About Effective Giving
“One additional unit of income can do a hundred times as much to benefit the extreme poor as it can to benefit you or I. [I]t's not often you have two options, one of which is a hundred times better than the other. Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beer for $5 or buy someone else a beer for 5¢. If that were the case, we'd probably be pretty generous — next round's on me! But that's effectively the situation we're in all the time. It's like a 99% off sale, or buy one, get ninety-nine free. It might be the most amazing deal you'll see in your life.”
— Will MacAskill, Associate Professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford
There are a seemingly infinite number of ways to work to help the world. A person might foster collaboration in international conflicts, or they might foster kittens; they might cultivate creativity through the arts, or cultivate animal cells into a more sustainable form of meat. However, while many charitable endeavors come with the best of intentions, each respective cause varies significantly in terms of the amount of good that can be achieved.
We have a finite amount of money and time available to help others and improve the world. This means that if we wish to accomplish the most possible good, then we need to be strategic with how we spend those resources. Effective Giving Quest follows the principles of effective altruism, a philosophy and social movement which calls us to use evidence and reason to prioritize our efforts to help others in order to accomplish the greatest possible good with our time and money.
Effective altruists have adopted a framework with the following three criteria to evaluate opportunities to do good in the world:
Scale
How many lives are affected? How much suffering could be avoided?
Neglectedness
How many resources are already being directed toward this area?
Tractability
How well do we understand solutions to pressing problems in this area?
By ranking cause areas with these three criteria, the areas with the most potential rise to the top. Using these criteria, we currently prioritize the following three areas:
Animal Welfare
The number of animals suffering in the world at any given time dwarfs that of humans by a large margin, and their suffering is often especially severe. For example, at any one moment over 30 billion animals are confined in intensive animal feeding operations (factory farms), an environment which offers them little to no protection from abuse. The number of animals in the wild is significantly higher than those in farms, and many of these animals suffer from disease, starvation, or predation, sometimes as a result of human actions.
Global Health
Over 1.4 billion people live below the international standard of extreme poverty of $1.25 per day, adjusted for purchasing power parity (meaning they earn only the equivalent of what $1.25 could buy in the United States). In the field of global health and development, there are very few charities that implement highly effective programs that have been studied rigorously and repeatedly. For example, the distribution of insecticide-treated nets used to prevent malaria is among the most cost-effective interventions to treat global health and spur global development. These programs bring about outcomes that are likely hundreds of times more effective than what the average global health charity can achieve.
Long-Term Future
When considering expected value, work on the long-term future seems to be an excellent source of value that we can influence today. Just as the butterfly effect implies a small change made in the distant past can create massive changes in the present, small directed interventions today may create massive value in the far future. This cause area deals with how to increase the chance that sentient beings will thrive in the long term with as much value as possible.
Even after determining that these are three especially important cause areas, there are many different ways that you can help and it can be difficult to know where to start. Do you rescue chickens, or do you rescue wildlife? Or do you rescue neither, and focus on legal advocacy or technology solutions? These are difficult complicated questions, and we need to rely on experts in these areas in order to make the best decisions.
To facilitate an easy way to do the most good, we offer three recommended funds that represent strong giving opportunities in each respective area. These funds will give you confidence that your donations will go to organizations thoroughly vetted by researchers and promising opportunities selected by independent fund managers with relevant expertise.
Other Cause Areas
A common concern about using this methodology is that it will inevitably take money away from other causes and other tactics. Don’t we care about them as well?
We care about all efforts to help the world. We believe that it is important to tackle social problems with a multi-pronged approach and that the best solutions are often found through a combination of different efforts.
However, we also recognize that there are a limited amount of resources, and that the majority of those resources are not being used effectively. We do believe that we need to work collaboratively from different angles, but we also believe that we need to evaluate our methods and direct more resources to areas which have the greatest potential. Many well-meaning people donate their time and money without researching the charities or fully understanding the amount of impact they might achieve. But triage is a critical step in doing good in the world; lives are at stake. Taking the time to choose wisely can literally mean the difference between life and death.
The causes we’ve selected are currently among those most prioritized by the effective altruism movement because of their exceptional potential. They rate highly in terms of scale, neglectedness, and/or tractability. If any of these causes were to start receiving so many resources that they could no longer operate with high efficiency, then we would reconsider our recommendations. Currently, the amount of money that is directed to these highly effective cause areas and charities is still relatively small compared to the scale of the problems, and strong progress is still being made by additional donations.
For more information and discussion on what kinds of charitable giving is thought to be highly effective, we recommend checking out the Effective Altruism Forum's posts on Effective Giving.
How You Can Help
If you work in the game industry, we strongly encourage you to learn about the Effective Giving Quest Alliance before donating. Joining the EGQ Alliance provides many additional benefits and provides the best way to get the absolute most out of your philanthropic gifts.
For individuals, EGQ provides a clear channel to direct your donations to any combination of our recommended funds through our donate page.