When British doctor Greg Lewis felt called to contribute more to the world, he looked into leaving the U.K. to serve less fortunate patients. That seemed a better way to do good than working in a pristine hospital.
But when he crunched the numbers, they told a different story. By treating patients in a poor country, he calculated he might save 4 lives a year. By choosing a specialty at home home and working toward an annual salary of $200,000, he could donate up to half to a charity providing antimalarial bed nets–saving dozens of lives per year. As William MacAskill explains in his forthcoming book, Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You Can Make a Difference, Lewis chose to earn in order to give.
She also reports about boycotts:
[William} MacAskill takes an irreverent approach to the rules of charity, suggesting that impulsive altruism can often do more harm than good. Boycotting brands that use sweatshops, for example, risks putting workers out of much-needed jobs with better conditions than they would otherwise find.