You Can Save Lives on the Cheap🔸
The most important thing you'll read today.
Joel Tan of the Center for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH) summarizes CEARCH’s new evaluation of Giving What We Can:
We estimate that GWWC's marginal 2025 giving multiplier is around 14x – for every additional $1 they spend on promoting pledging, around $14 will be raised for GiveWell top charities. Uncertainty is high and caution in interpreting results is advised.
I read the full report, and you can read it here. Everything seems above board, although uncertainty is high, so everything I say here is for the risk-tolerant.
Even if you give it low credence, the GWWC multiplier is likely one of the best “X-times match, LIMITED TIME OFFER!!!” charity deals you’ll ever get, not least because unlike a lot of conventional matching funds schemes, a good share of the money that GWWC helps raise wouldn’t have been donated in the counterfactual.
GWWC is a wonderful organization that evaluates and promotes some of the best charities in the world by getting people to pledge to donate at least 10% of their income each year. The pledge obviously isn’t enforceable, since there aren’t any EA police (yet [evil laugh]), but it’s huge for getting people motivated and feeling like they’re part of a movement that’s committed to making the world a better place. It was a huge part of how I discovered EA, along with a friend of mine (not an EA) who donated his kidney. I’ve met the volunteer leads of my city’s GWWC chapter, and they’re great guys. I just donated to the GWWC parent org, and I think you should too. (You can donate here.) Let me explain why.
GiveWell estimates that its top charities can save a life for every $5,000 they receive. (It’s a lot more complicated than that, but we can more or less trust the topline figure.) If you think GWWC can raise an extra $14 for GiveWell charities for every $1 that you donate, you can raise enough money to save a life for $5,000 / 14 = $357.14 donated to GWWC. Let’s round it up to $400 to reflect our uncertainty.
That’s an extraordinarily cheap cost to save someone’s life, especially when you put it in perspective. Oftentimes, when I’m about to make a large or frivolous purchase, I ask myself: “Is this worth X years of life for a child who would otherwise die of malaria?” where X = the price divided by ~$100. If I say no—and I can’t remember when I haven’t said no—I give the money to an EA charity instead. If these numbers are accurate, then the cost of adding an entire year to someone’s life is actually less than ten dollars!
Historically, when I’ve talked to people about EA and said that you can save someone’s life for $5,000, the response is muted. For most people, $5,000 sounds like a lot of money, and they just don’t get as excited as we do when we know about all the tremendous good we can do in the world. Besides, most people aren’t in a position where they can donate $5,000 to a top charity without some level of financial uncomfortability.
But $400 is an entirely different ask. If you can save a life for $400, that’s a steal! It’s a week or two of rent, and less than half of what most people spend on Christmas presents. Once researchers come up with some less uncertain figures, it should be our rallying cry: “Quality life years at low, low prices: EA, the Walmart of philanthropy!”
Okay, maybe not. But I think overcoming sticker shock is going to be important for growing the movement.
One last thing: EA sometimes gets criticized for spending money on movement-building (even though the share of funding that gets directed to movement-building is quite low). The argument goes that it’s dishonest to say you’re all about trying to get people to make the world better, and then… spend money trying to get more people to make the world better? Like most criticisms of EA, it falls apart upon inspection. But it’s nice to have numbers to refute it, too.
Again, you can donate to GWWC here.
