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by
Peter Singer
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April 11 - June 20, 2023
in Germany you must put yourself on the register to become a potential organ donor, while in Austria you are a potential organ donor unless you object.
Another situation in which the right kind of nudge could make a huge difference occurs when we write our wills.
Keldoulis, who describes himself as a “small ‘b’ buddhist,” decided to pursue the Buddhist teaching that by acting for the benefit of all sentient beings, we liberate ourselves.
Literature is full of characters like Molière’s Tartuffe, who pretend to be altruistically motivated when they are really self-seeking. We have a word for them: hypocrites. But there are fewer literary examples of people who are really altruistic but pretend to be self-interested, and there is, as far as I know, no single word to describe them.
When walking in London, Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century philosopher who famously held that all our actions are self-interested, gave a coin to a beggar. His companion, eager to catch the great man out, told Hobbes that he had just refuted his own theory. Not so, Hobbes responded: he gave the money because it pleased him to see the poor man happy. Hobbes thus avoided the refutation of his theory by widening the notion of self-interest so that it is compatible with a great deal of generosity and compassion. That reminds us that there is both a broad and a narrow sense of self-interest.
The investment analysts were astonished by how unprepared charities were for questions that went beyond such superficial and potentially misleading indicators of efficacy. Eventually, they realized something that seemed to them quite extraordinary: the reason they were not getting the information they wanted from the charities was that the charities themselves didn’t have it.
Knowing that a charity is in great financial health, practices good governance, is transparent and accountable, and is unlikely to be engaged in unethical activities is a start, but it isn’t all that matters, and it doesn’t answer Karnofsky and Hassenfeld’s key question: how much good is the charity doing with each dollar it receives?
A more significant problem with focusing on how much of its income a charity spends on administration, however, is that this figure tells you nothing at all about the impact the charity is having. Indeed, the pressure to keep administrative expenses low can make an organization less effective. If, for example, an agency working to reduce global poverty cuts staff who have expert knowledge of the countries in which they work, the agency will have lower administrative costs, and may appear to be getting a higher percentage of the funds it receives to people in need. But having removed its
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El bien que puede hacer una organización es proporcioal al nivel de talentos que decide o puede pagar
In affluent countries, there are charities that provide blind people with guide dogs. A good cause, right? Yes, it’s good to provide people who cannot see with a trained dog to help them get around, but it isn’t cheap. In the United States, to “breed, raise, train, and match” a dog costs about $50,000.[clxxi] Now if it is good to provide a blind person with a guide dog, it’s even better to prevent someone becoming blind in the first place, isn’t it? To restore sight to a blind person is also better than providing that person with a guide dog—just ask someone who is blind whether they would
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Simple arithmetic then shows that, for the cost of placing one guide dog with one blind person, you could instead donate to an organization like Seva or the Fred Hollows Foundation and provide surgery to restore sight to at least 1,000 people who cannot see, or prevent (at a conservative estimate allowing for a sevenfold increase in costs since 2006) a similar number of cases of blindness from trachoma.
answer
*Blowing in the wind, Bob Dylan
The independently evaluated trial showed that after one year of the campaign, the number of children with malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea taken to health facilities increased by 56%, 39%, and 73% respectively, compared to the control zones.
That night a neighbour came to visit and he was listening to his portable radio. That’s when I heard a message on the radio explaining how to recognize the symptoms of malaria in children and saying that parents should take them immediately to the health centre. As soon as I heard it I took her straight to the health centre. They told me she had severe malaria. They treated her and after a week she recovered. After we got back from the health centre the first thing I did was buy a radio. Since then the radio and I are inseparable. My daughter is now four. Everyone calls her “the child of the
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It’s easy to appreciate that being blind in a poor country, where there is little support for people with disabilities, is significantly worse than being blind in a rich nation. Restoring sight not only greatly helps those unable to see, it also enables them to contribute once again to their family and community.
Both Hamlin and Fistula Foundation estimate the cost for full fistula surgery and rehabilitation services to be around $650–$700 per woman.[cxcix] Just for comparison, as I was writing this account, I checked on the cost of tickets for Lady Gaga’s next concert, which happened to be in Las Vegas in May 2019. They started at $762 and went up from there. So what is more important to you: seeing Lady Gaga perform for a couple of hours, or giving a young woman her life back?
If we compare these costs with the sums we spend to save lives in rich nations, we can see that every item on the above list is extraordinarily good value. A 1995 Duke University study of more than 500 life-saving interventions in the United States put the median cost of saving a life at $2.2 million.
in 2017, worldwide net official development assistance and aid was approximately $170 billion, while in the same year, consumers spent $532 billion on cosmetics.
