Who is the person, who, if they hadn’t lived, the world would have been the most worse?
Please upvote the answer you find most compelling.
[Question] Who has done the most good?
I suggest another good candidate is Petrov
One source of answers might be the Future of Life Award, which is “given to individuals who, without having received much recognition at the time, have helped make today dramatically better than it may otherwise have been”. It has so far been awarded to:
2021: Joseph Farman , Susan Solomon and Stephen Andersen for helping save our ozone layer
2020: Viktor Zhdanov (your answer) and William Foege for critical contributions to the eradication of a virus that killed 30% of those it infected: Smallpox
2019: Matthew Meselson for being a driving force behind the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which averted an arms race in bioweapons
2018: Stanislav Petrov for helping to prevent an all-out US-Russian nuclear war with his decision to ignore algorithms and instead follow his gut instinct
2017: Vasili Arkhipov for single-handedly preventing nuclear war during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis through vetoing a submarine launch
It’s controversial but I’m inclined to think it might be Deng Xiaoping. Holden and Rob on the 80k podcast:
On the other hand, these reforms made China more powerful, which seems bad given its political system and aggressive foreign policy.
Hi Stefan,
That’s a good point—I suppose China’s development could turn out to be bad for the world. I can also optimistically imagine another wave of liberalising reforms, making Deng’s impact look even better (i.e. putting China on a long-run “liberal” track).
Lol
At first I misinterpreted Stefan’s “Lol” as deriding Ollie’s speculation about a new wave of liberalising reforms.
Then I clicked on the “Hi Stefan” link.
Viktor Zdanov
Estimate of lives saved: 15 million
This from Doing Good Better by William MacAskill
“In 1958, Zhdanov was a deputy minister of health for the Soviet Union. In May of that year, at the Eleventh World Health Assembly meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the Soviet Union’s first appearance in the assembly after a nine-year absence, Zhdanov described a visionary plan to eradicate smallpox. At the time, no disease had ever before been eradicated. No one knew if it could even be done. And no one expected such a suggestion to come from the USSR. But he conveyed his message with passion, conviction and optimism, boldly suggesting that the disease could be eradicated within ten years. Since smallpox was an exclusively human disease, he argued, it would be easier to eradicate than mosquito-borne infections such as malaria. He pointed to the Soviet Union’s success at eliminating smallpox, despite its vast territory and poor transportation networks.
…
By the force of his arguments, Zhdanov was successful. For the first time in its history, the WHO agreed to form a campaign to completely eradicate a disease. To assess how much good Zhdanov did, we should bear in mind that, even if he had not lobbied the WHO, smallpox would probably have been eradicated anyway. The problem was serious enough that someone would have started a campaign to fix it. Many of those 120 million lives that have been saved by smallpox eradication would therefore have been saved anyway. But there would probably have been a considerable delay in the smallpox eradication campaign. Suppose, therefore, that Zhdanov moved forward the eradication of smallpox by a decade. If so, then he alone prevented between 10 and 20 million deaths – about as much as if he’d achieved three decades of world peace.
Benjamin Lay. Probably did more than anyone else to kick off the abolitionist movement. There’s a not-too-crazy story under which if not for him, slavery might still be common throughout the world today. (And under the same world model, the further rights advances/moral circle expansion that followed abolitionism – e.g., women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, etc – likely wouldn’t have occurred either.)
Was he causally responsible for British, etc, abolitionism and not just in America?
Btw I started reading his pamphlet against slavery, and I really appreciate this intro:
Arguably yes. Early British abolitionists were clearly influenced by American abolitionists, and abolitionism in Britain (and to a lesser degree America) were major factors in the success of abolitionism in other countries. The big uncertainties here are: 1) how deterministic vs stochastic was the success of abolitionism, and 2) even if it was very stochastic/we got “lucky”, how important was Lay in particular for tipping success over the edge.
The other thing I’ll say about this is to read Will MacAskill’s book on longtermism (What We Owe the Future) when it comes out, which makes a pretty good case that abolitionism’s success wasn’t predetermined, and also does a good job talking about how important Benjamin Lay in particular was for abolitionism (though Will doesn’t argue that abolitionism’s success was dependent on Lay; I’m not sure what odds Will would put on P(much slavery in 2021 | world without Benjamin Lay) - P(much slavery in 2021 | world with Benjamin Lay)).
Maurice Hilleman could have both been the one who has done the most good or the one who caused the most suffering.
He developed over 40 vaccines, estimated to save 8 million lives / year [Biography].
But in a new documentary on him he’s credited to have invented a vaccine for chickens, which caused to the price of chicken and eggs to drop dramatically (at 43 mins). “The economic impact of Marek’s Disease was $2bn until, with a loss per hen of $15 or 60% of the total production value” [source]
There is a case to be made for Paul Ehrlich, the late 19th-century chemist recently highlighted by Cold Takes, who developed the staining techniques that allowed us to identify blood types, which enabled blood transfusions, which are estimated to have saved 1 Billion lives in this World Economic Forum article.
He shouldn’t get credit for all the lives saved by blood transfusions, but it seems like he discovered a lot of important medical technology beyond the staining techniques (e.g. he started developing drugs that a target particular pathogen without affecting normal host cells, a novel enough concept that it got the fancy name “Zauberkugel”, which translates to “magic bullet”). Check out Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) and His Contributions to the Foundation and Birth of Translational Medicine if you want more details.
Not to be confused with the other Paul Ehrlich who incorrectly predicted mass starvation in the 1970s; my respect for your Ehrlich was significantly increased when I discovered they were different people.
Great question and great answers so far. I always liked Alexander Fleming (discoverer of penicillin, which has certainly saved millions of lives) but I suspect someone else would have found it relatively quickly if he hadn’t—although I’ve never looked into the details.
What about George Washington? He obviously wasn’t the intellectual leader of the early USA and its form of government (and should only get a fraction of the credit / blame for everything that followed), but my sense (?) is that he played a key political (leadership) and military role in the revolution. Perhaps more importantly, he voluntarily stepped down after two terms as president, when he was still very popular. This seems rare in history (before or after his time) and likely led to more stable governance since then not only in the USA but also around the world. Arguably the US is the world’s oldest continuous government and oldest democracy; the UK is tough to pin down, but I’d go with the Reform Act of 1832 if I had to pick a year when the House of Commons truly escaped from aristocratic influence.