Doing Good Better

How can you make the biggest possible positive difference with your life? This is the simple but radical question at the heart of Doing Good Better by William MacAskill. The book argues that the difference between acting with good intentions and acting effectively can be vast. Good intentions alone aren’t enough—you need evidence, reasoning, and data to ensure that your altruism actually helps people rather than harms them. MacAskill’s central idea is that we can do much more good by applying critical thinking and science to our efforts to help.

MacAskill, one of the founders of the effective altruism movement, defines effective altruism as the use of evidence and reason to find out how to benefit others as much as possible and then acting on that basis. His book takes you inside one of the most innovative approaches to ethics and charity developed in decades—a philosophy and a social movement that has influenced organizations like GiveWell and 80,000 Hours and individuals such as Peter Singer and Bill Gates. Through storytelling, case studies, and pragmatic frameworks, MacAskill shows that doing good effectively requires more than empathy—it demands the clear-eyed analysis that scientists and investors use to produce results.

The Heart and the Head of Altruism

MacAskill opens with two contrasting stories. Trevor Field’s PlayPump seemed like an ingenious way to provide clean water to African villages—children played on a merry-go-round that pumped groundwater into a storage tank. It attracted media hype and millions in funding. But when invested in at scale, PlayPumps broke down, exhausted the villagers (who had to spin the pumps themselves), and ultimately failed. In contrast, Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennerster’s work on deworming—conducting randomized controlled trials to treat intestinal worms in Kenyan children—was an unglamorous but rigorously tested success. The simple intervention reduced school absenteeism by 25% and improved health and income over a decade later.

These stories dramatize the central theme of the book: emotion can inspire us to act, but evidence ensures we act wisely. The PlayPump represents unreflective altruism, driven by symbolism and emotion but lacking rigorous testing. Deworming programs represent effective altruism—using science to identify the most cost-effective ways to save or improve lives.

The Five Key Questions of Effective Altruism

To help us avoid the pitfalls of well-intentioned but ineffective charity, MacAskill introduces five foundational questions:

• How many people benefit, and by how much?
• Is this the most effective thing you can do?
• Is this area neglected?
• What would have happened otherwise?
• What are the chances of success, and how good would success be?

These questions translate moral intention into actionable strategy, functioning like a compass for doing the most good. They ask you not just to feel altruistic, but to think like a scientist, economist, and strategist—choosing the interventions that matter most and stretching your resources where they make the largest difference.

Evidence Over Emotion: The Power of Scale

One of the earliest chapters, “You Are the 1%,” helps readers confront the immense inequality between the developed and developing worlds. Even if you don’t feel rich, if you live in an affluent nation earning an average income, you are among the richest 5% globally. A single dollar can do over a hundred times more good in a poor country than in a wealthy one—a principle MacAskill calls the 100x Multiplier. This shocking fact shows how small sacrifices can transform lives when directed effectively.

For example, $3,400 donated to the Against Malaria Foundation can prevent a death by malaria, while providing a guide dog to one blind person in a rich nation costs $50,000 and benefits a single life. Both are good deeds; one is hundreds of times more effective. The lesson: don’t just do good—do the most good.

A Framework for Every Decision

Throughout the book, MacAskill applies these five questions to key domains of life—how we give to charity, consume products, choose a career, and decide which global problems deserve our attention. He invites readers to imagine a moral version of scientific inquiry: testing, comparing, and measuring with intellectual honesty and compassion. Whether it’s questioning the value of disaster relief donations, evaluating “ethical consumption” like fair-trade coffee, or considering “earning to give” by pursuing high-income careers with large charitable impact, MacAskill uses evidence and expected value theory to ask, “How can this truly help the most people?”

In essence, Doing Good Better isn’t just about donating more—it’s about donating smarter, living more intentionally, and thinking systematically about compassion. MacAskill calls it a new moral revolution, but it feels equally like a pragmatic manual for modern life: one that treats reasoning as the highest form of empathy.

When you decide to give money, time, or effort to help others, how can you truly know the impact of your actions? MacAskill begins with this question in Chapter 2, where he recounts the story of Dr. James Orbinski during the Rwandan genocide. Orbinski was forced to assign patients numbers—1, 2, or 3—to determine who would be treated first and who could not be saved. It’s a haunting metaphor: when resources are limited, tough choices are inevitable, and failing to choose deliberately is itself a choice.

Valuing Lives with QALYs and WALYs

MacAskill introduces the concept of the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY)—a measure used by health economists to evaluate how much a medical intervention improves both the quantity and quality of life. A full year of perfect health counts as one QALY; half a year or a year lived at half quality counts as 0.5 QALY. This measure lets us compare vastly different interventions: a surgery that restores sight versus a drug that extends life.

If charity programs are to be compared rationally, MacAskill argues, we need common units like QALYs. He demonstrates how fifty thousand dollars spent training a guide dog for a blind person in America might improve one life modestly, while the same sum could fund hundreds of trachoma surgeries in Africa—potentially curing blindness entirely for hundreds of people and yielding thousands of QALYs. The point: do not assume emotional value equals real-world impact.

A New Metric for Altruism

Expanding the idea beyond health, he also proposes “Well-Being-Adjusted Life Years” (WALYs), which include all factors affecting happiness—not just medical ones. This lets you compare actions like improving education, reducing poverty, or preventing loneliness. Though these numbers are imperfect, MacAskill emphasizes that approximating impact is much better than guessing blindly.

Key Principle

“When we fail to quantify, we fail to prioritize. The best intentions without evaluation can be dangerous.” —William MacAskill

Choosing With Empathy and Logic

Effective altruism, as presented here, is not cold utilitarianism but informed compassion. It challenges you to move beyond what feels right to what does right. Emotional giving—like donating to a disaster or disease tied to a personal story—can be good, but it’s often inefficient. Rational giving, grounded in evidence, is pragmatic empathy. As with triage, helping strategically can save far more lives than helping sentimentally.

MacAskill’s conclusion: if you want to help people effectively, ask how many lives you improve, by how much, and at what cost. Once you start measuring outcomes instead of intentions, doing good stops being guesswork and starts becoming a science.

In Chapter 1, “You Are the 1 Percent,” MacAskill reframes global inequality in shocking terms. You may not feel rich, but if you earn around $28,000 a year, you’re among the top 5% of incomes globally. Even someone living at the U.S. poverty line is richer than 85% of people worldwide. This relative wealth, he argues, gives you enormous moral leverage—a concept he calls the 100x Multiplier.

What the 100x Multiplier Means

Because money goes further in poorer countries, one dollar can do roughly one hundred times more good there than in a wealthy nation. That’s not a metaphor—it’s a data-backed reality. Based on economists’ findings that the relationship between income and well-being follows a logarithmic curve, a dollar given to someone living on $1.50 a day increases their happiness and survival prospects a hundred times more than that dollar increases yours. The same money that buys you a coffee could feed a family for days or pay for medicine that prevents blindness.

This multiplier reframes giving not as charity but as investment in global well-being. For MacAskill, realizing this shifts your ethical horizon: to help others effectively, you must recognize that your resources—time, energy, money—are vastly more powerful when deployed where need is greatest.

Crushing the Myth of Futility

People often say, “Why bother? Problems like global poverty are too big for one person to solve.” MacAskill dismantles this mindset: it’s not the size of the bucket that matters but the size of the drop you create. Because the world’s wealth is so unevenly distributed, even small lifestyle adjustments—say, donating 10% of your income—can have an enormous cumulative effect. His organization, Giving What We Can, encourages members to make this lifelong pledge.

Illustrative Comparison

Donating $3,400 to the Against Malaria Foundation can prevent one death—while $3,400 in a developed country might buy a new sofa. In effectiveness terms, it’s like choosing between saving a life and redecorating your living room.

By applying this multiplier logic, MacAskill shows that ordinary people can have extraordinary impact. Each reader, he insists, now lives in a historically unique moment—wealthy enough to do immense good and scientifically equipped to know how. The question is no longer whether you can make a difference, but whether you will make the most efficient one.

One of MacAskill’s most practical contributions lies in teaching readers how to evaluate charities intelligently. In Chapter 7, he dismantles popular myths about giving—like judging charities by their overhead costs or executive salaries—and replaces them with metrics that actually reveal impact. His goal is to move you from fuzzy trust in good intentions to evidence-based decisions that save lives.

The Problem With Overhead Obsession

Most donors fall for what he calls the overhead fallacy: believing a low administrative budget equals a good charity. Drawing examples from Charity Navigator, MacAskill shows that an NGO shipping donated books to African schools (Books for Africa) might spend less than 1% on overhead—but have little evidence that its books improve education outcomes. Meanwhile, Development Media International spends 44% on overhead because it runs national health education campaigns backed by rigorous data. The lesson: efficiency doesn’t mean frugality; it means results.

