I often see media coverage of effective altruism that says “effective altruists want to maximise the number of QALYs in the world.” (e.g. London Review of Books).
The specific example you mention is particularly puzzling: it is a review of Doing Good Better, which makes this point very clearly (pp. 39-40):
the same methods that were used to create the QALY could be used to measure the costs and benefits of pretty much anything. We could use these methods to estimate the degree to which your well-being is affected by stubbing your toe, or by going through a divorce, or by losing your job. We could call them well-being-adjusted life years instead. e idea would be that being dead is at 0 percent well-being; being as well off as you realistically can be is at 100 percent well-being. You can compare the impact of different activities in term of how much and for how long they increase people’s well-being. In chapter one we saw that doubling someone’s income gives a 5 percentage points increase in reported subjective well-being. On this measure, doubling someone’s income for twenty years would provide one WALY.
Thinking in terms of well-being improvements allows us to compare very different outcomes, at least in principle. For example, suppose you were unsure about whether to donate to the United Way of New York City or to Guide Dogs of America. You find out that it costs Guide Dogs of America approximately $50,000 to train and provide one guide dog for one blind person. Which is a better use of fifty dollars: providing five books, or a 1⁄1,000th contribution to a guide dog? It might initially seem like such a comparison is impossible, but if we knew the impact of each of these activities on people’s well-being, then we could compare them.
Suppose, hypothetically, that we found out that providing one guide dog (at a cost of $50,000) would give a 10 percentage points increase in reported well-being for one person’s life over nine years (the working life of the dog). at would be 0.9 WALYs. And suppose that providing five thousand books (at a cost of $50,000) provided a 0.001 percentage point increase in quality of life for five hundred people for forty years. at would be two WALYs. If we knew this, then we’d know that spending $50,000 on schoolbooks provided a greater benefit than spending $50,000 on one guide dog.
The difficulty of comparing different sorts of altruistic activity is therefore ultimately due to a lack of knowledge about what will happen as a result of that activity, or a lack of knowledge about how different activities translate into improvements to people’s lives. It’s not that different sorts of benefits are in principle incomparable.
The specific example you mention is particularly puzzling: it is a review of Doing Good Better, which makes this point very clearly (pp. 39-40):
This happens a lot—the most striking part of your message is what’s most memorable. Disclaimers and qualifications normally get forgotten.