I wrote this aimed at audiences who aren't already familiar with the idea of effective giving or pledging. Also posted at juliawise.net and Substack.
Takeaways:
- The world has a lot of appalling problems. Many can’t be addressed very well with money, but some can.
- On a rich-country income, you almost surely have some income you could dedicate to making the world better in whatever way seems best to you.
- This is best done not impulsively and sporadically, but deliberately as part of your ongoing budget.
- Donating a fraction of your income is a pretty great opportunity to make the world more like what you want it to be: with less suffering, more progress, more fairness, or whatever seems best to you.
- You don’t have to agree with my choice of where to donate! Think it through yourself!
- My ask to you for the coming year: think seriously about how much you want to give, and where you want to give it. One tool that I recommend is making a pledge (either for a period of time, or ongoing).
The world still has a lot of little match girls
[content: fictional and statistical child death, this section only]
Yesterday I took my daughter to see her friend in a Christmas performance based in part on Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Match Girl. I figured a family Christmas play would probably alter the part where the main character freezes to death, but no. I sobbed messily while the plot moved on.
The 1844 story is about a child dying from poverty in the streets of a major European city. That was common then; all rich countries were much poorer then.
But in today’s world, millions of children (expected to rise this year after aid cuts) still die every year from preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia. Those dying from extreme poverty aren’t in Copenhagen now, and they’re not in Boston where we paid $75 to watch the play. They’re out of sight, out of mind to us here.
……..
I take very seriously that I have the power to prevent other families from losing their children. This is a huge deal. For about $3,000, you can expect to save a parent from watching their child die from malaria. (Why this much, when treatment only costs a few dollars? Because most treatments won’t prevent a death, just like most vaccines. But it’s worth it to protect all the most vulnerable people, and to prevent a lot of nonfatal sickness.)
I don’t have words for how messed up it is that there are still so many preventable deaths. A world that had its act together would have fixed this by now.
The world clearly does not have its act together.
You don’t have to think global health is the best area
Donations let you make a dent in big problems, whether or not you also contribute in other ways. You can do that in lots of areas, if global health isn’t what seems most important to you:
- Maybe there are systemic changes you think are better to support.
- Maybe you think economic growth is more important, since it’s behind so many other improvements.
- Maybe you’d rather support developing new solutions instead of rolling out existing ones.
- Maybe there’s another population you think will benefit more from help.
- Maybe you want to try to prevent future problems (this is where Jeff and I are doing most of our giving this year).
If you take a hard look, you’ll also see many things you’d like to donate to that are not the most important ones. I think of those as candidates for a “have a good life in my community” budget (which is a totally valid thing to budget for!) but not a “change the world” budget.
You can afford to change things
If you’re reading this, you’re probably much richer than the typical person in the world. By living a bit more below your income, you can empower a cause you care about. As you think about your budget for the coming year, make a plan to set aside a meaningful amount to make the world more like what you want to see. (“Meaningful” will vary a lot by budget, but 10% is one longstanding method.)
Please give it a try.
Some places to get started
- Vox’s guide to giving
- The community of ordinary people making an extraordinary difference at Giving What We Can
If you’re interested in recommendations from the effective altruism space:
- Effective Altruism Funds
- Recommendations from staff at Coefficient Giving (previously Open Philanthropy)
An underexplored alternative to donation is hiring people from low-income contexts to do paid work on meaningful problems.
Here's a rough estimate of "happy" hourly rates for remote intellectual manual labor (data labeling, checking, summarization, interpretability grunt work), in USD:
Estimated Happy Rates ($/h)
There exists a very large supply of people who are both willing and happy to do careful cognitive work at rates that are trivial by rich-country standards, if the work is structured and paid.
Some reasons this possibility can be quite good and interesting:
A lot of important research and analysis is not bottlenecked on genius so much as on coordination, paradigms, and tooling. Once those exist, large amounts of careful human attention can be usefully applied in parallel.
— Buck's comment on "How might a herd of interns help with AI or biosecurity research tasks/questions?", EA Forum
I think there are real downsides of mixing unrelated goals (in this case: improving livelihoods/skills for educated people in LMICs, and getting work done).
management capacity is often a bottleneck, so rather than onboarding people to things like deadlines and quality standards, for the sake of getting the work done efficiently you might rather pay a higher rate to get someone who doesn't need as much hand-holding. (Maybe this isn't relevant if the work you want done isn't itself aiming at a positive impact, and you're ok with your widget business running less efficiently in order to offer a jobs program.)
If you have needs that can be met just as well by remote workers in LMICs, seems great! But I wouldn't start with the premise that this is your best option for improving the world.
I agree this cannot replace donation-based interventions! It is still feels potentially underrated and underconsidered.
I do agree that management and structure are the hardest parts. I do imagine many EA orgs have solved harder problems in the past.
I think automatic dubbing services have become good enough to make English fluency not be a hard requirement anymore for many potential jobs.
Here is a super hacky fermi-gpt estimate of a headcount of potentially hireable global workers:
"""
hacky fermi estimate — internet users → elite tail
definitions (clean + explicit):
combined ⇒ (1 / (20×20×20) ≈ 1 / 8000)
interpretation: this is a very conservative lower bound on people who could plausibly do high-quality remote cognitive work using tools like chatgpt (incl. translation). this is not a hiring claim; it’s an order-of-magnitude sanity check.
hacky fermi table
key takeaway:
even after filtering to internet users only and then applying an extremely harsh 95%×95%×95% filter, many countries still have thousands to tens of thousands of plausible high-quality contributors. at global scale, talent supply is not the bottleneck; coordination, tooling, and trust are.
"""
(I know this estimation relies on some independence assumptions. Regardless, it is meant to be illustrative, not authoritative.)