Intro. [Recording date: May 6, 2026.]
Russ Roberts: Today is May 6th, 2026, and my guest is Benjamin Todd. He is the founder of 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit that helps people find careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems. And he is the author of the book, 80,000 Hours: How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good, which is our subject for today. Ben, welcome to EconTalk.
Benjamin Todd: Hi. Thanks for having me. I’ve listened to many of your episodes for well over 10 years, so it’s an honor to be here.
Russ Roberts: Oh, many thanks.
1:10
Russ Roberts: Let’s start with the title. Why is your organization called 80,000 Hours, and why is the book called 80,000 Hours?
Benjamin Todd: 80,000 hours is the length of a typical career. So, that’s 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year for 40 years. And, the idea of the name is this is the biggest decision you’ll ever make, especially from the perspective of your impact on the world.
Russ Roberts: And, I’m going to start with–this is the hardest question I’m going to ask, probably, in the whole conversation. Why should I care? It’s a tough question. It may be self-evident to many people. Maybe to most people. But I’m going to challenge you. Shouldn’t I just try to make as much money as possible? Be happy? What’s wrong with that?
Benjamin Todd: Well, to some degree, it’s just true that many people do care. And our focus is: If you do want to make a difference, then how can you go about it more effectively? And helping people to do that.
But, if I was trying to convince someone, then I think the basic case is just it’s possible to have a much bigger impact than many people realize. It’s really possible to save hundreds of people’s lives over your career, work on really crucial issues like what’s happening now with AI [artificial intelligence], and preventing future pandemic. And, there’s actually things you can do about this.
And, you can have a career that is–most–over half of students from top universities go into law, consulting, finance, and big tech. Which often end up, kind of, very–they end up working very hard and in work–it’s often quite boring. And, it’s possible to do something that’s both better for the world and more fulfilling and interesting personally, as well.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I often discourage [?] people from doing those standard things. Part of it, which I think you’ll agree–you can tell me–some of those things don’t always make the world a better place. So, it’s one thing to say, ‘I’m not going to make a big impact in a positive way.’ It’s another to say, ‘I’m going to make a negative impact, but I’m going to make a lot of money along the way,’ right? So, I think the idea that you should choose your career carefully is a very good one.
3:35
Russ Roberts: You say early on in the book–and I think you’re 100% right–you say most career advice didn’t seem to be based on any research. You want to elaborate on that?
Because I think most people, young people, especially when they’re starting in the very beginning–forget mid-career moves–they want help; and there’s very little of it.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah, exactly. And, you’d think for such an important decision that people are making over decades of their life ahead of them, this would be one of the things that society would really put the most effort into, is figuring out how to best support people in making this decision. And, a lot of the advice ends up being not much more than slogans like, ‘Follow your passion,’ or ‘Keep your options open.’ And, the advice that there is, is often–there’s quite a lot of advice about, say, how to apply to a consulting job and how to do that process, but much less about how to figure out which paths are worth going down in the first place.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. And, I’ve written about this as well: it’s the things we know about careers apply to other people–not to you, the listener, the young person, whatever–and the joy someone gets from something may not be joyful to you. The drudgery of it may be soul-deadening to you. Other people may find it bearable. So, it’s a very difficult decision.
But part of it, what makes it easier, as you argue in the book, is it’s not the last time you’re going to make that decision. You don’t have to feel locked into a career. So, talk about the general strategy that you suggest people follow.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, that’s one way the name is a little bit misleading, in that a career is not a single decision you do. It’s ultimately a series of next steps, and it’s very possible to build up a great career by–as long as each step you learn more, you do a bit of good, you figure out more about what fits you–it’s possible to build a good career over time, even if you have no idea where it’s leading. And that’s a message many people find very comforting because the kind of people come in thinking that they need to find the single right career for them, and that’s going to be it for the rest of their lives, but that’s not the case.
But, yeah, the very broad level, one way of seeing the advice would be three key stages. So, exploring promising paths, trying out things; and then building valuable skills; and then using those skills to tackle problems that are meaningful and also get whatever you personally want out of your career.
6:30
Russ Roberts: I don’t spend, I don’t think, any time on behalf of the idea of creating something that brings joy or satisfaction or comfort. The book is mainly based around problems that the world faces, and economics under certain assumptions which don’t hold, so let’s just start with that. But, under certain assumptions, your salary is related to how much value you create in the world. Again, lots of footnotes, caveats, and so on. But that’s sometimes true. And, so, the idea–I would always tell my students: Do not take the job that pays the most money. That’s a bad rule of life to follow.
And, it would certainly be untrue that the job that pays the most money creates the most value. That’s not true; but there’s sometimes a relationship. And you don’t make any defense of that–of the idea of using your talents and your 80,000 hours to delight or to bring comfort or to solve a problem for an individual. You’re very focused on big problems. Do you want to say anything on behalf of the smaller stuff or defend the focus on the bigger problems?
Benjamin Todd: Well, maybe it’s worth clarifying. I do think your own personal fulfillment in the career is really important, and that’s what the first chapter is about, the key ingredients of a fulfilling career. And we have five I talk about there; and your positive impact is one of them. But then, yeah, when it comes to your positive impact, we argue the first key thing to think of there is which problems you’re focusing on. And, in particular, we argue we’re focusing on big and neglected problems.
