In the second chapter we focus on the issue of global poverty, an especially concrete and well-studied problem.  You'll read about some of the most promising strategies to address this problem: scalable health interventions as well as policy work (but work to address this set of problems is very varied: you can read about some very different approaches in more to explore).

We also try to give you tools to quantify and evaluate how much good an intervention can achieve; introduce expected value reasoning; and investigate differences in expected cost-effectiveness between interventions. 

Key concepts from this chapter include:

• Differences in impact: It appears that some of our options to help do many times more good than others. People generally don’t appreciate this, and so miss out on significant opportunities to help.
• Fermi estimates: When you’re trying to make a decision, it can be useful to make a rough calculation for which option is best. Even if there’s a lot of uncertainty, this can give you a rough answer, and can tell you which things are most important to estimate next.

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