Identifying Cost Effective Charities is Solvable

seems the most present. But should we be thinking about the effectiveness of our giving, how much suffering can be alleviated,

how many lives saved for the same donated dollar. We live in a world in which there are really cost effective, proven ways to save the lives of kids that are dying, and at least as a benchmark, we should be able to say, you know, you could and ten million dollars distributing anti malarial bednets, and those ten million dollars are going to protect two to four million households from getting malaria and are going to save the lives of several

thousand people. It sounds like a lot of the programs that you fond are directly connected to measurable things like health and consumption. Can you imagine this applying to other areas of charity. I think it extends to far more areas of charity than one would think. Buddy Shaws the managing director of give Well, an organization that researches the impact of giving across a variety of causes and makes

recommendations for where and how to give. My solvable is helping people identify charities that do the most good per dollar spent. My co host an Apple Bomb, spoke with Buddy about the importance of giving and how his organization evaluates the many worthy causes out there. Here's their conversation. Thinking back to when you were a child young adult, what's your earliest memory of donating money to a charitable cause?

Actually growing up? You know, I grew up in rural, small town Pennsylvania, but we would go to visit my family in East Africa and India fairly regularly, and so probably the earliest memory I have of donating money or doing something that's charitable is going with my grandfather in a rural part of western India and serving food at a school for death and mute children. And did your family talk about charity. Was there a conversation at home

about it as well? There were conversations about I think social justice, not charity so narrowly, but definitely that you know, we're very fortunate to be living comfortable, upper middle class lives in the United States. I remember reading John Rawls The Theory of Justice my freshman year of college, where he talks about our moral standing in this world, or what we actually have access to is an accident of birth.

And when I was reading that, basically it brought me back to those memories visiting family in Africa and India and recognizing that the fact that I was born in the US meant that I had far more opportunities than even my relatives and other people that I would regularly interact with on those trips. And there seemed to be something that was fundamentally morally unjust about the fact that I had a much better shot at leaving a full and meaningful life than those people did simply by virtue

of where I happened to be born. Still, give will is something more specific than the kind of charity you were used to growing up. First of all, maybe you could tell us a little bit about what it does what's the aim of give will, Yeah, so GiveWell. Really, what we're about is trying to find the charities that

save or improve lives most cost effectively. Essentially, what we're looking for our programs that have strong evidence of effectiveness, that what they're intending to do is actually leading to improvements in people's lives. But beyond the evidence of effectiveness is that they're extremely cost effective, that they do that

with as little money as possible. Two examples are one in global malaria, so hundreds of thousands of kids die every year simply because they don't have access to a five dollars anti malarial bednet or other malaria preventive treatments, and give Well essentially as found through rigorous research that the academic literature shows that if you can get an anti malarial bednet into the hands of a family, if they hang it up properly and sleep under it, that

that's extremely cost effective at saving lives. And then we do the work to make sure that we find organizations that are able to do that as cost effectively as possible and that have more capacity to absorb funding and deliver those programs. And so based on all of that research, we make recommendations to anyone looking to make a charitable donation so that their money goes as far as possible. And how do you measure effectiveness? Is it to do

with length of life? Is it to do with you know, the amount of food people have, is its standard of living? What is your ruler that you're using. Yeah, so this is a really hard question because you know, at our core, what we're trying to do is improve human wellbeing as much as possible, and so we're actually agnostic on the actual cause, whether that's improving incomes or lives or education. But obviously if you're choosing between a bunch of different charities,

you're forced to make these very challenging trade offs. And so where Gibbill is currently focused is on programs that save lives or programs that improve people's consumption or material well being. Last year, we directed over one hundred and fifty million dollars, and the question is how much of that money should go to programs that save people's lives versus how much of that money should go to prove

in cost effective ways that improve incomes. And that forces us to make very challenging moral trade offs and ask questions such as how many people's incomes would you have to double in the poorest parts of the world in order to forego saving someone's life, Because that's the real choice if you're really obsessed with maximizing impact that you have to make when you're choosing where to send money and where not to. Is maximizing impact? Though? Is that

always the best guide to the best charity? I ask because I've had a lot of involvements with organizations and NGOs and charities that are linked to problems of democracy and governance as a board member and in other ways, and of course these are subjects that don't lend themselves

at all to measures of cost effectiveness. You know, you can invest for many decades in democracy in a particular country and see no results until suddenly you do what makes you think that there's always going to be a numerical value on giving or how do you know that that's the best way to really improve life? I think

it's a really challenging and fundamental question. We started with a subset of things one can do that we're highly measurable, and I think that's valuable because there's a real opportunity cost of those dollars we live in a world in which there are really cost effective, proven ways to save the lives of kids that are dying, and at least as a benchmark, we should be able to say, you know, you could spend ten million dollars distributing antimlarial bednets, and

those ten million dollars are going to protect two to four million households from getting malaria and are going to save the lives of several thousand people. Now, if you want to say let's make a ten million dollar grant or a charitable investment in something that builds democracy, I think you should really think through what are the assumptions that that grant investment is likely to be better than letting several thousand kids die that you could otherwise save.

And so that's not to say that maybe these longer term, riskier bets in things like strengthening democratic institutions might be better at improving human welfare. I think that's a possibility. But our starting point is to say, what are the set of things that we know with high degree of

confidence really improve lives dramatically. And then as we consider things that are harder to measure and riskier or have longer time horizons at least there's some benchmark to say, you know, does it seem plausible that this is going

to be better than that? And I think that there's a whole other set of questions on how do you actually effectively evaluate the probability of impact when you're investing in things like strengthening democracy and how much capacity is there for philanthropic capital to actually affect those things because

there's such crowded spaces with very powerful other actors. All that to say, you know, very intellectually open to the possibility that there are things like that that are very hard to measure and don't lend themselves to this approach that could be extremely effective, but would start from the position of skepticism and trying to do that mental exercise of do we actually plausibly think that this could be better than you know, saving lives of thousands of people

that we know how to do extremely cost effectively, And how do you know that the investments you make have a long term impact. You know, if you can save somebody's life, obviously that's a that's a plus, But how do you make sure that the money you've invested Since you're thinking along those lines, not that I necessarily would, but that is what you do. How do you know that it will pay off in the long term and

not just in the short term. Within the set of things that give all recommends, there are life saving programs and income or consumption improving programs. Under the life saving programs, generally, if you get past the stage of infant mortality, then people will go on to live full lives. So right there, what we're talking about is averting a death that generally going to translate into sixty years of someone's life, sixty

to seventy years of someone's life. Then there's things that we don't even include in our cost effective estimates, which is all the more fuzzy economic evidence that if people have, if they're lower infant mortality rates, longer life expectancy, then that contributes to long term economic growth and stability of a country. We're not even incorporating any of those potential benefits.

But obviously if you look at global development over the last fifty to seventy years, you do see this correlation between improvements in health and longevity and general improvements in the stability incomes of a society. And so you know, there's a lot of complexity around whether that's correlation or causation, but those are the types of long term effects that you could see even beyond just the additional sixty years

of life. Then on the income improving charities that we invest in, one is providing deworming pills, so it's just a couple cents to deworm kids of parasitic infections, and based on one large randomized trial, we find is that twenty years later, if you spend one hundred dollars to deworm one hundred kids, so very cheap to deworm the kids that that cohort of children have an increase in their consumption of over a thousand dollars twenty years later.

And so there are these long term effects on consumption and material while being for some of the programs, but overall, you know, I think we are focused on saying that that improvement of life of an individual that lasts their whole life, you know, dying before five versus living till sixty, is really substantial and meaningful, and that any other benefits beyond that, you know, is almost gravy because it's so cost effective to just do that core thing of saving

the life and letting someone live. Obviously, by definition, it's easier to do cost effective charity in poorer countries because less money is needed to make a bigger difference. Doesn't this mean that you're leaving out people in wealthy countries. We have now in the United States people who are going hungry because of the COVID pandemic. You know, people who live lives of great misery. But it doesn't sound

like your charity would be directed at them. You know, are two philosophical starting points are one, all human lives have equal value, regardless of where they're born. And the second is how do we improve as many of those lives as possible with the set amount of money. With those philosophical starting points, it does mean that the vast majority and currently all of our work is focused on the poorest parts of the world because that allows us to improve the lives of as many people as possible.

And we don't draw moral distinctions between someone here at home and a person living ten thousand miles away. And I think one important thing to emphasize is there are definitely worthy causes, and there's suffering here in the US and in other high income countries. But if you just look at the scale of the suffering, it is very different.

The average median person in the Democratic Republic Congo lives on a few dollars a day, and even the lowest income people in the United States have ten twenty thirty times as much consumption and material well being as that. And that's not to downplay how important causes are here.

