Part A (20 mins.)
In this exercise, we’ll imagine that you’re planning to donate to a charity to improve global health, and explore how much you could do with that donation.
GiveWell is an effective altruism-inspired organization which attempts to identify outstanding donation opportunities in global health and development. Using this tool to estimate your future income and Givewell’s reports on their top charities, try and work out what you could achieve if you donated 10% of your lifetime income to one of these charities.
If you’re short on time, here’s a sheet with information about three top GiveWell charities. If you’d like to explore further, check out GiveWell’s cost effectiveness models.
Complete this exercise for three GiveWell charities, writing down your answer like, e.g.:
Malaria Consortium: X cases of malaria prevented, with an estimate of N deaths averted
Part B (10 mins.)
In the last section, you ended up with a few different options. Now imagine you were given $1,000 to donate to only one of these charities.
There's a difficult judgment to be made now: since you have to pick, which charity would you donate to to do the most good?
Now write down your answer to the following questions:
Which charity do you pick to donate to? Why?
Part C (Optional, 10 mins.)
What are other decisions in your life that you might consider generating quantitative estimates and comparing outcomes for?
A. $362,411.89 would be donated over the course of my lifetime.
I would consider New Incentives-Vaccines as it is a highly rated PREVENTATIVE charity. All are around $5K per life saved, but many people in this forum, and likely at large, have contributed to malaria treatment. However, a portion of this donation (about 33% each?) would also go to Helen Keller Intl (Vitamin A) and Malaria Consortium, as these are all preventative, clinical solutions to diseases in developing countries.
B. If I only had a thousand dollars, I would rather concentrate my efforts all into Malaria Consortium, as the statistics suggest that it is a long-term solution "protect a child from malaria," if more expensive than the $2 Helen Keller rate (this only supplies vitamins for a year).
C. Since I plan to go into academic research in biology, it is paramount to me that I consider a field that would actively save many lives (and preferably develop solutions to new or existing problems at low cost).