DOCTOR, NGO WORKER, OR SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY?

WHICH CAREERS DO THE MOST GOOD?

Will CrouchSt Anne’s College

Ben ToddBalliol College

INTRODUCTION Giving What We Can is a society whose members

pledge to give at least 10% (and in some cases over 50%) of their income to the most cost-effective causes.

Drawing on the latest economic research, we’ve found that one can save a life for £300.

By giving 50% of my academic salary, I’ll save 3000 lives.

But could I do more if I pursued a different career?

OVERVIEW OF THIS TALK Part I: How to Think about Careers

Normally, we think that the most ethical career is one in the third sector, directly benefiting people.

We suggest that’s wrong, based on mistakes regarding: indirect benefit; marginal benefit; quantification; and martyrdom.

Part II: High Impact Careers: Which is Best? We look at money-making careers, research

careers and ‘influencing’ careers. We point to the key questions to ask when

deciding between them.

PART I

HOW TO THINK ABOUT CAREERS

CATEGORISING CAREER PATHS

THE STANDARD VIEW

According to the Standard View, the paradigm examples of ethical careers are the ‘direct benefiters’.

But consider the following story...

THE STORY OF THE DOCTOR AND THE ALTRUISTIC BANKER Suppose that Jo becomes a doctor working in

the developing world. She performs 10 life-saving surgeries every week:

THE STORY OF THE DOCTOR AND THE ALTRUISTIC BANKER

Suppose that Lorna becomes an altruistic banker, earns £400k/yr, and donates enough money that she pays for 10 developing-world doctors:

THE STORY OF THE DOCTOR AND THE ALTRUISTIC BANKER

That means100 lives per week would be saved:

THE STORY OF THE DOCTOR AND THE ALTRUISTIC BANKER

DOCTORS, BANKERS, AND OPPORTUNITY COST: THE MORAL

The banker was able to save ten times as many lives as the doctor, even though she wasn’t directly saving any lives in her career.

DOCTORS, BANKERS, AND OPPORTUNITY COST: THE MORAL

The Moral: Ways of indirectly benefiting others, such as earning big and donating, can do much more good than directly benefiting.

MARGINAL BENEFIT The previous story underestimated the

discrepancy between the banker and the doctor.

This is because: had Jo not become that doctor, someone else would have done.

MARGINAL BENEFIT

In contrast, if Lorna had not earned and donated the money, the result would have been fewer doctors.

If she hadn’t become an altruistic banker, all 100 people would have died.

MARGINAL BENEFIT: THE MORAL

The Moral: Do something that wouldn’t have happened anyway.

‘MAKING A DIFFERENCE’: THE FAILURE TO QUANTIFY

Where did we go wrong?

Perhaps we focused on making a difference rather than making the most difference.

Thinking with our gut overlooks the vast discrepancy among different career routes.

‘MAKING A DIFFERENCE’: THE FAILURE TO QUANTIFY

‘MAKING A DIFFERENCE’: THE FAILURE TO QUANTIFY

The Moral: Going with your gut, or relying on heuristics like ‘do what you’re good at’ isn’t enough. Choosing the right career requires research and reflection, and the willingness to take new ideas seriously.

‘MAKING A DIFFERENCE’: MARTYRDOM

Perhaps we assume that doing good must involve self-sacrifice.

But if the altruistic banker earns £6mn over a 30yr career, she could save 10 thousand lives and still have an average salary of £100 000/yr.

‘MAKING A DIFFERENCE’: MARTYRDOM

The Moral: By choosing the right career, you can have a high-flying lifestyle and benefit others far more than you would otherwise have done.

CAUSING HARM?

The most obvious objection to our suggestion is: what if the career you pursue causes harm?

Surely that’s the reason why we shouldn’t go into banking.

CAUSING HARM?

There’s some truth in this objection, but also some considerations need to be born in mind:

Causing harm is an inevitable part of many careers, including working as a doctor or for an NGO.

Not all high-impact careers cause harm. For example: Investment Management Consultancy Accountancy / actuary

CAUSING HARM? And we need to think about what would have

happened if you hadn’t gone into the career.

Suppose that the typical manager in a petrochemical company causes 10 deaths, through his contribution to anthropogenic climate change:

CAUSING HARM? Now suppose that you pursue this career

path, for the high pay.

You, being altruistically minded, will very likely cause less harm than the typical manager of this company:

CAUSING HARM?

Far from harming people, the world is benefited in virtue of you working as a petrochemical engineer. This is a benefit independent of the good that your donations do.

CAUSING HARM?

The Moral: High-impact careers needn’t also involve harming people.

SUMMARY: THE MORALS – PART I

PART II

HIGH IMPACT CAREERS: WHICH IS

BEST?

HIGH IMPACT CAREERS: WHICH IS BEST?

Bearing in mind the morals of part 1...

And bearing in mind that you can save a life for £300...

Which career saves the most lives?

CATEGORISING CAREER PATHS

For most people, probably not

MONEY-MAKING

By pursuing certain careers, one can make a lot of money….

MONEY-MAKINGOwn a BusinessOwn a Hedge Fund

Estimates of average lifetime salary, salaries from prospects.ac.uk or contacts, my estimates of career progression

HOW MUCH COULD YOU MAKE?

Some career paths offer a small chance of making lots and lots of money. e.g. founding a business

– billions?

HOW MUCH COULD YOU MAKE?

Other career paths offer a good salary with high confidence. e.g. GPs can earn ~£3.6m, 2.25x the academic.

Others offer good salaries with high certainty and small chances of very high income. e.g. the starting salary in finance/consulting

(£40-50k) is roughly equal the lifetime average of an academic or teacher. And there’s a tail…

BANKING: OVER A 30 YEAR CAREER

$0

$500,000

$1,000,000

$1,500,000

$2,000,000

$2,500,000

$3,000,000

$3,500,000

$4,000,000

Source: http://www.careers-in-finance.com/ibsal.htm

HOW MUCH COULD YOU MAKE? If you level-out low in the ranks of:

investment bankers; management consultants; investment analysts; traders; barristers

Your lifetime earnings would be ~£6m (2x the doctor, 4x the academic).

That means 12,000 lives saved and 4x the income to live on.

At the top end, lifetime earnings can reach well beyond £20m (~10x the academic).

MONEY-MAKINGMoney-making is an attractive option.

It’s attainable. Almost any Oxford graduate can make a lot of money,

if they put in enough effort.

It’s high impact with relatively high certainty. The benefits are quantified, and to be had with high

confidence compared to most forms of career impact.

It’s flexible. One can contribute to the most effective causes one

knows at the time.

We’ll use it as our baseline.

HOW MUCH MONEY COULD YOU MAKE? Watch out for the sunk cost fallacy. Sunk

costs have already been paid. Future decisions should depend on prospective costs compared to benefits.

It may be better to start a new career path.

GWWC Member, Mark Lee, is terminating his philosophy PhD to take up corporate law…

RESEARCH Some researchers have

done huge amounts of good.

Norman Borlaug, in developing disease resistant wheat, directly saved 250 million people.

Even taking into account marginal benefit, his impact is likely in the tens of millions.

But some research isn’t much use.

And for most scientists, there is a significant marginal benefit problem. The person who would replace them is almost as

good.

Source: Power-law distributions for the citation index of scientific publications and scientists Braz. J. Phys. vol.35 no.4a São Paulo Dec. 2005

Top 0.01% of papers cited 100-1000x more than median

RESEARCH And watch out for bias!

The Illusion of Superiority. Only a very small proportion of researchers

produce high-impact work. We systematically overestimate our ability. e.g.:

87% of a sample of Stanford MBA students rated themselves above the median in terms of their academic performance.

25% percent of a sample of SAT-takers put themselves in the top 1% in terms of leadership abilities.

SHOULD I RESEARCH? Remember that a money-maker can easily

save 12,000 lives.

For a research career to have the chance of being this high impact you need to:

1. Be near the top of your year.2. Consider re-training to work on a high impact

area.

Areas for consideration: cost-effectiveness research, policy development, development economics, ethics, medical research, technology.

CASE STUDY: GAVERICK MATHENY

Friend of GWWC.

Was an architect; discovered the Disease Control Priorities Project (cost-effectiveness analysis).

Quit architecture, retrained as an economist, worked on the second edition of DCP.

RESEARCH

The Moral: If you think that you are near the top of your year group, consider going into high-value research. Be prepared to retrain.

INFLUENCING

One can influence other people to do high-impact activities.

Consider, for example, the canny persuader. She decides not to make money, but instead to persuade others to make money in order to give it away. In one year, she persuades 10 Oxford students to become altruistic bankers.

INFLUENCING Over the course of their careers:

An altruistic banker can easily save ten thousand lives.

A canny influencer could easily convince one hundred people to become altruistic bankers.

So one canny influencer would have saved one million lives.

Which would look like this:

INFLUENCING Surely this is a definitive argument,

therefore, for becoming an influencer rather than a money-maker?

Well.. not quite. One can influence people to make money and donate it. But one can also pay people to influence people to make money and donate it. There’s a regress…

THE INFLUENCER VS MONEY-MAKER PROBLEM This is up for debate, but I think the most

relevant consideration is the first step: If I spend x hours, can I persuade people to donate

more money to the most cost effective charities than I could earn at work?

If you persuade one person per year to join GWWC, that causes a ~£50k annual donation (conservative estimate).

Given how few people even consider doing this, for most of us, persuading people to donate to high impact charities is probably the way to do most good

INFLUENCER VS MONEY-MAKERBut there are some important caveats:

Probably the most effective way to persuade people to earn money and donate, is to do so yourself!

Very few people go into money-making jobs with the purpose of donating to charity – big influence!

Money-makers will find it easier to meet and influence other high earners.

DIRECT INFLUENCE Besides persuading people to donate, there

are other very high impact forms of influencing.

Cost-effectiveness is so un-stressed that the best health charities are 10,000x more effective than the worst.

Influencing NGO and government policy could be very high impact.

POLITICS Provided you meet minimum standards of ‘charisma’,

as Oxford graduates, you have good odds of becoming an MP if you go for it.

By holding out for increases in the aid budget, increases in cost-effectiveness, policy reform supporting development, and so on, you could have a huge direct impact.

UK Aid budget is ~£9bn. A 3.3% increase could save 1mn lives. If you have a 1% chance of personally making the difference, you save 10,000 expected lives.

You also have a platform from which to indirectly influence.

OTHER RELEVANT CONSIDERATIONS: THE RETURN OF THE STANDARD VIEW Talents, Passions

These are still relevant, insofar as, within a career, you are more likely to do well if you are naturally talented or interested in the area.

This reduces the marginal benefit problem – if you’re high achieving, the person who would replace you is not as good.

Risk of Burnout This is very important: your estimates of how much

good each career does must be discounted by how likely you are to give up and change career.

SOME KEY QUESTIONS How much money could you earn and

donate?

Are you a gifted researcher?

Could you influence policy?

How can you best persuade people to donate?

Some combination of these?

CONCLUSION: THE MORALS – PART I

CONCLUSION: THE MORALS – PART II

FINAL CONCLUSION

You can do huge amounts of good if you really aim for it. But the means to that end are not intuitive.

If you are convinced to any extent by the arguments given above, please come and speak to us.