Making Your 80,000 Hours Count (with Benjamin Todd)

If you want to change the world, how you spend your 80,000 working hours may be the most important decision you can make. Benjamin Todd, founder of 80,000 Hours, joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to dismantle the career advice you've been fed since childhood. "Follow your passion" turns out to be a trap. Chasing a big paycheck barely moves the happiness needle. And being a doctor has a smaller impact than you might think, says Todd. Todd and Roberts wrestle with the real ingredients of a fulfilling career--engaging work, supportive colleagues, meaningful problems--while debating whether Jeff Bezos has lived a worthy life and why most people won't part with 10% of their income to save lives abroad. Along the way, you'll meet unsung heroes like David Nalin, whose solution to dehydration saves millions of children's lives.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is May 6, 2026, and my guest is Benjamin Todd. He is the founder of 80,000 Hours,

• 0:43Speaker 00

  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 Econ Talk.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Oh, many thanks. Let's start with the title. Why is your organization called 80,000 Hours? And why is the book called 80,000 Hours?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  And I'm going to start with the, 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, I'm going to challenge you. Why should we, shouldn't I just try to make as much money as possible, be happy? What's wrong with that?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Well, to some degree, it's just that 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 there's 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 and preventing future pandemic. And there's actually things you can do about this. And you can have a career that is, you know, that most, over half of students from top universities

• 2:47Speaker 01

  go into law, consulting, finance and big tech. And 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.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I often discourage young people from doing those standard things. Part of it, which I think you'll agree, you can tell me, is 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 other 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, the idea that you should choose your career carefully is, is a, is a very good one. You say early on in the book, and I, I think you're a hundred percent right. You say most career advice didn't seem to be based on any research. You want to elaborate on that? Cause I think most people, young people, especially when they're starting in the very

• 3:53Speaker 00

  beginning, forget midterm, mid-career moves, they won't help. And there's very little of it.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And you'd think for such an important decision that people are making over decades of what they're gonna, 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, it's, 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, which paths are worth going down in the first place.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  And it's, you know, I've written about this as well. It's, uh, 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, um, it's hard, it's a very difficult decision. But part of it, what makes it easier is, as you argue in the book, is it's not the last time you're gonna make that decision. You don't have to feel locked into a career.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  So talk about the, the general strategy that you suggest people follow.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's, 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, 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.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  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. You know, in 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

• 7:09Speaker 00

  on. But that's sometimes true. And so, you know, 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. You don't, you don't make any defense of that, of the idea of bringing, 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

• 7:51Speaker 00

  focused on big problems. Do you want to say anything on behalf of the smaller stuff, or defend the focus on the bigger problems?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Well, maybe it's 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 and we have five I talk about there. And your positive impact is one of them.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  But then, yeah, when it comes to your positive impact,

• 8:31Speaker 01

  the we argue the way to the first key thing to think of there is which problems you're focusing on. And in particular, we argue focusing on big and neglected problems. And

• 8:46Speaker 01

  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 things are 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 is one area. Or there's we also talk about factory farming. And you know, factory farmed animals don't participate in the market. So there's little reason to

• 9:25Speaker 01

  expect if I just make money that that will help the the trillion or so factory farmed animals.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Trillion is a big number, right? I mean, you talk and you talk about that in the book. I think

• 9:42Speaker 00

  I think it's sort of it's worse than than the imperfect correlation between

• 9:50Speaker 00

  salary and doing producing value. I think the the way I would put it in its starkest terms is that the market rewards people for

• 10:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Stuff addictive as well.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Addictive, well, I admit that in the first category. You know, 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.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  But ultimately, he has given the world, forget the rest of the stuff. We could debate a thousand things he's done, is good or bad or different. 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.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah. It struck me during COVID, when everywhere was sold out of toilet paper, I was still able to get some on Amazon and, you know, that was impressive.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I mean, so I think.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Obviously, there's a lot of controversy around Amazon, but just in terms of the product itself.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  I mean, I do think, one thing is, 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 this is 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.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  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 burning to give that we also talk about.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll come back to that. It's a really important idea. I just want to talk about the, just for now, the direct impact of spending, devoting your life, or your daily life, when you're in a particular job, to a particular function. I would say it this way, you know, I don't, 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.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  And again, we can, there's lots of controversy, some of it I think is incorrect, but that's, and 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 actually 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.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  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 it's, 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?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  I mean, even thinking even more broadly than books in particular. I do, I mean, I do agree making the world wealthier is, is better. And it's not that you only have to save lives. In general, as the world's 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.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  But I definitely don't want to say there's like only one way to contribute.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Personally, I would be, you know, 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?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, many people say, you know, just money doesn't make, 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, I also, you know, there's, there were these papers that also claimed once you hit a certain level of income, like, I think it was 75,000, there's, 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

