The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty

by Peter Singer

9.7 million children under five still die annually;

What ought I be doing to help?

I’m hoping that you will look at the larger picture and think about what it takes to live ethically in a world in which 18 million people are dying unnecessarily each year. That’s a higher annual death rate than in World War II.

the World Bank set the poverty line at $1.25 per day. The number of people whose income puts them under this line is not 1 billion but 1.4 billion.

Its figures refer to the number of people existing on a daily total consumption of goods and services—whether earned or home-grown—comparable to the amount of goods and services that can be bought in the United States for $1.25.

The 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty are poor by an absolute standard tied to the most basic human needs.

After admitting that inexpensive quartz watches are extremely accurate and functional, the article opined that there is “something engaging about a mechanical movement.” Right, but how much will it cost you to have this engaging something on your wrist? “You might think that getting into mechanical watches is an expensive proposition, but there are plenty of choices in the $500–$5000 range.”

100 billion of food is wasted in the United States every year.14

Yet while thousands of children die each day, we spend money on things we take for granted and would hardly notice if they were not there. Is that wrong? If so, how far does our obligation to the poor go?

when prompted to think in concrete terms, about real individuals, most of us consider it obligatory to lessen the serious suffering of innocent others, even at some cost (even a high cost) to ourselves.1

First premise: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. Second premise: If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.

the Bible contains more than three thousand references to alleviating poverty—enough

I realized they were doing more for the poor than my entire megachurch.”

“I couldn’t care less about politics, the culture wars. My only interest is to get people to care about Darfurs and Rwandas.”12

$306 billion they donated to charities in 2007,

According to “Giving USA 2008,” the most authoritative report on U.S. charity, the largest portion of the money Americans give, fully a third of it, goes to religious institutions, where it pays for the salaries of the clergy and for building and maintaining churches, synagogues, and mosques. Some of that—but by the most optimistic estimate, less than 10 percent—is passed on as aid

Nobel Prize–winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon estimated that “social capital” is responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies.

their catch and fed their families have been destroyed by industrial fishing fleets that come from Europe, China, and Russia and sell their fish to well-fed Europeans who can afford to pay high prices.

In their dealings with corrupt dictators in developing countries, international corporations are akin to people who knowingly buy stolen goods, with the difference that the international legal and political order recognizes the corporations not as criminals in possession of stolen goods but as the legal owners of the goods they have bought.

If we use goods made from raw materials obtained by these unethical dealings from resource-rich but money-poor nations, we are harming those who live in these countries.

Two-thirds of the greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere have come from the United States and Europe. Without those gases, there would be no human-induced global warming problem.

If you are as skilled as Buffett in investing your money, I urge you to keep it until late in life, too, and then give away most of it, as he has done. But people with less-spectacular investment abilities might do better to give it away sooner.

the longer social problems are left unchecked, the worse they get.

The claim is a broad one, difficult to prove or disprove; but, if it is true for poverty in the United States, then it is even more likely to hold for poverty in developing countries, in part because it is easier to get a high percentage return when starting from a low base.

The fact that we tend to favor our families, communities, and countries may explain our failure to save the lives of the poor beyond those boundaries, but it does not justify that failure from an ethical perspective, no matter how many generations of our ancestors have seen nothing wrong with it.

The world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument.

A second group was shown the photo of a seven-year-old Malawian girl named Rokia; they were told that Rokia is desperately poor and that “her life will be changed for the better by your gift.” The group receiving information about Rokia gave significantly more than the group receiving only general information. Then a third group was given the general information, the photo, and the information about Rokia. That group gave more than the group that had received only the general information, but still gave less than the group that had received only the information about Rokia.2 Indeed, even adding a second identifiable child to the information about Rokia—while providing no general information—led to a lower average donation than when only one child was mentioned. The subjects of the experiment reported feeling stronger emotions when told about one child than when told about two children.3

This “identifiable victim effect” leads to “the rule of rescue”: we will spend far more to rescue an identifiable victim than we will to save a “statistical life.”

we use two distinct processes for grasping reality and deciding what to do: the affective system and the deliberative system.

Mother Teresa expressed this when she said: “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

We seem to respond as if anything that leaves most of the people in the camp at risk is “futile”—although,

“the proportion of lives saved often carries more weight than the number of lives saved.”

Kitty Genovese, a young woman in Queens, New York, was brutally attacked and killed while thirty-eight people in different apartments reportedly saw or heard what was happening but did nothing to aid her.

The diffusion of responsibility had a marked inhibiting effect—the “bystander effect.”

The person considering giving a substantial portion of his or her disposable income can’t help but be aware that others, including those with a lot more disposable income, are not.

Even monkeys will reject a reward for a task if they see another monkey getting a better reward for performing the same task.

Responders who reject small offers show that even when dealing with a complete stranger with whom they will never interact again, they would rather punish unfairness than gain money.

If we have no reason to think that the single identifiable victim is in any way more worthy of rescue than each of the five nonidentifiable people, surely we should rescue the larger number of people.

50% League,

But does this really matter? Isn’t it more important that the money go to a good cause than that it be given with “pure” motives? And if by sounding a trumpet when they give, they encourage others to give, that’s better still.

You enter through the Arlene and Robert Kogod Lobby. From there you may choose to ascend to the orchestra level by taking either the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Grand Staircase West or the Philip L. Graham Fund Grand Staircase East. . . . Should you arrive with time for a drink before the curtain, you can linger near the James and Esthy Adler Orchestra Terrace West, or the less personal-sounding American Airlines Orchestra Terrace East.

“I could easily have lived a life that was boring and inconsequential. Now I am graced with a life of service and meaning.”

In Germany, only 12 percent of the population is registered to become organ donors if as a result of an accident they should be declared brain-dead. In Austria, the comparable figure is an astonishing 99.98 percent.

Just as we tend to leave unchanged the factory settings on a computer, so other kinds of “defaults” can make a big difference to our behavior—and, in the case of organ donations, save thousands of lives.

The important point is to keep the default level below that at which most people would opt out, so that accepting the default level becomes something that almost everyone does. Though the idea may sound odd now, if a few corporations or institutions adopt it, it could spread.

in one study students were told about a budget proposal to slash research into an illness that affected only women. Asked to estimate what percentage of men and what percentage of women would oppose the proposal, they greatly overestimated the extent to which attitudes were affected by gender.

“the small actual effects of self-interest stand in sharp relief to the substantial assumed effects of self-interest.”

tell stories about our acts of compassion that put a self-interested face on them. As a result, the norm of self-interest appears to be confirmed, and so the behavior continues. The norm is self-reinforcing and yet socially pernicious, because if we believe that no one else acts altruistically, we are less likely to do it ourselves; the norm becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee