Even better, your donation could pay for one or two workers at Oxfam-or any effective cause you chose to donate to. The “next person up” would not have done the same, so you have created $50,000 of good that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. You make $100,000 and give away half to charity. Yes, imagine you work in investment banking. You’re probably not much better than that “next person up.” But imagine you go to work on Wall Street… But if you don’t get that job at Oxfam, somebody just as smart and generous will get it instead. Many such people try to get a job with Oxfam, the Gates Foundation, or any number of excellent charities. One night at an apartment party, MacAskill and I huddled with some beers in the corner of the kitchen to talk about his worldview, which he was turning into a book called Doing Good Better (out July 28.) Imagine you are a thoughtful 22-year-old college graduate who wants to make a great difference in the world, he said, invoking one of his many thought experiments. I'd volunteered for music-education programs because I liked music, but this felt not like an exercise in selflessness, but rather an expression of my personal identity, like wearing clothes. I certainly hadn’t thought deeply about my donations long before I met MacAskill. Up to that point, I would have described my interest in charity as approximately average. It is munificence matched with math, or, as he once described it to me memorably, “injecting science into the sentimental issue of doing good in the world.” MacAskill, I soon discovered, was a Cambridge-and Oxford-trained philosopher, and a steward of what’s known as effective altruism, a burgeoning movement that has been called 'generosity for nerds.' Effective altruism seeks to maximize the good from one's charitable donations and even from one’s career. He was extremely polite and devastatingly Scottish, trilling his “R”s so that in certain words, like crook or the name Brooke, the second consonant would vibrate with the clarity of a tiny engine. At first, I knew nothing about Will except what I could glean from some brief encounters, like his shaggy blond hair and the approximation of a beard.

Last winter, William MacAskill and his wife Amanda moved into a Union Square apartment that I was sharing with several friends in New York.

The life you can save book