And, I agree there is a correlation between the income of a job and its positive impact on society–though again, with a lot of caveats–though I do think if you’re really thinking about which things could have the most impact, that correlation is very weak because the most-neglected issues are just things that lie totally out of the market. So, we talk about the impact of our actions today on future generations as one area, or we also talk about factory farming, and factory-farmed animals don’t participate in the market. So, there’s little reason to expect if I just make money that that will help the trillion or so factory-farmed animals.
Russ Roberts: Trillion is a big number, right? And you talk about that in the book.
I think it’s worse than the imperfect correlation between salary and producing value. I think the way I would put it in its starkest terms is that: the market rewards people for giving people what they want. Sometimes what they want is not attractive in general. Sometimes what they want imposes costs on other people that they don’t take account of. Sometimes what they want is the result of regulations or perverse regulations that incentivize destructive behavior on the part of lawyers, financiers, financial players, and so on. But, I think–
Benjamin Todd: Stuff that’s addictive as well–
Russ Roberts: Addictive. Well, I meant that in the first category. You can defend it. Economists do sometimes. I have, but I’m less comfortable with that as I get older–the fact that somebody wants something that could kill them. Sometimes–I try to be respectful of their desires, but I also understand that sometimes those desires are literally self-destructive.
But I’m just thinking about the more–let’s take a silly example, maybe, of Jeff Bezos. So, I have a lot of gratitude towards Jeff Bezos. He has this idea called Amazon. It’s a loser, literally. They lose tons of money for a long, long time. But ultimately he has given the world–forget the rest of the stuff. We can debate a thousand things he’s done as good or bad or indifferent. But the idea that he has made it inexpensive to acquire books, I deeply appreciate. But, is that a life well-lived in your view, in the view of 80,000 Hours? Just that part, again, you can–
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. It struck me during COVID [Coronavirus Disease] when everywhere was sold out of toilet paper, I was still able to get some on Amazon. And that was impressive.
So, I think obviously, there’s a lot of controversy around Amazon, but just in terms of the product itself: I mean, I think Bezos is a particularly good example, but people do often not consider the counterfactuals in these cases. Because if you have a winner-takes-all market, then whoever gets there first captures the whole market, and so they will make huge profits. But, if they hadn’t done that, someone else would have done it at some point afterwards.
I mean, I think it’s very clear for cases like social media where there were so many different social media sites, and one eventually won–in, like, the case of Facebook. But, I mean, the scale is so large that it’s still probably a significant impact, even just speeding it up a little bit.
But then, the other thought that comes to mind for me is just: he could be having far more impact on top of that by using the money really effectively that he’s earned. And so, this is like the idea of earning to give that we also talk about.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. We’ll come back to that. It’s a really important idea.
13:09
Russ Roberts: I just want to talk about the, just for now, the direct impact of devoting your life or your daily life, when you’re in a particular job, to a particular function. I would say it this way; I think this is generally a problem with a utilitarian approach, which tends to emphasize things that can be measured. So, I would suggest–again, I’m going to just assume that Jeff Bezos, let’s say, he starts–which he did as a bookseller–and, let’s say, he never did anything else. He never diversified into toilet paper or the two zillion other things that he’s done. And, again, there’s lots of controversy. Some of it I think is incorrect, but some of it maybe is justified.
But, let’s say, all he did–and for me, this is not a small thing–all he did was to give people pleasure from having more access to books. Sometimes, that’s for people who live far away from a bookstore. Sometimes, it’s to the ease of which you could get the book. Sometimes, it was the price of the book, although in the early days, I think he subsidized it. He was especially using the money of his investors to make it cheaper for me to acquire the books that I love. But he doesn’t save any lives in this story, right? And, he’s a talented man, and you could judge him. I won’t. But I think one could–you could perhaps–judge him for a failure to devote his life to something more significant than less expensive books. But I wouldn’t. And, do you want to make that case? Or, do you disagree? Do you think what he did was important? If that was all he did, would you say that was not an important thing he did or use of his skills?
Benjamin Todd: I mean, even thinking even more broadly than books in particular, I mean, I do agree making the world wealthier is better, and it’s not that you only have to save lives. In general, as the world has got wealthier, that’s had lots of other good consequences. So, simply contributing to that does help. Though again, I mean, I think ultimately it would come down to the scale of both things. And, for many people, I think there’s much more impactful things they can do than just running a business. But I definitely don’t want to say there’s, like, only one way to contribute.
Russ Roberts: Personally, I would value very highly someone being able to start a business that provides meaningful work to lots of people. And, that solves a very small problem, which is: opportunities for people to use their skills and so on. And, you can react to that if you want. But I’m also happy to turn to two pieces of advice you give, which are: ‘Don’t chase money,’ and ‘Don’t chase ease.’ I think a lot of people chase both of those. Why shouldn’t they?
Benjamin Todd: Well, yeah. I mean, many people say just money doesn’t matter happiness as well. And, I think that’s also wrong. And, I think if we try and look at all the evidence on this, money makes you happier but only a little, is how I sum it up.
And so, I mean there were these papers that also claimed once you hit a certain level of income–like, I think it was $75,000–there’s no further benefit. And, I also think that’s probably wrong. It’s probably a kind of logarithmic relationship for quite a long way. But that does mean that it’s after around $100,000 a year in the United States, it’s just not making that much difference to your life satisfaction or happiness.
So, I think around that point, it just starts to become not a very important goal compared to other things.
And, for example, I think a thing that really drives people’s job satisfaction is: On a very hour to hour basis, how engaging do they find the work? And, do they get into a sense of flow?
