Derek Thompson :
(From previous issue)
There are four reasons why AMF is currently the top-rated charity at GiveWell. “First and foremost, giving out nets to prevent malaria has among the best evidence of any program that charity dollars can support worldwide, and more than 20 randomized controlled trials show it works,” Hassenfeld said.
“Second it’s really cost-effective, at about $3,500 dollars per life saved. Third, AMF itself has significantly more room for funding. Finally, AMF has a strong and unique commitment to transparency and monitoring.” Mather’s approach is like the platonic ideal of effective altruism, matching a clear-eyed approach to doing good with scientific exactitude, using smartphone technology to track the delivering and implementation of every net he distributes. “We’ve distributed 700,000 nets with smartphone technology,” he said. “We know within six meters where all 700,000 nets are.”
V. Greatest Good
In his new book The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically, the moral philosopher Peter Singer laments the fact that most people are more motivated to give by stories rather than numbers.
example, people are more likely to donate when they see the photo of one child rather than see several children suffering from the same disease. In my experience, I have found the exact same thing: Individual stories motivate, and statistics overwhelm.
Why do people mute their emotions in the face of greater suffering? A study from Keith Payne at the University of North Carolina found that “the collapse of compassion happens because when people see multiple victims, it is a signal that they ought to rein in their emotions [because] the alternative might seem too difficult.” It is a frustrating, yet nearly poetic, idea: The problem is not a lack of empathy, but the fear of feeling too much.
Some people in the past few weeks suggested to me that effective altruism suffers from a “cyborg problem.” That is, if you talk about human suffering like it’s a calculus equation, the empathic brain will shut down. But GiveWell has found the opposite to be true.
“A large contingent of donors tell us they give more than they would have, had GiveWell not existed,” Hassenfeld said. “We’re asking questions that encourage people to give, because we give them confidence that they can make a difference.”
Even as I’ve sought to find the holes in the philosophy I’ve chosen to adopt, I’ve become more convinced by effective altruism’s potential for widespread popularity. The mathematical challenge of finding the greatest good can expand the heart. Empathy opens the mind to suffering, and math keeps it open.
In the end, I considered making several different donations. But I kept coming back to something Robert Mather said: Malaria is not merely the greatest killer of children in the world, but also it is the greatest killer of pregnant women.
The disease plunders motherhood from both sides of the equation. The loss of a mother must be quantifiable by some measure of creative accounting, but in my experience it is immeasurable. This much I knew: There is the thing that I want, I cannot have it, but I can give it to somebody else. That seemed to honor the etymology and the root of altruism.
On Thursday, I wired the money: a thousand for every year of life for my mom, who died a few months before her birthday. To honor a family tradition, I also sent an extra thousand to GiveWell-“to grow on,” she would have said.
(Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, labor markets, and the entertainment business)
