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(05/07/14 4:12pm)
In honor of my final contribution to the Campus, I wanted to mention some things I love about Middlebury. I love that everybody is on the same housing and meal plan. I love that we all have access to top-notch athletic facilities, to mental and physical health services, and to innumerable devices and software. I love that students started Middbeat, JusTalks, beyond the green and Womp. I love that we’ve got need-blind admission (if imperfect). We’ve got major problems at Middlebury, but for these (and other) reasons, Middlebury is arguably more inclusive to its members than American society as a whole. What these things share in common is the commitment to equity amongst students.
We should be celebrating rising tuition in the same spirit. Tuition that rises faster than inflation is not a bad thing; in fact, I believe our tuition should rise faster than it does now. It would be a key piece of one of the most inclusive policies that our college can choose to adopt.
To clarify, rising public college tuition is not only a force that is exacerbating systematic inequality, but the accumulation of student debt is a major macro-economic problem in the United States. Rising tuition at state universities around the United States is a major obstacle to our nation’s economic competitiveness; it restricts upward mobility and squeezes the middle class. Protesting public tuition hikes is well founded.
But in the decade before 2012, the total annual cost of college (defined as tuition plus room and board, controlling for inflation) increased 40 percent for public schools, compared to only 28 percent for private non-profits. From 2004-2012, 71 percent of Americans lived in states where public school total costs grew faster than private schools. This is harmful: as the economy grows private school rates would ideally rise to accommodate increasing proportions of qualified, upwardly mobile, aid-dependent students, while public school rates should decrease to expand access, especially in times of economic distress. We can’t control public tuition, but we should strive to absorb the very best students who are squeezed by the system.
A private, non-profit institution like Middlebury is different from state universities, most relevantly, because the government cannot impose different prices for the same good depending on the individual payer. The government may be able to tax as it sees fit, but it cannot charge rich people more for stamps. In contrast, as a private non-profit institution, Middlebury can, in effect, charge different rates because of our commitment to “meet demonstrated need.” Arising from that commitment, charging a higher “sticker” tuition price (which only 58 percent of students actually pay) would function as a progressive tax that would free an enormous amount of grant aid funding.
Financial aid comes at a great cost, but is absolutely fundamental to our community. The Board of Trustees increased the total cost of college 2.94 percent for this upcoming year, but if that number had been 5.00 percent, we would free enough money for the provision of “average” aid grants to more than 28 students. Demonstrated need would still apply: anybody who could not foot the tuition increase could be covered with freed funds. Those that could afford full sticker price would pay, roughly, an additional $2,900 per semester; given the wealth of many Middlebury students, this is a small price to pay for admission to one of the best liberal schools in the world. Indeed, many families gracefully give beyond tuition costs as alumni donors. Half of applicants would pay no increase in price. This is an example, not a prescription: I do not know the ideal rate, but I believe growth in tuition costs should increase more than it currently is. I’m not advocating any other use for tuition hikes, nor am I opposed to other sources of funding for student aid; my point is we can improve the system meaningfully at the margins.
Frankly, many Middlebury students get in every year because they have money. I am a good example. I got into Middlebury off the waitlist — the fourth student from my private high school class of 80 — and part of it was because my family could pay sticker price. Increasing “sticker price” could end our need-blind-except-for-the-waitlist policy and bring greater socioeconomic diversity to campus.
Based on the amount of people who have shared experiences of marginalization based on race and class — which have been widely expressed in public forums — increasing need-based student aid could help Middlebury’s ability to attract a critical mass of identity groups to campus. Students here should not have to be representatives of their entire race in classrooms and parties, and Middlebury should not be as overwhelmingly white as it is. Most importantly, we could attract more of the top students who cannot pay their way to Middlebury.
I respect Middlebury as an institution. I value the people I met here as highly as anything. We should welcome this reform — despite the cost — for the betterment of the college that will always be my Alma Mater.
(04/09/14 4:39pm)
In light of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the calamitous threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s regime to the global order, we cannot lose sight of what an overreaction would do to America. If we allow Neo-Cold War ideology to drive American foreign policy and reshape our domestic economic and political institutions towards serving military purposes — the so called “Military Industrial Complex” — we will put at risk not only our international authority, but we, the United States, may pose a threat to global stability rivaling that of Putin. In the words of the esteemed English historian A.J.P. Taylor, “The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.”
Paul Ryan’s newly released budget proposal would represent a return to Bush-era military funding, reversing the military spending cuts initiated by the sequestration. It seeks to revive the U.S. war machine in a time of peace. In order to avoid escalation with Russia, it may be more important for the world that the U.S. elects “doves” than Democrats in the 2014 and 2016 elections.
Russia’s recent acts of aggression are not only concerning in themselves, but provide rhetorical ammunition for war-mongers to call into question the timing of the military drawbacks initiated by the sequestration. These facts will likely be spun by pundits and “hawk” politicians into the simplistic narrative that while Moscow grows stronger, we cannot be seen as weak and therefore we must ramp up military funding. We, the educated public, should be deeply skeptical of such claims.
The truth is our military already has the capacity to defeat any state. Increasing military spending will not make us more secure and should be a policy of last resort. Harsh economic sanctions, energy diplomacy and multilateral cooperation with allies remain our best strategies for deterring Russian aggression and avoiding conflict.
We must be aware of the risks posed by our own state, over which the public has little control in times of war. Since World War II our government has covertly overthrown countless regimes, fueled war by supplying weapons to states around the world and unilaterally initiated conflict. This, in turn, fed a negative feedback cycle of increased military funding. U.S. militarization represents an existential threat to international peace and the health of our democracy.
The recent overhaul of Russian offensive capabilities, despite Russian economic stagnation, suggests a new vision for Russian foreign policy in which its offensive military capacity will play a defining role. In light of Putin’s apparent belief in Russia’s manifest destiny to reclaim the territories lost during the collapse of the U.S.S.R., these developments are very concerning to states around the world, especially the former U.S.S.R., whose independence we should defend. Nonetheless, building allegiances with non-aligned states may be the best deterrence to Moscow’s aggression. If we are to make new allies, our authority in countering Russian aggression must be based on trust, soft power and democratic accountability, not just military strength.
The risks associated with increasing military spending are largely internal: increasing the influence of private military contractors could threaten our commitment to institutionalized conflict resolution and pacifism, thereby undermining our moral high ground over Russia. The recent Supreme Court ruling McCutcheon v. F.E.C. has gone beyond Citizens United in liberalizing campaign spending, expanding the latitude of defense contractors to lobby government efforts. We are likely to see a flood of campaign funding intended to move the political needle, among both Democrats and Republicans, towards increasing defense spending.
We must beware the influence of these glorified mercenaries, whose interests are not aligned with those of America. The empowerment of our increasingly privatized defense sector, who will profit greatly from conflict, represents the greatest potential accelerant to escalation with Russia — or any other enemy.
Russian coercion of the Ukrainian state by raising energy prices foreshadows an era of global energy diplomacy in which the expansion of domestic fracking and other energy infrastructure investments, like Keystone XL, may be increasingly justified if the U.S. is to compete with Russian oil reserves. Though liquefied natural gas is years away from being export-ready, the ability of the U.S. to offer subsidized energy to Russia’s neighbors to withstand a potential oil embargo or balance our budget may prove more valuable than an extra fleet of F-16s and, to some, justify the catastrophic climate impact of increasing fossil fuel extraction. We should expect to be faced with no good options; we must weigh accelerating climate change by expanding our energy capacity against the long-term impact on health of the planet. We need to foster open, thoughtful, public debate about the trade-offs of these looming, painful decisions. It only stands to reason that those most vulnerable to climate change, fracking and pipeline construction will be forced to shoulder the costs of an energy arms race. We must keep them — and the health of our planet as a whole — in mind. Seeking alliances with energy-rich countries like Venezuela, Azerbaijan and even Iran, despite the unsavory and corrupt regimes in power, may be necessary. On a brighter note, investments in promising innovations in renewable energy may become increasingly important for national security. Bearing in mind the strategic importance of such decisions, we must hold our government accountable lest we lose our national character in the fog of war.
Projections about what may happen in the coming years are purely speculative. Indeed, I hope that fears of Russian aggression are overblown. Nonetheless, pacifism, the development of alliances and the institutional resolution of disputes must triumph over military escalation if we are to avoid the worst.
It is not Putin, but the fear of our own weakness, that poses the greatest threat to American democracy, to the environment and to the stable and prosperous international status quo. We must stand up against war until the United States is left with no other option but to respond with force. In the words of the French philosopher and activist Simone Weil, “The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics.” If the will of the American people is tested with the temptation of false security and the fleeting glory of war, we must steadfastly demand peace.
(03/19/14 3:49pm)
As I transition out of the Middlebury community, I will be joining a cohort of young people who face career uncertainty that I will refer to as “The Entitled Precariat.” Despite its allusion to Marxism, the Entitled Precariat has nothing to do with ideology. Rather, it is a group of young professionals in precarious work situations that arise from a Catch-22 that would make Joseph Heller chortle: in order to get a secure, fulfilling, well-paying job you need to be able to offer value in the form of professional skills, but to get those skills you have to be employed. The primary recourse is temporary work, low-skill entry-level positions, and perhaps most insidious of all, unpaid internships. That, or going back to school and accumulating crippling debt. Many simply cannot afford the opportunity costs of the unpaid internships or pursuing advanced degrees, institutionalizing class bias in the workforce. Hard work is not enough. I will discuss three challenges that may well define the first few years of experience in the labor force.
1. Transitioning from an empowering intellectual atmosphere to subordinate roles
Entitlement has become central to the narrative around “Gen-Y”ers in the workforce. Widely exploited as cheap labor who are unconditioned to demanding equitable treatment, what is referred to as “entitlement” can also be considered a survival mechanism. The widespread expectation that workers owe the employer “appreciation for the opportunity,” serves to bolster the unequal terms of labor: the employer is seen as doing a favor by employing workers, rather than agreeing to mutually beneficial agreement.
To an educated student taught to question assumptions, deconstruct phenomena and challenge conventional discourse, roles that demand submissiveness and focus on monotonous tasks require a major adjustment. This transition, from the independent culture of higher education, to “respecting the hierarchy” requires an internal shift and can be very humbling.
2. The division between the “Entitled Precariat” and the “Code-geois”
Entitlement can be considered a euphemism for somebody overvaluing their value to an organization, suggesting that only people without relevant, valuable specializations can be considered “entitled.” The Entitled Precariat is characterized by frequently changing jobs, geographic migration and major lifestyle complications that arise from their unpredictable work life. To break free of incessant unpaid internships, they need to not only be productive, but exceptional. Their work-experience is an extended audition, rather than a development process.
In contrast, I coined the term “Code-geois” to refer to any worker who has widely sought-after skills, regardless of whether it’s being able to write C++ code, engineer new products or other transferable skills. These people are pursued by employers and will never have to consider unpaid internships. They do not have be thankful for the opportunity to work, nor are they accused of being “entitled,” because they have leverage to work at other firms. These are the people with stable incomes, employment security and, most importantly, options.
Acquiring such skills, the career progression paradox, is the central challenge for liberal arts students entering the workforce. Rather than pursuing what we believe to be our passion or aiming to work in our ideal field, a more effective strategy is to develop a “unique value proposition” by identifying an aptitude and developing it until it becomes a specialization. A key takeaway from Cal Newport’s, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, is that when it comes to a successful career, passion should not guide our search, but develop from within a specialized, engaging job. Passion matters, but to succeed in the workforce, a practical strategy to find an employment niche may be the most effective means of finding stable, lucrative, meaningful employment.
3. Living in accordance with your values
There’s a tension between career realpolitik and morality: how can you live as a cog in a system of structural injustice and not only survive, but make change? “When you don’t like capitalism, being an accountant doesn’t work in your favor,” Ashley Guzman ’13 offered sardonically in her presentation at the RAJ-organized Youth Labor and Unemployment Conference last week. She, along with other panelists at the event, sacrificed potential employment by pursuing only career options that aligned with their world views. While few workers are truly unrepentant, Frank Underwood-ian pragmatists, particularly selective moral compasses — a virtue to be commended — necessarily exclude options that others are happy to seize. The best way to live in accordance with our values is to combine a nuanced view of ethics in the workforce with a commitment to diligently refine our specialization, so that it is valuable enough, ideology aside, to be an asset to any employer. For example, if Exxon gives you a job that offers to help you develop your GIS skills, perhaps you cannot change the organization from within, but you can accumulate some income while acquiring a valuable skill for the rest of your career. It’s easier to move from the for-profit world to a specialized role in a social enterprise or non-profit than vice-versa.
While each of our moral codes is distinctive, developing skills and finding a niche is the best strategy to escape internship purgatory and thrust yourself into the ranks of the Code-geois, where you will have options that can allow you to live according to your values and find meaning in your work. To say there is only one way to achieve such goals would be reductive: the paths to our own versions of success are likely to be indirect, unpredictable and arduous. But we are more than capable of living up the challenge.
(02/26/14 6:48pm)
Google’s effectively unparalleled capacity for high-level innovation may prove to be the source of many of the technological innovations that will define human advancement in the 21st century. Inherent in the spectacular potential of companies like Google to reshape society, however, is the profound societal danger associated with such innovation. Navigating the evolving relationship between humanity and technology will be among the greatest challenges of our generation.
Google’s advertising and analytics software, its unmatched access to personal data, its free software offerings, its mobile products, and many more of its services are all on the cutting edge. But these offerings pale in comparison to Google’s long-term vision. Google has played a key role in redefining the relationship between humans, geographic space and software. For example, Google’s constantly expanding street view service is now ubiquitous in just about every major commerce hub across the world, including key regions in the global south. As of last December, their latest fleet of 25 self-driving cars had driven around 600,000 miles without a major accident (far better than an average driver). Google glasses are straight out of a futuristic spy movie, except that Google puts such technology in the hands of consumers.
Other initiatives could have enormous political impacts as well. Google’s “uProxy” initiative, still in “restricted beta” mode, is a peer-to-peer service that allows one to establish an encrypted Internet connection with somebody they trust, allowing a user to evade essentially any government surveillance or fire-wall. Its “Project Tango” aims to give its mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion in the real world, enabling the phone to process not only its location, but every physical detail about that location, calling to mind the fictional technology developed by Wayne Industries in The Dark Knight (2008), which uses sonar to map all of Gotham in real-time.
They are also making significant investments beyond just software: their appropriately titled Google X, a secretive research initiative, has been conducting research on sophisticated robotics and machine learning. In the last year, Google has acquired some of the most advanced and promising robotics companies in the world, including DeepMind, a firm that specializes in advanced machine learning called “Deep Learning”, and Boston Dynamics, makers of a slew of biomimicry-inspired robots such as Cheetah, a robot that can run up to 28.3 miles per hour as well as numerous other firms with diverse specialties, talent and intellectual property. Google envisions manufacturing applications of these robotics capacities, potentially even challenging Amazon in high-tech manufacturing.
These initiatives appear to be the components of a wildly ambitious — and perhaps still amorphous — vision of next-generation technologies that exist at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer usability. Google is not only attempting to create disruptive technologies, it is pushing towards the precipice of a paradigm-shifting technological revolution. Fittingly perhaps its most ambitious vision is an outgrowth of its very first offering: its search engine. Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google and founder of the Singularity Institute, intends to help the company develop its search engine to behave like a “cybernetic friend,” that “will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, [because] It will have read every email you’ve ever written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better…, perhaps, than even yourself.”
Tamar Yehoshua, director of product management on Google Search, shares Kurzweil’s vision: “Our vision is the Star Trek computer...You can talk to it -— it understands you, and it can have a conversation with you.” Though Google openly admits such ambitions are implausible in the short-term, Google is not merely speculating. Its bombastic idealism is central to its corporate philosophy and strategy. Google’s profitability allows them to make long-term investments that are essentially unmatched in both scale and audacity. Google’s market dominance, rather than constraining innovation (as most monopolies do), seems to amplify both the rate and scale of innovation; for better or worse, we are witnessing the astonishingly improbable convergence of profitability, ambition and big-picture thinking that may turn out to be a core driver of 21st century innovation. Google often feels more like a movement than a corporation, publicly representing itself as a company in which employees are “true believers,” passionately investing their intellect and creativity in creating something they believe transcends themselves — a future yet-to-be constructed. Their corporate philosophy echoes such bold values: “We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected...We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards.” The moral implications of Google’s growth — and the growth of other high-tech companies — are profound. Our reaction to the explosive rate of technological advance is of the utmost importance for the future of humanity. Though predicting Google’s impact on society is impossible, it is naive to dismiss the possibility that Google, or other private actors, could fundamentally alter the balance of power between private corporations and public institutions, the barrier between physical space and “the cloud,” or even the structural organization of human society.
Our generation has the responsibility to act conscientiously in this critical juncture in the evolution of the relationship between humanity and technology, because how we respond in the coming decades will have a significant impact on the future of human society. It would behoove the Middlebury community and other centers of critical investigation, to engage in collective dialogue about how best to harness the potential of looming technological innovations while avoiding their pitfalls. Our ability to navigate these ethical dilemmas may be our generation’s legacy — or our greatest calamity.
(02/12/14 4:42pm)
The philanthropic sector in the U.S. is broken.
According to Jeffery Sach’s estimate in his book, The End of Poverty, just $175 billion dollars annually over the next 20 years, appropriated efficiently, could end global extreme poverty, defined as people living on less than $1.25 a day. The estimate is likely wildly optimistic; nonetheless, it illustrates both the enormous potential of properly applied charitable dollars and the relatively feasible scale of funding needed to fight poverty global poverty.
When Sach’s book was published in 2005, United States philanthropic giving (not including foundations) was a total of $252.2 billion — a figure which has since increased over 25 percent in less than a decade, to over $316 billion (though lower than the pre-bubble high in 2007 of over $344). Despite the availability of significant funding, the philanthropic sector is structurally inefficient at serving the truly neediest. The scope of the misallocation of charitable dollars owes to three main factors.
The first is rooted in human nature; we are largely driven to give by emotional rather than rational reasons. Donors behave like consumers, rather than investors, meaning that how riveting a charity’s “story” or “brand” is often more important than the evidence of their cost-effectiveness (“return on investment”). This characteristic drastically distorts the efficiency of giving.
Great marketing, not empirical evidence, differentiates non-profits like Charity: Water (3.5 million people served) from Evidence Action’s Safe Water Dispenser project (roughly 1 million people served). Despite its smaller reach, which reflects donor behavior, the later’s intervention is based on better empirical evidence, including multiple Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs), oversight of academics at the forefront of their fields, and ongoing evaluation of impact on recipients.
Donor issue selection is also often emotionally driven, as in the case of an individual who gives to Lyme disease foundations because they lost somebody dear to the disease, even though most would agree that preventing malaria has the best impact on human welfare on the margin.
