Cheaper than asteroids!

This week, while everybody was watching videos of a meteor in Russia, a larger asteroid passed by the earth. It might hit us next time it comes around.

Space agencies track the risk from things like asteroids, but it's unclear how much to spend on this sort of thing. The Planetary Society writes:

Near-Earth object surveys have found (we think) 98% of the largest objects that present the most risk, reducing the actuarial risk due to asteroid impacts from 250 fatalities per year to 64 per year. Based on past discovery rates and projecting forward through proposed future projects, over the next 16 years, we should achieve 90% completion of discovery of asteroids larger than 140 meters in diameter. The effect of this 16 years of work -- at a cost of roughly a billion dollars -- will be to reduce the actuarial risk to 33 fatalities per year. If you see asteroid surveys as a form of insurance, then you're spending about two million dollars per fatality avoided.

Is $2 million per life a good price?  It's repellent to even think about putting dollar values on lives, but we do it all the time.  If you buy the cheaper car instead of the safer, more expensive one, for example, you're trading off money and safety.

US government agencies define the “value of a statistical life” somewhere around $7 million. If they're deciding whether to institute new safety regulations on seat belts or air pollution, for example, they want to know whether spending billions of dollars is worth it. “Worth it”, for American lives, is around $7 million.

That's a pretty arbitrary number, and it isn't the same for all lives. What's the dollar value of a life in Haiti or Cambodia? I don't know, but I know the US government sure wouldn't spend $7 million to save one.

GiveWell currently estimates that its top-rated charity, the Against Malaria Foundation, saves lives for about $2,300. That's a pretty great deal, considering. In my whole life, I don't expect to earn $7 million. But I do expect to save hundreds of lives by donating to cost-effective charities.

The nice thing is that economies are not zero-sum. It's not just a question of shuffling money around; sometimes there are win-win solutions.  Some changes (like immigration) create more well-being for everyone, and we should aim for those.

But in the meantime, it's nice to know that you can save people's lives for a lot less than it costs NASA.

Getting your hands dirty

I was talking to a friend about ways to help the world, and he said something that surprised me: “I sometimes feel guilty about doing little more than donating money to charities without actually getting my hands dirty.”

Actually, I don't think he should feel guilty at all.

If I moved to a poor country to do good deeds, pretty much anything I would do there would be better done by a local person. I would need to learn the local language(s), learn how to function in a new culture, and learn skills that would be useful there.

If you're a nurse, and you think Africa needs more nurses, the answer is not to go to Africa and work as a nurse. Nurses in Kenya earn around $3,000 a year. If you're an American nurse earning $65,000 a year, you could fund thirteen Kenyan nurses and still keep above the US median income. Plus those nurses would be familiar with local culture and language rather than being known as “that nice foreigner who speaks such terrible Swahili.”

The idea that you should help in person is perpetuated by programs like the Peace Corps. (I came within an inch of going to Kazakhstan for two years with them, and in retrospect I think I did a lot more good by staying home and earning money to give.) I do think Peace Corps and similar programs have a positive impact, but it's mostly in the form of cultural exchange and understanding rather than actual development work.

Now, things are different if you have very specific skills. If you're an expert in, say, microfinance or running small rural health clinics, you might be very valuable working in the field. But the rest of us can probably help more by staying home and doing what we do best.  Most jobs will provide us with enough money to live comfortably and still fund good work elsewhere.

Of course, there's value to cultural exchange and hands-on experience, too. Are we doomed to be armchair philanthropists who are clueless about the real needs of people we're trying to help? Hardly. More on that next time.

Our worst subjects

“I prefer to give to local organizations.” I've heard this a lot.

Imagine a high school student who sits down to study for exams. Her chemistry book is lying closest to her on the desk, so she decides to study chemistry. Her father points out that since she has an A in chemistry and a D in history, studying history might help her grades more. “But that book is all the way over there in my backpack,” the student points out; “I prefer to study locally.”

If you were her parent, you probably wouldn't let her get away with this. All things being equal, she would benefit most from studying the subjects where she's most behind. Even though she hasn't learned all the chemistry there is to know, a few hours of studying history will get her farther than spending the same hours on chemistry.

Even within rich countries, we don't have straight As on our report card. Homelessness, environment, prisons, health, schools – we're behind where we should be in lots of areas. As a social work student, I've seen many of these problems first hand. It hurts to see, and I can't help wanting to fix them.

But these are not our worst subjects. The fact that millions of people every year die of easily preventable diseases, and billions live in grinding poverty – that is a much worse failure. Only it's not happening right here next to us; it's happening far away.

The good news is this: the same amount of effort goes a lot farther on our worst subjects. For a few hundred dollars, I can save a life somewhere in the developing world. There’s no local charity (local to me in the United States) where that money will accomplish anywhere near as much.

I'm not saying we should neglect local causes altogether. If our own society falls apart, we’ll be less able to help. But we should put most of our effort – and money – toward areas where we’re failing.


A version of this post appeared earlier on 80,000 Hours.

My pick

In the last weeks, I've been working on the decision of where to give money this year.  Recently I:

• Met with staff at Oxfam America from their monitoring and evaluation team (full disclosure: I used to work there as an administrative assistant)
• Met with staff at Poverty Action Labs
• Spoke with Holden Karnofsky from GiveWell

After hearing three different perspectives, I have a lot of thoughts.