A Framework for Smart Giving

To replace intuition with evidence, he offers five questions for evaluating charities:

• What does this charity do, specifically?
• How cost-effective is each program?
• How strong is the evidence behind its impact?
• How well is it implemented and monitored?
• Does it need more funding to scale?

Applying this framework, he compares organizations like GiveDirectly (which transfers cash straight to the poor) and DMI (which runs radio health campaigns). Both are effective, but in different ways: GiveDirectly’s results are proven and transparent, while DMI’s modeled campaigns might, if fully realized, save lives at a fraction of the cost. He calls these tough judgment calls “expected value” trade-offs.

Ultimately, MacAskill identifies top organizations—Against Malaria Foundation, Deworm the World Initiative, Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, and GiveDirectly—that deliver astonishing results per dollar. For donors overwhelmed by choice, these names distill the science of giving into clear action: focus on measurable, neglected, and proven solutions.

In Chapter 9, “Don’t Follow Your Passion,” MacAskill upends the romantic advice offered by graduates, YouTube philosophers, and even Steve Jobs. The myth of following your passion, he contends, destroys career potential—not because passion is bad, but because most people’s passions don’t align with the world’s greatest needs. Instead, he argues, you should pursue your personal fit and long-term impact.

From Passion to Purposeful Fit

Research shows that job satisfaction stems not from preexisting passions but from developing mastery, autonomy, and meaning. A passion for art or music doesn’t ensure employment or happiness—most passions aren’t in demand. Instead, MacAskill advises focusing on learning transferable skills that amplify your eventual impact. At his organization 80,000 Hours (named after the average hours in a career), people are coached to think scientifically about career choices: Which path lets me help the most people over my lifetime?

He lays out three factors to assess any career: personal fit (how suited you are), immediate impact (resources or lives you affect directly), and long-term impact (skills and influence that grow exponentially). This approach transforms work from a self-focused search for joy into a strategic plan for good.

Earning to Give and Other Paths

One such strategy is “earning to give.” Instead of working for a nonprofit, you might earn far more in another career and donate half your income to effective causes—potentially outstripping your direct impact by orders of magnitude. MacAskill profiles people like Greg Lewis, a doctor who realized he could save more lives by donating 50% of his salary to global health initiatives than by treating patients himself.

He also showcases public servants like Laura Brown, who chose politics over finance because of its massive upside potential: if just one policymaker passes an effective reform, the payoff could dwarf decades of private donations. These are pragmatic, evidence-based ways to make your career count for the greatest good.

MacAskill’s conclusion: a fulfilling career isn’t about following your bliss—it’s about aligning your talents with humanity’s needs. The irony is that those who follow this path often find deeper passion along the way.

In Chapter 10, MacAskill turns to the question of cause selection—the art of deciding which global problems deserve your limited energy and money. Not all causes are created equal. Some are already saturated with funding, while others languish in obscurity despite enormous potential. The sweet spot, he explains, lies at the intersection of large scale, high tractability, and low attention: problems that are big, solvable, and ignored.

The Three-Part Framework

Effective altruists assess causes by three factors:

• Scale – How many lives are impacted and how deeply?
• Neglectedness – How many resources already address this issue?
• Tractability – How likely are additional resources to make progress?

Using this model, MacAskill compares major causes. Global poverty scores high on all three: it’s massive in scale, underfunded compared to domestic welfare, and highly tractable thanks to proven health interventions. He also spotlights newer frontiers: criminal justice reform in the U.S. (highly tractable now due to political momentum), open borders for labor migration (massive economic gains but politically hard), animal welfare (huge scale, low attention), and preventing global catastrophic risks like pandemics or climate collapse (low probability but enormous stakes).

Choosing Where to Stand

The purpose of cause prioritization isn’t to dismiss popular causes like cancer research or domestic poverty—it’s to reveal opportunities that others overlook. By redirecting even a fraction of philanthropy toward neglected but solvable problems, individuals can multiply their impact many times over.

MacAskill’s final message is one of agency and hope: that clear thinking magnifies compassion. You don’t need to be rich or famous to change the world. You just need to be strategic—and brave enough to focus on what truly helps rather than what merely feels good.