The second factor is the lack of information available to both donors and non-profits themselves. It is extremely challenging — and costly — to measure and compare the real-world impact of charities because of unintended consequences and indirect effects. The effects of deworming efforts on long-term education, for example, could very well be better or worse than widely assumed, despite there being multiple RCTs designed to answer this very question.
Sometimes donors lean on false proxies for cost-effectiveness, like measuring a non-profit’s overhead. Organizations like Charity Navigator are more harmful than helpful in this regard: comparisons of overhead (non-program related operating expenses) distract from the fact that different interventions can be orders of magnitude more impactful than others. In fact, overhead can, depending on context, be the best investment an organization can make, by helping reevaluate programs, and refine best practices in diverse contexts.
The third factor is our misguided charitable tax-deduction policy. Because tax deductions for charitable contributions are tied only to legal classification, rather than impact, tax deductions accrue whether one gives to the Guggenheim or to prevent mother-child transmission of HIV during birth in vulnerable communities. This policy gives legal justification to the ethically flawed rationalization that giving to what we care about matters as much as giving to the neediest. Clearly, the preventing HIV transmission matters more on the margin.
A 2007 study from The Center for Philanthropy at IUPUI found that while households that make less than $100,000 focus around 36 percent of their giving on the needs of the poor, those that make over a million commit less than 22 percent of their giving to such causes, although the wealthiest (top 10 percent) were the most generous to all causes, donating a greater percentage of their income to charity than any other (there were other divergences too, like the top 10 percent prioritizing the Arts and medical research, while giving a smaller percentage of their donations to religious institutions). These figures reflect substantially different giving priorities between classes, but most relevantly about how most Americans prioritize helping the poor.
In total, only 26 percent of charitable contributions go to the domestic poor, while only 4.6 percent of giving goes to help the poor abroad. In 2005, less than one third of giving in the U.S. directly benefitted poor people, with no reason to believe this trend has reversed from contemporary data (for which I did not have the same detailed analysis).
Here’s the kicker: according to a recent CBO report, of the $39 billion dollars the U.S. spends annually on charitable tax deductions, 80 percent goes in tax relief to the donors who give the least, in proportion to total giving, to the poor: the top 20 percent. Such tax deductions represent only 0.1 percent of after-tax income for families in the middle quintile, but a walloping 1.4 percent of after-tax income amongst the richest 1 percent. Tax deductions accrue disproportionately to people who support the needs of the poor the least, when the policy would be far more efficient if it incentivized intelligent, impactful giving by tying deductions to empirical impact as determined by an unbiased, third party.
The principal problem with giving in the U.S. is not the generosity of Americans, but how that money is distributed. Donors are bad at choosing which charities to give to; charities face distorted incentives to market well, rather than be accountable; and charitable tax deductions incentivize counter-productive behavior with regard to the global poor. These factors contribute to the morally catastrophic distribution of U.S. donations, with those most in need of aid shouldering the burden.
(01/23/14 12:56am)
Last week in my article “Empathizing with Mental Illness,” I made some serious errors that offended some readers. First, I want to apologize to those I offended and to the Middlebury Campus editorial staff. I accept responsibility for my submission.
Even more importantly, however, I want to thank the readers who reached out to me in response to the article. I have the utmost respect and appreciation for Ada Santiago ’13.5, who talked with me face-to-face for almost an hour, helping me recognize where and how I went wrong. How she engaged me in dialogue diplomatically, thoughtfully and openly epitomizes what I believe we are at Middlebury to do: to teach and learn from one another.
My article concerned topics beyond my expertise and, despite my best intentions, reflected the very stigma that I had hoped to denounce and call attention to. For example, by lumping a broad and diverse range of mental diseases and disorders into the non-specific category of “mental illness,” I repeatedly implied a negative normative judgment upon individuals with mental disorders. This example, along with other aspects of the piece, was deeply problematic and unacceptable. Rather than enumerate and apologize for each individual instance in which erred, I encourage those with more expertise than myself to deconstruct, debate and even denounce what I wrote.
I am learning from my mistake(s), both personally and as a writer. I once again apologize and appreciate the civil, thoughtful response of readers when resentful, anonymous postings would have been justified.
(01/16/14 1:04am)
Mental illness is not a personal shortcoming; it is a disease that is exacerbated by the shame that comes with stigma.
We as a society gravely misunderstand mental illness. While we are universally willing to treat bacterial infections, mental illness is presumed to be a personal shortcoming rather than a chronic illness. Treatment is associated with acceptance of being “sick,” rather than the brave pursuit of being healthy. This is backwards: expert consensus dictates that mental illness, such as addiction, is best conceived as a chronic, often fatal, disease.
The truth is, as a disease, mental illness must be treated not only by “willpower,” but by personal, chemical, behavioral and even spiritual modifications in a manner not unlike treating other chronic illnesses like heart disease. Nonetheless, there remains a stigma around mental illness: it’s more shameful than being physically ill.
Rather than conceiving of mental illness as a failure, we should think of it as a character-defining challenge: just as cancer survivors are held as heroes in American society, so should surviving addicts and depressives be idolized for their valor, resilience and adaption.
We are each psychologically limited, emotionally vulnerable and personally fallible in ways beyond our control (but not beyond hope). We underestimate the constant threat that forces beyond our conscious, rational control pose to us. Some arise outside of us: we cannot comprehend the constant possibility of world-shattering tragedy or of experiencing a traumatic event. Some threats to our well-being grow from within, which is not to say that they are preventable.
The experience of the mentally ill is completely incomprehensible to those without their disease; the healthy cannot possibly fathom the depth of their suffering nor the impossibility of small, daily tasks for somebody with a severe mental illness. However, inability for the healthy among us to empathize does not mean we are immune: once we understand that mental illness is not a question of will-power, nor deterministic, we must accept that each of us — as impossible as it is to comprehend — are vulnerable to mental illness.
For example, many perceive drug addicts as selfish, manipulative and, perhaps most damning, purposeless. The truth, however, is that addiction is a twisted, ruthless disease from which no one can be certain they are safe. The aforementioned traits of addiction are not common to people who become addicted, but are symptoms of the illness of which we are all capable. The moralization of addiction that lies at the heart of American drug policy is profoundly counter-productive, demonizing the sick and fetishizing “law and order” at the cost of the civil liberties of vulnerable individuals and communities.
