do Work that Matters, and Make Smarter Choices about Giving Back reprint Edition
Author(s): William MacAskill (Author)
- Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
- Publication Date: 2 Aug. 2016
- Edition: reprint
- Language: English
- Print length: 272 pages
- ISBN-10: 1592409660
- ISBN-13: 9781592409662
Book Description
While a researcher at Oxford, William MacAskill decided to devote his study to a simple question: How can we do good better? MacAskill realized that, while most of us want to make a difference, we often decide how to do so based on assumptions and emotions rather than facts. As a result, our good intentions often lead to ineffective, sometimes downright harmful, outcomes.
As an antidote, MacAskill and his colleagues developed effective altruism—a practical, data-driven approach to doing good that allows us to make a tremendous difference regardless of our resources. Effective altruists operate by asking certain key questions that force them to think differently, set aside biases, and use evidence and careful reasoning rather than act on impulse. In Doing Good Better, MacAskill lays out these principles and shows that, when we use them correctly—when we apply the head and the heart to each of our altruistic endeavors—each of us has the power to do an astonishing amount of good.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This is the most valuable guide to charitable giving ever published. Even readers who disagree with MacAskill’s conclusions about the value of particular charitable donations will make smarter decisions by learning from his analysis.”—Paul Brest, co-director, Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and former president, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
"A straightforward guide to help anyone make the largest possible difference in the lives of others." —Sue Desmond-Hellman, CEO of the Gates Foundation
"We research hotels and headphones and sushi bars—but not charities. That is lunacy. And in this powerful and persuasive book, William MacAskill shows us how much we stand to gain from a little bit of thoughtfulness: The same donation could do hundreds of times more good if given to the most effective charities, rather than the least"—Dan Heath, co-author of the
New York Times bestsellers Made to Stick, Switch, and Decisive“Effective altruism—efforts that actually help people rather than making you feel good or helping you show off—is one of the great new ideas of the twenty-first century. Doing Good Better is the definitive guide to this exciting new movement.”—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature
“Doing Good Better is a superb achievement. This must-read book will lead people to change their careers, their lives, and the world, for the better.”—Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, author of Animal Liberation and The Most Good You Can Do
“Doing Good Better is a must-read for anyone with both a heart and a brain. MacAskill demolishes the lazy myths of nothing-you-can-do-ism and demonstrates the power of asking the right questions. This is an important book. It's also surprisingly fun. Figuring out what really helps people is a challenging scientific puzzle, and these pages are full of unexpected twists—enlightening and invigorating.”—Joshua Greene, director of Harvard's Moral Cognition Lab, author of Moral Tribes
“Humanity currently spends more money on cigarette ads than on making sure that we as a species survive this century. We've got our priorities all wrong, and we need effective altruism to right them. If you want to make a real difference on the biggest issues of our time, you need to read Doing Good Better.”— Jaan Tallinn, cofounder, Skype and Kazaa
“Doing Good Better has rare combination of strikingly original ideas, effortless clarity of delivery, and a thoroughgoing practicality that leaves the reader inspired to get out of their chair and take on the world. Humanity faces some big challenges in the 21st century; this is a much-needed manifesto for social change, and Will MacAskill is the ideal ambassador.”—Eric Drexler, founder of nanotechnology and author of Engines of Creation
“MacAskill tackles a monumental question: how can we make the biggest difference for the greatest number of people? His answer is a grand vision to make giving, volunteering, spending, and working more worthwhile.”—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take
“Are you interested in giving away money more effectively? This is the very best book on how to do that.” —Tyler Cowen, Holbert C. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and author of Average is Over
“I wish I'd had this structure and insights twenty years ago!”—Caroline Fiennes, Director, Giving Evidence
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
How can you do the most good?
Until 1989, Trevor Field was a typical middle-aged South African man who had lived a fairly normal life. He enjoyed fresh steaks, cold beer, and fishing with his friends. Working in advertising for magazines like TopCar and Penthouse, he had never thought seriously about using his skills for the greater good. When he discovered the PlayPump, however, everything changed.
That year, Field and his father-in-law, a farmer, visited an agricultural fair in Pretoria. There, he met a water engineer named Ronnie Stuiver who was demonstrating a model for a new type of water pump. The demonstration reminded Field of a fishing trip he’d taken years before, during which 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 water back to their homes. So they simply sat and waited for the water to flow. Field had been struck by how unfair this was. There simply must be a better way to do this, he thought. Now he was witnessing a potential solution.
