Three concrete recommendations to help you do the most good.
Peter Singer’s reading of effective altruism encourages us to balance or even prioritize reason over feeling, giving rationally and strategically to do the most good possible with our time and resources on this earth. Working towards these three global issue areas challenges us to do exactly that. The recipients of your altruism are vague and distant, yet choosing the right organizations can ensure your money contributes to concrete change.
Effective altruism encourages focusing on problem areas which are (1) great in scale, (2), highly neglected, and (3) highly solvable or tractable (are low-hanging fruits if sufficient resources are directed towards it).
All three problem areas — world hunger, gender inequality, and climate change — are great in scale and highly neglected. Peter Singer singles out extreme poverty, which is the most direct cause of hunger and malnutrition, as an example of an effective altruistic cause. $13 billion a year for 20 years is hardly a price for alleviating mass suffering and death. Meanwhile, the potential impact of your lifestyle on climate change far exceeds its potential impact in most other global issue areas. Issues like global gender equality involve complex economic, social and cultural dynamics that are more difficult or impossible to address through personal decisions and require robust government policy responses.
Therefore, following Peter Singer’s guide, here are my personal recommendations for you and myself on how we, as individuals, can do the most good:
Have one fewer child.
Having one less child will reduce your emissions by an estimated 60 carbon tons per year. Having one less child is the most effective way one person can minimize their carbon footprint throughout their life and is the most powerful individual decision a person can make to reverse climate change.
Choose a career that helps those most in need. Live small and donate.
Choose to work in a domain that addresses a dire global problem. An average career spans 80,000 hours. Find a way to spend those 80,000 hours in the most impactful way possible. Live small and aim to donate 50% of your income to those in greater needs. Use GiveWell to find the hunger, climate change, and gender equality organizations most likely to make effective use of your donations.
Eat a plant-based diet and lead a plant-based lifestyle.
One of the top causes of world hunger is the use of resources on the production of animal products. The production of dairy, meat and eggs eat up valuable resources and market forces encourage farmers to shift from the production of staple crops to animal-based foods, which compromises the food supply chain and exacerbates world hunger.