William MacAskill > Quotes

“One additional unit of income can do a hundred times as much to the benefit the extreme poor as it can to benefit you or I [earning the typical US wage of $28,000 or ‎£18,000 per year]. [I]t's not often you have two options, one of which is a hundred times better than the other. Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beet for $5 or buy someone else a beer for 5¢. If that were the case, we'd probably be pretty generous – next round's on me! But that's effectively the situation we're in all the time. It's like a 99% off sale, or buy one, get ninety-nine free. It might be the most amazing deal you'll see in your life.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“The challenge for us is this: How can we ensure that, when we try to help others, we do so as effectively as possible?”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“People who had previously purchased a “green” product were significantly more likely to both lie and steal than those who had purchased the conventional product. Their demonstration of ethical behavior subconsciously gave them license to act unethically when the chance arose.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“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.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“When thinking about risk from transport, you can think directly in terms of minutes of life lost per hour of travel. Each time you travel, you face a slight risk of getting into a fatal accident, but the chance of getting into a fatal accident varies dramatically depending on the mode of transport. For example, the risk of a fatal car crash while driving for an hour is about one in ten million (so 0.1 micromorts). For a twenty-year-old, that’s a one-in-ten-million chance of losing sixty years. The expected life lost from driving for one hour is therefore three minutes. Looking at expected minutes lost shows just how great a discrepancy there is between risks from different sorts of transport. Whereas an hour on a train costs you only twenty expected seconds of life, an hour on a motorbike costs you an expected three hours and forty-five minutes. In addition to giving us a way to compare the risks of different activities, the concept of expected value helps us choose which risks are worth taking. Would you be willing to spend an hour on a motorbike if it was perfectly safe but caused you to be unconscious later for three hours and forty-five minutes? If your answer is no, but you’re otherwise happy to ride motorbikes in your day-to-day life, you’re probably not fully appreciating the risk of death.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“Another common recommendation is to turn lights off when you leave a room, but lighting accounts for only 3% of household energy use, so even if you used no lighting at all in your house you would save only a fraction of a metric ton of carbon emissions. Plastic bags have also been a major focus of concern, but even on very generous estimates, if you stopped using plastic bags entirely you'd cut out 10kg CO2eq per year, which is only 0.4% of your total emissions. Similarly, the focus on buying locally produced goods is overhyped: only 10% of the carbon footprint of food comes from transportation whereas 80% comes from production, so what type of food you buy is much more important than whether that food is produced locally or internationally. Cutting out red meat and dairy for one day a week achieves a greater reduction in your carbon footprint than buying entirely locally produced food. In fact, exactly the same food can sometimes have higher carbon footprint if it's locally grown than if it's imported: one study found that the carbon footprint from locally grown tomatoes in northern Europe was five times as great as the carbon footprint from tomatoes grown in Spain because the emissions generated by heating and lighting greenhouses dwarfed the emissions generated by transportation.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“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.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“Whether the future is wonderful or terrible is, in part, up to us.”
― William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future

“Responding to bereavement by trying to make a difference is certainly both understandable and admirable, but it doesn't give you good reason to raise money for one specific cause of death rather than any other. If that person had died in different circumstances it would have been no less tragic. What we care about when we lose someone close to us is that they suffered or died, not that they died from a specific cause. By all means, the sadness we feel at the loss of a loved one should be harnessed in order to make the world a better place. But we should focus that motivation on preventing death and improving lives per se, rather than preventing death and improving lives in one very specific way. Any other decision would be unfair on those we could have helped more.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“Effective altruism is about asking "How can I make the biggest difference I can?" and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good. Just as science consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what's true, and a committment to believe the truth whatever that turns out to be. As the phrase suggests, effective altruism consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what's best for the world, and a commitment to do what's best, whatever that turns out to be.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“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.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“In buying Fairtrade products, you’re at best giving very small amounts of money to people in comparatively well-off countries. You’d do considerably more good by buying cheaper goods and donating the money you save to one of the cost-effective charities mentioned in the previous chapter.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“I have sought love… because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy.”
― William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future

“According to the most rigorous estimates, the cost to save a life in the developing world is about $3,400 (or $100 for one QALY). This is a small enough amount that most of us in affluent countries could donate that amount every year while maintaining about the same quality of life. Rather than just saving one life, we could save a life every working year of our lives. Donating to charity is not nearly as glamorous as kicking down the door of a burning building, but the benefits are just as great. Through the simple act of donating to the most effective charities, we have the power to save dozens of lives. That’s”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“But just as the world does not stop at our doorstep or our country’s borders, neither does it stop with our generation, or the next.”
― William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future

“[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.”
― William MacAskill

“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.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“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.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“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.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“The good I do is not a matter of the direct benefits I cause. Rather, it is the difference I make.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“This book is about longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.11”
― William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future

“Ironically, the law of diminishing returns suggests that, if you feel a strong emotional reaction to a story and want to help, you should probably resist this inclination because there are probably many others like you who are also donating. By all means, you should harness the emotion you feel when a natural disaster strikes, but remind yourself that a similar disaster is happening all the time—and then consider donating to wherever your money will help the most rather than what is getting the most attention.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“Distance in time is like distance in space. People matter even if they live thousands of miles away. Likewise, they matter even if they live thousands of years hence.”
― William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future

“Writing gave ideas the power to influence society for thousands of years; artificial intelligence could give them influence that lasts millions.”
― William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future

“A better word would be “eutopia,” meaning “good place”—something to strive for.”
― William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future

“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.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“Your choice of career is a choice about how to spend more than eighty thousand hours over the course of your life, which means it makes sense to invest a considerable amount of time in the decision. If you were to spend just 1 percent of your working time thinking about how to spend the other 99 percent, that would mean you’d spend eight hundred hours, or twenty working weeks, on your career decision.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“The only quantitative estimates of farmed animal welfare I’ve been able to find come from Bailey Norwood, an economist and agricultural expert. He rated the welfare of different animals on a scale of –10 to 10, where negative numbers indicate that it would be better, from the animal’s perspective, to be dead rather than alive. He rates beef cattle at 6 and dairy cows at 4. In contrast his average rating for broiler chickens is –1, and for pigs and caged hens is –5. In other words, cows raised for food live better lives than chicken, hens, or pigs, which suffer terribly.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“If you add up all the wars, genocides, and terrorist acts that occurred since 1973, the death toll is a staggering twelve million. Prior to its eradication, smallpox killed 1.5 to 3 million people every year, so by preventing these deaths for over forty years, its eradication has effectively saved somewhere between 60 and 120 million lives. The eradication of smallpox is one success story from aid, saving five times as many lives as world peace would have done.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

“Nor could we say that you do more good by saving one million lives than by saving ten.”
― William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference