Epistemic status: definitely old hat, certainly not my original thoughts, but you know it’s worth reiterating every now and then.
The Effective Altruism movement in general tends to have problems with feelings of powerlessness. People feel that even if they are on a high-impact track, they still won’t be able to make a dent in the global scale of problems. Even worse, people feel that if they aren’t a genius or a prodigy and can’t get on an extremely high impact track, there’s nothing they can to do contribute.
This feeling of powerlessness can often be obliterated instantly by a quick look at some of the relevant numbers. I kept a note to this effect on my phone for several years – I am now translating into a more public notebook.
It costs about $4000 to distribute enough insecticide-treated bed nets to save one person (on average) from dying of malaria. The average age of death from malaria is about 20 years old, due to the high infant mortality rates from malaria (calculated from “malaria deaths by age group” chart on Our World in Data). Life expectancy in Africa (~90% of malaria deaths are in Africa) is about 62 years. This means it costs $4000 to save 42 years of life on average. This converts to an expense rate of $0.0109/hour.
The average hourly wage in the US is $15.35/hour. This means the average US worker has a leverage factor of 1,412. Take a moment to pause and consider how ridiculous that is. Every hour you can spend working to donate gives someone else that time back, over a thousandfold. If you are only able to donate 10% of your income, this reduces your leverage to a mere 141.2-fold. Nearly six days, for every hour of time you’re able to spare.
And this is the baseline, an option that’s very thoroughly vetted and researched. If you’re willing to tolerate some risk, the leverage factors for various longtermist interventions may blow this out of the water by many orders of magnitude.
Yes, the world is seriously busted in a lot of ways. That means there’s some really big problems humanity is going up against. But it also means there’s all sorts of low hanging fruit scattered about willy-nilly. Effective altruism isn’t, at its core, about high-powered jobs, brilliant inventions, or groundbreaking research. It’s about doing good as effectively as you can. And given the current (crazy! absurd!) margins, you’re able to do an extraordinary amount of good even from a very ordinary position.