Earlier in the essay series on career [here][career-1], we discussed about financial contingency, physical health and other things we might be interested in considering, for a long life of giving what we can. In the [next post][career-2] we go into details of what a good job should have. Essentially we would like a job that gives us flow (we work on something that we are good at), good money or impact, and moderate stress levels on short-term. It was attempted to also debunk the myths or the fear behind having any stress at all. Moving on through the blessing of [80k-hrs][80k-uur], we continue through their series.

Impact is king

All decisions are to be made based on Impact that can be expected. Impact is king. Number of lives saved will be the variable we use to judge impact roughly speaking. ‘All lives are equal’, allows us to count all lives with the same value. Whether the person is known, close to us or otherwise, it still pains us if they are hurt. This has been discussed extensively in the earlier essays. When we have the opportunity to save 100 lives in 100 years and 10 lives now, we should go for the one that saves ~10 lives~ 100 lives. This is because we care about only one thing in this world and it is called ‘impact’.

We don’t want to be just another doctor in the developed world whose effective impact in his career is saving 5 lives. This is nothing compared to what we can do as people in the 3 percentile income of the world. We can save easily 40 lives in the span of 40 years.

Can one person make a difference

One person can make a huge difference. Of course as seen above, with the number of lives we can save. If you look at Giving-what-we-can, it gives another estimate of what money is worth. 10% of my current after-tax-income, can add 36 years of healthy life to this world. All this just from one year.

So, yes he can. Man can make a difference as one person even. A popular movement is the 10% donation movement, where in an individual pledges (and of course he is expected to follow through) donates 10% of his income. It is also a known fact that more income doesn’t necessarily translate to more happiness. Granted it gives you more buying power.

Money in the developing states can improve lives of people much more dramatically than lives of people in developed countries. Of course it hurts to neglect someone from your home country. But we know that home is just a word, boundaries are just man-made. If all lives our equal then it doens’t matter which man-made nationality dies in front of us, we will still try to save him. We can’t leave it to shear availability to take care of a life. As said before we would like to save as many lives as possible and contributing to the developing world will save more people, will create more impact. Period?

The poor served by GiveDirectly in Kenya have an average individual consumption of about $500 per year. This figure is based on how much $500 could buy in the US, meaning it takes account of the fact that money goes further in poor countries. The average US college graduate roughly has an annual, individual, working income of about $77,000 in 2017, or $54,000 post-tax.3 This means a dollar will do about 108 times more good if you give it to a Kenyan rather than spending it on yourself.

Just 500$ a year, takes care of yearly expenses of a person in the developing world. In the off chance that one might think that we might be making people lazy, it might be a good idea to look into the outcomes of what Give Directly achieves. The things they want to spend money on is not booze, or women or a TV (not saying anything is wrong in getting them), but these…

“I would like to use part of the money to build a new house since my house is in a very bad condition. Secondly, I would wish to pay fees for my son to go to a technical institute…. My proudest achievement is that I have managed to educate my son in secondary school. My biggest hardship in life is [that I] lack a proper source of income. My current goals are to build and own a pit latrine and dig a borehole since getting water is a very big problem.”

I, with a 10% donation can easily take care of the cost of living of 8 people in the under-developed world. Even if you don’t really save lives, improving the standard of living of these people, reducing their chance for diseases, and giving them a good chance to survive is worthwhile nevertheless.

Help others be more effective

My friend, an STM, spent a decent amount of time before I am finally got on board. He roughly probably doubled his impact. Yay!

Getting people on board is hard. People don’t really respond to logic. I spent days and days writing about this and I took a 2 year sabbatical from this before I could get anywhere. It takes lot of effort to understand this for me, but not everyone is the same. And even if someone completely understood the logic and actually got so far as to write about it and understand it, what are the chances he will be a 10%’er? or in other words, people actually listening to their true value system is rare as compared to the population. Apparently even though there might have been millions of people (according to traffic estimating websites) who have been to the site, the very looks of the donation page of MIRI, says enough regarding the reading turning into action.

Anyways, for now I don’t want to ruin my chances of speaking with my rich ass friends about donating. I don’t want to half baked start pitching to them what they should do with their money. In the future, this would be a great way to double, triple or quadruple my impact on the world, by making others contribute as much as I. Before I ever make suggestion to people or pitch these ideas to someone else, I would really like to take time and prepare and also lead by example. This is a risky territory as one could permanently loose his chance of starting this conversation with his friends again.

Other methods to involve people could be to use birthday fundraisers. One could do so by the following.

http://www.charityscience.com/birthday-fundraisers.html

I would like to try it on my cousins, colleagues and friends.

Summary

So in summary, give, give well and give effectively. :)

There’s no reason to be embarrassed by this fact, but it does emphasize how important it is to consider how you can use your good fortune to help others. In a more equal and intuitive world, we could just focus on helping those around us, and making our own lives go well. But it turns out we have an enormous opportunity to help other people with little cost to ourselves – and it would be a terrible shame to squander it

You know you can get a different education, or move to a job that pays more or grow the necessary skills to earn more? This means more people eating food for more meals in their lives? YAY?