| I really recommend you read about the Effective Altruism movement if you want a detailed response to your questions. In response to your question, you are totally right! Anything you can do for most of these problems will probably be completely meaningless compared to the scale of the problem. Almost certainly, the rational decision is to do nothing. So what? The entire idea of altruism is that you make an economically irrational choice to contribute to a cause that produces positive externalities for society but does not benefit you directly (if it did, it's not altruism anymore: it's just an investment). Measuring caring in terms of dollars allows you to maximize your possible contribution. Imagine a highly-paid consultant who cares about the homeless, so he volunteers at the local soup kitchen for several hours a week. If he instead simply worked for those same hours and earned $100 an hour, he could pay 10 people to work at the same soup kitchen and help 10 times as many homeless. That's the kind of tradeoff you don't think about if you don't realize that money is fungible with regard to caring. In the longer run, realizing that money <-> fixing things means that you can also decide to dedicate your life to making money and donate a significant chunk of that money to the cause of your choice, leaving both you and presumably society better off than if you had dedicated your whole life to volunteering/working for your cause in the first place, since your money can fund specialists in the field who are probably more effective than you, as a random coder/manager would be. And no, this doesn't imply that if billionaires hold the most effective resources for solving the problem, you should give up. Instead, dedicate yourself to effectively convincing said billionaires to care about your cause. The guy(s) who successfully convinced Bill Gates to donate to malaria eradication have probably saved more lives than every volunteer who was previously working on that effort. The point is, realize that if you want to care, you should make a difference in the most effective way possible, and often that is by leveraging money and resources in ways that most people would not consider "charitable work" in the traditional sense of the phrase. |
A statement that 'money is fungible with regards to caring' ignores the network effects that happens when money becomes prioritized, like a version of the Jevons paradox, in which a relative efficiency in coal resulted in an absolute increase in coal consumption.