The Best Thing You Can Do
How you can prevent animals from spending millions of years in a cage and save hundreds of lives without any personal sacrifice
(I think this is an important article so I’d appreciate you sharing and restacking it.)
The core philosophical argument for giving is strikingly simple: charitable donations can prevent lots of death and suffering at a comparatively minor cost. For a few thousand dollars, you can save someone’s life. By taking the Giving What We Can pledge—which I have taken, and I would encourage you to take—and giving away 10% of your lifetime income, you can save hundreds of lives without sacrificing anything of remotely comparable value. Taking the pledge likely does more good than anything else you will ever do.
If you make what the average American makes and give away 10% of your income, you will still be richer than almost everyone who ever lived, but you will know that because of you fewer children are dead. You will know that mothers do not have to cry over lost children because of you and that additional children will get to live to adulthood. The best charities save lives for just $4,500. Each time you give that much away, you can know that one extra child still breathes, instead of being buried before his parents, in a tiny grave, in a distant cemetery.
If you earn the average income of an American and give away 10%, you will save a child every year. You will get to know that no matter how much you fuck up in life, however much you feel like a failure, there are fewer children dead because of you. A life spent saving a child every year cannot be a failure.
Think about the loved ones you’ve lost, how immeasurably tragic it is each time a loved one dies. In the West, when our loved ones die, they are mostly elderly. But it is far more tragic when a child dies. Malaria kills pregnant women and other adults, but most of its victims are children. It leaves an irreversible stain on the lives of everyone who knew the child—the child who was ripped from the world, ripped from her mother’s loving arms. If you are a parent, or have a small child that you care about, imagine how tragic it would be for that child to die. Then remember that you personally can prevent a tragedy of that scale every single year. Potentially multiple times a year.
There are more complex philosophical arguments for giving. Peter Singer argues that in failing to save faraway children dying of disease, we behave no differently from people who ignore nearby drowning children because saving them would ruin their expensive suit. I think his argument is correct—the fact that the child is far away and stricken with disease rather than nearby and drowning does nothing to lessen our obligation. But you don’t need any complex philosophical argument, you don’t need to think about possible asymmetries between the two cases, to accept the core, much simpler argument: children are dying and you can do something to stop it.
Doing so would not majorly harm your life. In fact, it’s likely to make it better. Even controlling for other factors, studies find charitable giving improves physical health, lowers stress, and increases happiness, especially when donors know their giving had a major impact. Science has confirmed that if you want to be happy, you should aim to help others instead of for immediate satisfaction.
We in the West are richer than any other group in human history, but it has not made us happy. We have spent our wealth on ourselves rather than on helping others, even when helping others is the best way to improve our happiness long-term. We’ve built what would be called paradise by most humans who ever lived, and yet we ignore the interests of those outside its walls, preferring to fritter away our unprecedented abundance on cheap dopamine while children starve.
Giving your money to effective charities makes your life more meaningful. You get to know that your life is in service of a greater cause, spent doing something that actually matters. If your job saved a life every year, that would be hugely meaningful. But you can save a life every year without even having to switch jobs, just by giving away some of your money. It’s not even a sacrifice—it makes your life better.
If you take the pledge, you can also give money to causes outside of global health. If you give money to animal charities, you can spare animals from around 10 years in a cage with each dollar you give. If you give away 10% of your income to these animal charities, then over the course of a 40-year career on the average American’s salary, animals will spend 2 million fewer years in cages because of you. This would be as if you pulled a chicken out of a cage every ten minutes for those forty years—not even taking a break to sleep—when the chicken would have otherwise been trapped for a whole year.
Humans have all sorts of biases that make us reluctant to effectively give. One bias is called scope neglect, where we don’t intuitively appreciate big numbers. People will pay the same amount to spare 2,000 birds as to spare 200,000 birds. Another is the identifiable victim effect—people give vastly more if a victim has a name or a face than if they don’t.
But these are errors. Behind each dollar donated, there is an actual, living, flesh-and-blood sentient being who matters. There is someone you would care about if you got to know them. Even if you can’t convince your emotions to care 100 times as much when a problem is 100 times worse, at an intellectual level, you ought to know that it really is 100 times worse and act accordingly. What you are doing each time you give a dollar is equivalent to freeing ten birds from a cage for a year.
The children dying of malaria are people who you’d care about if you got to know them. Though they may be nameless and faceless to you, they have a name, a face, and a family. Like the children you know, they learn and they laugh and they cry and they love; they hate certain foods, they tease their little siblings, and they have the adorable innocence of children you know. They don’t want to die, don’t want to be howling in the night, stricken by a horrible disease that claims over half a million lives every single year.
And if you give to Longtermist organizations, you can reduce the odds that the species goes extinct. Given the staggering number of future people, each dollar given to these organizations plausibly affects, in expectation, a number of lives that you’d need a large exponent to write out. When MacAskill and Greaves did back-of-the-envelope calculations, they ended up with expected numbers of happy lives created per dollar given to existential threat reduction on the order of 10 billion—and potentially much more.
In any case, you can give across these three areas as you see fit. And there are many other good charities besides these. The core reason to give—the core reason I give—is that terrible things are happening in the world that can be easily stopped. Things so bad that if they happened to you, they’d be the worst thing that ever happened to you, can be stopped for a small cost.
When I was young, there were several consecutive summers when I lost loved ones—one each year. I have taken the pledge because I know that by doing so, I can prevent comparable death and tragedy—greater, in fact, because the loved ones I lost were old and had lived a full life. Those who die of malaria are just children. I can prevent, with each passing year, a new child from dying, or tens of thousands of animals from languishing in a cage for a whole year, or billions of expected future beings from never getting the chance to exist, or some combination of those, and that is an opportunity too good to pass up.
Decency, in a cosmopolitan world, is about caring about what would move you if you witnessed it, even when it lies out of view. It is about acting to stop screams you cannot hear, tears you cannot see, and deaths of people you will never know. It is about following the golden rule consistently. Just as you would want a stranger to sacrifice a few thousand dollars to save your life or the life of your child, you ought to afford strangers the same consideration. There are millions drowning in the pond. It is up to us to pull them out.
(If you take the pledge in response to this article, you get a free lifetime subscription to my blog.)
Very compelling post -- I've heard of the pledge before but never took it until now. Thanks for sharing!!!
Verification I took the pledge: https://imgur.com/a/MD1UtKx
Your description of the children who die of malaria really hits home. It doesn't take too much effort of imagination to transcend the barriers of distance and culture and put yourself in the shoes of someone who knows one of those children personally and experiences the loss. To prevent one of those tragedies, or many, by simply donating a relatively small amount of money, e.g. to GiveWell, is an opportunity not to be taken lightly. Excellent post.