Review: Moral Ambition

 Moral Ambition is Ruger Bregman's book trying to convince people to stop taking high paying but soul sucking jobs in favor of jobs that matter. I enjoyed Utopia for Realists so I picked it up. 

The book starts with the story of Thomas Clarkson, who while doing research in college about the ethics of owning slaves came to the conclusion that slavery was such a scourge that he could do nothing but devote his life to abolishing it. He eventually linked up with the Quakers and obviously the movement was successful in getting the British Empire to stop the slave trade.

The book then goes through other case studies indicating that while most people have a strong moral sense, many people require someone to ask them to do the right thing instead of doing nothing by default. This need for activation leads to clusters of people doing the right thing, but a small well organized group can be much more effective if they're willing to work very hard. 

That sounds very much like a startup, so Bregman introduces us to a school in London that incubates and trains non profit entrepreneurs. We see various examples like how Bill Gates essentially funded the malaria vaccine, while a single entrepreneur singlehandedly funded the distribution of several million mosquito nets.

My critique of the book is my usual critiques of do-gooders. The biggest lever you can have is to win the government of the superpower in the world. Unfortunately, it looks a lot as though progressives keep failing to do that, and many of the gains they hope to achieve may actually be rolled back as a result of not focusing on such gains.

Bergman is not naive. He notes that many groups that are fanatically devoted to a cause may not even have sufficient introspection to realize that their cause is not a good one. Another problem for many progressive institutions is the demand for moral purity and refusal to compromise, which essentially means that they're very hard to work with and tend to get nothing done since the purity contests prevent effectiveness.

The book is short and a fast read. I'm not sure I agree with all of it but it deserves a reading. Maybe it'll inspire you to take up an important cause.