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?
A.
Malaria Consortium: ~45,770 cases of malaria prevented, with an estimate of 64 deaths averted.
Hellen Keller International: ~320,387 vitamin A supplements delivered, with an estimate of 64 lives saved.
New Incentives: ~2,067 infants vaccinated, with an estimate of 64 lives saved.
B.
With just $1,000 I would donate to the Helen Keller International Vitamin A Supplementation program. This program (while labeled "very strong" rather than "exceptionally strong"-- I'll need to investigate why) appears to offer the most impact per dollar spent (most lives saved per contribution). Furthermore, the estimate is that with just $1, an important vitamin A supplement may be provided for an infant. Though this does not necessarily correlate to saving that infant's life, the extremely small dollar amount could have other important implications regarding an increase to quality of life for that individual.
C. Other important life decisions that I would consider generating quantitative estimates and comparing outcomes for: (1) where I would prefer to live/work (between my 2 nationalities), taking into account salaries and social programs, (2) whether or not it makes financial sense to go back to school/earn a graduate degree, taking into account debt incurrence and potential for increased salary/positions with better benefits.