Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is September 1st, 2015, and my guest is William McCaskel, Professor Philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford,

co-founder of Two Non-profits, 80,000 Hours, and giving what we can,

and author of doing good, better, effective altruism and how you can make a difference,

and finally co-founder of the Effective Altruism Movement. Well, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you for having me.

We're going to talk about the ideas in your book, Doing Good, Better,

and the whole concept of Effective Altruism.

But first, I want to give a shout out to journalist Mark Gunther,

whose article on Effective Altruism, which will link to, got me interested in the idea.

So I want to start with the principles of Effective Altruism. You list five. What are they?

Yeah, so Effective Altruism is about using your time and money as effectively as possible

to make the world a better place, and taking a scientific approach to doing so.

And in the book, I list these five principles that help you to think in the way that Effective Altruists tend to think.

And as I'm sure your audience will notice, they have a lot of similarities to some core concepts in economic thinking.

So the first one is just to think about the impact of your actions.

And in particular, the impact in terms of improvements on people's wellbeing.

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