Stuiver’s invention seemed brilliant. Instead of the typical hand pump or windmill pump found in many villages in poor countries, Stuiver’s pump doubled as a playground merry-go-round. Children would play on the merry-go-round, which, as it spun, would pump clean water from deep underground up to a storage tank. No longer would the women of the village need to walk miles to draw water using a hand pump or wait in line at a windmill-powered pump on a still day. The PlayPump, as it was called, utilized the power of playing children to provide a sustainable water supply for the community. “African [kids] have almost nothing—not even books in school let alone playground equipment—and access to water is a huge problem,” Field later told me. “I thought it was just the best idea I’ve ever seen.”
Field bought the patent from Stuiver and worked in his spare time over the next five years to improve the design. Using his experience in advertising, Field came up with the idea of placing billboard advertisements on the sides of the water tank as a way to generate revenue to pay for pump maintenance. 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, now a registered charity called PlayPumps International. Progress was slow at first, but he persevered, paying for several pumps with his own money. At the same time, he developed connections with corporations and government bodies across South Africa to pay for more pumps. By the turn of the millennium, he had installed fifty pumps across the country.
His first major breakthrough came in 2000 when, out of three thousand applicants, he won a World Bank Development Marketplace Award, given to “innovative, early-stage development projects that are scalable and/or replicable, while also having high potential for development impact.” That award attracted funding and attention, which culminated in a site visit from Steve Case, CEO of AOL, and his wife, Jean. “They thought the PlayPump was incredible,” Field said. “As soon as they saw it in action, they were sold.” In 2005, the Cases agreed to fund the project and worked with Field to set up an American arm of PlayPumps International. Their aim was to roll out thousands of new PlayPumps across Africa.
The PlayPump became the center of a massive marketing campaign. Steve Case used his expertise from running AOL to pioneer new forms of online fund-raising. The One Foundation, a British fund-raising charity, launched a bottled water brand called One Water and donated the profits to PlayPumps International. It was a huge success and became the official bottled water of the Live 8 concerts and the Make Poverty History campaign. The PlayPump became the darling of the international media, who leaped at the opportunity to pun, with headlines like PUMPING WATER IS CHILD’S PLAY and THE MAGIC ROUNDABOUT. In an article for Time in 2006, Bill Clinton called the PlayPump a “wonderful innovation.”
Celebrities, too, jumped on the bandwagon. Jay-Z raised tens of thousands of dollars through his “The Diary of Jay-Z: Water for Life” concert tour. Soon after, PlayPumps International secured its biggest win: a $16.4 million grant awarded by then First Lady Laura Bush, launching a campaign designed to raise $60 million to fund four thousand PlayPumps across Africa by 2010. By 2007, the PlayPump was the hottest thing in international development, and Trevor Field was at the center of it all—a rock star of the charity world.
“It has just gone berserk! . . . When I first looked at this water pump . . . I could never imagine that this is something that could possibly change the world,” Field said in 2008, reflecting on PlayPump International’s startling success. “It really rocks me to know we’re making a difference to a lot of people who are nowhere near as privileged as I am or my family is.” By 2009, his charity had installed eighteen hundred PlayPumps across South Africa, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Zambia.
Then things went sour. Two damning reports were released, one by UNICEF and one by the Swiss Resource Centre and Consultancies for Development (SKAT). It turned out that, despite the hype and the awards and the millions of dollars spent, no one had really considered the practicalities of the PlayPump. Most playground merry-go-rounds 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 get exhausted. According to the UNICEF report, children sometimes fell off and broke limbs, and some vomited from the spinning. In one village, local children were paid to “play” on the pump. Much of the time, women of the village ended up pushing the merry-go-round themselves—a task they found tiring, undignified, and demeaning.
What’s more, no one had asked the local communities if they wanted a PlayPump in the first place. When the investigators from SKAT asked the community what they thought about the new PlayPump, many said they preferred the hand pumps that were previously installed. With less effort, a Zimbabwe Bush hand pump of the same cylinder size as a PlayPump provided thirteen hundred liters of water per hour—five times the amount of the PlayPump. A woman in Mozambique said, “From five A.M., we are in the fields, working for six hours. Then we come to this pump and have to turn it. From this, your arms start to hurt. The old hand pump was much easier.” One reporter estimated that, in order to provide a typical village’s water needs, the merry-go-round would have to spin for twenty-seven hours per day.
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 mechanics of the pump were encased in a metal shell and could not be repaired by the community. The locals were supposed to receive a phone number to call for maintenance, but most communities never received one, and those who did never got anyone on the phone. The billboards on the storage tanks lay bare: the rural communities were too poor for companies to be interested in paying for advertising. The PlayPump was inferior in almost every way to the unsexy but functional hand pumps it competed with. Yet, at $14,000 per unit, it cost four times as much.
Soon, the media turned on its golden child. PBS ran a documentary exposing the...
