An Intuition Worth Following
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show”; that’s ... Read more >
Walking the Walk of Effective Giving and Christianity
My journey toward understanding altruism better began with my father. I was fortunate enough to learn many habits of financial generosity and honesty from him, but mostly the lesson that excess should be used for the greater good. At that time, there was no internet or significant scientific research to help people identify where money could most likely accomplish this greater good, but that was always the context for how I viewed generosity as I became an adult. This was further honed througho... Read more >
Becoming an Effective Altruist on a Tight Budget
I have always wanted to make a difference. I think most people do. As a young teenager, I remember giving away all my Christmas money after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. I understood that I didn’t actually need that money, and there were other people who needed it desperately. As I grew older, I began to realise that this desperate need doesn’t go away just because the news cameras have moved on, or is only present in the wake of a disaster. Extreme poverty is an everyday fact of li... Read more >
High-impact books
I began to think about effective altruism a few years ago when I read Poor Economics, a book by two MIT economists on “the surprising truth about life on less than one dollar a day”. I loved the book, which teems with insight about what drives the economic lives of the world’s poorest people, and contains a lot of surprising evidence about the best policies to improve their lives. (Why, for instance, do the poor borrow in order to save? Read the book.) But I read many interesti... Read more >