Michael Kremer And Jay Williams: Effective Altruism

Effective Altruism

It is in the human spirit to give back. Mahatma Gandi said it best: “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” This statement rings true, but we must be careful when we give our time and our money. People all too often do not take into consideration potential downsides to service or humanitarian aid. Because of this billions of dollars are being spent on ineffective humanitarian work, and even worse than that, some work does more harm than it does good. If we want to continue giving service and donating our money, we have to be much more conscientious of where our time and money is actually going. Effective donation comes from compassion, a business mindset, and good investments.

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While Kremer was a PhD student at Harvard University, he was struck with the idea of treating humanitarian aid as an economic experiment rather than merely as a service project. He initiated the first humanitarian randomized control trial. He surveyed and collected data from 14 different Kenyan schools, in 7 schools he implemented current humanitarian aid projects and tested results, in the other 7 he let them continue as normal. This was an experiment that is nearly the standard in hard sciences, but had never been considered for work like this. Kremer took the most popular humanitarian efforts of the time focusing on academic success and simply tested them. His results were shocking. Kremer first tested one of the most common humanitarian aid projects, book donation. It is common in many third world countries to have only one text book per classroom, it would make sense if the amount of books increased, the overall quality of education would as well. Surprisingly, book donation had very little overall effect on the performance of the students. After extensive research, he found that the only students who seemed to benefit from this were the highest achieving students. He later hypothesized that the books were on too high of a reading level to be effective for the average student.

Arthur Brooks, author We need to have a liberal obsession for helping while maintaining a conservative mindset of successful business. We cannot afford any more ineffective solutions. We cannot be successful without the mindsets of both parties. The only way to find a long, lasting, sustainable solution to the world’s poverty is to work together. To be successful we must have compassion, education, and invest in effective solutions.

Striving for better solutions is crucial in humanitarian work. Finding a solution takes time and effort. Michael Kremer’s creative approach was one of the best ways to find an effective solution. It took months of testing and hours of critical analysis to discover academic success may be linked to something other than academic supplies.

Humans want and need to give service. In many cases, service carries with it the possibility of lasting positive results on a community and on an economy. We have a chance of making a lasting and sustainable difference in this world. If we blindly try to make a difference, we may end up doing more damage. If we are careful, and make good investments in people. We can and we will make a difference. We simply need to remember to have compassion, have a business mindset, and test solutions prior to implementing