Sam deere – Giving What We Can - EA Global
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Sam Deere discusses Doing What We Can
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Sam deere – Giving What We Can - EA Global
- 2. $1.25 / day
- 3. $2 / day
- 4. 1.5 million
- 5. ≈
- 6. 200 million infections≈ 500,000 deaths
- 7. 500 million
- 9. How can we make headway?
- 13. What does it mean to do good?
- 14. How do we keep doing good?
- 15. +
- 16. What can we do?
- 19. 1190 members $460 million pledged $8+ million donated
- 20. $$
- 21. Do good Do the most good
- 22. What does it mean to make the world a better place?
- 24. If all people are equal, why would we limit ourselves?
- 25. $100 x 2001x
- 27. “...A+++, would donate again…”
- 28. Charities ‘R’ Us ACME Charity CharityCorp iCharity Charitasaurus Chariterrific
- 30. Playpumps
- 31. How do we compare charities?
- 33. Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY)
- 34. Room for more funding
- 35. Accountability
- 36. Grey areas
- 37. How can you possibly choose?
- 39. Our Charities
- 45. How do we keep doing good?
- 46. F E B R U A R Y
- 47. We are in this together
- 48. $50,000top 3.5% 22 x richer
- 50. Starting now is easier
- 51. Giving makes you happier!
- 52. I recognise that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good. Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that for the rest of my life or until the day I retire, I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn to whichever organisations can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others, now and in the years to come. I make this pledge freely, openly, and sincerely. The Pledge to Give:
- 53. +
Editor's Notes
- One billion people — one in seven human beings — lives at or below the poverty line of $1.25/day, another billion fall below $2/day. [http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview]
- Diarrhoeal diseases kill 1.5 million people each year, [http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/]
- Largely related to the fact that over 750 million people — as many people as live in all of Europe — don't have access to clean drinking water http://water.org/water-crisis/water-facts/water/
- Malaria infects nearly 200 million people each year, killing around half a million of them, mostly young children in Africa. [http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs094/en/]
- Meanwhile, millions of animals suffer in factory farms — 500 million chickens are reared in them each year in Australia alone. [https://www.voiceless.org.au/the-issues/factory-farming]
- And catastrophic threats, like climate change, a global pandemic, or a superintelligence explosion, loom on the horizon.
- Looking at this, you might think that there is cause to despair. How can we possibly make headway against such an enormous wave of suffering?
- It's not an easy task. But we are making progress. International aid and development certainly have their critics, but there are some amazing success stories. Infant and maternal mortality have both halved since 1990, as has the number of people living in extreme poverty. Polio and guinea worm are both nearly eradicated, going the way of smallpox. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that making a difference is possible.
- We are all here today, because we want to make the world a better place. Our instinct to want to make things better, to contribute, is not, of itself, unique. For hundreds of years, thousands of people have given millions of dollars in the service of good causes.
- Here, in the developed world, we are incredibly lucky in our material wealth. And I think that most of us don't just recognise that as an abstract fact. We recognise that we have an opportunity — perhaps even an obligation — to use our relative wealth to give something back. But we face two big challenges.
- Firstly, what does it mean to do good? Are some ways of doing good better than others, all else being equal? And can we be satisfied with doing things that simply _are_ good, or do we think we should be doing _as much good as we possibly can_?
- Secondly, how do we keep doing good? Life is full of distractions and complications. It's easy for idealistic notions of making the world a better place to be supplanted by financial stress, or shifting interests. What can we do to ensure we stick to our guns, and keep making a difference throughout our lives?
- These are complicated questions, which don't necessarily have simple answers. But there is a way forward, if you are prepared to let a clear head guide your heart.
- You are all here today at Effective Altruism Global because you are part of a movement that doesn't just want to answer these difficult questions in the abstract. You are here as part of a movement that wants to do something concrete. So what can we do?
- We don't just want to do good. We want to do the most good. I want to talk to you about how we think about those questions — the question of what it means to do good, and do good better; and the question of how to continue doing good, even when it becomes difficult.
- What does it mean to make the world a better place? Sure, it's easy to be cynical about all the reasons why people give to charity. But ask anyone why they give of themselves — whether their time, or their money — and I'm sure they'll tell you it's to help people. It's to make a difference. It's to be part of something bigger than themselves. It's about making a connection with other people, and making a positive impact on their lives. All of us want to make a positive impact on the world.
- And there are lots of things that you can do that make the world better, many of which are right in front of our faces. We can give a spare dollar to someone on a street corner, or push a fiver into a Salvo's coin-box.
