Do you have a personal moral code?
Do you try to live your life in accordance with that code, doing the morally right thing whenever possible?
Do you believe that it is morally commendable for people with plenty of disposable income to donate some of their money to life-saving charities?
If there are two charities, A and B, and A saves more lives per donation dollar than B, is it morally preferable to donate to charity A?
If you answered “yes” to all four of these questions, as I did, then you agree with the fundamental logic of the Effective Altruism movement. After researching this movement a lot this year, I decided to greatly increase the amount I to donate to charity.
Three tough questions remained: Which charities should I donate to? How much? And when?
To answer the first question with any rigor, you would need to research thousands of charities, evaluating and verifying their claims and ranking them by impact. The good news: several organizations have been doing exactly that for years, and their results are easy to find online. One excellent website is GiveWell. Their top ranked charity is the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes insecticide-treated mosquito bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa. This is an excellent way to save the most lives with your dollars: Malaria kills more than a million people each year, most of them children, and producing and distributing bed nets costs about $5 each. Additionally, the AMF takes care of their own administration costs, so 100% of your donation goes to buying nets. By dividing the cost of the nets by the decreased chance of contracting fatal malaria for children under 5 who sleep under a net, GiveWell estimates that the AMF saves the life of one child for every $2,838 they receive.
I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like quite a bargain. If a friend of mine had a kid who needed $2,800 for a life-saving operation, I would write them that check in a heartbeat. For comparison, one life is saved in the US for every $30,000 spent on automobile seatbelts or every $1,800,000 spent on airbags.
The second question (how much to donate) is tricky. Logically, it is more moral to spend every $2,800 of disposable income I have on saving a child from dying than on my hobbies and luxuries. Is the only moral life the life of an ascetic? Fortunately, there’s a way out of this trap: If I really donate every single dollar I can, I’m not likely to convince anyone else to do the same. But if I donate a smaller percentage of my yearly income, I might inspire other people to follow my example (possibly in a Steem post!), who might inspire others, and the branching chain of donations could exceed 100% of my income. Even better, I could join a group that has coalesced around a particular donation number. As it grows, the impact and recruitment of the group could potentially grow super-linearly.
As you may have guessed, yes this organization already exists, and I’m a proud member. They’re called Giving What We Can, they’re big fans of the AMF, and their number is ten percent.
Why ten percent? Permit me to quote a post by Scott Alexander of the incomparable blog Slate Star Codex:
“The most important thing is having a Schelling point, and ten percent is nice, round, divinely ordained, and – crucially – the Schelling point upon which we have already settled. It is an active Schelling point. If you give ten percent, you can have your name on a nice list and get access to a secret forum on the Giving What We Can site which is actually pretty boring.
It’s ten percent because definitions were made for Man, not Man for definitions, and if we define ‘good person’ in a way such that everyone is sitting around miserable because they can’t reach an unobtainable standard, we are stupid definition-makers. If we are smart definition-makers, we will define it in precisely that way which makes it the most effective tool to convince people to give at least that much.
Finally, it’s ten percent because if you believe in something like universalizability as a foundation for morality, a world in which everybody gives ten percent of their income to charity is a world where about seven trillion dollars go to charity a year. Solving global poverty forever is estimated to cost about $100 billion a year for the couple-decade length of the project. That’s about two percent of the money that would suddenly become available. If charity got seven trillion dollars a year, the first year would give us enough to solve global poverty, eliminate all treatable diseases, fund research into the untreatable ones for approximately the next forever, educate anybody who needs educating, feed anybody who needs feeding, fund an unparalleled renaissance in the arts, permanently save every rainforest in the world, and have enough left over to launch five or six different manned missions to Mars. That would be the first year. Goodness only knows what would happen in Year 2.
By contrast, if everybody in the world retweeted the latest hashtag campaign, Twitter would break.”
Now for some people’s personal financial situations (such as for those who have kids), donating 10% of their income may not be feasible. But I don’t have such an excuse. And if you DO have that kind of money but are balking at the cost, consider this: Do you think the happiness you would feel from doubling your current net worth is about the same magnitude as the sadness you would feel from losing half of that money? If so, then like me you have a subconscious logarithmic utility function. And that means earning $90,000 a year will feel 99.085% as good as earning $100,000 a year. Plus or minus.
If you buy my arguments about where and how much to donate, the final piece of the puzzle is “when”. But before that, I have a big confession to make: I was lying. The $2,838 dollars-per-life-saved number I quoted above is completely wrong.
How so? Simple: charitable donations to the AMF are tax deductible! It’s actually even cheaper than that! You can multiply $2,838 by one minus your current tax bracket (highest bracket, not even average bracket!) to see how much it actually costs you. If you’re in the 28% bracket, a life-saving donation only costs you $2,043. Uncle Sam will pay the rest.
Keeping that in mind, there is an optimal day of the year to donate: December 31. Then, no matter when you do your taxes, you’ll have the shortest window between donation and tax refund. If you donate on January 1 instead, the government will give you your tax refund check 365 days later.
So that my personal rationale. Thanks so much for reading my first Steem post. Upvotes and comments are much appreciated!