Giving What We Can is in the process of developing more resources for lay audiences.
I'd love to see what ideas you all have for topics that would be interesting for a lay audience and we could have an effective altruism/effective giving spin on it.
Add each new idea as a comment and upvote your favourites. We'll then conduct a follow up study and let you know which were the most popular (see preliminary results – the participant is asked to pick 1 from three so 33% is the benchmark).
To get your creative juices flowing, we've done some initial research and so far these are the top 20 questions from the ideas our team generated:
| Do charitable donations actually reach the intended recipients? |
| How much money actually goes to charities? |
| Is aid useless due to corruption in the governments who receive it? |
| Does charity and aid really work? |
| Does donating to charity just subsidise billionaires? |
| Does hard work determine someone’s economic success? |
| Is economic growth going to lift people out of poverty on its own? |
| Does charity begin at home? Should we solve our own problems first? |
| Does the money already spent on foreign aid have any effect? |
| Are charities with the lowest overhead costs most effective? |
| Can global poverty be solved? |
| Should we donate based on charity effectiveness? |
| What are the worst charities? |
| What are good reasons not to give to charity? |
| Is there a significant difference between different charities’ impact? |
| How should we decide which charities to donate to? |
| Do farmed animals live lives worth living? |
| Are problems so large that my donations are too small to make a difference? |
| Should international poverty relief be the responsibility of governments not individuals? |
| Is it better to save for ourselves and our families than to give to help strangers? |
Maybe related is that when we talk about charity we are implicitly talking about aid, but there are also charities that could advocate for policy interventions etc. So something to separate aid from other kinds of charity work could be useful, although I don't know if that's a question so much as a clarification.
Absolutely, I hear this all the time. Here's some anecdotal advice:
In particular, there's a strong thread in my circles that privileged people need to give up their power (for example, this was recently posted in the math Discord server at my left-leaning university), and philanthropy allows privileged people to hold onto power while feeling good about themselves. Social justice folks and EAs agree that everyone is complicit in injustice, and we should each take life-changing steps to help. The difference is that EAs claim that throwing away one's power is... (read more)