The Ledger
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MacAskill: The top charities achieve up to 1000x more positive impact
“We have some charities that can do, you know, hundreds of thousands of times more good than others which is an amazing opportunity if you are trying to do the most good but at the same time is indicative of the fact that it's just very hard to tell between the…”
MacAskill: Direct Cash Transfers Are Extremely Effective and Often Beat Traditional Aid
“The huge amount of spending goes on, and we don't even know whether that spending, such as buying livestock or providing wells or providing textbooks, is actually having more of an impact than simply giving poor people cash, which is the simplest thing to do. …”
MacAskill: Birth country and parental wealth dictate 80% of personal income
“80% of the income that people earn is explained by the country of birth and socioeconomic status of their parents”
MacAskill: The poorest people in the US or Canada are in the top 10-15% globally
“Even the very poor in the United States, for example, or Canada, They're still in the richest 10 to 15% of the world's population”
MacAskill: The 'Scared Straight' juvenile intervention program actively increased crime rates
“And what they discovered was not only was the program ineffective, it was actively harmful. So the juveniles who went through this program would go on to commit more crimes, you know, that's more thefts, more rapes, more murders if they had gone through this p…”
MacAskill: Global health aid massively outperforms economic development aid
“So if you look at the past 50 years of aid spending, the track record of spending on economic development is really very mixed. You know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The track record of spending on global health is just outstanding.”
MacAskill: 21st-century human activity could cause civilizational collapse or extinction
“There's very, very many ways in which the activities that we, that humanity will likely do over the 21st century could lead to global catastrophe, civilizational collapse, or even extinction.”
MacAskill: Saving a child's life with bed nets costs under $10,000
“For example, by buying bed nets and distributing them to those who need them just for the, you know, single digit thousands of dollars, statistically speaking, you can save a child's life.”
MacAskill: Some recent graduates donate roughly $1M annually through high-earning careers
“And I know a number of people who've chosen to do this, and actually just some of whom are just a few years out of college and already are able to donate on the order of a million dollars per year.”
MacAskill: Most people's passions lie in hyper-competitive fields like arts and sports
“When you look at what people are actually passionate about, the vast majority tend to be passionate about things where it's extremely hard to have a promising career. So that's the arts, that's music, that's sport, and that's not a coincidence.”