But this tends to be pretty overlooked, I think, when people think about what makes for a good job. They tend to kind of think of, like: What would people think of me if I had this career and this more far mode type picture of things? But, your actual satisfaction is much more driven by the hour-to-hour basis.
Russ Roberts: You also say, Don’t follow your passion.’ What’s wrong with that? People give that advice all the time. I agree. I think it’s kind of mindless and dangerous, but what’s your take on it? What’s your take on it?
Benjamin Todd: Well, I mean, the thing that’s correct about it is that being intrinsically motivated is really good. But then, it’s then interpreted as the prescription to find that is to think about what your biggest interests are, which almost all young people say is sport, art, and music. And that’s in surveys, which is not surprising. And then, the key to find a fulfilling career is to find a career that matches your particular hobbies or interests. And, that’s just a very limiting view. Like, a lot of people, they think, ‘Well, I love literature, so I need to become a writer in order to have a fulfilling career.’ And, there’s actually probably many more paths that they could consider that they would find fulfilling as well.
And, by really narrowing themselves down, they’ve cut off a lot of options. And in fact, they probably even led themselves into the most competitive areas because most people are passionate about the same things. And, yeah, we also find only a couple of percent of jobs in the economy are in arts, sports, and music. So, you’ve got the majority of people trying to crowd into a small range of fields.
Russ Roberts: And of course, the ones that successfully crowd in there are passionate about it usually, and they’ll tell you how great it is, and they’ll tell you to follow your passion. Which is really bad advice, because they’re not typical. They’re the outliers who made it. The ones who didn’t, we don’t–they usually come don’t to the platform.
Benjamin Todd: There’s a big problem with a lot of careers advice is it’s basically just based on a bunch of stories of successful people.
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
19:46
Russ Roberts: So, I like your summary. I very much like your summary of what a person should think about in terms of the job itself. We’ll come back to the question of what that job should be focused on. But, you talk about the predictors of job satisfaction, which are: Freedom to decide how to perform your work. I think that’s really important in the day-to-day, hourly, hour-to-hour part of it. Clear tasks with the well-defined start and end–lovely. Variety in the nature of those tasks. And: Feedback so you know how well you’re doing. And then, you talk about what then matters is that the work is engaging, and that’s those factors.
It helps others that you’re good at it, and you have supportive colleagues–or, I would say pleasant colleagues, delightful colleagues, funny colleagues, kind colleagues. But, who you work alongside matters a great deal. And, I think people tend not to think about that, especially when they interview for the job, they have a very romantic ideal. And they’ll tell you, ‘I’ve always wanted to be a,’ and then fill-in-the-blank, ‘that job’; but they didn’t think about what it’s like to be a fill-in-the-blank alongside people who are not nice to you, or whatever else is wrong with that actual version of that job. But, talk about in general, those kind of issues and why they’re important.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. I think something I find really interesting about those ingredients is so much of them are about the context in which you’re doing the work rather than the work itself or the job title. And, it’s very possible you could be doing something that sounds quite boring, like financial admin. But, if it’s as part of a great team and you’re knocking off tasks and it’s in pursuit of a meaningful goal–it’s for a charity you’re excited about–then that can be really engaging. While at the same time, you could love motocross racing but have a really bad boss and then be really miserable, even though you’re working in the area you’re passionate about.
And, this actually means people have more options than they think because if you can find those conditions for satisfaction in many other paths and fields than you might first think that you need to go down. And, another very common thing is someone’s done a biology major and they think, ‘Well, I need to work within biology.’ But, most people don’t work within the field of their major, and they actually have probably a much wider range of options than they’re thinking.
Russ Roberts: And of course, this has implications for lessons in leadership and management, being a boss. Again, totally independent of your field or the organization’s purpose or its goals: Giving people freedom to decide how to perform their work, giving them clear tasks with well-defined start and end, allowing them some variety, and giving them feedback that tells them they’re doing well when they’re doing it well is a very, very good menu for how to be a successful leader.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, there’s quite a bit of research about this. It’s called job crafting. So, trying to design the role so that it is more engaging and more meaningful.
Russ Roberts: When I started my job here as president of Shalem College, I saw part of my–I don’t know if I’m good at it or not, but I did see part of it is making sure that the people who work alongside me use their superpowers as opposed to their not-so-superpowers, right? A lot of people have great gifts; and for a variety of reasons, their job doesn’t allow them to use them. Or worse, they’re doing a bunch of different tasks. Just as an aside, I think one of the challenges of being in an organization, any organization, is that we all are tempted to do what we like and not necessarily what has the most impact on the organization. And the unpleasant tasks, if they become a significant portion of our time spent on that job, we might quit or leave or just have very low satisfaction and it would degrade our productivity and the rest of the tasks. But there’s also the opportunity to reassign people to things that they’re relatively good at and get satisfaction from.
So, it’s a constant. I think a fascinating issue of workplace culture to think about how to enhance that component of how people’s skills are applied to different tasks and to make sure they relatively closely stick to those tasks so that the organization benefits as well.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, it’s alluding to the question of personal fit; and in our advice as well, we say generate a short list of things that you think would be good for the world and fulfilling, but then after that, really try to choose between that based on which one you’ll be best at.
24:55
Russ Roberts: So, let’s turn to some of the specifics. One of my favorite things in the book is the–it’s a contrarian–it’s a very delightful chapter. You basically suggest, argue that being a doctor is not so helpful. Most people associate being in healthcare as the most important thing you could–if you had to choose anything, you’re going to be in the medical profession and what could be more valuable, important, and helping of people than being a doctor.