But if you truly believe that all have equal value and you're trying to do as much good as possible per dollar, I do think that leads you, and it leads us to focus on the lowest income parts of the world, because you know, we think we can improve more people's lives by a larger amount. How do you identify the charities that you give to? I mean, do charities apply to you, do they present their programs or do you go out and look for look at what

people are doing and then evaluate their work. So our team of researchers are going through all the public health journals, economics journals, trying to find the latest studies and then doing intensive due diligence with the actual organizations that would be delivering programs that have some evidence of effectiveness on

them based on what's been published in literature. So it is us going out into the world trying to find the best giving opportunities through a mix of looking at research as well as talking to practitioners in the field. It sounds like a lot of the programs that you fund are directly connected to measurable things like health and consumption. Can you imagine this applying to other areas of charity. I think it extends to far more areas of charity

than one would think. So you think about highly measurable randomized trials, you might think health, but as you said, applies to consumption programs such as straight cash transfers to the poorest households on Earth. You could also apply it to things like education. If you're trying to get more girls into school in rural India, you could test a whole bunch of different interventions to do that. You could do it for programs that might improve the well being

of subsistence farmers. You know, do new seed varieties work, do new farming techniques work? And so it extends to many things. And I think that's one of the big revolutions in charity is the idea that you can measure a lot more than we previously thought that having been said, I do think there are a number of areas where

this approach just doesn't work. So, you know, you can't have directly measurable effects on really basic science research, R and D technology, perhaps parts of the arts, strengthening the media. So there's certainly a wide range of things that might not be amenable to this type of measurement approach. But I think there's a surprising amount that actually is. Has the global pandemic shifted your recommendations for giving this year

and do you think it will for next year? Yeah, So we took a hard look at COVID and whether there are any highly cost effective giving opportunities that we could identify, and so there were a number of grants that we may initially in COVID, primarily supporting developing low income country governments in their COVID response. But I think

we realized two things. One is that a lot of these drivers of death that are preventable by very cost effective programs still needed to be delivered during COVID, and that was much more challenging and potentially going to be underfunded because of the global focus on COVID, And so we made the strategic decision to really focus on the programs that we knew were cost effective and would continue to need to be delivered during COVID otherwise you could

see a big increase in debts from causes like malaria or vitamin A deficiency related debts, and so it's something that we continue to monitor. But it's also something where there's a huge influx of cash from governments, multilaterals, pharmaceuticals, and so if you think about where's my marginal dollar as someone making a philanthropic contribution at the end of the year going to be highest, it might not be in a place where there are billions of dollars flowing

in from national governments, multilaterals, and pharmaceuticals. And so you know, that's the lens that we're always trying to evaluate on is where's your marginal dollar going to be most cost effective? Who are the clients for your research? Is it other philanthropies, is it big charitable organizations, is it individual donors? Who who are you advising? All of our research is fully transparent and publicly available and is used by a wide

range of donors. So we have over fifty thousand give well donors that use our recommendations, and that's everything from people giving twenty five dollars at the end of the year to many people that are giving well over a million dollars. And how are you funded? What about your organization? How do you do take a percentage of money that's given to you? How does that work? Yeah, we take zero fees from any of the donations, and in the way that any nonprofit would be funded just through donors

that believe in our mission and their zero fees. What are three things that listeners can do right now to learn more about smart donating and to make smart donations themselves. What do you advise people listening to this program? One is to I'd recommend a couple of books. So Peter Singers The Life You Can Save or Will McCaskill's Doing Good Better are two books by philosophers, but really practical around you know, what are our moral obligations to others?

And how can we do as much good as possible? And a third book that i'd recommend is Larissa mcfarquhar's Strangers Drowning. You know, she's a writer for The New Yorker. Wrote this book about your really incredible people who have devoted their lives to basically you know, donating as much as possible to the most effective places, and just what's going through their own psychology and minds in making that shift from living a fairly normal life to fully de

themselves to improving the lives of others. And then you know, obviously going through the Giveball website and reading about this kind of research is a third thing that I would recommend. Buddy Shaw is the managing director of GiveWell. Be sure to check out our show notes for suggestions he shared for ways to learn more about informed giving. There's so

many worthy causes, especially this year. Next week Unsolvable, we'll hear from Rachel Stroher about how regenerative agriculture can help solve the problems of climate change and unsustainable extractive farming. Solvable is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our show is produced by Camille Baptista, Senior Producer, Jocelyn Frank. Catherine Girardo is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Nia Loebell. Special thanks to Kobe Guildford have their fine

Eric Sandler, Carly Migliori and Kenesia Holland. I'm Jacob Weisberg would