• 17:01Speaker 01

  a year in the US, 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, 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? And but this tends to be pretty overlooked, I think, when people think about what makes for a good job, they tend, they tend to kind of think of like, how would people, what would people think of me if

• 17:40Speaker 01

  I had this career and this kind of more farm mode type picture of things. But your actual like satisfaction is much more driven by the, the hour to hour basis.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  You also say, don't chase, 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, but, and dangerous. But what, what's your take on it?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Well, the kids, I mean, the thing that's correct about it is that it's being intrinsically motivated is really good.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  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 like 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 be 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 they've cut off a lot of options. And in fact, they probably even led themselves into the most competitive areas because most

• 19:02Speaker 01

  people are passionate about the same things. And yeah, we also find you this only a couple of percent in the of jobs in the economy are in art, sport and music. So you've got like the majority of people trying to crowd into a small range of a small range of fields.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  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 don't get a platform.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Well, this is a big, 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.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I like your summary, I very much like your summary of of what a person should think about in terms of the 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 hourly hour to hour part of it. Clear tasks with a 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. Yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  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, you know, matters a great deal. And I think people tend not to think about that. And when, especially when they interview for the job, they have a very romantic ideal. And I'll tell you, I've always wanted to be a, and then fill 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, is wrong with that actual version of that job. Uh, but talk about in general, those, those kind of, those kind of issues and, uh, and why they're important.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Well, 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 like 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, you're excited about, then that can be really engaging. Um, 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.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Um, 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, then you might first think that you need to go down. Like, uh, another very common thing is someone's done a biology major and they think, well, I need to work within biology. But, um, you know, 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.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, when I started my job here as president of Schlum 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 as 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. You know, 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

• 23:53Speaker 00

  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 task. 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, you know, workplace culture, to think about how to enhance that component of the, 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.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's it's alluding to the question of personal fit and in our advice as well, we try, you know, we say kind of generate a shortlist 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.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  So let's turn this up in the specifics. You know, one of my favorite things in the book is the it's kind of a

• 25:06Speaker 00

  as a contrarian, it's a very delightful chapter, basically say, suggest, argue that being a doctor is not so helpful. Most people associate being in healthcare is the most important thing you could possibly 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.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  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 could have quite a lot more impact again. But yeah, the so the basic, some of the basic reasons.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  I mean, the first is that healthcare hasn't actually increased our lifespans that much. Most of the increase in life expectancy.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Don't tell anybody. That's a terrible thing to say.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Well, it's increased them by a couple of years, which is very valuable.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  But a lot of the increase is just from public health and sanitation and just generally being wealthier, all these, all these other things. And then that 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 kind of shared.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  But then, yeah, maybe the most important thing is just diminishing returns. So. You can very clearly, 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.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  And all, 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 US anyway, it's actually kind of, the curve bends down and marginal healthcare is even slightly counterproductive because of all the side effects.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I don't, I don't go that far in the book, I'm like claiming that it's still, still positive, but just quite diminishing. And then the, you know, the third kind of effect is, if you don't go to medical school, there's a kind of, 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, you know, if you're the person who got the place, then presumably the medical school thinks you'll make a better doctor, so you're, you know, 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.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  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 been, wouldn't have happened otherwise. So, I mean, this is obviously probably uncertain to within 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 UK.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Which is, I think, is still a meaningful impact, but I think it's a lot less than people intuitively expect.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would just again defend the smaller interventions. You know, 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. A nice man told her she's fine. And that was nice. Now, the other thing I would, I would, I would just add is that, you know, I, you know, if I take someone else's place, I like to think of it as, and this is particularly true in medicine where, you know, the number of medical schools is, is controlled by regulation.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  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, and with love and empathy. And so I think, you know, even in jobs where the impact is smaller than life-saving, it's not negligible. It's still, 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 life-saving, but life-enhancing could just make someone's day.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  That would be an achievement, so.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, people, I do think it's important to be a nice person in your day-to-day life, though I guess what one thought that does come to mind is like, you know, 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.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  So let's turn to that. I, you know,

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Most people would agree on some of those. It's a tricky thing to talk about, right? Most people would agree on some of the existential challenges the human race faces. One that you mentioned 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's gotten, it's 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, let's just leave it at that.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  But, you know, 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.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  For better, for worse, a lot of people said, I don't want to have anything to do with it because it's, he's a politician and I, and he's quote, wrong because he's a Democrat. Same would be true of Republicans. My joke, it's not a joke, in my claim during COVID was that if, 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 it's, my point is simple. It's really hard.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  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.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  And I think it's, you know, 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 what you're, I'd like you to make the case that you should worry even more.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's, 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 Straits, which, you know, with this huge federal program where, like, youths who'd committed misdemeanors were taken to prisons in the US, 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.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  So like, they were actually committing more crimes compared to the counterfactual. And, I mean, people don't know why, maybe they, 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.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  They got career advice that was helpful to them from the criminals, yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this, you know, this program persisted for decades and received huge amounts of funding, and the people involved all thought it was working. It won, there was an award-winning documentary about it, and there's a lot of examples like this.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  At the same time, there are causes that seem to be obviously helped by various interventions that actually, in this case, 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

