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Daniel Selwyn

How your student loan can save lives

What do you want to be when you’re older?

It’s probably one of the first questions we can remember our response to. Back then our vivid imaginations could transport us from being astronauts on spaceships to princesses in beautiful dresses with an entourage of seven dwarves (only one of those was an actual childhood dream of mine).

The unbounded nature of childhood dreams is surely universal, innate to every child.

It should thus both deeply sadden and anger us that so many children across the world die before they even reach the age of five. Nine million a year, one every four seconds.

 at the hands of preventable diseases that rob families, communities and continents of the prosperity and livelihood that it is so easy to take for granted.

The fact that where you are born determines to such a cruel extent the scope of your response to that age-old question about the future is strikingly unjust. The globe is polarized between those who are allowed to dream and those who can only live in nightmares.

The perennial nature of extreme poverty is precisely the reason why it so often escapes the headlines. It also contributes to a perception that the reasons for its persistence are inevitably structural and insurmountable, beyond the comprehension or capacities of ordinary people.

effective altruism, especially for a student armed with nothing more than a government loan and a desire to do something purposeful, is both shocking and inspiring.

Rigorous research and extensive evidence can demonstrate just how conceivable the eradication of poverty really is - when our charitable giving is used in the right way.

For the price of a pint we could deworm fifty children, keeping them healthy enough to attend school and exercise their right to an education of their own. Mosquito nets could protect the beds of almost thirty people for around three to four years for the same amount as a weekly shop. (If you would like to check, use this 

This does not mean that you have to either starve yourself or be a recluse at university in order to truly help others. Such a degree of self-sacrifice is neither necessary nor desirable.

But it does raise a fundamental question: 

if students were aware of just how far even a small amount of money can go - making a tangible difference to such a significant number of people’s lives -, would we continue to spend it on ourselves?

Judging by the success with which the effective altruism movement has been embraced at university campuses across the globe, the answer to that question from the student body appears at best to be a resounding no, at worst, a ‘probably not as often’.

If an entire generation of millennials changed their spending patterns for a lifetime to include the most effective charities we would see astonishing results.

But such bold claims are all well and good coming from a privileged group of society, of whom many don’t even know what it’s like not having a three-month summer holiday, let alone working a full-time job.

What’s to stop a student with high-minded ideals reneging on them once they have to pay their taxes, bills and rent and find that they have very little left over?

This is a legitimate question. But, for me, there are three reasons to pledge as a student that stand out.

Firstly, taking the Giving What We Can pledge itself was a 

public announcement of my determination to be part of the fight against extreme poverty and also a growing community of people doing the same thing. It’s a commitment with which I can hold myself accountable.

It may, in fact, be particularly beneficial for students to take the pledge before we’ve started earning. This is because it 

avoids the potential difficulties of having to adjust at a later stage.

 How can you miss something that wasn’t there in the first place?

I know that from day one of my first job until the last, 10% of my earnings are accounted for. I will have to work around that from the very beginning, which could make it far easier in the long run.

even after donating 10% of our salaries to the most effective causes, we are still likely to be in a position of immense fortune.

It’s hard to think of ourselves as part of the world’s super-rich; most of us are far from oligarchs or sheiks! But reality tells a different story: 

the average starting salary for a graduate (£21,702) makes them richer than 96% of the world, earning a staggering 21.1 times the global average.

Even after deducting 10% from that starting salary they would still be part of the richest 4.9% of the world’s population. But in this scenario, they would also be able to distribute 523 mosquito nets, or treat 2,679 people for neglected tropical diseases- 

the equivalent to saving one life every year.

it will make me happier knowing that a significant part of my earnings will be going towards saving and transforming other people’s lives.

 By spending it exclusively on myself, the increase in quality of life and happiness I might be able to expect would be comparably insignificant.

It’s important that we don’t overestimate the importance of that 10% to our lives or underestimate how much good we could do with it and how much happier that could make us.

So, as a student approaching the final year of my time at university, the question of what I want to do when I’m older has never seemed so daunting and exciting.

This is not just because I have sadly outgrown my Snow White gown. Rather, it is because 

I am increasingly aware of how privileged I am to even be able to choose what I want to do, as well as how empowered our generation is, more than any before it, to make a difference.

