Doctor, NGO Worker, or Something Else Entirely? Which Careers do the most good?

1. Doctor, NGO Worker, or Something Else Entirely?Which Careers do the most good? Ben Todd Balliol College Will Crouch St Anne’s College

2. 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?

3. 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.

4. Part IHow to think about Careers

5. Categorising Career Paths

6. The Standard View • According to the Standard View, the paradigm examples of ethical careers are the ‘direct benefiters’. • But consider the following story...

7. 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:

8. 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:

9. The story of the doctor and the altruistic banker • That means100 lives per week would be saved:

10. The story of the doctor and the altruistic banker

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

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

16. ‘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.

17. ‘Making a Difference’: The Failure to Quantify

18. ‘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.

19. ‘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.

20. ‘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.

21. 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.

22. 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

23. 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:

24. 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:

25. 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.

26. Causing Harm? The Moral: High-impact careers needn’t also involve harming people.

27. Summary: The Morals – Part I

28. Part IIHigh Impact Careers: Which is Best?

29. 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?

30. Categorising Career Paths For most people, probably not

31. Money-Making • By pursuing certain careers, one can make a lot of money….

32. Money-Making Own a Business Own a Hedge Fund Estimates of average lifetime salary, salaries from prospects.ac.uk or contacts, my estimates of career progression

33. 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?

34. 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…

35. BANKING: OVER A 30 YEAR CAREER Source: http://www.careers-in-finance.com/ibsal.htm

36. 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).

37. Money-Making Money-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.

38. 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…

39. 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.

40. 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.

41. Top 0.01% of papers cited 100-1000x more than median Source: Power-law distributions for the citation index of scientific publications and scientists Braz. J. Phys. vol.35 no.4a São Paulo Dec. 2005

42. 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.

43. 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: Be near the top of your year. Consider re-training to work on a high impact area. Areas for consideration: cost-effectiveness research, policy development, development economics, ethics, medical research, technology.

44. 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.

45. 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.

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

47. 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.

50. 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: