Doing Good Better

**Author:** William MacAskill

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:**

- Why your charitable donations might be doing 100 times less good than they could - How to identify the world's most pressing problems using evidence rather than emotion - Why some careers create vastly more positive impact than others - How to overcome the psychological biases that distort our giving decisions - Practical steps to dramatically increase your positive impact on the world

**Who This Book Is For:**

This book is for anyone who wants their life to matter. It is for the person who gives to charity but wonders if their money is actually helping. It is for the student choosing a career and wanting to make a difference. It is for the professional who suspects that some ways of doing good are far more effective than others but does not know how to tell the difference. If you have ever asked yourself whether your efforts to improve the world are actually working, this book will change how you think.

Imagine you are walking through a park on a warm afternoon. You pass a shallow pond and notice a child struggling in the water. The child is drowning. You look around. No one else is nearby. You are wearing an expensive suit and shoes that would be ruined by the water. Do you wade in to save the child? Almost everyone answers immediately: of course. The cost of ruining some clothing is nothing compared to a child's life. Any decent person would jump in without hesitation. Now imagine a different scenario. You receive a letter from a reputable charity explaining that children are dying every day from preventable diseases like malaria. A donation of a few thousand dollars, the letter says, could save a child's life. You have a few thousand dollars in savings. You were planning to use it for a new television, a vacation, or simply to keep as a buffer. Do you send the money? Most people hesitate. Most people do not donate. Yet the moral logic is identical. In both cases, a relatively small sacrifice on your part can save a life. The difference is that in the first scenario, the child is visible, immediate, and emotionally compelling. In the second, the children are distant, statistical, and easy to ignore. This book is about closing that gap. It is about taking the moral impulse that would make you jump into a pond to save a drowning child and applying it consistently to all the choices you make with your time and money. William MacAskill is a philosophy professor at Oxford University and a co-founder of the effective altruism movement. His central question is…