- But if our desire is to actually make the world better — and if we take all people in the world as being equally deserving of living happy, safe, comfortable lives — then why would we limit ourselves. Why would we choose to give to the first cause that we came across? Because I don't think it's plausible to say that all actions are equally good. Not all interventions will bring about as much positive change.
- If you had $100 to donate, and one charity told you they could treat one person's illness with the money, and another charity told you they could treat 200, you'd give the money to the second one. No question. But of the hundreds of charities where we could possibly give our money, some can make an incredible difference, and some make almost no difference at all.
- We feel very comfortable making clear statements of preference about everything else. This TV show is better than that one. That phone is better than this one. Restaurants, cars, shoes, phones, clothes, airlines, coffee, movies.
- If you were about to invest a comparatively small amount of time into watching a new TV show, or buying a new phone, you wouldn't just buy the first one that you heard about, or the one that had the advertising campaign making the boldest claims. You'd spend some time thinking about what you wanted. You'd ask people you trusted, or source your decision from many people. You'd ask yourself, 'does this product actually do what I want it to do?' So why, when the stakes are so high, and the opportunities to do good so varied, do we not put the same time and energy into thinking about where we should donate our money?
- And you cannot give to every cause. We can only give to so many causes. And every cause we choose to give to is an implicit choice not to give to another. In economics this is called opportunity cost — the cost you incur choosing one pathway over another. Whether we like it or not, we have to make a choice. If we are to take this idea of doing the most good seriously, we need to think about how we make that choice.
- As a teenager, whenever I used to talk to my dad about the importance of donating to charity, he was always cynical. He used to work in Kenya, and would tell me the story of a local community who received a fantastic new tractor from an international charity. The charity promised that the tractor would save people from the back-breaking labour of tilling their fields. But you all know how this story ends. There was no after-sales service, no parts to repair the tractor when it broke down. Soon it was sitting in a field, rusting and disused, all the money spent on purchasing it slowly evaporating.
- If you've read Will MacAskill's new book, perhaps you've heard the story of PlayPumps. PlayPumps looked like the roundabouts you'd find at a children's playground, with one difference — they were connected to a pump that drew fresh water from an underground aquifer. Children got new play equipment, the village got clean drinking water, and the whole enterprise would pay for itself by placing ads on the water tanks nearby. It seemed like a brilliant, innovative solution. A sustainable social innovation! Many investors got on board — companies like Colgate, individuals like Jay-Z and Beyoncé. It seemed like PlayPumps would make a huge difference to the lives of many of the world's poorest. But roundabouts are only fun when they don't have any resistance on them, so children can jump on and coast. The PlayPump required someone to be pushing it at all times, turning playing kids into child labourers. Village elders found the play equipment demeaning, over the hand pumps that they were used to. And it turned out that you'd have to pump for 27 hours a day to get the promised returns on investment. In short, PlayPumps were a failure. They were obviously well-intentioned, and they told a compelling narrative. But they didn't actually do what they were supposed to. This tells us something important — we cannot rely on our intuitions when choosing between charities. We need hard data.
- So how would we start to weigh different charities against each other? Giving What We Can recommends four charities. We rely fairly heavily on the work of an organisation called GiveWell, which I suspect many of you will have heard of. We've arrived at our recommendations by asking a few simple questions. Any time you're considering whether to give to a cause, try asking yourself the same questions, and see how well the cause stacks up.
- Does the charity have a track record of effectiveness? That is, what are the actual outcomes of that charity's work? This means looking further than just what the charity says it will do, or even whether the charity publishes statistics about the different things it's done. We have to try to measure, not just how many food parcels, or textbooks, or bednets were distributed — we have to try to think about how good it actually is to do those things. We also have to compare how good the intervention is to the other interventions that we could invest in instead. Maybe our charity can distribute a school's worth of textbooks for $5000. Maybe that does make some difference. But what if we spent that money on something else. Would training another teacher give better outcomes? What about investing in a really cost-effective healthcare intervention that meant fewer school absences due to illness?
- One way we think about this — at least for healthcare related interventions — is to use a measure of how bad it is to have a disease, called a disability-adjusted life year, or DALY. A DALY tries to account for the suffering caused by a disease, and is equivalent to the loss of one year of life at full health, or equivalently, two years at half health. It's an imperfect measure, and there are new measurements being developed that try to address its shortcomings. But it's much better to have something that at least pushes you in the right direction, rather than trying to guess blindly.
