80% of opportunities won't make a difference to you

From The best solutions are far more effective than others by Benjamin Todd.  The power law keeps popping up recently.  

Scared Straight was a government programme that received billions of dollars of funding, and was profiled in an award-winning documentary. The idea was to take kids who committed crimes, show them life in jail, and scare them into embracing the straight and narrow.

The only problem? One meta-analysis found the programme made the kids more likely to commit crimes, and another more recent meta-analysis found it had no effect.1

Causing this much harm is rare, but when social programmes are rigorously tested, a large fraction of them don’t work.

So, even if you’ve chosen a pressing issue, it would be easy to end up working on a solution to it that has very little impact.

Meanwhile, research finds that among solutions that do have positive effects, the best interventions within an area are far more cost effective than average — often achieving over 10 and sometimes 100 times as much for a given unit of resources.

Taking a career that lets you work on more effective solutions is one way to find a greater opportunity to contribute.

In this article, we explain what we think the current research implies about how much solutions differ in effectiveness, why this should change how we approach making a difference, and how to find the best solutions within an area in practice.

How much do solutions differ in how well they work?

In recent years there’s been a wave of advocacy to stop the use of plastic bags. However, convincing someone to entirely give up plastic bags for the rest of their life (about 10,000 bags) would avoid about 0.1 tonnes of CO2 emissions. In contrast, convincing someone to take just one fewer transatlantic flight would reduce CO2 emissions by over one tonne — more than 10 times as much.3

And rather than trying to change personal consumption in the first place, we’d argue you could do even more to reduce emissions by advocating for greater funding of neglected green technology.

This pattern doesn’t just hold within climate change. Its significance was first pointed out in the field of global health, by Toby Ord’s article “The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health.”

He found data that compared different health interventions in poor countries (e.g. malaria bed nets, vaccines, types of surgery) in terms of how many years of healthy life they produce per $1,000 invested.

This data showed that the most cost-effective interventions were around 50 times as cost effective as the median, 23 times the mean, and almost exactly obeyed the 80/20 rule.

Intervention cost effectiveness in global health in order of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per $1,000 on the y-axis, from the DCP2.

This is an incredible finding, because it suggests that one person working on the most effective interventions within global health could achieve as much as 50 people working on a typical intervention.

We’ve since seem similar patterns among:

Large US social programmes

Elsewhere in global health, as well as in health in rich countries

Education both in the developing and developed world

Policies to reduce CO2 emissions

Different ways to get out the vote

We’ve basically found this pattern wherever data is available.

Other global health datasets, such as WHO-CHOICE and the DCP3

Public health in rich countries

Education interventions in developing countries

Ways to alter meat consumption to reduce animal suffering

Policies to reduce CO2 emissions

We’ve done a more comprehensive review of the data in a separate research piece:

How much do solutions to social problems differ in their effectiveness? A collection of all the studies we could find.

Go to the article for the large number of links to hard data.  Basically, if you face 100 opportunities, 80 of them will be essentially meaningless.  All of them will be be presented as meaningful and desirable but only 20 will be, and of the 20 only 5 or so will truly make a material difference.  

 

Most people spend an immense amount of time and effort to find random opportunities when, in terms of good life outcomes, most the effort should actually be in understanding whether, of the opportunities surfaced, which ones are really worthwhile.  

Yet another example of the Power of No.