So, make the case. I wish you’d chosen a different field, but that’s okay because you could have written about a lot of different fields that people have a misapprehension about, but it’s fun to choose medicine because most people assume that that’s a high-value field for making the world a better place. Why doesn’t it? Make the case.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. I mean, I want to clarify, I do think compared to most jobs that people could take, it is having an important positive impact. But my claim is someone who would be capable of doing that could have quite a lot more impact again. But, yeah, some of the basic reasons, I mean the first is that healthcare hasn’t actually increased our lifespans that much. Most of the increase in life expectancy is–
Russ Roberts: Don’t tell anybody. That’s a terrible thing to say.
Benjamin Todd: Well, it has increased them by a couple of years, which is very valuable; but a lot of the increase is just from public health and sanitation and just generally being wealthier–all these other things. And then, those extra couple of years we get from healthcare, that’s not just doctors: that’s also spread across nurses and all the hospitals, the physical equipment that is needed as well, it’s shared.
But then, yeah, maybe the most important thing is just diminishing returns. So, there’s a very clear graph if you look at just the number of doctors in the population against the amount of ill health in that population. And, you very clearly see early on, each extra doctor is making a huge, huge impact. But it very quickly levels off and pretty much all rich countries are at the level where it’s looking very flat.
And, some people, I mean, I think Robin Hanson has claimed that, in the United States anyway, it’s actually–the curve bends down, and marginal healthcare is even slightly counterproductive because of all the side effects. So, I mean, I don’t go that far in the book. I’m claiming that it’s still positive, but just quite diminishing.
And then, the third effect is: if you don’t go to medical school, there’s a fixed number of places so someone else will take that place. And, that doesn’t mean you’re having no impact, because if you’re the person who got the place, then presumably the medical school thinks you’ll make a better doctor. So, you’re increasing the supply of doctors and that should mean that the field is improved overall. But, again, it’s also attenuating the impact, compared to the kind of intuitive view that it’s, like, ‘Well, I’m doing these heart surgeries so I’m saving these lives,’ but those really crucial surgeries would have been done by someone else and the extra impact is more like whatever the extra marginal thing that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
So, I mean, this is obviously probably uncertain to within an order of magnitude, but we come down with an estimate of saving about one life every 10 years of work as a doctor in the United Kingdom. Which I think is still a meaningful impact, but I think it’s a lot less than people intuitively expect.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I would just, again, defend the smaller interventions. My wife and I were in London; my wife stepped off the curb. Curbs in London are not the same height as curbs in the United States. She felt a wrenching pain, went to the NHS [National Health Service]. A nice man told her she’s fine. And, that was nice.
Now, the other thing I would just add is that if I take someone else’s place, I like to think of it as–and this is particularly true in medicine where the number of medical schools is controlled by regulation. There really is roughly a fixed number and if you don’t take it, there are plenty who will. But you should dedicate yourself to being a kinder doctor, a more effective doctor, more understanding doctor, a doctor who delivers sometimes bad news with a full heart and with love and empathy.
So, I think even in jobs where the impact is smaller than lifesaving, it’s not negligible. I think all of us have the opportunity, whatever we do, to make a difference in the lives of the people we interact with around us. Again, usually not lifesaving, but life-enhancing. You could just make someone’s day. That would be an achievement.
Benjamin Todd: Well, yeah–I mean, I do think it’s important to be a nice person in your day-to-day life. Though, I guess one thought that does come to mind is we are facing these civilizational challenges and there’s a lot we can do about them. And, so, I think it is really important to think about that big picture as well.
30:47
Russ Roberts: So, let’s turn to that. Most people would agree on some of those. It’s a tricky thing to talk about. Most people would agree on some of the existential challenges the human race faces. One that you mention in the book a number of times–which is funny–it’s just not as salient today as it was five years ago–which is climate change. For no good reason, right? The world has gotten still very warm. The winters are still very warm. But it’s been pushed out of the headlines by a number of more clickable things. Let’s just leave it at that.
But, just to make a perverse–use a perverse–example: I have always believed it might be false, but it’s just an example of the challenges of this kind of large cultural social problem–that Al Gore, who was a very passionate advocate for fighting climate change, may have damaged that cause because he’s a politician. I think because of his high-profile position in the Democratic Party, Vice President, for better or for worse, a lot of people said, ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Because he’s a politician and he’s, quote, “wrong” because he’s a Democrat.’ The same would be true of Republicans.
My joke–it’s not a joke–my claim during COVID was that if Donald Trump had been a passionate advocate of wearing masks and keeping a six-foot distance from people around you–which he for better or for worse, went in the other direction–I think that would have made a difference. Forget whether it was good or bad, but it would have changed how people responded.
So, I think my point is simple. It’s really hard: Wanting to change the world and make it better is not enough.
Obviously–what I love about what you do and people who worry about these things, trying to quantify it and noting that feelings are insufficient–that actual impact is what counts–is, I think, the most important contribution of the effective altruism movement and others of which–I don’t know–I think your book is in that spirit. But it’s really hard, and wanting to make a difference and that there’s research that suggests you’re making a difference is often not enough.