To acknowledge that one is an addict and to receive treatment is not an admission of weakness, but a proclamation of hope and a dedication to achieving one’s own potential. The case for restorative versus retributive justice — essentially treatment and rehabilitation versus punishment and deterrence — basically makes itself when you have the facts.
While it is clear that some are more predisposed to mental illness like depression or addiction than others — the role of genetics and trauma are among the major risk factors — the plasticity and complexity of neurological functions means that nobody can be certain they are safe. And this is not a small issue, nor one limited by class: law-abiding, loving, likable people get hooked on legal painkillers like prescribed oxycodone (“Oxy” or “Percoset,” but basically reformulated heroin) every day: in fact, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, nine percent of America has abused such opiates despite many starting with a legal prescription. 22 percent of Americans, according to Alcoholics Anonymous, have abused alcohol.
In addition, approximately one in eleven Americans, according to the CDC, are depressed; one in 25 were “majorly” depressed. Major depression is the leading cause of disability in the United States. The ADAA estimates that almost one in five Americans suffer from clinical anxiety. Look around the room you’re in and think about what those figures mean.
What depression, anxiety and addiction share is that they are non-voluntary, invisible and, by definition, prevent people from acting rationally or in their own self-interest. Mental illness can hollow out vibrant, fascinating people, wasting human potential not only for the affected, but impacting families, social networks and workplaces.
You and I are vulnerable. Only by acknowledging that vulnerability can we proactively protect ourselves from illness that can rob us of our vividness. Stigma surrounding mental illness is far more than antiquated: it is self-loathing. This is not about liberal ideology, political correctness, or anecdotal defense of the character of those suffering from mental illness. No. To recognize one’s own fallibility is a necessary act of self-preservation.
The truth is that, at one point or another, each of us will need to rely on others to thrive and even to survive. The modesty to accept the possibility that some day we may need help, even if times are good at present, is incredibly important. Acknowledging the possibility of our own future mental illness is not weak, but wise, because only by holding within us a willingness to fight can we overcome or manage such a dangerous disease. After all, being relatively happy — and functional — is not selfish, but a prerequisite for helping others.
Artwork by TAMIR WILLIAMS
(11/21/13 1:56am)
Cheating at a competitive place like Middlebury will never go away, but it is possible to change the incentives that currently allow its tolerance. Beyond being lazy and counter-productive to education, cheating is a collective action problem. The best way to prevent cheating — in addition to investing in steps like plagiarism detection software and proctoring all tests at Middlebury — is to make sure we each have skin in the game.
The story of cheating at Middlebury is not only about “Billy,” the anonymous Middlebury student in Jessica Cheung’s exposé of Middlebury’s academic dishonesty; it is also about how Middlebury’s policies enable cheating. Roughly one in three students anonymously self-report cheating, while the true number is likely higher. The undeniable truth is cheating is rampant at Middlebury.
You and I may have never cheated, but the burden of responsibility to proactively prevent cheating falls on all of us, including the student body, student governance, staff (including Old Chapel) and faculty. Our academic system is failing, in the language of the honor code, to provide the “ethical, and social qualities essential for leadership.”
When students cheat in introductory Econ courses, it does not significantly affect the rest of the Middlebury student body or even those in the same classes in which the cheating occurs, because the vast majority of people we are in competition with for jobs are at other colleges and universities. That some under-qualified, over-stressed Middlebury students get better GPAs by cheating seems morally ambiguous: at least it is a fellow MiddKid and, hey, nobody wants to be a tattletale. Our imagined communion with “Billy” personalizes his actions, making them relatively more palatable. The truth is cheating undermines our education no matter what — it creates a perverse incentive structure that devalues hard work, and rewards willingness to break community values.
Regularly running student work through plagiarism detection software is a no-brainer so long as the burden on professors is not egregious. Regularly proctoring exams, even if not by professors, is similarly necessary, because trust-based proctoring has been a failure. Any peace of mind gained by not having a professor in the room is overshadowed by the cheating it enables.
But making lasting changes require a more radical step: final grades for courses should be determined by a normal distribution curve within each course, especially in larger, lecture courses with less variability in the “average student”. This idea is based on the belief that Middlebury students would not acquiesce to rampant cheating in their class if it directly hurt their own grades, and that students would be deterred from cheating if it directly affected their (honest) friend’s grades. In addition, a curve would prevent departments, professors and individual courses from having widely different GPAs that are totally unrelated to the difficulty of the course (cue Chinese, Physics and Murray Dry’s students nodding their heads vigorously).
Mean grades for all courses should be set at the average grade for the entire student body, roughly just worse than a B+. Exceptions could be made for seminars and small courses, while the rules could be flexible enough to allow professors discretion in evaluating students. On the whole, however, we would have a more meritocratic system, an incentive to crack down on cheating, and more consistent grading between majors and professors, all without changing the average grade.
Would such a change create more competition, and fuel more cheating? Would it lead to a less collaborative atmosphere in and out of the classroom? Perhaps, but that is exactly where there is need for a new honor code, based on fostering solidarity and collaboration within a competitive space.
Academic life is, by its very nature, competitive — creating a grade-based curve would only explicitly acknowledge that fact. As currently constructed, our academic honor code is redundant, cheating is equally prohibited with or without it. In contrast, an honor code based on actively encouraging positive community values, such as collaboration, critical thinking, accountability and empathy — the qualities that define great leaders — could be a step towards a better Middlebury.
The job environment we are entering is extremely competitive, but collaboration — even when there is no obvious self-interest involved — is how problems are solved, industries are advanced and disruptive technologies are invented. How we train the next generation of leaders should reflect this reality.
Learning to behave morally within a competitive atmosphere is one of the most important lessons Middlebury should aspire to impart to its students. The liberal arts are not about a prohibition of pre-professional course offerings, but rather a holistic education in lieu of skill-based training. Ethical self-awareness is central to what “learning how to think” really means.
Reform is not only necessary; it is possible. The willingness of our administration and our student body to constantly and critically reevaluate our values and policies is one of Middlebury’s greatest institutional strengths, and it is time that we took advantage of it.
Here is how we do it: public, transparent discourse. Looking to the the exceptional journalism conducted at middbeat and The Campus this year, student-run media at Middlebury is of a higher caliber now that it ever has been during my tenure at Middlebury. A curve may not be the way to go, but we need to construct an alternative academic model, because the status quo is failing us.
