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?
Unexpectedly to myself, if I start earning again this year and retire at 70 (which is very probable as I will work for as long as I would be capable), I have a chance to earn more than £1.000.000, that’ll make me able to donate at least £100.000.
Due to cost effective logic, I would donate most of it to Helen Keller International (that would be the answer to second question as well) and the rest to preventive medicine like Malaria Consortium.
I always used such approach in education and job-related decisions. I used it even in the choice of the country to flee the war to. Yes, I spent more time under the missiles and drones, but my choice of new home country was based on reasons not emotions.