So, it’s a very hard problem. And, I’ll confess that I think, because it’s a hard problem, there is a temptation to say, ‘Let’s not worry about it.’ You could easily–I think I’d like you to make the case that you should worry even more.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. I would say that’s also a theme of the book–is how it is difficult to make an impact. And, I use the example of Scared Straights, which is this huge federal program where youths who had committed misdemeanors were taken to prisons in the United States and shown around; and the hope was to scare them onto the straight and narrow. And, there were a lot of trials done on this; and they found that afterwards, the kids did actually commit less crimes. So it looked like it was working. But, when they compared it to the control group who’d never gone through, the decrease was less. So, they were actually committing more crimes compared to the counterfactual.
And, I mean, people don’t know why. Maybe it was normalizing life in jail and maybe they looked up to the criminals or it wasn’t as bad as they thought or something like that, but–
Russ Roberts: They got career advice that was helpful to them from the criminals. Yeah.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, this program persisted for decades and received huge amounts of funding and the people involved all thought it was working. There was an award-winning documentary about it. And there’s a lot of examples like this.
35:20
Russ Roberts: At the same time, there are causes that seem to be obviously helped by various interventions that actually in this case [the Scared Straight case–Econlib Ed.], for example, do not. But there’s so many things that are done in the world that are good that don’t get enough attention. And one of the values of your book is highlighting of people who made an enormous difference and through relatively–they’re not geniuses per se. They’re not everyday people necessarily: they’re not average. But they’re not Albert Einstein and they’re not Steve Jobs. They’re not extraordinary. They’re just sometimes dogged, persistent.
And, I wanted to highlight one of them just because it seems to me that one of the virtues of your book, which I think we need a lot more of, is lauding people who make people’s lives better, who aren’t the famous people, aren’t the celebrities, aren’t the glamorous people.
And, the one that sticks out in your book for me was David Nalin. I don’t know if that’s how you pronounce his name. Now I’ve never heard of him. I’ve heard of what he figured out, but I would suggest that most people don’t know about either of those. So, talk about him; and I think giving glory to people who make a difference is a very useful thing.
Benjamin Todd: And, Nalin also goes back to our point about doctors where my estimate was for a typical doctor, but he went to work in India. I think it was in refugee camps where a lot of people were dying from cholera and diarrhea, and tried to figure out–
Russ Roberts: Dehydration, mostly–
Benjamin Todd: Exactly. And then, trying to figure out what could he do about this huge problem.
And, at the time, they would use intravenous drips to treat dehydration, but that’s pretty difficult to do in a refugee camp because you just don’t have the equipment. But, he figured out that actually if people just simply drank a solution of water and salt in the right concentration, it would be far more hydrating than just drinking normal water and would reduce mortality almost as much as the full intravenous drips with the bags of saline shipped in and all of that.
And so, by figuring out there was this much cheaper way to deliver this–I forget the exact numbers, but I mean, the number of children who die from diarrhea and the dehydration that results has reduced by millions per year from this intervention being scaled up across the world. And, again, someone would have figured this out eventually. So, it’s not that Nalin is 100% of that impact.
Russ Roberts: [?] Yeah.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. But, even just if we’re talking about millions of lives per year, just even a small speed up of that is a huge impact.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. Again, it seems to me we should be spending some resources saluting such people. Another example which comes to mind is Semmelweis [Ignaz Semmelweis], who figured out that it’s a really good idea if you’re a doctor who works in delivering babies that, after you go to the morgue, you should wash your hands before you go deliver the baby. And, doctors didn’t think about this; and women of course died horribly in childbirth because of puerperal fever, which came from the contamination from the corpses. And, finding that out–I’m sure we would have discovered it, as you point out–but discovering it sooner than later is incredibly important.
And tragically, even after it was discovered, it was basically ignored because Semmelweis was a difficult person and the studies that he did to make the case, he didn’t do them very rigorously because it was so obvious to him. And that allowed people to dismiss the findings for years. I mean, it’s heartbreaking.
So, I think it’s really important, as our culture, as society, to honor these people. We give out Nobel Prizes and fame, but we ought to give for these people who don’t get Nobel Prizes, they should get some fame and glory for their work.
Benjamin Todd: And in a way, we sometimes almost do the opposite, where someone like Mark Zuckerberg will spend $50 million on a house or a yacht and no one remarks on that. But, if he says he’s donating loads of money to medical research, then he gets a huge amount of hate for that. And, you can have your objections to income inequality and so on, but I think we should still be encouraging people to do more good when they can.
Russ Roberts: Why does he get criticized for donating to medical research?
Benjamin Todd: I think people just–they hate the idea of billionaire philanthropy and–you know, it’s non-democratic–and yeah, I’ve seen a lot of news stories about, does he have ulterior motives? Is this just trying to make himself look good? People are very suspicious about it.
Russ Roberts: I would just say if there are any billionaires listening now who are thinking about giving to medical research, they could instead donate it to Shalem College in Jerusalem. You’ll be applauded and honored for it. I’m just throwing that out there.
Oh, one other example before I forget–again, someone I’d never heard of; this makes me sad and that these people should be the household names that Mark Zuckerberg and others are–is Karl Landsteiner. Talk about what Karl Landsteiner did. Incredibly important. Sees a secret.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah, that was the discovery of blood groups. And so, before that, if you lost a lot of blood during an operation, they could give you blood, but sometimes that would also kill you because it would not be compatible. And then, he realized that people had fell into certain groups and if you matched the group, you could make transfusions safe. Which again, has enabled many millions of operations every year to take place that would have been too dangerous otherwise.
Russ Roberts: Amazing.
