HLS Effective Altruism has been thrilled at the positive response to HLS Gives. So far, HLS students like you have pledged over $27,000 of their collective summer earnings. This generosity will make a significant positive impact on the world.
While many of our pledgers have already promised to give to a specific organization, many remain uncommitted. We appreciate this open-mindedness: one ought to think hard about where to give. If you agree with our commonsense philosophy—that evidence ought to guide our quest to do the most good we can—you should give to the highly effective, proven charities recommended through our partner organization, One For The World (OFTW). I’m sure you already know that donating to the wrong charity can accomplish nothing, or even cause harm. Even within the class of charities that do have a positive effect, the difference between the least and most cost-effective charities can be significant. The lack of solid evidence for many organizations’ effectiveness and differences in transparency further complicate the decision. Fortunately, however, teams of experts have analyzed dozens of the most promising charities and selected those which have the best evidence of high efficacy. Donations through OFTW go to such charities.
Our Values: Doing Good, Cause-neutrality, Maximizing Impact, Using Evidence
A brief primer on our approach to giving, called “effective altruism,” is helpful to understand why we recommend OFTW. Although you may not have heard of effective altruism before, we suspect you already agree with our core values: doing good, doing the most good we can with our limited resources, and using evidence to determine how.
If you signed the Pledge, you already agree with us that doing good is important. But, of course, our world abounds with more suffering and injustice than a single person can confront. So, we must choose where to focus our efforts.
We believe that no charitable cause is inherently more worthy of our donated time and effort than any other. We reach this conclusion because we, like you, value humans equally, regardless of their nationality or geographical proximity. Thus, we do not believe that saving the life of a child in Cambridge is, morally, any better (or worse) than saving the life of a child in Kampala. Of course, we also care about humans’ quality of life, and seek out interventions that add both quality and duration to human lives.
We also believe in maximizing our per-dollar impact. This follows from our commitment to equality: if all human lives have equal moral value, then saving more lives is better than saving fewer lives, and improving more lives is better than improving fewer lives by the same amount. We want less suffering, so the more suffering we can eliminate, the better.
Finally, we aim to select proven charitable causes and interventions. We believe that altruistic intentions are desirable, but we also need actions that actually and demonstrably improve the lives of others. Many people are skeptical about the efficacy of charity and therefore choose not to give (more). OFTW meets skeptics’ concerns by choosing charities that have withstood rigorous scrutiny and are proven to work.
Why Extreme Poverty?: Magnitude, Tractability, and Neglectedness
We use three criteria to select a focus cause: magnitude, tractability, and neglectedness. Using these criteria to select a cause ensures that our cause selection accords with the values discussed above. OFTW and HLS Effective Altruism focus on ameliorating extreme poverty and the related problem of neglected tropical diseases because we believe these are large, tractable, and neglected problems.
Magnitude is the most straightforward of these criteria: we want to select a cause that will significantly benefit a large number of people, both immediately and in the long run. We think that the scale and severity of extreme global poverty make it a worthwhile cause. Your charitable dollars have the power to stop young children in extreme poverty from dying of preventable diseases. This has the added benefit of aiding the economies of affected regions. In the right hands, your donation can do an incredible amount of good.
Since we care about making a difference, the tractability of the cause matters: we want to focus on causes for which clear and demonstrably effective interventions exist. Again, we think extreme poverty is a highly tractable issue. The interventions supported by OFTW—providing insecticide-treated bed nets, unconditional direct cash transfers, and deworming, for example—make demonstrable and significant positive impacts on the lives of people living in extreme poverty.
Finally, we ought to focus on neglected issues. Just as income has diminishing marginal utility for individuals, money-limited organizations can generally use additional charitable dollars more effectively than well-funded ones. Another way of saying this is that it makes little sense to give more money towards a cause that is not limited by the amount of money dedicated to it but instead lacks sufficient political will, time, talent, or knowledge. Of course, these are not entirely independent categories: more money could generate more political will, for example. Still, we ought to give money only where money is truly needed. Given the scope and severity of extreme global poverty, it is a highly neglected issue. All of the global poverty charities recommended by OFTW could effectively use much more money. Sadly, this need is currently not being met by aid from the West for a number of reasons. The US allocates less than 1% of its budget to foreign aid each year. President Trump wants to cut this even further and eviscerate other programs that ameliorate global poverty. The vast majority of American charitable dollars are given to domestic organizations. This gives donors like us an incredible opportunity to fill this gap and give much-needed resources to people living in extreme poverty.
In sum, global poverty is a large, highly tractable, and highly neglected issue. This means that your charitable dollars will do a lot more good when given to organizations fighting global poverty than they would if given to a domestic cause.
Why OFTW?: Building a Culture of Giving
We recommend giving through OFTW specifically for a few reasons. Most importantly, the charities they recommend are all highly cost-effective and supported by robust evidence. They, in collaboration with organizations like The Life You Can Save and GiveWell, have done the hard work of identifying charities that align with our values so we don’t have to. Furthermore, OFTW works to promote a culture of giving among high-earning professionals like HLS and HBS students. Thus, giving through (and thereby promoting) OFTW will help multiply your impact by encouraging other high-earners to give. OFTW also sponsors outreach at HLS for the Pledge: by giving through OFTW specifically, you demonstrate that their investment in promoting global giving at HLS was worthwhile. This too will multiply your impact by helping Pledge sponsors receive more promotional assistance in the future. Finally, increasing HLS’s profile within OFTW’s donor base will allow HLS students to influence future OFTW charity selection.
I hope this has convinced you to donate 1% or more of your summer income to One For The World. If it has not, or if you still have more questions about why we recommend OFTW, we encourage you to email us or consult the following resources: