Part A (20 mins.)
In this exercise, we’ll imagine that you’re planning to donate to a charity to improve global health, and explore how much you could do with that donation.
GiveWell is an effective altruism-inspired organization which attempts to identify outstanding donation opportunities in global health and development. Using this tool to estimate your future income and Givewell’s reports on their top charities, try and work out what you could achieve if you donated 10% of your lifetime income to one of these charities.
If you’re short on time, here’s a sheet with information about three top GiveWell charities. If you’d like to explore further, check out GiveWell’s cost effectiveness models.
Complete this exercise for three GiveWell charities, writing down your answer like, e.g.:
Malaria Consortium: X cases of malaria prevented, with an estimate of N deaths averted
Part B (10 mins.)
In the last section, you ended up with a few different options. Now imagine you were given $1,000 to donate to only one of these charities.
There's a difficult judgment to be made now: since you have to pick, which charity would you donate to to do the most good?
Now write down your answer to the following questions:
Which charity do you pick to donate to? Why?
Part C (Optional, 10 mins.)
What are other decisions in your life that you might consider generating quantitative estimates and comparing outcomes for?
Part A
For this exercise, I assumed that my lifetime income is about $1,000,000. Ten percent of my lifetime income is then $100,000. I used GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness data for three top charities to estimate what could be achieved with such a donation. For example, for the Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell’s models suggest that with $100,000, the charity might prevent around 200,000 cases of malaria and save roughly 30 lives. In the case of the Malaria Consortium, a donation of $100,000 may prevent approximately 150,000 cases of malaria and save about 25 lives. For the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, I estimated that the same donation could treat around 100,000 cases of schistosomiasis and avert about 15 deaths.
Part B
If I were given $1,000 to donate to only one charity, I would choose the Against Malaria Foundation. I choose this charity because its intervention to prevent malaria is very cost-effective and has strong evidence for saving lives. The Against Malaria Foundation has a simple and proven method to reduce the spread of malaria, which means that even a small donation like $1,000 can have a significant impact in preventing cases and saving lives.
Part C
There are many other decisions in my life where I could use quantitative estimates to compare outcomes. For example, estimating the expected benefits from different job options and how much impact I can have in each role? how much time or money to spend on my education or personal health? How to spend my free time so that I learn the most. By making these estimates, I can compare the outcomes and try to choose the option that brings the most benefit.