(11/06/13 9:28pm)
A friend of mine once described “fun” as looking forward to an event and reminiscing about that event. Anticipation and nostalgia, he thought, were more important to explaining our experience of fun that the actual experience. Daniel Kahnman’s research, including his most recent book Thinking Fast and Slow, gives some credibility to this claim.
Through this lens, nostalgia is pleasure, derived from looking back at a memory that once inspired a positive feeling. The danger, however, is intellectual inertia. In a sense, nostalgia leads us to hold rigid ideas of how things should be, leaving us biased by the conventionality of how they could be.
Being aware of, and correcting for, irrational tendencies like nostalgia makes us smarter.
For example, there is nothing better than the feeling of taking off cold, wet socks and plopping yourself down next to a crackling, glowing fire. It is viscerally refreshing, plus it connects our experience, however indirectly, with pre-historic humans. Wood fires feel innate to humanity.
Problem is, some studies suggest that being around such fires is likely worse for you than cigarettes. Because household wood fires release tiny particles that we cannot smell, we are ignorant to the damage it does to our pulmonary and cardiovascular systems. It releases carbon sequestered in the wood, which exacerbates climate change when scaled to a national level (although electric and gas “fireplaces” may be worse still).
Worst of all, it is not just hurting the person enjoying the fire: recreational fires in modern fireplaces create an substantial “second hand smoke” effect in suburbs and medium population density zones. One study estimated that 70 percent of smoke released from household fires re-enters other nearby chimneys, with deleterious health impacts. While there is uncertainty about the true health impacts, the possibility of such disastrous side effects should make us critically investigate the status quo.
Our irrational love of wood fires illustrates the flaw of emotionally driven, non-rational decision-making that characterizes most human choices. All of our decisions are determined in large part by emotion, familiarity, and aesthetics. This is often a great way to simplify decision making to save intellectual bandwidth for other activities; however, it also means that when one argues that fireplaces should be illegal except in timber-rich, population sparse zones, people immediately and instinctually defend fireplaces. In fact, you — the reader — likely feel nostalgic about an experience you had near a fireplace and are therefore resistant to embrace my point.
Yes, there are valid arguments against banning fireplaces, like asking, “If there are greater evils out there, why fire places?” Fair, perhaps it should not be the top priority in D.C., but I do not believe that is the primary reason people instinctually defend fireplaces. There is a legitimate health benefit to the policy which, weighed against the mild infringement of liberty, seems comparable to the polarizing soda ban in New York City. In both cases, the small infringement of liberty is a means to correct a market imperfection — the negative externality of fireplaces or of sugar-fueled obesity and diabetes — that could lead to saving vast amounts of lives and health expenditures. The EPA agrees, and has quietly improved fireplace standards across the U.S. this year.
So why are we resistant to banning fireplaces all together? Because we have pre-established positions on fireplaces rooted in nostalgia. The real reason fireplaces still exist in semi-urban zones is that being against fireplaces is like being against hot chocolate and Christmas. Fireplaces symbolize family, togetherness, and relief from the cold. Thus, the archaic technology persists long past its usefulness.
We irrationally associate a secondary element of our memories - in this case, fireplaces - with the relief and togetherness that really made us happy. What makes fireplace memories special is how we got wet and cold and whom you were with when you warmed up, not the fireplaces themselves. Banning fireplaces would just allow for more moments about which to be nostalgic, by lengthening people’s lives. Even if the benefits are imperceivable on the individual scale, society as a whole will benefit.
My argument is not really about fireplaces, but around our willingness to embrace new ideas that challenge conventions and address problems. It is entirely possible that future evidence declares fireplaces safe, and that the new EPA policies are erroneous. But that is not the point: if we are to achieve a world that is connected, cohesive, and provides the fundamentals of human happiness - shelter, food, health, education and hope – it may require embracing non-conventional solutions. It is our responsibility to be open to arguments rooted in evidence, rather than emotion.
(10/17/13 4:05am)
1. Eating Beef is horrific for the environment.
Eating beef results in an enormous amount of carbon emissions, to the tune of around 2.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide per 100 gram serving (or around 214 calories of 90 percent lean beef). In fact, a drive from Middlebury to New York City actually releases less CO2 than getting a burger along the way.
2. Lamb is actually worse, in-terms of CO2 emissions, than beef.
Producing lamb is estimated to release 34.2 percent more CO2 than beef for the same serving size. One of the main reasons is that the portion of edible flesh on lambs (42 percent by weight) is far lower than in cows (55 percent by weight), although the relative economic value of the meat from a single lamb is higher than beef, meaning there is an incentive for farmers to keep raising lamb. For any amount of protein harvested from lamb, the carbon emissions released will be more than eight times larger than the same amount of chicken would produce.
3. Pork is, relatively, more environmentally friendly than you might think.
In part because so much of each pig is edible (65 percent), CO2 emissions of pork production per weight of meat output are roughly four times less the same amount of beef, and only about two times more than chicken.
4. Locally raised meat, especially beef, does not drastically change environmental impact compared to non-local meat.
According to the Environmental Working Groups, 90 percent of carbon emissions related to beef comefrom the production and disposal — or waste — of beef, which does not include its transportation, storage, or preservation. Locally raised beef may be good for Vermonters, but it is only slightly better for the climate.
5. Cheese is drastically worse for the environment than you thought, but yogurt and milk are fine.
For every kilogram of cheese produced about 9.82 kilograms of CO2 are released, which is only 36 percent less than beef’s emissions by weight. That is more than twice as bad for the environment as bacon (although that is if you are eating 100 grams of cheese, which is unlikely). Yogurt and milk, in contrast, have emissions comparable to broccoli, tomatoes and other crops. The primary reason behind this discrepancy is that it takes 10 pounds of milk to make 1 pound of cheese.
6. Only looking at the weight of wasted food in the dining halls tells us very little.
The difference in the climate implications of an entirely wasted salad is less than the last bite of a hamburger. It is, however, useful to know the total weight if we can estimate the proportion of each type of ingredient that it is made up of (how much of the waste is London broil versus “bean greens”). A better way of doing this is simply measuring how much of what kind of ingredients are used by our dining halls. That said, it is an extremely noble cause: 15 percent of total beef emissions are a result of “avoidable waste”, compared to only around 1 percent for domestic transport and refrigeration.
