Benjamin Todd

speaker

4,140 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2023 last heard 28 May

Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · The 80,000 Hours Career Guide (2023) · 4 Sep 2023 podcast

The world has so many big problems, and they often seem impossible to solve.

So when we started 80,000 Hours with the aim of helping people do good with their careers, one of the first questions we asked was, how much difference can one person really make?

We learned that while many common ways to do good, such as becoming a doctor, have less impact than you might first think, others have allowed certain people to achieve an extraordinary impact.

In other words, one person can make a difference, but you might have to do something a little unconventional.

In this chapter, we start by estimating how much good you could do by becoming a doctor.

Then we share some stories of the highest impact people in history and consider what they mean for your career.

How much impact do doctors have?

Many people who want to help others become doctors.

One of our early readers, Dr. Greg Lewis, did exactly that.

I want to study medicine because of a desire I have to help others, he wrote on his university application.

And so the chance of spending a career doing something worthwhile, I can't resist.

So we wondered, how much difference does becoming a doctor really make?

In 2012, we teamed up with Greg to find out.

Since a doctor's primary purpose is to improve health, we tried to figure out how much extra health one doctor actually adds to humanity.

We found that over the course of their career, an average doctor in the UK will enable their patients to live about an extra combined 100 years of healthy life, either by extending their lifespans or by improving their overall health.

There is, of course, a huge amount of uncertainty in this figure, but the real figure is unlikely to be more than 10 times higher.

Using a standard conversion rate, used by the World Bank among other institutions, of 30 extra years of healthy life to one life saved, 100 years of healthy life is equivalent to about 3 lives saved.

This is clearly a significant impact, however it's less of an impact than many people expect doctors to have over their entire career.

There are three main reasons this impact is lower than you might expect.

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