42:22
Russ Roberts: So, let’s turn to earning to give, which–explain what it is and what’s good about it, maybe what is not so good, and of course is sometimes criticized for what we just alluded to.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, just in the overall framework, we try and get people to think about which problems are biggest and most neglected. And then, the second stage in terms of your impact would be trying to find ways you can contribute to those on a bigger scale. And, the idea is to think broadly about all the different ways you can contribute. And, one of these options that is rarely–if you want to get advice on how to have a socially impactful career, then people will say charity, become a social worker, maybe a doctor. They won’t say go into the corporate sector and donate the money.
But some people are a good fit for these. They want to do these careers anyway. If they can do it in a way that–I wouldn’t say to do it in a harmful career, but something that’s morally neutral or ideally it’s a positive, it’s building a useful business, then you can donate some of that to enable other people who are maybe a better fit for working directly, say, in charities, to have a big impact.
And, yeah, in the book, I use the example of Fred Mulder, who was a student in Oxford and really wanted to make an impact and was considering becoming a social worker, but he thought this would be a terrible fit for him: he wouldn’t be able to hack it.
And then, instead, he was on holiday in Paris, and he uncovered this chest of Picasso prints, and he realized that these could be resold in the United Kingdom at a big markup. So, he actually put his graduate stipend into buying them and then turned them for a profit. And, this eventually turned into a career as an art dealer over many decades of career; and then he donated and he also set up an organization called the Funding Network, which is a kind of giving circle where it’s encouraging other people to donate. And they’ve raised many millions of dollars for charity.
And, by doing that, he’s enabled tens of people to take jobs in the charity sector who wouldn’t have been able to get those otherwise and he thinks had a much bigger impact than he could have by doing it himself.
Russ Roberts: That’s very cool. But as you say, some people are critical of wealthy people giving away money–because they control what it’s spent on sometimes, or they care about–they give it to sectors that may not be as needy as others. What advice do you have for people on how they should think about their personal charitable giving?
Benjamin Todd: Well, it’s really important to think about which place is most effective to donate to. For the reasons we’ve been discussing, many charities probably don’t have that much impact; but we think some do have a really big impact.
And the brief advice would be, again: Think about which problems are biggest and most neglected in the world, and then think about which organizations you think are doing really good work in those problems, and then try and find those that have a room for funding. So, they have lots of people who want to work for them, but they don’t have the money for the salaries. And, that would be the framework for thinking about where to donate.
Yeah. I mean, in the book I use as a lower bound–I think you can do a lot more than this–but, as a lower-bound estimate on your impact, you could give to GiveDirectly, which just literally transfers the money via mobile phone to some of the world’s poorest people who typically live on about $500 of income per year. And so, the average U.S. college graduate earns about $70,000 per year over their life. So, if they were donating 10% of that, that’s enough to double the income of several people every year, several households among the world’s poorest people.
And, because the money goes so much further, the poorer you are–the same reason that money doesn’t make you happier in the United States–it means that money goes far further if you’re one of the world’s poorest people. And, so, just simply transferring money to them can have a big impact on their lives.
47:12
Russ Roberts: Why do you think most people don’t do that? Most people don’t do it. They don’t give away–I think you advocate for at least 10%. I try to give 10% of my income. It’s a religious obligation for me as a Jew. But non-religious people give away charity, give away money, and 10% is a nice amount. It has this tradition of–through religion–of tithing, and it has a resonance through human history. But you can give more than that. That’s a minimum. You can give 20%; you talk about people in the book who give 50%.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. If you are earning to give especially, then normally that would be more than 10%.
Russ Roberts: But, let’s think about the GiveDirectly model for the person who is desperately poor–not just not as well off as you and I are–but desperately poor, near subsistence, near death, children near death. And you have a chance to not just increase their income or wellbeing a little bit. You have a chance to, say, double their income, in the example you gave, or more. And ideally one would hope–not necessarily true, which would be part of the challenge–but you hope this is transformative for them. Their children will survive past childhood with a higher probability.
And, if you put that case to people and you say, ‘Well, do you think that’s a good idea?’ I mean, you’ve got–let’s pick the number, let’s pick a round number, $100,000. You’re making $100,000 a year and after taxes, depends what country you’re in, but let’s say you’re taking home $60,000, and of that $60,000 surely you could give away 15%, roughly $10,000. And, that $10,000 isn’t just pleasant. It’s pleasant for you; but it’s life-changing for the five, 10, 20, whatever number it is, you spread it out among the poorest people in the world. And I think most people, if you say, ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’ They’d say they’re in favor of it.
And, if you say, ‘Well, why don’t you do it?’ Why do you think that most people don’t? Let’s just be clear about it.
And, obviously in your book, you’re trying to make the case. Others–we’ve had Peter Singer on the show; it’s a huge theme of his that this is a moral imperative for people who are wealthy, comfortable. ‘Wealthy’ is not the right word because you don’t even have to be wealthy to be wealthier than the people we’re talking about. And yet most people don’t do it. Why do you think? One reason is they haven’t read your book. Obviously, if they read your book, they’d be more likely. But, even after reading your book–
Benjamin Todd: Well, I mean, yeah–
Russ Roberts: some people won’t do it. So, why do you think?
Benjamin Todd: Hundreds of people who have read the book have taken the 10% pledge. So, maybe if you read it, there’s a one in a thousand chance or something that you will, maybe one in a hundred.
