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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Researchers largely agree that medicine has only increased average life expectancy by a few years.
Most gains in life expectancy over the last 100 years have instead occurred due to better nutrition, improved sanitation, increased wealth, and other factors.
2.
Doctors are only one part of the medical system, which also relies on nurses and hospital staff, as well as overhead and equipment.
The impact of medical interventions is shared between all of these elements.
And three, most importantly, there are already a lot of doctors in the developed world, so if you don't become a doctor, somebody else will be available to perform the most critical procedures.
Additional doctors therefore only enable us to carry out procedures that deliver less significant and less certain results.
The last point is illustrated by the chart below, which compares the impact of doctors in different countries.
The y-axis shows the amount of ill health in the population, measured in disability-adjusted life years, or dailies, per 100,000 people.
where one daily equals one year of life lost due to ill health.
The x-axis shows the number of doctors per 100,000 people.
Here's a graph titled dailies per 100,000 people versus doctors per 100,000 people.
Looking at the graph, we notice that as the number of doctors increases, the dailies gained drops off pretty rapidly.
Much of the gains seem to come from the initial 100 doctors per 100,000 people.
you can see that the curve goes nearly flat once you have more than 150 doctors per 100,000 people.
After this point, which almost all developed countries meet, additional doctors only achieve a small impact on average.
So, if you become a doctor in a rich country like the US or UK, you may well do more good than you would in many other jobs, and if you're an exceptional doctor then you'll have a bigger impact than these averages, but it probably won't be a huge impact.
In fact, in the next chapter we'll show how almost any college graduate can do more to save lives than a typical doctor.
and in the rest of the career guide, will cover many other examples of common but ineffective attempts to do good.
These findings motivated Greg to switch from clinical medicine into biosecurity, for reasons we'll explain over the rest of the guide.
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