Alison Woodman

What I learnt from talking to over 100 Giving What We Can members

Giving What We Can now has over 1000 members, representing many different walks of life and nearly 50 countries. As Director of Community, one of my aims is to get to know as many of these people as possible. I want to learn about how and why they came to join Giving What We Can, and see what our staff can do to support them in their extraordinary commitments. I took on the role in February, and since then I have had the pleasure of speaking with over 100 recently signed up members. A couple of weeks ago I booked a few days off from Skyping with members and used the time to look back over the conversations I’d had so far. I’d like to share with you some of the things I found!

We’re naturally interested in why people choose to donate a significant amount of their income to others, and our blog has highlighted individual stories in the 

’. One of the most interesting things I’ve been learning about is this: why do members choose to take a pledge, rather than make a private commitment to give 10%? I found that, in nearly all cases, people gave one or more of the three following answers:

“Taking the pledge acts as a commitment device”

: this was the most common explanation I heard. Choosing to give 10% of your lifetime income is a long term commitment, and many people find that it’s easy to forget internal goals as time goes on. By joining Giving What We Can, you make a public commitment, and have more accountability, so you’re more likely to stay on track.

“By joining I might inspire others to join”

: this was the second most common reason given. By joining you can signal your support - you add your name to our 

 and it makes it easier to explain your giving to others when you are part of an established group who are all doing something similar. Indeed, some of the members I spoke with had already decided to give away 10% or more before they heard of Giving What We Can, but they saw that by joining they could encourage others to do so too.

: for a smaller group of members, joining was a way to become more involved in a community and to meet like-minded people. For most of these, community was closely tied to their feelings about commitment, since giving as part of a community can help motivate you to achieve your aims.

Another of my focuses during conversations was on finding out how well connected members were to other people in the community (both Giving What We Can members and people interested in effective giving more broadly), and to gauge their interest in meeting other members. So far, I’ve found that nearly all of those members I spoke with wished to be connected with other members. Most of these either already knew some people within the community or had a local chapter or meetup group they planned to check out. However, there were a number of people who did not know anybody in the community, and did not have a chapter within travelling distance.

Combine the demand for chapters among current members with the fact that the most common way people hear about Giving What We Can is through word of mouth (and 27 out of 80 members I asked told me they had interacted with a local chapter before joining) - this suggests local chapters and meet up groups are really valuable. Even small and informal meetup groups provide a place to come together with others who care deeply about improving the lives of others.

If you think you may be interested in starting a local chapter or meetup group, you can go 

 and Jon, our super friendly Director of Outreach, will get in touch (or feel free to email him directly at 

Unfortunately, my insights are so far limited to a relatively small group of our members (though hopefully I’ll get to meet lots more over the coming years). If you’re still curious, you can easily find out more about who our members are, where they come from and when they joined. Our 

 summarises information collected when a new member signs up, you can find a full list of our members 

, and read the stories of some of our members 

Larissa Hesketh-Rowe

Tell All Your Friends!

This year I finally took the Giving What We Can 

 and now donate 10% of my income to the most effective 

. It’s been a really rewarding experience, and I have got to know a fantastic community of like-minded people in the process. I join 1100 other people who donate 10% or more of their income with Giving What We Can. Together we’ve pledged $434 million to some of the best charities out there. What could be more incredible that that?

How about 2200 members? $868 million pledged?

Giving What We Can doubled their membership in 2014 and broke 1000 members this year. We are planning to double our members and thus our impact.

We can grow the membership, we can increase the funds raised, we can spread the word.

You may have seen a few posts on Giving What We Can about the value of starting a chapter. Jonathan Courtney, Director of Outreach at Giving What We Can, conservatively estimated that you could raise 100,000 USD for effective charities.

I’ve started one myself and it’s not as difficult as you’d think. Whilst the more long-term nature of the relationships formed and the community aspect of chapters make new pledges more likely, you don’t have to start a chapter to have a similar impact.

If you convince just one friend to switch their current donation to a more effective one then you’ve increased the good done in the world. If you convince them to take the pledge then you’ve doubled your own impact.

Yes, we have meta charities like Giving What We Can spreading the word. There are also some 

we need to take responsibility for getting the message out there too

. In fact, people are more likely to believe their peers. We 

Global spending on ice cream is more than double the money needed to provide education, sanitation and healthcare for all. There is enough money in the developed world to meet the most basic needs of the world's poorest people, 

With enough people on board we can bring about unprecedented change.

 to get people thinking about all of the different ways we can raise extra cash for our 

. Not only is fundraising an excellent way of funding more 

 but it can also be the perfect way to start a conversation about effective giving.

