Luck of the draw

Seeing stories about the horrifying conditions Syrian refugees face, I’m thinking once again about how lucky I am to have been born in this country.

As a social worker, some of the clients I work with are immigration detainees waiting to find out if they will be deported.

The descriptions they give of their journeys to this country are harrowing. “I spent three days walking through the mountains. There were snakes.” “In the desert it was freezing at night and hot in the day. We got surprised by immigration officials at night and ran off without our water. My neighbor died.” “You pass corpses in the desert.”

What exactly would make a person take those kind of risks? Sometimes it’s a very specific fear: “After my brother got shot, my parents scraped together the money for the trip and told me to come here.” But often it’s simply to avoid grinding poverty. One man explained the life he left as a corn farmer in Central America: “I think I could make about $8 a day. What kind of life can you have? I can’t get married on that, I can’t raise kids.”

Some of them speak of the difference they were able to make to their families: “My mother depends on money I send her for insulin. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to afford it if I have to go back.” “I’ve been keeping my children in school. School there isn’t free like here: you have to buy uniforms and books.” “When I visited my cousins, I left my clothes with them because they didn’t have decent clothes. That’s how poor they are.”

In short, they’re normal people who want normal things and have gone to extraordinary lengths to get them.

Source: Branko Milanovic, PovcalNet (World Bank)

An American at the poverty line ($11,770 a year) is richer than 85% of the world, even after accounting for different costs of living. You can play around with the “How Rich Am I?” calculator.

This is why the idea of prioritizing one’s own neighborhood or nation over others has never made sense to me. No one would choose to be born in the murder capital of the world, or a country undergoing civil war, or a community where people can’t afford to send their children to school. I didn’t do anything to earn my American passport except be born. I didn’t earn the right to be white, or healthy, or from an upper-middle-class family.

And that’s why I want to use my good fortune to make a difference for people who didn’t get so lucky.

669 lives

In 1938, a British stockbroker named Nicholas Winton was about to go on skiing vacation in Switzerland when a friend asked him to come to Prague instead. He arrived at a Czech refugee camp instead of his planned ski trip. The camp was filled with Jewish families trying to escape before the Germans arrived. In Winton's words, “I felt compelled to do something.”

He spent the next nine months using his money and organizational skills to arrange for hundreds of children to be evacuated by train and fostered by British families. He was 29 years old. He saved 669 children that year.  And afterwards, he didn't tell anyone what he had done.

50 years later, his wife discovered his journals in a briefcase in the attic. The children's names were in a scrapbook he had kept.  Here's footage of Winton realizing he's sitting next to dozens of the now-grown children:

We talk about “lives saved.” Mentally, I know that this year my donations will save several people's lives, and keep many more from getting sick. But it's so different to actually see those people assembled in a room.

Winton is still alive at age 104, and the children he saved are themselves old. One became a member of Parliament, another a groundbreaking geneticist, another a journalist and author. And most of them went on to do nothing especially remarkable except grow up, go to school, work, get married, have children, and generally do the things people enjoy doing when they don't die at age 6.

Recently someone asked me if it wasn't rather limiting, not getting to do as much travel as I might if I didn't donate. It's hard to imagine that Nicholas Winton regrets giving up his ski trip.

Cheerfully

As a young person, I was extremely struck by the realization that my choice to donate or not meant the difference between someone else’s living and dying. A lot of decisions started to look very starkly wrong.

I remember telling my dad that I had decided it would be immoral for me to have children, because they would take too much of my time and money away from better causes. “It doesn't sound like this lifestyle is going to make you happy,” he said.

“My happiness is not the point,” I told him.

A few years later, I was deeply bitter about the decision. I had always wanted and intended to be a parent, and I felt thwarted. It was making me sick and miserable. I looked at the rest of my life as more of an obligation than a joy.

So Jeff and I decided that it wasn't worth having a breakdown over. We decided to set aside enough for our personal spending that we could reasonably afford to raise a child. Looking back at my journal entries from before and after the decision, I'm struck by how much difference it made in my outlook. Immediately after we gave ourselves permission to be parents, I was excited about the future again. I don't know when we'll actually have a kid, but just the possibility helps me feel things will be all right. And I suspect that feeling of satisfaction with my own life lets me be more help to the world than I would have as a broken-down altruist.

