This article is a preview from the Autumn 2016 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.
What would you do if you were presented with a large sum of money to give away to charity? Would you donate it all to your favourite cause? Distribute it to as many worthy organisations as possible? What constitutes “worthy”? Do you favour charities with a local resonance that mean something to you personally – or those with as little to do with your day-to-day life as possible? Do you prefer to help people over animals, the poor over the sick, the young over the old, the arts over the environment?
As with all the ways in which we choose to spend our money, charitable donation is both highly individual and highly politicised – a powerful means of affirming, in the most material terms, what we think is most important. Or at least that’s true in theory. In practice, the ways in which we donate are often haphazard and irrational. We give money in response to bad things that have just happened (wars, earthquakes, floods) when bad things happen all the time (famine, disease, inequality). We give when spurred by media campaigns, collection tins or requests for sponsorship from friends climbing Kilimanjaro, as if we don’t have the agency to decide when and how to give.
Proximity and guilt are potent motivating factors. I was recently struck by the following scene at a Pret a Manger on London Bridge. Outside, a man sat begging on the street as hundreds of commuters streamed past. Many noticed him but no one stopped. The man wandered into Pret. Suddenly, he shared a static space with his fellow human beings; he was, just like them, a person waiting in a queue. The result: he was mobbed with offers to buy him breakfast.
Even when we’re more strategic in our giving, most of us approach it in the vaguest of ways. We invest in an idea or ideal (saving pandas, curing cancer) without paying much attention to the charity’s end product. How much research can you honestly say you carry out into the efficiency of the causes to which you regularly give? And by efficiency I don’t just mean the happy stories of pandas saved or medical advances made but the concrete practicalities of bang for your buck. We expect good overall value when we choose a hotel or a new sofa. Should it be any different when we give to charity?
Lately, these concerns have been much on my mind – ever since, late last year, my father was called upon to distribute a large sum of money among the charities of his choice. He’d befriended a man at the pub – Don – who had no family, no dependents, no close friends. My father kept an eye on Don during his latter years of deteriorating health and agreed to disperse his estate when the time came. Don had little money but he did own an ex-council flat that overlooked Clissold Park in Stoke Newington: a once ordinary area that, like much of London, now commands ludicrous property prices. The flat sold for some £300,000. Don’s only stipulation was that £2,000 – no more – be given to The Limbless Veterans. The rest my father was to give away as he saw fit. And so, having chosen to donate some money to London Zoo and Macmillan Nurses – and having defied Don by giving £10,000 to The Limbless Veterans – he approached his family and friends and asked them each to nominate a charity.
The choices included the World Wildlife Fund, Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, a veterinary hospital in Hertfordshire, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, two different rotary clubs in Essex, several cancer charities, and three separate London theatre charities (one designed for underprivileged children; one for those with disabilities; and one for women caught up in the criminal justice system). My family is Jewish and several of the choices were Jewish charities. Someone nominated Brondesbury Synagogue; another the Association of Jewish Refugees; another a Jewish cancer charity, Chai Cancer Care.
For reasons that, at the time, I found it uncomfortable to articulate, I felt rather scornful at the range of choices. I didn’t, for a moment, doubt that all these charities did good things with their donations, but I couldn’t help noticing how parochial the overall picture looked. The only charity – apart from the World Wildlife Fund – that wasn’t based in Britain and for the benefit of British people (or animals) was a Colombian charity for underprivileged children: but then it turned out that the nominator’s partner was Colombian.
All the relevant donors had a personal connection with the three theatre charities. And I’ve always felt a slight unease with religiously affiliated charities, which, by their definition, exclude other communities. (The thriving British Jewish community is particularly well served by a range of specific health-related charities; moreover, the fact that Don wasn’t Jewish didn’t seem to occur to anyone.)
In fact, a little digging revealed that the choices were relatively typical of the country as a whole. UK Giving – the most comprehensive survey of its kind in Britain – found that, over the past two years, “medical research” is the cause supported by the largest proportion (31 per cent) of individual donors in this country. It was certainly true of my sample group. And this is perhaps unsurprising: after all, everyone has some experience of a loved one getting ill, from cancer in particular. “Children” (30 per cent), “Hospitals” (22.5 per cent) and “Animals” (21.5 per cent) came next. In terms of actual money given, last year medical research (16 per cent) was followed by “Religious” charities (13 per cent). Where my own unscientific sample overperformed was in giving to arts charities (these make up less than 1 per cent of donations nationally); and where they underperformed was in giving to overseas aid (12 per cent of national donations). Doubtless this says everything about the narrow demographic of my sample.
And yet, looking at my own relationship with charity, I could hardly claim to be more imaginative. The three charities I give to on monthly direct debits are Amnesty International, Shelter and the Motor Neurone Disease Association. Amnesty’s commitment to free speech is clearly appealing to a journalist; I signed up at university and have rarely given it much further thought. Shelter is an English charity (at least, I give to the English branch of it) and I started donating to the MND association after I witnessed a colleague die of that terrible disease. The rest of my recent giving has been entirely reactive: to Syrian refugees, Bangladeshi earthquake victims, the young son of a friend due to embark on a sponsored walk.
Still undecided about where to apportion my share of this windfall, I found myself sub-editing an article in the Times Literary Supplement – the magazine at which I work – about effective altruism. The article, by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, was a review of two recent books on the subject: Peter Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do and William MacAskill’s Doing Good Better.
The broad aim of effective altruism is to use evidence and reason to bring about positive change in the world. The underlying principle is that we should all aim to do good generally and that for those with high levels of material comfort this should involve giving away a substantial amount of your resources (there are, of course, myriad ways of interpreting what counts as “substantial”).
So far, so anti-capitalist, you may think – but actually it’s the opposite. In terms of application, effective altruism is a hard-nosed approach to charity, which draws on cost-benefit analysis and demands a rigorous appraisal of outcomes. The idea is to approach charities much as you would a stock in which you wished to invest. Pioneers in the field include former bankers and current Silicon Valley billionaires. One particularly interesting point is that this utilitarian approach discounts moralistic arguments about the money spent on a charity’s bureaucracy or fundraising. An effective altruist is only interested in value compared to the alternatives – and if that means a successful charity spending a vast fortune on the senior board then so be it.
Effective altruism takes it as a given that all human lives are worth the same and – depending on how you interpret it – this includes provision for the lives of animals and the health of the environment as well. Some versions employ a specific unit of value, the Quality Adjusted Life Year (or QALY), which equates to one year of good human health. Thus, if you cure the cancer of a sixty-year-old who goes on to live to seventy-five, you have earned 15 QALYs. If you educate an entire Sub-Saharan village in safe sex practices, thereby preventing the spread of AIDS, well, that’s a lot of QALYs.
The problem with this methodology is apparent from my previous example: it is not always possible to measure a QALY. And taken to its logical extreme (and effective altruism is nothing if not logical) we are left with a very skewed picture. No pound spent on a British charity could ever compete with a pound spent on one in, say, Niger – but even the most utilitarian of effective altruists would be hard pushed to argue that no one should ever give to British charities. The same goes for the arts. How can anyone justify giving money to an art gallery in Cambridge when that money could be spent earning so many more QALYs curing people of river blindness in Cameroon?
The fact is you can’t. But nor can you blame people for acting on personal motivations. The uncomfortable truth is that, to any one individual, all human lives are not worth the same – which is why we look out for our children and, to a lesser extent, our friends and, to a still lesser extent, those we know of via other people, or feel a connection to through national or religious or cultural ties. Moreover, there are some things that it’s hard to put a value on, QALY or not. As Mr Gradgrind showed us in Dickens’s Hard Times, a world based on utilitarian values is a poorer one.
Nonetheless, with so much emotion underpinning the distribution of Don’s bequest, I thought I ought to swing the balance round the other way. Nagel’s article pointed me to several organisations designed to promote effective altruism and out of these the one that really caught my attention was GiveWell. Set up by two former hedge-fund analysts, GiveWell is a kind of league table of charities, based on cost-effectiveness and need. Its aim is to find the charities that “will maximise the impact of additional donations in terms of lives saved or improved”.
Top of GiveWell’s current list is Against Malaria Foundation, which provides cheap, highly effective insect nets impregnated with insecticide to malarial areas. The second charity is Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, which supports programmes to treat people for parasitic worm infections that can lead to a host of health problems. The third charity is Deworm the World Initiative, which deals with the same problem. The fourth is GiveDirectly, which diverts money directly to “very poor individuals” in Kenya and Uganda.
Generally in favour of the underdog, I turned my attention to the deworming charities, which, along with the usual difficulties, must have to battle an image problem. Deworming is hardly the sexiest of causes and yet, as GiveWell tells us, the parasites are both devastating in effect and, given the right resources, easy to eliminate.
Scanning the list of “other standout charities”, however, my eye then caught an organisation called Development Media International (DMI), which uses radio and television “to promote improved health behaviors in developing countries”. These behaviours include “exclusive breastfeeding of infants” and “seeking treatment for symptoms associated with fatal diseases”. DMI is particularly focused on young children and on preventing child mortality.
Despite embracing the new utilitarian approach, I was finding it hard to keep my personal proclivities out of it, and in the end I chose this charity, which appealed to me as both a media professional and a new father – as well as for the more hard-nosed reasons of its simplicity and effectiveness. DMI is described by GiveWell as “a standout giving opportunity because of its strong transparency, rigorous self-evaluation, and its work on a potentially cost-effective program”.
I wondered if there was a lesson in this – some way of combining utilitarian giving with more human motivations – though I still went away with a slight sense of unease. I think it was something to do with those unglamorous deworming charities. Perhaps, I reasoned, I could write an article about my experience and donate the money earned from it to one of them. Combining business and charity in this way seemed to be the essence of effective altruism. All I needed was an enlightened magazine willing to take me up on it.
The money from this article goes to Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and Deworm the World Initiative
