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

by Peter Singer

having three dollars to buy a hamburger is a luxury that hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty cannot conceive of.

a life is a life, no matter where that life lives.

The drop is even more impressive because the world’s population has more than doubled since 1960. Yet we can’t become complacent: 5.4 million children under five dying every year, with over half of those deaths due to conditions that could be prevented or treated with access to simple, affordable interventions, is an immense tragedy, not to mention a moral stain on a world as rich as ours.

this is the right time to ask yourself: what ought I be doing to help?

Think about someone you love, and then ask yourself how much you would give to prevent that person from dying of malaria, or to enable that person to be treated for a childbirth injury that made her a social outcast, or to have their sight restored if they should become blind? Then ask yourself how much you are doing to help people living in poverty who lack the means to do just those things for themselves and their families.

Take the death of this small boy this morning, for example. The boy died of measles. We all know he could have been cured at the hospital. But the parents had no money and so the boy died a slow and painful death, not of measles but out of poverty.

Is it possible that by choosing to spend your money on such things rather than contributing to an effective charity, you are leaving a child to die, a child you could have saved?

The 736 million people living in extreme poverty are poor by an absolute standard tied to the most basic human needs.

For Africa to end poverty by 2030, more than one person would need to escape poverty every second; instead, Africa currently adds poor people.”[xix]

Most of us are absolutely certain that we wouldn’t hesitate to save a drowning child, and that we would do it at considerable cost to ourselves. 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?

Putting yourself in the place of others, like the parents of that boy, or the child himself, is what thinking ethically is all about.

The Hebrew word for “charity,” tzedakah, simply means “justice” and, as this suggests, for Jews, giving to the poor is no optional extra but an essential part of living a just life.

Charity begins at home, the saying goes, and for many people, charity also stops at home, or not very far from it.

if we reject moral relativism in some situations, then we should reject it everywhere.

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

most of the poor do work at least as hard as you or I. They have little choice, even though they almost always work in conditions that most people in rich nations would never tolerate.

If poor people are not working, it is probably because unemployment is higher in poor nations than in rich ones, and that is not the fault of the poor.

the world’s 26 richest people own as much as the poorest 50% of the global population.

Despite attempts to regulate fishing in African coastal waters, one study estimated that illegal industrial fishing trawlers take $300 million worth of fish out of Senegalese waters alone, with the total for West Africa estimated at $1.3 billion. This story is repeated in many other coastal areas around the world.[lvii]

The evidence is overwhelming that the greenhouse gas emissions of the industrialized nations have harmed, and are continuing to harm, many of the world’s poorest people—along with many richer ones.

If we accept that those who harm others must compensate them, we cannot deny that the industrialized nations owe compensation to many of the world’s poorest people.

The International Monetary Fund has estimated that the developing economies will need climate adaptation investment of $80 billion a year until 2050. In 2014, only $9.3 billion was being invested for that purpose. The International Monetary Fund added: “On equity grounds, there is some appeal in linking climate ...

In a world that has no more capacity to absorb greenhouse gases without the consequence of damaging climate change, the philosophy of “You leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone” has become almost impossible to live by, for it requires ceasing to put any more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Otherwise, we simply are not leaving others alone.

If you live in a country that is lagging behind other countries in the proportion of gross national income given as foreign aid, then donating money yourself is not the only thing you can do. It is also important to be an active citizen in informing others about how little your country gives and letting your political representatives know that you want your country to develop an effective foreign aid program that meets the United Nations target of giving at least 0.7% of gross national income.

Philanthropy, philosopher Paul Gomberg believes, promotes “political quietism,” deflecting attention from the institutional causes of poverty—essentially, in his view, capitalism—and from the need to find radical alternatives to these institutions.

if you can’t heal the wound, that’s not a reason for refusing a band-aid.

Their results, which are borne out by other trials of cash transfers, have demonstrated that giving money to poor families: Does not reduce the amount that adults work, but does reduce child labor; Raises school attendance; Increases economic autonomy; Increases women’s decision-making power; Leads to greater diversity in diet. Stimulates more use of health services.[lxxvi]

Programa GiveDirectly

GiveDirectly has changed my attitude to giving money to the poor. It clearly does have positive effects. But will providing a guaranteed basic income create greater dependency than a single cash transfer? And are cash transfers more effective than other forms of aid? We do not yet have sufficient evidence to answer these questions.

“I can’t change the world, but I try to make my little corner of the world a little bit better every day,” is how Cipriano describes his philanthropy.

He plans to give most of his vast fortune to the Gates Foundation because he sees that improving health and stimulating economic growth in the world’s poorest communities is much more cost-effective than giving in the United States.

just as capital grows when invested, so the costs of fixing social problems are likely to grow.

the rate at which the cost of fixing social problems grows is “exponentially greater” than the rate of return on capital.

the more lives we can save. If everyone gave significantly more than they now give, however, we would be in a totally different situation.

whether a small number of people give a lot, or a large number of people give a little, ending large-scale extreme poverty wouldn’t cripple the economies of affluent countries. It would leave plenty of scope for entrepreneurial activity and individual wealth. Moreover, in the long run, the global economy would be enhanced, not diminished, by bringing into it the 736 million people now outside it, creating new markets and new opportunities for trade and investment.

The problem is that 12 identifiable children trapped in a cave makes for a gripping news story, while 746 fewer children dying each day — when no one can point to a particular child and say that child would have died had she not been immunized against measles, or not slept under a bed net — doesn’t make the news at all.

The world is not running out of food. The problem is that people in high-income countries have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible if they were to eat the crops we grow directly.

Where many children die and there is no Social Security, parents tend to have large families to ensure that some will survive to look after them in their old age, and, in the case of rural families, to work the land.

we will spend far more to rescue an identifiable victim than we will to save a “statistical life.”

The identifiable victim moves us in a way that more-abstract information does not. But the phenomenon doesn’t even require particular details about the person.

The affective system is grounded in our emotional responses. It works with images, real or metaphorical, and with stories, rapidly processing them to generate an intuitive feeling that something is right or wrong, good or bad. That feeling leads to immediate action.

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

The tragic earthquake that struck China’s Sichuan province in 2008 showed that Smith’s observation still holds. Though the earthquake killed 70,000 people, injured 350,000, and made nearly 5 million homeless, its impact on me was quite temporary. Reading about the deaths and seeing the devastation on television aroused my sympathy for the families of the victims, but I did not stop work, lose sleep, or even cease to enjoy the normal pleasures of life.

Nobody likes being the only one cleaning up while everyone else stands around. In the same way, our willingness to help the poor can be reduced if we think that we would be doing more than our fair share.

Among social animals, those who form cooperative relationships tend to do much better than those who do not. By making a fair offer, you signal that you are the kind of person who would make a good partner for cooperating.

A society in which most people act fairly will generally do better than one in which everyone is always seeking to take unfair advantage, because people will be better able to trust each other and form cooperative relationships.

we are much more likely to do the right thing if we think others are already doing it.[cxx] More specifically, we tend to do what others in our “reference group”—those with whom we identify—are doing.

today when people give large sums with a lot of fanfare, we may suspect that their real motive is to gain social status by their philanthropy, and to draw attention to how rich and generous they are.

for those who are already wealthy, there comes a point at which more money has no benefit to oneself, but it can have great benefit to others.

According to #GivingTuesday, over $1 billion has been given globally on this day since 2012.[cxxxvii]

Problems like lack of safe drinking water, sanitation, and health care can be addressed only by projects undertaken at the level of the community rather than the family.