• 36:04Speaker 00

  not extraordinary, they're just sometimes dogged, persistent. And I wanted to highlight one of them, just because it seems to me that, you know, 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.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  So, talk about him, and, you know, I think giving glory to people who make a difference is a very useful thing.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  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-

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Dehydration, mostly.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then trying to figure out- What could he do about this huge problem? And at the time, they would use intravenous strips 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 strips with the, you know, the bags of saline shipped in and all of that.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  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 nail in is 100% of that impact.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. But even just if we're talking about millions of lives per year, just a small, even a small speed up of that is a huge impact.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. Again, I think it seems to me we should be spending some resources saluting such people. And, you know, another example which comes to mind is Semenwise, who figured out that it's a really good idea if you're a doctor who works in the 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 a purple fever, which came from the contamination from the corpses. And finding that out, discovering, I'm sure we would have discovered it, right?

• 39:20Speaker 00

  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 Semenwise 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

• 39:53Speaker 00

  As society to honor these people, we, you know, we give out Nobel prizes and, 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.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  And in a, in a way, we sometimes almost do the opposite where, um, you know, 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. Uh, and you know, I, you can, 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.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Why does he get criticized for donating to medical research?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Um, I think people just, they hate the idea of billionaire philanthropy. And, um, you know, it's non-democratic and, um, yeah, I, I just, I've, I've seen a lot of, a lot of news stories about is that, you know, does he have ulterior motives? Is this just, just trying to make himself look good? Uh, people are very suspicious about it.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  I, 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 Shalom College in Jerusalem. It's, uh, you'll be applauded and honored for it. I'll just, just throwing that out there. Um,

• 41:28Speaker 00

  I want to talk about one other example before I forgot again, someone I'd never heard of. This makes me sad is, and, and that we don't, these people should be the household names that Mark Zuckerberg and others are, uh, is Carl Landsteiner. Talk about what Carl Landsteiner did. Incredibly important. He's a secret.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  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, you know, people had fell into certain groups and if you matched the group, you could make transfusions safe. Which again, you know, has enabled many millions of operations every year to take place that would have been too dangerous otherwise.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Amazing. 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, as we just alluded to.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and just in the overall framework, like, you know, we try and get people to think about which problems are biggest and most neglected. And then the second stage would be, 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, you know, if you go to, 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.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  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 if something that's morally neutral or ideally, you know, 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, he was a student in Oxford and really wanted to make an impact.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  And he was considering becoming a social worker, but he thought he would just, 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 UK 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.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  That's very cool. As you say, some people are critical of it, of wealthy people giving away money because they control what it's spent on sometimes or they care about, you know, they give it to sectors that may not be as needy as others.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  What advice do you have for people on how they should think about their personal charitable giving?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Well, it's really important to think about which place is most effective to donate to. And 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 the 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 need, have a room for funding. So, you know, 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.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, as a kind of, 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 give directly, 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 US 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, several people every year. Several households in, among the world's poorest people.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  And because money goes so much further, the poorer you are, like the same reason that money doesn't make you happier in the US. It means that money goes far further if you're, 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.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  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, I try to give 10% of my income. It's a religious obligation for me as, as a Jew. But non-religious people give away charity, I give away money and 10% is a nice amount. It's, it has this tradition of, through religion of tithing and it has a residence through, through human history, but you can give more than that. You can get, that's a minimum. You could give 20, you could give, you talk about people in the book who give 50.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you're, you're earning to give especially, then normally that would be more than 10%.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  But let's think about the, the give directly model for the person who's, who's 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, an example you gave, or, or more. And in Ideally, one would hope, not necessarily true, which should be part of the challenge, but you'd hope this is transformative for them. They, their children will survive past childhood more with a higher probability. And if you put that case to people and you

• 48:40Speaker 00

  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. And of that 60, 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 5, 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? What do you think? Most people don't. Let's just be clear about it. And, and obviously, in your book, you're trying to make the case.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  Others, you know, we've had Peter Singer on the show, it's, 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, some people won't do it. So why do you think?

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Hundreds of people who've read the book have taken the 10% pledge. So maybe if you read it, there's a one in a thousand chance of something that you will, maybe one in 100. 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, that has happened, that has existed in some, some cultures where people have many, most people tied, and that's, that's the tide, and that's the norm. One way to also...

• 50:24Speaker 01

  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 parts that involve taking more than a 50% salary cut. You know, if you, if you become a teacher, you're probably, you might be taking a two-thirds salary cut compared to what you could have otherwise. And then that's seen as completely, that's seen as completely normal.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Virtuous. It's virtuous.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think to some degree it is virtuous, but I remember like telling my mother I was going to donate 10% of my income. And she was like, well, how can you afford that? Like, that's gonna 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. That's such a huge, that's a much, they almost see that as a lesser sacrifice than the, than the money. And yeah, I'm really not sure. I mean, you know, there's, there's even all this research that suggests that giving to charity makes people happier on that. So it's not even obvious that you're going to be made worse off.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  So let me speculate on it and get your reaction. 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? We get.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  But I think, but this applies even in the US when, you know, 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, they're not giving 10%.

• 51:56Speaker 00

  But anyway, I think part of it is, there's no, 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, and before they were in rags, and after you've helped them, they're in a nice, they're in nice clothes and they're in a nice place and they, they come back to their old spot on the sidewalk and they thank you and they, so I think, I think part of it is, is feedback. Part of it is skepticism that it might actually be happening because you don't get that feedback. And part of it is

• 52:36Speaker 00

  selfishness, which is human. What I think is, and I think about these challenges in a very different way. I think the, I don't think.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  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 put an emphasis on effectively, when we have information about what might be most beneficial to that person. Money's 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 well-being. 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.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  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. 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 a parent, or a child. And I'm putting aside the fact that giving people money

• 54:18Speaker 00

  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 the texture of life. But it's starving to death. It's really hard to argue against it. And yet, we do strike 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's just callousness, probably. What do you think?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  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,

• 55:20Speaker 01

  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,

• 55:48Speaker 01

  in a way, there's this, there's this kind of, yeah, I agree, it's like a kind of internal matter of your motivation, how do you extend your, extend your kindness beyond what you can see immediately in front of you? And

• 56:04Speaker 01

  I think many people, when they reflect on it, they, they, they do realise that,

• 56:10Speaker 01

  yeah, just because you can't see someone doesn't mean they don't matter.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  But then, yeah, how to do that? I mean, one very practical, one very practical piece of advice, I think, in a way is, you know, a lot of people we work with, they work on these very abstract causes where they don't see the feedback of their, exactly what they're doing. For example, they're helping future generations and we won't, we won't see all the benefits of that.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  But you can still have a very fulfilling career by... You know, 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.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  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 read your, you know, I spent time with you and read your words. But if you tell me, and you live in, 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, and you say, you know, if you would just give me 10% of your income, you know, I travel in such and such a country, it's very poor, and I'll make sure that the people there

• 57:55Speaker 00

  who are the poorest get a significant, a life changing amount of money. And I'm not going to do that. Right? I'm not going to, 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.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  That would be one. The second would be I'd worry that you're not going to be careful with it.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  But are those just, you know, maybe those are just excuses.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I don't think you should give it to me. You should, you would give it to give directly would be much more. I mean, I'll be able to do it a lot more efficiently just for starters, you know, much less overhead. I wouldn't have to fly out anywhere, which would already.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  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, you know, I really think some of this is.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Is an information problem, right? If, if, 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. A Passover be 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, does the rabbi, 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.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  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, 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 that try to do certain things, talking about just directly helping people, is how complicated the human experience is, and how hard it

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I definitely, I definitely don't claim to be a perfect altruist. I've tried to design the book to be, you know, I, 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.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  At the end of the book, you give a, you call, 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?

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  A summary of all the advice?

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's the last two pages. It's the last two pages of the book. It takes, you claim it's a minute. It might take two minutes. I don't know.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we've already covered on 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 work, good colleagues, and sufficient, if not, you know, a sufficient salary rather than maximizing your salary.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  And then consider exploring several of those, especially if you're right at the start of your career. Like, you don't necessarily, 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.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  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 then the final kind of final stage is then thinking about how you can use your core capital to tackle these 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 I basically think the key thing going on right now is to do with with AI and how we might have AI that can do AI R and D within the next couple of years.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  And this could really change society. And that creates a whole host of problems downstream from that. It's like 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.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  And, you know, ideally it would be even more, but these types of things I've just been listing, like, 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 as a civilization. And that means any listeners, if they if they switch now, they could really be among this very small group of people shaping shaping these issues. And but yeah, we we we talk about other problems as well, like factory farming and global health in the book, too. And then.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then 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 that's the final section, which is now like, given the actual options you're facing, how do you how do you choose between them?

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  And figure out the right plan for you? And?

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know. I do you feel like I has there an important thing I've missed?

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  It's, I think it's very useful to.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  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 re-try different paths, come back.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Exactly. And get off the armchair, even without trying to hold 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 am I actually, what could actually change my ranking here? Like, you have your options and then what could actually be decisive between these, what things 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.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Benjamin Todd. His book is 80,000 Hours. Ben, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Thanks so much.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.