I mean, I think social norms play a big role in this; and just, if we had a culture where everyone was doing this, then most people would. And, that has existed in some cultures, where most people tithe and that’s the tithe and that’s the norm.
One way also, that occurs to me why it’s even more mysterious in a way is that people who want to do good with their career will often go into paths that involve taking more than a 50% salary cut.
If you become a teacher, you might be taking a two-thirds salary cut compared to what you could have and otherwise. And then, that’s seen as completely normal.
Russ Roberts: Virtuous. It’s virtuous.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean I think to some degree, it is virtuous. But I remember telling my mother I was going to donate 10% of my income and she was, like, ‘Well, how can you afford that? That’s going to be a real hardship.’ But, if I’d said, ‘Oh, I’m becoming a teacher,’ she would have never said, ‘Oh, you’re giving up two-thirds of your income.’ They almost see that as a lesser sacrifice than the money.
Yeah, I’m really not sure. I mean, there’s even all this research that suggests that giving to charity makes people happier on net. So, it’s not even obvious that you’re going to be made worse off.
51:24
Russ Roberts: So, let me speculate on it and get your reaction. You know, I think part of it is–obviously distance matters. The person we’re helping is far away. We get no feedback, almost no feedback, right?
Benjamin Todd: But, this applies even in the United States when most people just donate a few percent and a lot of that’s to local causes that they can see. And, I think, yeah, even when people have something right in front of them, they’re not giving 10%.
Russ Roberts: But anyway, I think part of it is there’s no joy. There’s no direct joy. There’s no salience in your thoughts or mind that you’ve done something transformative. If you walk by the person every day and you saw that before they were in rags and after you’ve helped them, they’re in nice clothes and they’re in a nice place and they come back to their old spot on the sidewalk and they thank you.
So, I think part of it is feedback. Part of it is skepticism that it might not actually be happening because you don’t get that feedback. And part of it is selfishness, which is human.
What I think is–and I think about these challenges in a very different way. I think we’re self-interested as human beings. We’re not selfish, most of us, but we’re self-interested. To get us to care about others is challenging; and it happens most effectively in human societies. And I’ll put an emphasis on effectively when we have information about what might be most beneficial to that person. Money is a pretty good way to do that because–in the absence of information–because you trust that the person who gets it will spend it for their own wellbeing. But, I think in most cases, the acts of generosity that people perform are motivated by connection and knowledge: they’re part of our community, they look like me, they’re my religion, they’re my culture, my family, my neighbor.
And throughout history, those are the things that have motivated people effectively to go beyond their own narrow self-interest. What you and others in the movement are doing is impossibly bold, right? It’s basically saying: Put aside your nature, overcome your nature, not just give away what you could have for yourself, but give it away to someone who is not like you, who gives you no joy or feedback like a neighbor would, or a sibling, or parent, or a child.
And I’m putting aside the fact that giving people money is often really a bad idea. I want to be clear about that. It’s not always the case that helping people financially is good for them. It takes away agency, sometimes, and motivation and part of their texture of life. But if someone is starving to death, it’s really hard to argue against it. And yet we do striking little of it. Again, I think there’s some good reasons for it. I think you could argue that we can’t do it effectively. We don’t know if it actually happens and so on. But most of it is just callousness, probably. What do you think?
Benjamin Todd: I mean, I do think–although, like I say, many or most charities, we don’t really know if it works. As long as there’s at least one that does work, then it is really true that you can actually make a difference.
But, I mean, what comes to mind for me is I think in a sense, there’s this big trade off where, for exactly these reasons, if you want to have a big impact–if you want to help others–because of this neglectedness point, the things that will have the biggest impact will be the things that aren’t already being handled by society. And that will tend to be these more abstract issues that don’t pull people’s heartstrings.
And so, in general, if you’re able to work on something more abstract, that’s a way to have a significantly bigger impact because it’s more neglected. And so, in a way, there’s this kind of–yeah, I agree–it’s like a kind of internal matter of your motivation. How do you extend your kindness beyond what you can see immediately in front of you?
And, I think many people, when they reflect on it, they do realize that, yeah, just because you can’t see someone doesn’t mean they don’t matter. But then: yeah, how to do that?
I mean, one very practical piece of advice I think in a way is a lot of people we work with, they work on these very abstract causes where they don’t see the feedback of exactly what they’re doing. For example, they’re helping future generations, and we won’t see all the benefits of that.
But you can still have a very fulfilling career by doing it with great colleagues, having engaging work. And, that’s one way you can try to line up your–you can try and take a big-picture approach to your impact, but then make sure your day-to-day job is fulfilling and engaging and still then have a very satisfying life, even though you’re not seeing the immediate effects of your actions in the way that would be maximally motivating.
57:12
Russ Roberts: I mean, I think the not-seeing is an incentive problem, right? So, I don’t know you. I know you a little better than I did two weeks ago because I’ve spent time with you and read your words. But if you tell me–and you live in England, correct? So, I’m going to be in London in a little bit, in a month or so. So, let’s say, I meet you and you seem as nice as you seem to be in the book, and you say, ‘If you would just give me 10% of your income, I travel in such-and-such a country–it’s very poor–and I’ll make sure that the people there who are the poorest get a life-changing amount of money.’
