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?
Unable to make a choice.
I suppose one way to approach this is to do the math and save the most lives, but I don’t do well with mathematics, so this is not an option for me.
Therefore, another approach would be to carry out additional research based on the following thoughts:
If saving a life means keeping someone alive, then perhaps the question I should try to answer is: How long will they be kept alive with the suggested solution? I mean, if someone survives disease A today and dies from disease B tomorrow, then all I did was give them one extra day. Then again, should this matter? Is it more important to help, let’s say 10 people gain one extra day of life than 1 person gain 10 more days of life? I apologize for my phrasing. I know it sounds awful.
To figure all these things out, I will have to conduct my own research to gather additional information about the people who receive these support solutions, what else threatens their lives, and many other factors. Of course, this will require a great deal of time, and then again I will have to consider whether all that time spent on research could cost those people by preventing me from earning the amount of money that would actually help any. In the end, I will choose randomly, hoping that I made the right choice.