"Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
- A Greek Proverb
Problem: Emotional Empathy
Before we spend money on something, we do our homework. We look at Zomato ratings to decide on a restaurant, rotten tomato scores for movies/TV shows, youtube reviews for a smartphone, Goodreads ratings for a book, rank of a university while applying for higher education, and efficacy rates for vaccines. We seek empirical evidence because we want to get the best possible value for money.
However, we never apply this kind of rigor when it comes to philanthropic spending. When we donate money for a cause, we rarely look at the data. We feel deeply moved by some Youtube video or a documentary film and we make a decision to donate on a whim. We fail to pause and ask ourselves “Am I buying the maximum reduction in suffering with my money?” We happily forget the concept of value for money when it comes to charity.
The reason for this is twofold.
One is that we are donating money to feel good about ourselves (at least partly). We feel any act of charity is intrinsically benevolent and it meets our bar for doing good. But we need to raise this bar and push ourselves to ask “Is this the best kind of charity my money can buy?“
The second reason is that our thoughts stem from emotional empathy instead of rational compassion. Emotional empathy can be misleading and short-sighted. It does little to help us fight our biases. For example, we are more troubled by the suffering we see vs the suffering we don't see, we empathize more when someone like us is being harmed than someone who belongs to a different race/ethnicity, and so on. We are all victims of several biases and emotional empathy is a conduit for these biases. We might watch a video of how children are abused in factories or cows being slaughtered in an animal farm and become deeply upset. But here is the thing: we should not go by how disgusted and upset we feel after watching those videos to decide which problems we should work on/donate money to.
Let me get this straight - any charity is infinitely better than no charity. But we need to pause and ask ourselves “Am I eradicating the most suffering I can with this donation?” We don’t do that today because our decision to provide financial aid is emotional. Consequently, we do not seek evidence, we simply give our money away and feel good about having given our money away. Like I mentioned in my article on space billionaires, good intentions are simply not good enough. We should not and cannot allow ourselves to be complacent just because we are doing something good. We can do better.
Solution: Effective Altruism
Consider investments. When choosing a mutual fund, we look at various parameters like the historical performance, ratios, fund manager, etc. We want to put our money in the fund that gives us the best possible return.
I would argue that donating is pretty much the same; only, we are investing in the growth & betterment of our species. Shouldn’t we apply the same kind of rigor to figure out avenues that can do the most good for our species?
To do that, we need a more methodical, evidence-based, rational approach to altruism. This is precisely what Effective Altruism (EA) is about. Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that advocates the use of evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others. Researchers belonging to the EA community have put together a framework for figuring out which causes have the biggest impact on our world. From this EA blog:
Working on a cause is likely to be highly impactful to the extent that the cause is:
Great in scale (it affects many lives, by a great amount)
Highly neglected (few other people are working on addressing the problem), and
Highly solvable or tractable (additional resources will do a great deal to address it).
The EA community did the homework for us and have identified the following to be the high-impact causes (from the same EA blog):
1. Fighting extreme poverty
Diseases associated with extreme poverty, such as malaria and parasitic worms, kill millions of people every year. Poor nutrition in low-income countries can lead to cognitive impairment, birth defects, and growth stunting.
2. Animal suffering
The advent of industrialized agriculture means that billions of animals each year are kept in inhumane conditions on factory farms. Most have their lives ended prematurely when they are slaughtered for food. Advocates for their welfare argue that it is relatively cheap to reduce demand for factory-farmed meat, or to enact legislative changes that improve the welfare of farmed animals. Because of the huge numbers of animals involved, making progress on this issue could avert a very large amount of suffering.
3. Improving the long-term future
Most of us care not just about this generation, but also about preserving the planet for future generations.
Because the future is so vast, the number of people who could exist in the future is probably many times greater than the number of people alive today. This suggests that it may be extremely important to ensure that life on Earth continues, and that people in the future have positive lives.
Unfortunately, there are many ways that we could miss out on a very positive long-term future. Climate change and nuclear war are well-known threats to the long-term survival of our species. Many researchers believe that risks from emerging technologies, such as advanced artificial intelligence and designed pathogens, may be even more worrying. Of course, it's hard to be sure exactly how technologies will develop, or the impact they will have. But it seems that these technologies have the potential to radically shape the course of progress over the centuries to come.
Because of the scale of the future, it seems likely that the best opportunities in this area will be even more impactful than those in the the previous two cause areas.
4. Other causes
There are many other promising causes that, while not currently the primary focuses of the effective altruism community, are plausible candidates for having a big impact. These include:
Improvements to the scientific establishment, such as greater transparency and replication of results
Researching mental health and neurological disorders, particularly depression and anxiety, and improving access to treatment in low-income countries
Tobacco control
US criminal justice reform
International migration and trade policy reform
Electoral reform (e.g. implementing better voting methods)
How you can get started
EA is not just an evidence-based approach to figure out the most pressing issues we are facing today; it is also about analyzing nonprofits to see which ones do the best job of putting your money to use. If you want to donate to the causes mentioned above, you can check out this list put together by GiveWell, a nonprofit organization dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing a detailed analysis to help donors decide where to give.
If you want to read more about EA, you can check out the following resources:
Charity is not the only avenue, you can also contribute to EA with your time. There are a lot of career opportunities that allow you to work on the most pressing issues of today. Check them out here.
To become a part of the EA community in India, join this FB group.
Remember, you have a responsibility to ensure that your money has the maximum impact. Let us do good better.
Thanks to Pragya and Harini for reading drafts of this.
All views expressed by the author are personal.
Any feedback and criticism are more than welcome. Find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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