The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty

by Peter Singer

18 million people are dying unnecessarily each year.

the officers’ inaction was defended on the grounds that they had not been trained to deal with such situations.

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

The World Bank defines extreme poverty as not having enough income to meet the most basic human needs for adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care, and education.

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.

South Asia is still the region with the largest number of people living in extreme poverty,

Today Americans spend, on average, only 6 percent of their income on buying food.

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.

The Golden Rule requires us to accept that the desires of others ought to count as if they were our own.

So you must keep cutting back on unnecessary spending, and donating what you save, until you have reduced yourself to the point where if you give any more, you will be sacrificing something nearly as important as a child’s life—like

When we spend our surplus on concerts or fashionable shoes, on fine dining and good wines, or on holidays in faraway lands, we are doing something wrong.

The Hebrew word for “charity,” tzedakah, simply means “justice”

U.S. private philanthropy for foreign aid amounts to only 0.07 percent of the nation’s gross national income (that’s just 7 cents for every $100 of income).

My aim is to convince you, the individual reader, that you can and should be doing a lot more to help the poor.

just 2 percent of the world’s people own half the world’s wealth, and the richest 10 percent own 85 percent of the wealth. In contrast, half the world’s people have barely 1 percent of the world’s assets to split among them.

it’s a good thing Warren Buffett did not give away the first million dollars he earned. Had he done so, he would not have had the investment capital he needed to develop his business, and would never have been able to give away the $31 billion that he has now pledged to give.

But people with less-spectacular investment abilities might do better to give it away sooner.

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

Because so few people give significant amounts, the need for more to be given is great, and the more each one of us gives, the more lives we can save.

quite a modest contribution from everyone who has enough to live comfortably, eat out occasionally, and buy bottled water, would suffice to achieve the goal of lifting most of the world’s extremely poor people above the poverty line of $1.25 per day.

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.

those told about the single child gave more.

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

Similarly, we do not abandon trapped miners or lost sailors, even though we could save more lives by using the money spent on such rescues on making dangerous intersections safer.

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

The affective system is grounded in our emotional responses. It works with images, real or metaphorical, and with stories,

the deliberative system takes a little longer than the affective system, and does not result in such immediate action.

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

In general, the smaller the proportion of people at risk who can be saved, the less willing people are to send aid.

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

the use of money undermines what is best and noblest in human relationships.

When asked to make a donation, the money group gave just a little over half as much as the control group.

we are much more likely to do the right thing if we think others are already doing it.

mentioning a figure close to the upper end of what callers generally gave—to be precise, at the ninetieth percentile— resulted in callers donating substantially more than a control group not provided with this information.

Isn’t it more important that the money go to a good cause than that it be given with “pure” motives?

since we know that people will give more if they believe that others are giving more, we should not worry too much about the motives with which they give. Rather, we should encourage them to be more open about the size of their donations.

Partners in Health,

often it doesn’t take much of a nudge to overcome the apathy that gets in the way of our doing what we know would be best for us.

if we believe that no one else acts altruistically, we are less likely to do it ourselves; the norm becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

began calling the charities directly and asking detailed questions about what they did with their money and what evidence they had that the money was doing what it was intended to do.

the pressure to keep administrative expenses low can make an organization less effective.

it would probably pay, over the long term, for organizations to set aside some money specifically for proper studies of the effectiveness of their programs.

A 1995 Duke University study of more than five hundred lifesaving interventions in the United States put the median cost of saving a life at $2.2 million.

aid is still not given solely—or in some cases, even primarily—to relieve global poverty.

the problem is not that we are producing too little food; rather, we’re not eating the food we grow.

The world is not running out of food. The problem is that we—the relatively affluent—have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible, if we were to eat the crops we grow directly.

When aid is a means of increasing literacy and gender equality, then it can help achieve a sustainable population.

do your obligations to your own children override your obligations to strangers, no matter how great their need or suffering?

For the same reason, philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious.

I have found that for some people, striving for a high moral standard pushes them in the right direction, even if they—and here I include myself—do not go as far as the standard implies they should.