I ran a half marathon to raise money for the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative

 I took a sponsorship form to the pub when I met my friends and round my office at work.

Raising money for what? so many of my friends asked.

“The Schistosomiasis Control Initiative”

 I answer each one (very proud to have learnt how to say it). 

“They provide treatment to people in Africa who’ve contracted diseases from infected water. It may not sound like much but I chose them because they are one of the most effective charities you can give to, 50p from you is one tablet to treat someone for a year”

 From there I often went on to discuss how I really recommend looking at the 

 websites to find effective charities to donate to.

Fundraising is the perfect chance to advocate.

 You’re approaching your friends and family. They want to support you. And they want to know why on earth you are running a marathon or living on only £1.50 a day. Now is your chance to tell them why you’re excited to be fire walking or hiking up a mountain: because it’s an opportunity to 

If you’re organising a social event for charity (like a coffee morning or a dinner), then it’s completely acceptable to talk about your charity and why you’re donating. In fact it could be one of the most effective things you could do.

By talking about the top charities we can normalise looking for effectiveness in charities and start moving funds to where they will be better spent. By normalising giving we can increase the funds available in the first place.

This is where I’ve not practiced what I’m currently preaching. I rarely tell people that I’m giving away 10% of my income. I don’t often say to friends or colleagues that I care so much for these more effective charities that I happily give away an above average amount to help others.

Talking about money feels awkward. I remember being warned at work that it’s not appropriate to discuss pay. And telling people that I donate that much, isn’t that just bragging? 

Look at me I’m such a fantastic person.

 Self deprecation feels much more acceptable (and British).

But perhaps we need to change this culture.

Inspiring change requires positive examples

, not just dire warnings. It is important to remain critical, but if we only talk in negatives then we feed the idea that there is nothing any individual can do to make a difference.

Take poverty. So often people talk of it as an insurmountable problem - and if it cannot be tackled, why bother to donate? It won’t make any difference anyway. And yet talk of corruption and huge numbers of people still in poverty ignores what we have achieved. The number of children dying before their fifth birthday worldwide declined 

. We’ve also halved the number of people living in extreme poverty (less than the equivalent of $1.25 a day) over the same period.

So perhaps I should be telling people I donate 10% of my income. Not only can I share my own positive experience but also that if I - a median wage worker, similar in so many ways to so many of my friends - can do this, anyone can.

Since I went vegan, I’ve noticed that for many of the people in my life veganism has gone from a strange, fringe concept to something almost every day. They see me happily living my normal life, they bake me vegan cakes, they naturally check ingredients on office biscuits and wonder why there are bits of cow in jelly sweets.

We need to do something similar with effective giving. If I can tell my friends and colleagues that I give 10% of my income away but show I’m not living like a hermit, I’m not a saint and I am all the happier for it, this normalises giving too.

I’d like to see a world where more people realise 

 they can have in other people’s lives. But that’s not going to come about on it’s own. No one wants to do something big alone. One of the things that really kept me interested in effective giving in the first place was the supportive online community. 

We need to bring that community out into our offices, homes, social clubs and friendship circles.

So let’s increase our impact this year. Fundraise and tell people all about the most effective charities in the process. Donate and tell people you do so that people see more and more of their peers are giving.

We donate 10% to the most effective charities - let’s get our friends to do the same.

Dillon Bowen

Want to be a good altruist? Check your biases.

When people invest in the stock market, their primary goal is to make as much money as possible. We know this because a massive industry has grown to ensure that stock investments yield optimal returns, stocks which yield poor returns quickly die out, and investors explicitly consider it their fiduciary duty to maximize profit for shareholders. 

When people give money to charity, or formulate opinions on how their tax dollars ought to be spent, their primary goal is not to help as many people as possible.

 We know this because only a tiny fraction of donors have even heard of organizations like The Life You Can Save, ineffective charities thrive alongside charities which are more effective by orders of magnitude, and people rarely seem to consider the size of the impact of their philanthropy.

There are many biases which hinder our efforts to make optimal economic decisions, such as the gambler’s fallacy or loss aversion. And when it comes to our fiscal health, we recognize that these biases are bad. We understand that, for example, having a successful fund for your child’s college education depends on overcoming psychological mechanisms favoring impulsive spending. As we’ve seen, there are also manifold biases that prevent us from making altruistic decisions effectively. But when it comes to our moral decisions, people often fail to see these biases as in any way problematic. Most importantly, people fail to appreciate that the fate of billions of people in the world today - and potentially the entire future of humanity - depends on us finding a way to overcome our moral biases.