Even the figure of 30 cents given in aid from every $100 earned seriously exaggerates the amount that the rich nations gave during that period to help the world’s poorest people. Much of the aid was based on political or defense priorities rather than humanitarian considerations.
Afghanistan is undoubtedly a very poor country, but so is Ethiopia, and Ethiopia has three times as many people as Afghanistan. Perhaps if the United States had invaded it, it would have received as much aid as Iraq or Afghanistan did.
Congress also requires that almost all U.S. food aid must be grown domestically, even though it would be far cheaper to buy the grain in the region where it is needed, saving on shipping costs and other overheads, as well as avoiding a delay of about four months in delivery of the food. A study of the 2008 Farm Bill found that local sourcing of food would result in a significant cost saving: 25% on pulses and legumes, and 53% on grains.
Does the cost of one night out really amount to what Easterly calls “so much well-meaning compassion”?
One reason that aid could slow economic growth is “Dutch disease,” a term The Economist coined to describe a decline in the Dutch economy in the 1960s after natural gas was discovered in the North Sea off the country’s coast. This valuable natural resource should have been a great economic boon, but in fact, as the revenues from gas exports began flowing in, Dutch manufacturing slumped. The reason, according to economists, was that as other countries bought Dutch oil, sending money into the country, the value of the Dutch currency rose relative to that of the country’s main trading partners,
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When aid improves infrastructure, agricultural methods, and the skill levels of the workforce, it enhances productivity and leads to increased exports that can outweigh the Dutch disease problem.
The elimination of all agricultural subsidies and a 50% reduction in nonagricultural tariffs would, according to a study by economists Kym Anderson and Alan Winters, mean a global economic gain of at least $96 billion annually, of which $30 billion would go to the developing world.[ccxxx] It would also save U.S. taxpayers more than $16 billion per year, and European taxpayers even more.
Less grotesquely unfair trade rules would help, but still would not guarantee that trade would lift every region out of poverty. Economic growth can bypass people, regions, and even entire countries.
Economic growth is not the only way for a country to improve the lives of its citizens. Sometimes poorer countries do better on key indicators of human well-being, such as infant mortality and longevity, than richer ones. Cuba, famously, has lower infant mortality than the United States.
When William Easterly and Bill Gates were on a panel together at the World Economic Forum in 2007, Easterly made his usual point that all the aid given to Africa over the years has failed to stimulate economic growth there. Gates responded sharply: “I don’t promise that when a kid lives it will cause a GNP increase. I think life has value.”
Our focus should not be growth for its own sake, but the goals that lie behind our desire for growth: saving lives, reducing misery, and meeting people’s basic needs.
Paul Collier, an economist who studies aid and its impact on development, has demonstrated that aid can be effective in improving institutions, particularly when dealing with fragile states. Countries emerging from civil war, for instance, are at high risk of falling back into conflict, with all the misery that that will bring to their citizens. Collier has shown that substantial amounts of aid, properly directed and sustained for several years, can enhance the capacity of governments to avoid that tragedy.
The idea behind No Lean Season was that providing small travel subsidies or loans would enable laborers to get to a nearby city or another rural area with different labor opportunities. There, they might find jobs during the lean season in which they would earn much more than they could if they stayed in the countryside.
Taken together, they provide strong evidence that the combination of providing cash or an in-kind asset, business training, and savings groups is effective in improving the position of extremely poor people.
What this suggests is that we may need to set our standards lower in order to draw more people to meet them.
Collins accepts the argument that “Of course, we have to respond to our immediate family,” but adds that “once they’re okay, we need to expand the circle. A larger sense of family is a radical idea, but we get into trouble as a society when we don’t see that we’re in the same boat.”
Similarly, enjoying “the capacity of great composers and performers to exploit nuances of timbre and texture to powerful aesthetic effect” is a worthwhile goal, and one that justifies buying “more than minimal” stereo equipment.[cclxxxix]
Only goods like friendship and integrity, which involve our deepest commitments, should not be judged on the basis of how much they cost.
In a world in which more-pressing needs had already been met, philanthropy for the arts would be a noble act. Sadly, we don’t live in such a world.
fulfillment. I have many emails from people who have told me that giving has filled their lives with a new purpose and meaning.
The link between giving and happiness is clear, but surveys cannot show the direction of causation.
Altruists often talk of the “warm glow” they get from helping others. Now we have seen it happening in the brain.
what greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?