I've attended Quaker meeting for the last ten years. The founder, George Fox, gave his followers this advice in 1658: “Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing.”

Quakers have tended to emphasize the part about “that of God in everyone,” with its implication about equality: how can it be right to keep slaves, for example, if the slave has an element of the divine in her?

But my favorite part is that word “cheerfully.” Fox was a man who had been jailed and beaten for his religious beliefs – surely he had a right to be bitter. Quakerism later developed a stern and dour style, but George Fox was not about that.

Some things I can do cheerfully. It turns out that giving up children was not one of them. Other people would have no problem giving up parenthood, but I suspect that everyone has something that would cause an inordinate amount of pain to sacrifice.

So test your boundaries, and see what changes you can make that will help others without costing you too dearly. But when you find something is making you bitter, stop. Effective altruism is not about driving yourself to a breakdown. We don't need people making sacrifices that leave them drained and miserable. We need people who can walk cheerfully over the world, or at least do their damnedest.

Ways to learn

Last time, I argued that those of us in rich countries can help more by earning money to give than by traveling to poor countries. But what about the understanding you can get from first-hand experience?

Travel is always a learning experience. It's a good way to see things about your own society that you never noticed until you saw a system that worked differently. It's a way to meet people whose lives have been very different from your own.

But most of my learning from living in other countries (Denmark and Ecuador) came from talking to people who had lived there all their lives. Conversations with my host families and teachers there were more illuminating than what I was able to observe walking around the streets. If you're in a place for a few weeks or months, you spend a lot of time getting your bearings. Unless you're going to spend years in a place, most of your learning will be mediated through people who have lived there a long time. And you don't need to leave your home country to meet people from around the world.

Several times when I've been between jobs, I've volunteered for a few weeks at a refugee services organization. I didn't accomplish anything earth-shattering, but I got to know people from places I had only read about: Nepal, Cuba, Ethiopia, Haiti, Somalia.

Instead of statistics, they became real people to me. I admired their bravery, their humor, their work ethic, and their loyalty to their families. When you listen to other people's life stories you get things through their filter, but when you hear enough stories you can piece together a complex picture.

Sometimes I hear “armchair philanthropists” criticized for not getting out there and seeing the situations they are trying to change. But you don't need to go to a refugee camp to hear someone's experience of what it's like there. If you want to meet people from hard-hit places, there are certainly immigrants living in your town.

For that matter, there are hard-hit people who are from your town. As a social worker I meet people who have been through appalling deprivation just miles from my house. But the elements I see missing in my client's lives are usually related to parenting rather than material resources.

Learning about people's experiences doesn't always mean I can help. Learning about what life is like in a Quito orphanage, Kenyan refugee camp, or South Boston doesn't enable me to fix any of it. Civil war and broken families are not problems that I can make much of a dent in. So I focus my donations on lower-hanging fruit.

But I still think there's value in learning from other people's experiences. Sitting down to talk with people from the other side of the tracks or the other side of the world can help us be more aware, more compassionate people.

In your town, there are refugees and immigrants who want to learn more English. There are kids at homeless shelters who want someone to read to them. There are people who want help writing a resume so they can apply for jobs. If you want to see a different side of life, try working with them for a while. No plane tickets needed.

Ugh fields and big problems

One of my favorite concepts from the Less Wrong blog is the "ugh field," coined by Jennifer Rodriguez-Müller. The idea: if you hate washing the dishes, not only do you leave the dishes unwashed, but you hate thinking about the mounting pile of dirty dishes. The more you dislike thinking about the dishes, you harder you try not to think about them at all. In other words, there's an ugh field around the dishes. (In psychology this would be called some kind of defense mechanism, probably denial or thought suppression. But I find "ugh field" so much more descriptive.)

This summer I wanted to learn to play the banjo. In the past, I've quickly lost momentum when trying to learn an instrument. My husband plays about six instruments, so I've used his method for painless musicianship:

- Keep the instrument in plain view where it's easy to pick up for a few minutes in between other activities.

- No scales, exercises, or anything you don't enjoy.

- Spend time fooling around with the instrument, playing whatever you want.

I realize that most of the best musicians do practice scales, etc., but that requires more discipline than I was willing to put into this project. Using Jeff's method means I don't have an ugh field around practice, so I've made decent progress with the banjo this summer.