7. Our binary conception of “vegetarianism” is irrational.
Vegetarianism and Veganism are generally conceived as absolute categories: you are or you are not. This is misguided and not just because vegetarian burritos at Chipotle come with free guacamole. It is very hard to give up meat, but replacing half the meat on your plate with a plant-based protein every day is far more impactful than adopting “meatless Mondays.” If you cannot be a vegetarian because you cannot give up bacon, then just give up everything else. Or just give up beef and lamb and order instead, when possible, vegetarian, chicken or seafood options.
8. There are decreasing returns for replacing proteins.
Although there is about a 20-kilogram difference in CO2 between beef emissions and chicken emissions per kilogram of meat produced, the difference between chicken emissions and tofu (which is similar to other plant based-foods) is only about 4.9 kilograms of CO2 emissions. This means that, although there are strong moral arguments for why eating tofu is preferable to killing chickens, environmentally speaking, you are getting around 80 percent of the benefit by switching from beef to chicken as compared to beef to tofu.
Feel free to reach out with questions regarding methodology, sources, or logic. Almost all of the CO2 emissions estimates for this piece come from the Environmental Working Group’s “Meat Eaters Guide (2011),” which is publicly available for free.
(10/09/13 4:25pm)
Without looking, what underwear are you wearing today? Are you certain?
I believe that we are prone to overestimating how often we are right. By acknowledging the likelihood that we are wrong, we can protect ourselves from this irrational tendency.
As a thought experiment, consider if you were randomly asked about your underwear 1,000 times throughout your life. Let’s say you get it right 95 percent of the time. Assuming that were true, how certain were you when you answered at the beginning of the column? Wasn’t there a five percent chance you were wrong? The fact that you were (probably) right about your underwear does not mean that there was no uncertainty surrounding your answer.
You may understand uncertainty in the abstract, but the question is whether you have internalized that any of your memories, perceptions or beliefs, no matter how strongly you believe them, may well be wrong. There are very few statements you can make with 100 percent certainty. Though our own experience is the most vivid we can draw on, recognizing that our own perceptions are flawed and no more likely to be accurate than somebody else’s is challenging but critically important. At its most extreme, failure to acknowledge our own uncertainty can lead to dogmatism. This is especially true when we make decisions based on emotions.
The more we hear our own beliefs repeated -— “Democracy is good” -— “Oil corporations are bad” — “Processed food is unhealthy” — the more dogmatic we become about them. “Your belief on these topics is likely informed by regurgitating the perspectives of others, probably selected for holding similar beliefs as you, rather than your own detailed understanding of the topic. You should be aware of the distinct possibility you are wrong.
I am not advocating decision paralysis: we have to operate under beliefs even if we acknowledge that they may be wrong. Instead, I propose putting as much conscious, rational thought into decision making as possible while simultaneously being open to changing that position if new information presents itself. Though a disastrous accusation in politics, “flip-flopping” is a reflection of intelligence and critical awareness. In Emerson’s words, “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
If you have a viscerally negative reaction to the idea that working in finance might be the best way to help the world’s poor, I suggest you take a step back and weigh the evidence. I could be missing some key insight into why “Earning to Give” (the idea of pursuing a high-earning career and giving a large amount of your earnings to the best charities you can find) is not as effective as I think it is. I could also be right. Either way, pre-judging the argument based on its convenience in your life is disastrously flawed. To truly weigh the argument, or any argument, it’s important that you sincerely question the beliefs that it calls into question. Many of the things we “know” are actually misinformed, vestigial beliefs that we have somehow failed to question. I’m as guilty of this as anybody.
If you have always had a dream of being a lawyer, going to law school without objectively evaluating the pros and cons of law versus other careers as best as you can is being dogmatic. The same goes with any career aspiration. You are almost definitely capable of thriving and finding happiness working in a different field.
If you are sure that processed food is bad and that the solution is eating as much local produce and other “real” food as possible, or that the U.S. government should have a strictly non-interventionist international policy, but do not have relevant expertise, you are also being dogmatic.
Deciding to buy from your local farmers market, protesting against war and going to law school are not irrational per-say, but the manner in which you make these decisions may be. Sure, many decisions are so trivial that they are not worth being rational about - for example, I’ve never read consumer reports on toothpaste - but letting your instinctual, emotional, dogmatic logic inform key life decisions can be extremely dangerous, especially if you are not good at acknowledging the likelihood that you are wrong.
Rejecting Earning to Give without thoughtfully weighing its merits because it does not fit one’s world view is misguided. Just because you have learned one method of achieving social good, community organizing for example, does not mean there are not better ways of achieving similar ends. Similarly, just because you are passionate about an issue, say the environment, does not mean it should be the issue you should commit your life to working on. If you want to help humanity as much as possible, you should be constantly reevaluating your stance on how to do so. You may decide you disagree with me, and you may be right. Please reach out to let me know why I’m wrong so I can learn from your insight.
We err not by being wrong, but by not doing everything we can to expose ourselves as wrong. Part of being virtuous, I believe, is recognizing our own fallibility.
(09/25/13 11:50pm)
Bill McKibben, one of the nation’s leading environmentalists, actually pollutes far more than the average American. And he’s justified in doing so.
Last week I presented why a concept known as “earning to give” may be, counter-intuitively, a better strategy to do good than working in the non-profit sector for some. Earning to give is a strategy of working in a high-earning sector and donating a large amount of your money away to the best charity you can find.
One of the strongest criticisms of this strategy is that one’s employment may do more harm than the person’s giving does good (or at least that the person’s “net good” is lower than working on a another job). Not all “high-earning” jobs are morally equivalent. This is a justified critique that is important for each of us to consider before taking a job; however, there are two key considerations that make this point less compelling to me.
The first is considering one’s “value above replacement” (marginal utility for Econ buffs). For example, say Jennifer works at J.P Morgan and Tom works at the charity x. Let’s assume that a firm can always find an adequate replacement employee, and that both Tom and Jennifer are similarly talented as other job seekers, but are more socially conscious. If you believe that J.P. Morgan has a negative effect on the world – which is plausible – that does not actually mean that Jennifer does.
We should think of her contribution relative to a hypothetical replacement, or her “value above replacement.” If she is equally skilled but more socially responsible within her role at the bank than her replacement would have been, she could be having a very positive net contribution for the world. Tom should also be judged relative to his hypothetical replacement employee at charity x, where his replacement is likely to share similar values. In this sense, the return on an individuals’ social consciousness may be higher in banking than in charity.