And I’m not going to do that, right? And, it’s an interesting question of why not, right? Part of it, I think, is, although I trust you, I don’t know you well enough to trust you completely. That would be one. The second would be, I’d worry that you’re not going to be careful with it. But maybe those are just excuses? But I just think–
Benjamin Todd: No, I mean, I don’t think you should give it to me. You should you give it to GiveDirectly–would be much more–I mean, they’ll be able to do it a lot more efficiently just for starters, much less overhead. I wouldn’t[?] have to fly out anywhere, which would already use up a big–
Russ Roberts: No, you’re already going. In my story, you’re already going.
And, you’ve got a close group of friends and people that you’ve already–I really think of some of this is an information problem, right? Like, I give–in the Jewish calendar, there are certain dates, certain holidays, where it’s traditional to give extra money for people who don’t have enough to eat. Passover being an example. And rabbis around the world collect money for the poorest people so that they can afford enough to have a Passover ceremony. And, I give some money to that sometimes, and I feel good about it. And yet I’m always wondering: How carefully does the rabbi give out that money? Right?
Because, if you’re giving it out not so carefully, I don’t really want to give it to them.
And, there’s a question of interpersonal trust there and my assessment of their judgment and making those calls and so on. But, I think that’s tricky, right? It’s very different than when it’s your neighbor or the person who you see regularly and you see their hardship: you know it’s real and you can gauge how much they need and so on.
So, it’s a–I think part of the challenge of effective charity of this kind–as opposed to, say, fighting climate change or NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] that try to do certain things, talk about just directly helping people, is how complicated the human experience is and how hard it is to assess accurately how much people are in dire straits and so on.
I think that’s part of it anyway. But I think part of it is just self-interest, period. Not selfishness, self-interest. I think about myself more often than I think about others. Most humans do for better or worse. Sometimes worse.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. And, I definitely don’t claim to be perfect altruist. I’ve tried to design the book to be–for myself, I think of it in terms of I have different spheres of my life and I try to do what’s best within each sphere. And, one of those is making the world better in general. But I’m definitely not saying that’s the only thing people should focus on.
1:01:05
Russ Roberts: At the end of the book, you give a–you call it, I think–a one-minute pitch. It’s an elevator pitch for a relatively tall building and a relatively slow elevator. Why don’t you take us home with a summary of the case you’re trying to make for how people should think about their working life?
Benjamin Todd: A summary of all the advice?
Russ Roberts: Yeah. It’s the last two pages of the book. You claim it’s a minute. It might take two minutes. I don’t know.
Benjamin Todd: Yeah. I mean, we’ve already covered a lot of it. So, we’ve talked about what really makes for a dream job and why it’s not as simple as following your passion, but you want to find something–well, you want to build valuable skills and apply them to something that helps others and that gets you the personal things that you want, like engaging works, good colleagues, and a sufficient salary rather than maximizing your salary.
And then, the kind of general recipe we have for doing that is–I mean, I would say start with thinking about what are some of the biggest and most neglected problems in the world and what paths could help address those. And then, consider exploring several of those, especially if you’re right at the start of your career. Before you’ve tried any jobs, it’s hard to know which things are going to be a good fit for you. So, it’s important to be empirical about it.
And then, really focus on building valuable skills. You need something to offer.
And then, finally, when you have those skills, or we talk about career capital to make it–it’s broader than just your skills. It’s also your connections and your character and your reputation. Those are all things that help you be a more effective actor in the world. And then, the final stage is then thinking about how you can use your career capital to tackle these problems.
And, yeah: I mean we do have our own take on which problems in the world are most pressing right now, which is one of the chapters in the book. And I basically think the key thing going on right now is to do with AI and how we might have AI that can do AI R&D [Research and Development] within the next couple of years. And, this could really change society. And, that creates a whole host of problems downstream from that.
So, there’s the loss of control worries that you’ve had covered before, but I think there’s also things around concentration of power. And there’s things like engineered pandemics, totally new technologies. And, these things are still really, really neglected. Like, I think there’s around–it’s hard to get an exact figure, but there’s something like 10 million people working on in climate jobs around the world. And, ideally, it would be even more. But, these types of things I’ve just been listening, we’re talking in the thousands. So, it’s a thousand times less people working on these things, even though these are some of the biggest challenges where we could face as a civilization.
And, that means any listeners, if they switch now, they could really be among this very small group of people shaping these issues.
But yeah, we talk about other problems as well like factory farming and global health in the book, too. Yeah. And then, yeah–choosing between them based on your personal fit. And, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of other practical advice in the book. Like, if you’re facing two options, how do you choose between them? And also just, like, how to do job hunting well? And, that’s the final section, which is now, like: given the actual options you’re facing, how do you choose between them and figure out the right plan for you? And, yeah. And, I don’t know–do you feel like is there an important thing I’ve missed?
Russ Roberts: No, no.
Russ Roberts: I think it’s very useful to use your time well on this earth. It’s short. So, once you give it some thought, sometimes thinking about it doesn’t help so much. But I think the advice that you give in various places in the book to explore and retry different paths, come back–
Benjamin Todd: Exactly. And, get off the armchair. Even without trying whole career paths, people often just try to really figure it out in their head. And, often one of the most useful things is actually just to write down what could actually change my ranking here. You have your options and then what could actually be decisive between these: what things do I need to figure out? And then, just going and figuring those things out, which normally looks like talking to people in the field or even just applying to lots of jobs. These are often the fastest way to find the best path for you.
Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Benjamin Todd. His book is 80,000 Hours. Ben, thanks for being part of EconTalk.
Benjamin Todd: Thanks so much.
-1024x683.jpg "Congress Is Back – Again – But Can It Clear the Legislative Logjam?")