When a task seems insurmountable, we're less likely to attempt it at all. I think all of us have an ugh field around the fact that there are more problems in the world than we can possibly solve. I don't think our minds can really comprehend that, even if we tried. And most so most people build a very strong ugh field around the topic.

I think it's worthwhile to chip off bits that are more manageable. I can't become a banjo expert this week, nor can I fix the Sahel food crisis. But I can decide that before I go to bed tonight, I'll put in twenty minutes. Maybe I'll read up on different charities, or maybe I'll write an email to a friend about a cause I think is important. If I keep the plan manageable, I'm more likely to actually do it.

I'll go to bed knowing I didn't do everything, but I did something. And that will make it easier to do something else tomorrow.

Letting myself care

Recently I was talking with friends about what role emotion should play in giving decisions.  Some said we shouldn't let emotions muddle our thinking.

"But I want to have an emotional connection to the people I help," another said. I found myself agreeing with both sides.

We're emotional creatures (some more than others).   Personally, I'm pretty high on the bleeding-heart scale.  One thing I loved about Oxfam is that they do a great job documenting their work in articles and photography, so I could feel really connected to the people they work with.  I put their pictures on my wall.  I wanted to see their faces.

Of course,  I don't want to choose a cause based on how emotionally connected I already am to it.  I don't want to pass up an excellent opportunity to help because I felt more  pulled to a less effective cause.  When it comes to choosing a cause, I want to act based on information, not sentiment. At the end of the year I'll reevaluate which charities to support, and I don't want to be muddled when I do that.

But once I've chosen a cause, I give myself permission to fall in love with it.  What I care about, after all, is not the cause itself but the human lives at stake.  (For you, it might be animal lives as well, or the lives of people not yet born.  But you get the idea.)  So I look for a way to connect.

Against Malaria Foundation posts photos of most of its bednet distributions.  It's a way to document that they're doing what they say they are - but for me, it's also a chance to see the human face of the work they do.  The work I help them do.

Seeing her face is a way of overcoming the blind chance that put me in the US and her in Mali.  It's a way of making us neighbors.

It's hard to feel warm and fuzzy about our donations going to dozens of distribution points around the world. We didn't evolve to feel an emotional glow about numbers. It can feel like we're sending money into some kind of oblivion. It's hard to feel motivated about that.

That's why I imagine it going to her.  I imagine how glad her family will be to see her reach her eighth birthday, eleventh birthday, twentieth birthday.  I imagine all the things she can do now that she's not sick.  That kind of glow is what my heart was made for.

What I learned

I think one reason people want to help locally, and to do something hands-on rather than just writing a check, is that they want to see the situation first-hand. I can see the appeal of this.

I'm finishing up my visit to Ecuador. I wanted to experience a developing country, and to some extent I have. I've seen kids begging in the streets. I've seen people with deformities that probably would have been corrected in the US. I see how nothing is wasted here. Yesterday my host family curiously asked me if it's true that in America we throw out things that are still good. I confessed that it was.

And yet I'm not sure that this experience has changed my goals or how I think about philanthropy. Yes, it hit me in the gut the first time I saw a child begging on the street at night, when I saw her playing with broken glass for lack of any other toy.

But I pretty already much knew that poverty sucks, and that I want to do something about that. My donations won't go to help that girl, because the best organizations I know of don't work in Ecuador. But they will help other people who had the bad luck to be born with few resources.

Some people are more driven by emotion and first-hand experience than others. If you're one of those people, maybe it would make sense to go see the work you think is important. Charities are very happy to tell you about what they're doing, and if you want to pay your own way, you could probably visit their field sites.

I'm affected by the poverty I see here, and for that matter, by the problems I see at home in Boston. But for every person I see who tugs at my heart, there are millions more I don't see. I feel I owe it to them to give the best help I can. Which means giving based on the best research I can find, not who I happened to see.

Objections to giving

These are arguments I've heard against giving, or against the type of giving I do.

“I have no obligation to solve other people's problems.”

I don't know exactly what to say to this. I don't think there's a report card in life where someone will eventually grade me and check off the “helped others” box. I don't go around thinking everyone around me is a bad person for not giving all their money away. But I do think that if they gave more, or gave more wisely, the world would be a better place. (If you want to get into philosophy jargon, it's because I'm a consequentialist and not a deontologist. I think it's because I'm a social worker and we focus on solutions, not blame.)