- It's also important to consider whether the cause area has room for more funding. A cause might be really important, but if it already has all the money it needs, then you might have more of an impact donating elsewhere. For example, it's really important to invest in vaccinations for young children, to ward off preventable and potentially life-threatening illnesses like measles, or polio. But there are already lots of people working on this problem. The Gates Foundation is funding an organisation called the Global Alliance for Vaccines to [MORE DETAIL]. This cause is hugely important, but your marginal dollar may not do as much good here, because they are already doing what they need to be doing — spending more money here may not be as effective at this point in time, taking into consideration what other people are already doing.
- We also focus on accountability. How transparent is the charity about its activities, and its finances, and therefore, how confident can we be in our evaluation of it. Obviously these are not easy questions to answer. There will always be grey areas. Should we prefer an intervention that adds one year to someone's life at full health, or one that adds two years at half health. Should you donate to a group that will definitely deliver an education or healthcare program to a smaller number of people now, or to an activist organisation that's campaigning to improve access to education and healthcare _en masse_, with a much smaller chance of success, but potentially benefiting everyone in the country?
- Obviously these are not easy questions to answer. There will always be grey areas. Should we prefer an intervention that adds one year to someone's life at full health, or one that adds two years at half health. Should you donate to a group that will definitely deliver an education or healthcare program to a smaller number of people now, or to an activist organisation that's campaigning to improve access to education and healthcare _en masse_, with a much smaller chance of success, but potentially benefiting everyone in the country?
- This is a common question that people raise: 'how can you possibly make a choice between these causes'. I think the answer is that, at some point we do have to make a judgement call. But if we're at that point then at least we know that we're choosing among some of the very best interventions in the world, rather than giving equal weight to interventions that just don't even come close. Making these decisions always involves a bit of uncertainty. But it's a lot less uncertainty than not asking the questions at all.
- One thing that's incredibly important is to stress that I'm not trying to suggest that people who are not currently donating effectively are doing a bad thing. Indeed, that urge to make a difference is incredibly important — it is foundational to our progress as a society. But I do think that they are missing out on a huge opportunity, an opportunity to multiply the good that they are doing many times over.
- One question you might ask is, 'why the focus on global poverty?' Our pledge is actually cause-neutral. We just ask that people give to where they think they'll do the most good, whether that be poverty alleviation, or political activism, or even institutions trying to ensure that humanity doesn't go extinct. The reason that our charities focus on global poverty is simple — we think it represents the most cost-effective way to alleviate suffering. The interventions we recommend are proven, scalable, and cheap.
- So far I've just talked about ways to think about doing good. But just as important as thinking about how we do good — in fact, much more important — is actually doing it. It's fine for us to know what the best causes are in the abstract.
- We know this about ourselves — we litter our Februarys with the bones of a thousand well-intentioned new years resolutions, resolutions born of our better selves, but cast aside when the reality . We didn't want to break them. It just got hard. Life got in the way.
- We ask our members to make a pledge to give — not just for now, but for the rest of their working lives. This seems like could be hard. But we help by creating a supportive, friendly community of people who are in this together. It's not just you and your donations ranged against all the suffering in the world. It's you, and me, and all of our members working as one, to make the biggest difference we can.
- And we help by showing just how much difference you can actually make. Someone on the median income in Australia — around $50,000 AUD — is in the richest 3.5 percent of people in the world, and 22 times richer than the global average. Giving 10% of your income over your working life would yield $200,000.
- Giving 10% of your income over your working life would yield $200,000. You could distribute 24,000 Insecticide-Treated Mosquito Nets, or treat 124,000 people for schistosomiasis over the course of your lifetime. Think about how amazing it would feel to save someone from a burning building, or drowning in a pond. Thinking carefully about donating, and continuing to donate, gives you that opportunity many times over.
- By starting to give now, by making it just one of those things that you do, you factor it into your future spending decisions, and it stays easy.
- And here's the thing — giving actually makes you happier. Because giving isn't throwing money away. It's spending money on something that's really important to you. And unlike most material purchases, which give a small burst of happiness when you buy them, but which fades over time, the research shows that giving makes people happier, for longer. Giving doesn't have to be a sacrifice. Quite the opposite. People say you can't buy happiness. But in actual fact, maybe you can.
- So I'd invite you to look at our pledge. And whether you take the pledge or not, I'd urge you to think critically whenever you donate.
- Because by combining our empathy and our desire to make the world a better place with reason and evidence; and by giving what we can, we can all make a substantial difference.
- Thank you!