Doing Good Better

How can you, yes you, do the most good? Become a community organizer? Start your own social enterprise? Work as a hedge fund manager and donate 20% of your income away to charity?

This is the idea behind 80,000 Hours, one of the startups incubated by Y Combinator in 2015 and already one of the major players in the effective altruism movement. For those of you who don’t know about it already, effective altruism is a philosophy that seeks to accomplish the most good with our limited time and resources.

Founded by Oxford philosopher William MacAskill and guided by the effective altruism movement (also co-founded by MacAskill), 80,000 Hours provides career advice to help you maximize your social impact through your job. You know, that thing that yanked you back to the chaos of “herding cats” and the doldrums of “hump days” from your blissful holiday vacation.

But how can we even track our social impact? 80,000 Hours believe they have the answer: they measure impact by comparing what happens if you take Action X with the situation where you did not take Action X. Or, to put it another way, when we think about impact, we oftentimes just think about the immediate results, what 80,000 Hours calls tangible impact. But they argue impact doesn’t stop there. To see the full impact, as they say, you need to compare the world you bring about with the world as it would have been without your involvement, what they call true impact.

Consider the following example: You take a high salary job as Lead Rainforest Harvester. Your tangible impact would likely be negative for environmental reasons alone (sorry, trees), but your true impact wouldn’t necessarily be positive or negative. Why? Well, if you hadn’t accepted the job, someone else would have taken the position, extracted a comparable amount of wood, and therefore had the same amount of negative tangible impact. On the other hand, if you were to actively work to make the exotic wood industry less harmful, your true impact would tilt that needle to positive — assuming “the next guy” would not have done the same. And you could increase this true impact even more if you were to donate large portions of your high salary, since it’s unlikely “the next guy,” would have made the same choice.

Following this logic, you don’t have to work at a social enterprise or nonprofit to do good. There are many other paths to consider, from an economics PhD to teaching to founding a tech startup. And 80,000 Hours, who conducts research investigating the most effective career options and guidance practices, is here to help you find the career for you given your own personal strengths, beyond the tangible impact of our work, including donating cost-effectively, fundraising for great charities, advocating for effective causes, high-impact volunteering, and building career capital.

And that’s what it’s all about. Helping you find an effective job that will play to your strengths, because the stronger the fit, the more productive you can be, and the greater your overall social impact.

Honestly, it took me a little while to warm up to the idea; their philosophy seemed to be straddling this strange middle ground — not quite an exact science while feeling very clinical at the same time. Regardless, I think it’s a thoughtful way of framing how to do good and an interesting thought experiment to play out. They’re evoking empathy to help those in need through morality, data, and counterfactual reasoning, and, maybe it’s the economist in me, but I find this concept both novel and tempting. And as someone who is considering going to graduate school, this is speaking to me at a time in my life where I can make these next steps really count.

That’s not to say that this hasn’t raised some red flags. What about job satisfaction? Should a career simply be a means to an end? Who decides what is good or not? How will this affect the arts?

Their approach certainly has an air of academic sterility, reducing the world to a dizzying series of cost-benefit analyses. For example, it suggests that you should absolutely care about job satisfaction, in part because it’s good for your mental well-being — but according to the philosophy, this is even more important because those who work at jobs they are satisfied with are more productive and less replaceable and therefore maximizing their true social impact.

I kind of imagine this is what it would feel like if you went to Sherlock for some life-coaching. Our life-course spins from a tapestry of rational decisions, gut intuition, and chance, and it seems like trying to convert all of that to ones and zeros seems a little impersonal, even if it is empathetic in its own Cumberbatchian way.

That said, the effective altruism movement is trying to tackle some of the worlds most pressing issues and, true to form, they’ve triaged their priority list to first concentrate on areas where they will be able to do the most good: global poverty alleviation, animal welfare, and global catastrophic risk mitigation like global warming. Not a bad list, right?

At the end of the day, 80,000 Hours challenges us to act through a set of strong moral principles to actually make the world a better place, and that’s something I can get on board with. And I suspect it’s something the rest of you might appreciate as well.

I’m not asking everyone to drop what they are doing and become an effective altruist or to take this blog post as a hint to switch careers; I just want to hold myself, my peers, and our readers accountable to a higher standard than we did last year. Because what is a New Year without a New Year resolution? What can I say — 80,000 Hours has inspired me to try and do good, better.

My resolution: to research and seriously consider graduate degrees that could allow me to maximize my social impact in a sector that I care about.

What’s yours?