So I guess this is true: I don't consider giving a mandate, but rather an option. A really, really good option that will greatly improve other people's lives at a low cost to you.

“Aid just hurts poor countries.”

This is only partly true. Yes, there has been a lot of bad aid out there – aid that amounted to buying food from Western farmers and shipping it to places where it would put poor farmers out of business. Or tying aid to lots of rules about what countries had to do in exchange. Or as Cold War political leverage, or a way to unload useless goods and get a tax break.

We can obviously do better than that. Rich countries need to reform their aid policies, and individual donors like us can make better choices.

"My tax money is already going to foreign aid."

Well, depends on where you live. If you're Swedish, congratulations - your country tops the charts by donating over 1% of its gross national income. The US is down there with 0.21%. Twenty-one cents for every $100 earned is not my idea of generous.

The way the US allots our foreign aid money is pretty ridiculous. The top receiver of US aid is Afghanistan, which seems legit as the place really could use some development. But the next biggest receivers are Israel ($2.2 billion, highly developed), Pakistan ($1.5 billion, somewhat developed), and Egypt ($1.3 billion, somewhat developed). Israel has half the population of Mali (a desperately poor country) and gets 20 times the aid money. In other words, if you're poor and politically unimportant, you're out of luck.

"So much aid goes to corruption."

This is an undeniable problem. A lot of aid money has gone astray, and some has probably made things worse. It's part of why I look for transparency in a charity. One benefit to relatively small, single-issue charities like the ones GiveWell recommends is that it's clearer what your money is going for.

“Saving lives will lead to environmental destruction from all those extra people.”

The easiest lives to save are in developing countries. For example, Against Malaria Foundation gives out more nets in Malawi than any other country. Your average Malawian produces .7 tons of carbon annually. Your average American produces 28.6 tons annually – that's 40 times the carbon output of a Malawian. Yet I've never heard anyone carry this concern to its logical end and advocate letting Americans die to reduce our carbon footprint.

Almost 10 tons of the American's carbon output is from manufactured goods and transportation. If you want to reduce environmental damage, you could buy less stuff and drive less, and use the money you save to save the lives of people in countries with very low carbon footprints. Win.

“Saving children now will just lead to overpopulation, food shortages, and more suffering later.”

The global trend is that a lower child mortality rate goes hand-in-hand with a lower birthrate. Correlation is not causation, so if the two changes happen at the same time we can't be sure the lower birthrate didn't cause lower child mortality somehow. Or maybe something else caused both of these changes. But there are factors that appear to really decrease birthrates and increase people's ability to feed themselves. Those are things like female literacy, better access to contraception, and better farming methods.

In the end, if you think overpopulation is the greatest problem, there are charities out there doing that work. Funding them would be better than sitting around complaining!

“There's some more pressing problem (climate change, existential risk, etc.)”

Again, if you've done your homework and you think that's the best use of donations, go for it.

I don't think most of these reasons are people's real objections. I think the real objection is usually "it seems hard." And I am here to tell you: it's not that hard.

Value yourself as a donor

I used to work in donor services at a large nonprofit. For low-dollar donors, there was a person who could answer your questions by phone or email. Once you started donating more, you were assigned a “gift officer” whose job it was to stay in touch and be nice to you. They rarely ask you to donate, but they're there to answer your questions and provide you with glossy brochures about the good work you're funding. If you're interested in a particular program, they can get you more information on that. They host receptions for major donors to meet each other.

For its employees, the charity provided an attractive workspace with good coffee and tea. At first I wavered on things like this – did it really make sense for a charity to spend money on courting me as a donor, or free tea for me and my coworkers? Shouldn't it be sending every possible penny to the actual field work?

Well, no. The attractive setting, good benefits, and free caffeine probably reduced turnover and improved productivity. And given that fundraising is a business, I'm sure that the optimal level of sucking up to donors was well-studied.

People love to tell me, “If you give everything away, you'll have to depend on others for charity!” I never proposed to do that. If I did that, I would burn out before you can say “rice and beans.” If my life as a donor is difficult enough that I hate it, I'd quit. That would be a bad outcome for everyone.

Imagine a charity that wants your donation. How would they best interact with you? They probably shouldn't wine you and dine you too much, or you'll think they were wasteful. Nor should they be too pushy or lay the guilt on too hard, or you'll feel used and bitter. But they should be friendly and appreciative and perhaps ply you with your favorite coffee.

