| Yeah, that article is pretty weird. To add on your last point: > > One could spend at most a few tens of millions of dollars on anti-mosquito bed nets before returns start dramatically diminishing because everyone who can be helped by them already has one. That's a feature. It's half of what makes "effective" part of "effective" altruism effective. The fact that charities aren't infinite money sinks allows everyone to donate by a simple algorithm of: do {
let charity = runQuery("
SELECT *
FROM charities
ORDER BY effectiveness DESC
LIMIT 1;")
donateTo(charity);
} while(charity != null && hasMoneyToHelp());
The idea being, charities that can do most good now get the funds, and as they saturate and hit diminishing returns, they stop being the most effective ones, so other charities takes their place. Repeat until there are no more charities remaining, thus no more problems to solve.(People may have slightly different definitions of "effective", or one may prefer to do e.g. LIMIT 5 and pick one of the top 5 at random - the idea still works, the slight variance is a hedge against uncertainty.) It's an obvious idea, and it's how people approach other aspects of their lives if they care about the outcome, so why not donating too? The article continues: > > This points to the limits of the individualistic consumerist approach to ending poverty. The best – most beneficial – choice you can make as an individual spending $50 or even $5,000 is different from the best choice you should make if you have several hundred billion dollars to spend. There's only one entity with several hundred billion dollars to spare, and that's US Government. Other than that, this is why people donate to charities: charities exist to pool money, to turn ten thousand $50 donations into a single $500 000 force that can be better used than if everyone tried to apply their $50 directly at the problem. |