One concern Oxfam raised, which I hadn't thought about before, is that basic health work really ought to be the concern of governments or local organizations, not international charities. GiveWell notes a similar concern. One Oxfam staff member pointed out that Americans would be upset if the Swiss started coming in and building roads or laying pipe, because we pay our government to do those things. Oxfam does some nice work encouraging government and corporate accountability, pushing for transparency so that citizens can ask their governments, “This money was budgeted for services to us – where did it go?”

And yet Oxfam and others do step in when a government's irresponsibility leads to disaster – as when a breakdown of sanitation systems led to a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe in 2008. The government was obviously at fault – they had failed to maintain existing hospitals, or to buy enough chlorine to treat the water system – but international NGOs stepped in rather than watch millions of people die.

This happens on a slower, less obvious scale all the time. Whether from incompetence, corruption, or generally being screwed over by colonization, many nations do not meet their citizens' basic needs. If there were a charity that seemed really effective at getting governments to shape up, I might well support it. But I'm not convinced that most governments are going to get their acts together anytime soon, so I'd rather take action now.

If I could design a perfect nonprofit, it would be one that empowers local people to have more control over their lives. This might be through lots of means – gender equality, education, safe water, good nutrition, sustainable land use, access to healthcare, access to markets, government accountability, an end to violence, an end to economic policies that disadvantage poor people. The ultimate goal, after all, is for people to be able to take care of themselves and their families. Also, this perfect nonprofit would be monitoring its progress and learning from its mistakes.

I think Oxfam and others are doing good work on many of these problems. But at this point, they're also doing a lot of other things that I don't think are as worthwhile – disaster relief, work in the US, projects that haven't really been evaluated or whose evaluations aren't released.

So for this year, I'll be donating to Against Malaria Foundation. They're highly recommended by both GiveWell and Giving What We Can. I have mixed feelings about the decision, since I would prefer to fund something with a broader strategy. Malaria prevention does seem to help development in some ways, since kids who aren't sick or dead from malaria can grow up healthier, and adults can be more productive at whatever they're doing if they're not sick. But the bottom line is that bednets are a cheap way to prevent sickness and death of a lot of people.

I think this is a good choice, and that there are other good choices out there (including Oxfam). I expect to reevaluate this every year, so maybe next year there will be a better one out there.

Bieber fever

This time of year, there are a lot of donation asks out there. Charity mailings, food drives, clothing drives, toy drives. I saw a newspaper article urging me to “Cure a child's Bieber fever.” For a second I thought this was some tropical disease, but I was actually supposed to donate Justin Bieber-themed loot to the paper's toy drive.

A lot of these drives aren't even helpful. I've worked or volunteered in some of the places that receive the donations. The women's shelter had a garage overflowing with excess blankets donated by well-meaning people. The food pantry had some nourishing food but also a lot of junk like gravy mix and diet drink powders — things the donors didn't want anymore. Well, the food pantry clients didn't want them either.

If you're done with your coat and there's still use in it, go ahead and give it to a thrift store or coat drive. But if you want to help a child this winter, don't buy canned goods or Justin Bieber posters. Try a mosquito net.

See also: Charities need your money, not your random old food

Cold research

I just watched a film of Steven Levitt (co-author of Freakonomics) giving a speech at a charity fundraiser.  He explains his personal connection to the organization - he adopted his daughters from China, and this is a charity that aims to improve Chinese orphanages.

After praising the charity's mission, Levitt asks, "Does it work? It sounds great, it's a nice story, but how do we know it really works?" He goes on to explain he'll be conducting a rigorous academic study of the agency's effectiveness.

I can imagine some people's reactions to that.  "Jeez, these economists.  How can he be so cold?  How can he analyze the effectiveness of comforting orphan babies? Can't he just see that it's a good cause and let it be, especially when it concerns his own child?"

But I'm guessing he's doing this study because the topic is so close to his heart. Yes, it's great that some kids out there are getting a better life. But are we doing the best we can? What if there's a better way to help them? If it were his daughter still in an orphanage, Levitt wouldn't just want well-intentioned help for her.  He would want the best help for her.  And that's exactly why research matters.

For another take on this, see Holden Karnofsky's "Reason versus emotion."

Why you need a plan

I know a lot of well-intentioned people who give haphazardly. A check to some charities they get mail from, a pledge to the organizations that call them, a few dollars in the Salvation Army kettle, change to homeless people.

(The most extreme case I've seen, from my days working at a nonprofit, was an elderly man who sent $3 checks to 75 charities. Since it costs more than that to process a donation, this poor guy was spending $225 to take money from his favorite organizations.)

That's not to say you have to pick only one cause to donate to. Maybe you want to give to organizations that benefit you, like your public radio station or place of worship. Maybe it warms your heart to give that guy on the street corner a few bucks. Maybe your daughter's school is doing a fundraiser and you want to support her.

There's nothing wrong with spending money this way. It's like buying a magazine subscription, or lunch with a friend, or anything else that nourishes your spirit or your bonds with other people.

The problem is when you give some money here and there as the mood strikes you, and by the time you think about giving to something that saves lives, you think, "I've already done my part."

But random donations are not the same as effective charity.

$50 toward the utility bills at your church is not the same as $50 to vaccinate a child against a disease that may kill him. $500 to your alma mater is not the same as training a community health worker in Mozambique who can help her neighbors stay healthy. If your child were in danger, you know how you would choose to use the money.

So make a plan. Figure out who is doing good work in a field you think is important, and decide how much you're going to give in the next year or so. Then, budget a separate amount for feel-good giving.

That's something you can feel good about.