If you donate to a good charity, you are doing a good and important thing. You want to reward that kind of behavior - even when it's yourself that you're rewarding.

Of course, you know your own limits better than you know other people's, so you can press yourself farther than you would press someone else. And you know whether you're likely to err on the side of giving too much or too little. But whichever one it is, treat yourself like a valued donor.

So next time you make a donation, celebrate. Give yourself a nap, a croissant, a beer, a long bath, a special meal – whatever would feel good. If you tend towards burnout, a treat after donating will give you some respite. If you tend towards hoarding, it will help remind you that giving can be a pleasure. Either way, positive reinforcement is a good thing.

Sensing our impact

Last time, I wrote about evidence that donating or buying gifts makes people happier. At least on the $5/$20 level, the amount doesn't matter. That means if you have $20 to give, you'll enjoy giving more if you spread your donations out over several days.

How might we arrange things to give ourselves more pleasure from giving? I saw a great idea in a post by "Orthonormal":

This summer, I had just gone through the usual experience of being asked for money for a nice but inefficient cause, turning them down, and feeling a bit bad about it. I made a mental note to donate some money to a more efficient cause, but worried that I'd forget about it; it's too much work to make a bunch of small donations over the year (plus, if done by credit card, the fees take a bigger cut that way) and there's no way I'd remember that day at the end of the year.

Unless, that is, I found some way to keep track of it.

So I made up several jars with the names of charities I found efficient (SIAI and VillageReach) and kept a bunch of poker chips near them. Starting then, whenever I felt like doing a good deed (and especially if I'd passed up an opportunity to do a less efficient one), I'd take a chip of an appropriate value and toss it in the jar of my choice. I have to say, this gave me much more in the way of warm fuzzies than if I'd just waited and made up a number at the end of the year.

And now I've added up and made my contributions: $1,370 to SIAI and $566 to VillageReach.

I love this method. We evolved to respond more to tangible things - like filling a jar - than to numbers on a spreadsheet. We're sensory creatures, and we might as well work with that.

The jar method gives us a sense of doing something. But it doesn't let us sense our impact. On my last post, Orlando Weber commented that grouping donations with buying presents is a bit unfair, because buying a beer for friends is probably more enjoyable than buying a mosquito net for somebody you'll never see. Like her:

Source: Against Malaria Foundation

We're social as well as sensory creatures. Buying gifts for people we know is fun because we get to see their pleasure and thus experience some of it ourselves. If every day we saw cute kids in danger of dying from something stupid like malaria, we'd probably feel a lot more motivated to help them. (Sponsor-a-child charities work on this principle, but in reality you're not sponsoring a particular child. Which is fine, because it's more efficient to fund a program than an individual.)

So what if we did actually see these people every day, or every time we donated? I want a nonprofit to offer an option where your donation receipt includes a picture of a person being helped — not that your money is literally going to that person, but it will go to help someone in a similar situation. Or maybe every week you would be able to access a new photo or video (Oxfam does some nice ones). Or, maybe you use it as a kind of digital chip jar - every time you want an altruism hit, you pledge to donate a certain amount, and you get rewarded with a picture or video. Every year you add up your pledges and make your donation.

Someone with better programming skills than mine could write something like this — it would keep track of your pledges, and after each pledge you could access some new piece of content. You'd need to get content related to the various causes people could choose, either from the charities themselves or images of a similar population. (SIAI would have the perennial problem that all its photos are of guys standing in front of a blue screen.)

If any of you programmers want this project, please, run with it!

Does altruism matter?

The other day on the subway, I gave up my seat for an older woman. Afterwards, I thought about why I had done it. Some was out of what you might call altruism, an actual concern that her feet probably hurt more than mine did. Some was to maintain my community as one I want to live in. When I'm pregnant or old, I want people to give me seats, so I'd better do the same for such people now. And some was because I want people to see me as a good person, the kind of person who gives seats to old ladies.

Some people like to analyze whether altruism is real. "Aha," they say, "there's no such thing as pure altruism! You're really doing it out of selfishness!"

...so? The woman who got my seat on the subway doesn't care.

You can help other people because you think it's morally right, or because it feels good, or for the tax break, or to impress your friends. The result is the same. Do it for whatever reason works for you.