As humans, we tend to underestimate the value of rewards and punishments based on how far into the future they will occur. This bias is known as ‘hyperbolic temporal discounting’[1]. For instance, people will often prefer a smaller, more immediate sum of cash to a larger sum of money which they will receive at some point in the future. This is an obvious impediment to certain financial goals, like saving for retirement. Yet, in spite of temporal discounting, many people somehow succeed in long-term monetary planning.

Perhaps people who are fiscally prudent are immune to temporal discounting? But no, this hypothesis is not borne out by the psychological literature. Rather, the conflict between immediate and delayed gratification involves two somewhat independent cognitive processes[2]. One - the fast, emotionally charged process - generates a strong visceral desire for immediate reward. The other - the slower, emotionally cooler process - responds to abstract reasons. Things such as saving for retirement require our slower, reasoning processes to direct or perhaps supersede our faster, intuitive processes.

Despite the fact that our economic decisions are plagued by biases, to a large extent we have learned to prevail over them. We’ve done this by explicitly evaluating our economic activity in terms of monetary yield. Having this aim allows us to make economic decisions empirically and rationally, rather than by relying solely on what intuitively strikes us as the correct way to invest our capital. I suggest that we should take these lessons from economics and apply them morality.

Extreme poverty could be eliminated for $330 billion annually[3]. Malaria and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) could be permanently eradicated for $10 billion full stop[4]. This may sound expensive, but the costs of these projects could be paid for by the US and EU for less than 1% of their GDP[5]. Lest there be any doubt about the severity of these problems, consider that the poorest quintile of the global population is 20 times as destitute as the poorest quintile of the American population[6]. And children worldwide are being killed by malaria and NTDs at 5 times the rate that children die in the USA from all causes combined [7].

These problems are both more terrible and far easier to fix than most people understand. Yet the billions of people affected by them will continue to subsist in an incomprehensible depth of misery as long as we in the developed world fail to act. 

But they live far away from us. They are not of the same skin color as many of us. They are not citizens of our countries. We don’t see their faces or know their stories. And so we let them suffer and die.

As ineffective altruists, our potential for helping others is stifled by our moral biases. Charities and public policies gain support not based on the extent to which they improve the lives of conscious creatures, but based on the force with which they pull on our heartstrings. Hopefully the catastrophic consequences of the status quo have convinced you that 

we need to revolutionize how we think about morality. In addition to thinking emotionally, we need to think economically.

 Altruism should be explicitly viewed as an investment in the well-being of conscious creatures. And we should demand nothing less of ourselves than to see our investment yield maximum returns.

Adopting this attitude will turn us into effective altruists. At a minimum, effective altruism says that to the extent we care about the well-being of others, we should try to improve the lives of as many people as possible by as much as possible. You don’t have to be a thoroughgoing 

 to accept this premise. For example, you don’t have to be willing to push fat people off footbridges or harvest your patients’ organs to be an effective altruist. All you have to believe is that it’s better to give more help to more people, rather than less help to fewer people.

And again, I want to emphasize that my argument is not necessarily that you should value all individuals equally. My point is simply that you shouldn’t value some individuals more than others based on obviously morally unimportant factors, like race, sexual orientation, nationality, or physical proximity. You are probably already devoting some portion of your time and money to helping people who are not your family, friends, or community members. So why not try to use this time and money to improve the well-being of conscious creatures by as much as you possibly can?

Once we accept that the purpose of altruism should be to eliminate as much suffering as we can, the question of where we should donate to charity or how our tax dollars should be appropriated is no longer a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact.

 Empathy may drive us, but reason and evidence need to steer us. This is the key to discovering and overcoming our moral biases. We need to recognize the immense amount of suffering in the world today, as well as the vast potential for happiness in the future, and take it as our mission to make the world as happy a place as it can possibly be.

Blog

How your student loan can save lives

What I learnt from talking to over 100 Giving What We Can members

Tell All Your Friends!

Want to be a good altruist? Check your biases.

The Economics of Morality

Our ultimate fundraising idea list: What kind of fundraiser are you?

Giving Is Receiving

When is systemic change a good idea?

Giving What We Can needs your support — only 5 days left to close our funding gap

Giving What We Can hosting Skype with Against Malaria's Rob Mather