Talent may work in the opposite direction: if Tom is particularly talented, his return of “good” on that talent might be higher in managing an effective charity than if he were the very best trader at J.P. Morgan. Innovation and leadership in the non-profit sector is extremely valuable, while low-skilled desk work is less so. Therefore, evaluating people by the industry or company they work for is a flawed endeavor.
The other key insight is acknowledging that each of our impacts on the world is marginal. Jennifer may be participating in an unjust social order, but as a marginal actor, simply refusing to participate in the twisted game that is our contemporary global economy is actually reneging her responsibility to face the moral ambiguities that come with power. Somebody else will fill her job – in fact, there are probably thousands vying to at any moment – so it’s better her than a likely replacement. Change is just as likely to come from within powerful institutions, driven by morally conscious individuals like Jennifer, as from activists or non-profits.
This marginal consideration matters for each of us, and leads to some morally uncomfortable but compelling conclusions about how we conceive of doing the most good. This is where McKibben comes in.
If everybody cut his or her carbon emissions by 20 percent, our environment would be in much better shape. That does not mean McKibben should not fly on planes every week to protest environmentally destructive policy; he should, even if it means his carbon emissions are 75 times that of the average American, so long as his impact is greater than his harm. In fact, if he had a moral stance against flying on planes, his net positive impact would be far less (and Keystone XL could be halfway done).
The same is arguably true about those passionate about the greater good but who are unwilling to grapple with a high-earning job for ethical reasons.
This marginal consideration also matters with regard to where you give. I am profoundly disgusted by U.S. domestic incarceration, and think it is the principle human rights issue that we face as a nation. However, because I am operating at the margin, I will likely never give any money to incredible organizations like the Innocence project. The opportunity cost of giving to such causes instead of de-worming children in Africa or distributing malaria nets is far too high. I loathe domestic incarceration, but my money will always be guided by where the highest marginal return of each dollar is, which is likely to always be abroad and meeting fundamental human needs.
So long as you believe that all human lives are morally equivalent – at least outside of your immediate family or closest friends because, lets face it, we’re selfish – it should not matter for marginal actors (i.e. everybody) who most deserves to be helped, but rather how one can do the most good for the most people. As we saw with Margaret and Ben last week, the lives saved by one cause can be orders of magnitude higher than those saved by another.
We should prioritize the maximum good of the world above a personal concept of justice, even if the means are unsavory and it requires complex ethical dilemmas. Want to save the environment? It may mean you may have to take a plane.
(09/18/13 6:49pm)
Imagine Ben. He’s outgoing, incredibly kind and extremely bright. When he was 16, he witnessed global poverty for the first time while traveling abroad. It was an experience that changed his life. While in college, he did community service every week as he pursued a dual degree in economics (which he hated) and theater (which he loved). After college, he spent a few months working as a consultant, but itched to make a difference in the world. He quit his job and founded a charity in Botswana, which he selected for its high HIV rate, that tapped into his passion for theater as a way to educate children about HIV/AIDs through afterschool programs. He raised just enough to cover administrative and fundraising costs as well as teachers’ salaries and material expenses: an average of $150,000 annually. Over his 20 years at the organization, the program spread throughout the region and national statistics demonstrated declining HIV transmission rates, something he was quite proud of. When he was 45, he nobly retired from working abroad. He moved to his hometown, got married, had three kids and became a local private school theater teacher. He felt deeply enriched by his experience working abroad, and remembered the names of the children he worked with until he died.
Imagine Margaret. She spent her career working at an investment bank before bouncing between private equity firms and ultimately retiring at age 52. She spent her career thinking about sterile finance-speak like “return on investment.” Margaret had an average salary of $400,000 over the course of her career and cashed in stock options for an additional $2.5 million. She and her husband, Steven, ate dinner out regularly, bought a nice house downtown and vacationed frequently at nice hotels, but never had kids. Margaret donated 20% of the income she earned every year to charity (including the stock). She hired a consultant to research which interventions had the best empiric proof of saving lives, concluding that the best thing to do was buy and distribute malaria nets in Africa. She never met a single person who benefitted from her donations; in fact, occasionally she would forget which country in Africa her donations went to.
Ben’s story is inspiringly selfless. Margaret’s feels colder, more calculating and more selfish. The truth, however, is that Margaret’s life had a far greater impact on the world than Ben. She was an “effective altruist.”
I submit to you, reader, that you need to seriously re-evaluate your life and start making decisions more like Margaret than Ben.
Ben’s story is great, but he erred in three ways: First, he applied his passion (theater) to somebody else’s problem (AIDS), instead of looking for the most cost-efficient way to prevent AIDS transmission. Secondly, he didn’t research what was the best cause he could be involved in, as he could have saved more lives with a malaria organization. Finally, he was not objective in where to intervene, as Botswana, despite its high rate of HIV (23.4% among adults), actually has the highest basic HIV awareness and condom use in Sub-Saharan Africa. The hypothetical national decrease in AIDS almost certainly would have had nothing to do with his regional program.
Margaret, on the other hand, was able to target all her donations to the most cost-effective intervention in the world. That made all the difference.
By my calculations that draw on figures and estimates from the UN, academic research and randomized controlled trial findings, Ben’s entire organization saved a heroic 96 hypothetical lives over 20 years. Ben truly changed the world for the better. However, in contrast, Margaret’s donations - $2.9 million over her lifetime - allowed a hypothetical organization to save an astronomical 1,416 lives. Margaret saved almost 15 times as many hypothetical lives as Ben’s entire organization.
Bear in mind that I do not claim these estimates to be accurate, as uncertainty is very much a part of charity, but they are the most accurate based in real world estimates I could find. “Lives” is also an imprecise poor measurement of impact However, this hypothetical aims to demonstrate three points. Firstly, not all charity is morally equivalent. Secondly, good intentions often have little to do with real world impact. Finally, even a single person can make a difference by themselves.
This column is about how each of us can reorient our lives to maximize our impacts, because the 1,416th life Margaret saved matters just as much to that person as yours does to you. Rather than evaluate a charity by the vividness of warm glow it offers, or even the story it tells, this is a call to arms to apply your liberal arts education and critically investigate the evidence of its cost-effectiveness. And give generously. It will make all the difference in the world.
“This isn’t about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain’s feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn’t even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply” - Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of Lesswrong.com and of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
Sources and calculations are available upon request from hcavanagh@middlebury.edu. Feedback is more than welcome.