Effective altruism: Are you doing good, better?

During a recent discussion on effective altruism, a friend shared she’s spending approximately $7 a month for Ratricia, a Gambian pouched rat under training by Belgian nonprofit Apopo to detect landmines in Tanzania. The commitment was personal: The giver is an animal lover. She also thinks demining is a neglected issue, and finds the strategy employed by Apopo as seemingly low-cost and high impact. This is the same across all her charitable givings; she donates to the Free Yezidi Foundation as a way to help the thousands singled out by the Islamic State group in Sinjar, Iraq, as well as to UNICEF to meet her desire to help children in need. Charity Navigator had an influence on her decision to donate to UNICEF, however. After conducting further research on the U.N. agency, she found in its annual report that most of the money (more than 90 percent) it receives is spent on programming. This would mean it, as per the charity evaluator’s criteria, likely has higher efficiency than those spending more than 30 percent of their budget on overhead. But which of these qualifies as “effective altruism?” Devex took a look at the latest in the evidence- and reason-driven movement. First, let’s define effective altruism. Peter Singer, the man behind the viral book “The Life You Can Save,” and one of the key figures in the effective altruism movement, describes it as giving using one’s heart and mind. That means that you don’t just contribute to any animal charity, for example, just because it recently Tweeted a photo of a dog in a wheelchair — though it may have moved you. You also have to consider whether the money you’re giving to that charity would have the most impact in terms of saving animals’ lives. You could use a little math for this — most aspiring effective altruists do. In this PSI Impact interview with Singer for the Best Buys in Global Health campaign with PATH and Devex, for example, the professor, who teaches bioethics at Princeton University, computes how best a person can make use of his or her money. “If you give $10,000 to a charity that spends $5,000 for each life saved, when you could have given it to one that spends $1,000 for each life saved, you’ve effectively wasted $8,000 of your donation. You’ve also allowed eight lives to be lost needlessly,” he said. Of course it’s not that simple. Just because you can buy more insecticide-treated bed nets with the money you have, and therefore save more lives by preventing more people from getting malaria, doesn’t mean it’s the right choice over pouring your money into research that looks to develop new drugs to treat tuberculosis. So how do you choose then where to direct your money? Effectivealtruism.org poses three key questions aspiring effective altruists usually ask themselves when deciding on a cause to support: 1. Will my contribution “drastically” save or improve more lives? 2. Can it make a “measurable difference”? 3. How much attention — or lack of it — has this cause received? But who to give to? Those that involve themselves with the effective altruism movement have flagged specific causes or charities they believe people should be supporting, given these charities’ record of cost-effectiveness. Most likely, these are charities evaluated and given top marks by GiveWell, a nonprofit that conducts in-depth research to find the best charities — backed by evidence — for donors to channel funding to. But don’t be surprised if you don’t find your favorite cause on the list: The charities recommended by GiveWell fall in certain categories covered in its priority programs, seven of which are recently reviewed: conditional and unconditional cash transfers, bed net distribution, deworming, salt iodization, vitamin A supplementation, and immunization against maternal and neonatal tetanus. This doesn’t mean, however, that the cause or charity you believe in isn’t worthy. GiveWell’s disclaimer: “The charities we don't recommend may be doing great work, and our lack of recommendation shouldn't be taken as evidence to the contrary.” There are other platforms that are similar to GiveWell in recommending charities donors should donate to, like Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save, although you’ll likely find the same charities — Against Malaria Foundation, Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, DeWorm the World Initiative — and then some. It all boils down to how “wisely” you donate your money? No, not exactly. It also takes into account how “wisely” you spend your time to make the most difference. Many may have answered this call by shifting to a humanitarian career, or by getting involved in a charity or an organization doing development work. But the people behind 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit that provides advice on careers you can choose to be able to make the “most social impact,” who are also key players in the effective altruism movement, are strongly advocating for you not to abandon your professional career just yet — you may actually get more things done if you stay in that marketing firm, or better yet, on Wall Street. “Many people should seriously consider “earning to give,” which is deliberately taking a lucrative career in order to do good by your donations rather than deliberately working somewhere where you could have a direct, immediate impact,” co-founder William MacAskill said in an interview with Vox Politics. So if I do all these I’d become an effective altruist? It depends on your calculations, how well you do your math (an example is total utility x probability to be achieved = expected utility gained per dollar spent, as per Singer), and of course, on what the term “effective” means to you. Humanitarian activist Dan Pallotta for one thinks a charity’s overhead costs is a poor indicator of efficiency. “We should stop saying charities with low ratios are efficient,” he wrote in this Harvard Business Review blog in 2009, and then goes on to make his case. “Say Jonas Salk spent $50 million to raise $100 million to find a polio vaccine. The admin:program ratio would report he had a shameful 50 percent overhead. But the $100 million he raised wasnʼt his end result. His end result was a vaccine. Divide the $50 million fundraising expense into the God-only-knows-how-many billions of dollars a polio vaccine is worth, and his overhead ratio at eradicating polio is 0 percent.” That’s more efficient, Pallotta argued, than a charity with a fundraising cost of only 10 percent, but a failed vaccine. Giving What We Can’s Toby Ord’s argument on cost-effectiveness in global health interventions meanwhile may raise a few eyebrows, especially to those allergic to the phrase “redirecting funds”: “If we can save 1,000 lives with one intervention and 10,000 with another at an equal price, then merely moving our funding from the first to the second saves 9,000 lives,” he concluded in this piece originally posted on the GivingWell website. It all depends on whose school of thought you ascribe to: Several prominent thought leaders in the movement, for example, are concentrated on fighting off artificial intelligence dominance. And some of you may take issue with the potentially oversimplified process aspiring effective altruists employ to determine worthy causes. But it’s harder to argue that causes wouldn’t benefit from more informed citizens making smart use of their limited time and money. The effective altruism movement places strong emphasis on efficiency, but what does the term mean for you? Tell us what you think in the comments below. Our mission is to do more good for more people. If you think the right information can make a difference, we invite you to join us by making a small investment in Professional Membership.