Top Highlights

• As Trevor Field’s story illustrates, however, good intentions can all too easily lead to bad outcomes.
• When it comes to helping others, being unreflective often means being ineffective.
• We very often fail to think as carefully about helping others as we could, mistakenly believing that applying data and rationality to a charitable endeavor robs the act of virtue. And
• One difference between investing in a company and donating to a charity is that the charity world often lacks appropriate feedback mechanisms. Invest in a bad company, and you lose money; but give money to a bad charity, and you probably won’t hear about its failings.
• The French economist Thomas Piketty, who gained international fame for his 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has suggested that the level of income inequality in the United States is “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.”