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Juan Magasich

Giving What We Can member Juan Magasich explores why he decides to donate each and every month.

My end of month: Reflections on donating

It is the end of the month, so for me, it is the time to go over my income and expenses (a possibly futile way of telling myself that I have control over these kinds of things). I look over my major monthly expenses quickly, so it isn't too painful to contemplate, and, of course, I check out my salary. Then, I review other payments, like monthly lessons, loan fees, and, for almost two years now, my monthly pledged contribution to effective charities. I am generally a cautious guy, so every time I make the payment, I find myself asking the question: why?

Reaching adulthood is a difficult transition. It means worrying about what you eat, drinking those eight daily glasses of water, and so many other things that weren't concerns when you were younger. Also, money becomes an actual issue. Once you are making your own money, there seem to be two directions you can take. The first one is to spend, to "live the good life"- go out to nice restaurants, indulge your hobbies, and so on. On the other hand, you can also save money, hopefully in a smart way. The question behind these two aspects, really, is how can I use my money well?

For spending, the answer was quite clear for me: I will spend what I actually can, and on what I actually want to. Truth be told, for me there are not too many things I actually want to buy. It always comes down to the question "is it really worth it?", and the answer, quite often, is "no, it is not."

What about saving? When I first ventured into the jungle of adulthood, and still sometimes today, there were well-meaning, if slightly irritating, friends and family members who would remind me of the importance of putting my money to work. In my bank account, my cash was comfortably sleeping, not bothering anyone, working as a backup cushion but it was not being "useful." They urged me to take a more active approach to managing my money, citing term deposits, mutual funds, and the like. But for me, to be frank, the idea of making money to make more money for money's sake didn't really appeal either. I delayed researching investment options. After all, what I made was already enough for me, and I was managing to save a healthy amount each month.

A few years ago there was an author who really caught my attention, so I looked him up on the TED website (I am a nerd who likes spending time on sites like Quora, Ted, and other blogs). It was 

a short speech about something called "effective altruism"

Peter Singer: The why and how of effective altruism

Singer opened his talk by citing a UNICEF statistic that 69,000,000 children die every year due to preventable diseases. He then asked the audience directly: the moral question here is can we do anything about it? And he answered that question with an emphatic yes, as long as we reflect on how to do it effectively. This comment caught my attention, for I always associated altruism, first, with purely good intentions, and second, with some sort of a general occupation or full-time profession that was distant from my job as a litigant lawyer. But Singer argued that it is not just an issue of pure will and good intentions, nor a full-time job. He said there also has to be some thought about the how.

With these ideas in mind, I realized there were new possible answers to the questions I asked as I became an adult. In a first approximation, it had seemed that what I did with my money was an individualistic question - the question about "how can I use my money well?" appeared to be "how can my money be the most useful to me?" As I became aware of 

, though, the question became both simpler and more complicated: "how can my money be the most useful?"

"How can my money be the most useful" is a profound question. So let's say that I have $100 to spare monthly. I could spend it on a fine jacket that I really like, or on a new lens for my camera. I could take my girlfriend out for a (really!) nice dinner, or invite my brothers and parents for a meal. Any of these options would be nice, for me. But wouldn't that same money be better-spent on a vaccine for a child that cannot afford it, preventing a fatal infection? We can change the examples, but the question remains: how can my money be the most useful?

I started by describing my end-of-month routine (though it is usually more chaotic than the way I present it here!), and the thoughts that come along with it. Even though, every month, I continue to ask myself the same questions about how to spend my money, I continue to donate a portion of my salary. I want to acknowledge, though, that I keep asking myself about why I give, and that it is a difficult question to answer, much more difficult than the paragraphs above suggest. I want to acknowledge, too, that the framework I described depends on whether a person can afford these kinds of choices. Not everyone has the luxury I have to make the choice to give. It all starts from the point of individual abundance; otherwise, it is just not possible.

There are other questions that trouble me, too:

Why is it that individuals have to do this task of redistribution, and not our modern state?

Am I closing the door to an actual and more systematic redistribution of wealth?

Isn't the decision of "just" giving away money an easy way to clear my conscience?

What about the more human aspect, the attachment that every human relationship needs?

Does my contribution imply that other measures are not useful?

Where is the limit of the individual contribution?

Does this mean I cannot spend on things I like, but that are not really necessary?

These and other questions wash over me from time to time. I think this is only natural, for behind effective altruism there is a dense philosophical tradition related to 

, its offshoots, and its critiques. The good thing is that, if you are reading this, you are not the only one concerned with these issues. There is a global community of people with the same general concerns, who have probably asked themselves many of the same questions (and who might have come to different answers). We can connect with each other through groups like 

, pose these questions, and work through them together.

So, it is the end of the month. Here I am again, attempting to keep my finances under control, reflecting on why I spend the way I do, and on why I give. It is interesting for me to look back on the winding path that has led me here. I hope it may be interesting, and perhaps even inspiring for you, too.

Luke Freeman

2020 has been quite a year. It would be hard to find a single person who's remained unaffected by the turmoil of the pandemic. Our hearts go out to everyone impacted, and we deeply appreciate the support and commitment of this community. Your enthusiasm for making the world a better place is wonderful, touching, and inspiring.

December 2020 Newsletter

On a positive note, this year we've seen an incredible amount of generosity (our most pledges ever) and seen many good things happening in the world amongst it all (check out the 

As giving season comes to an end and the new year approaches, now is a great time to review the updated giving recommendations and 

For many donors we recommend using a charity regranting fund that allows donors to pool their money together to find outstanding giving opportunities. See our 

As we have conversations with friends and family around giving gifts, and new plans for the new year, it's also a fantastic time to talk about making a commitment to use your income to help others. Check out our 

 page for some tips on talking about effective giving.

Now is also a great time to reflect on your giving for 2020 and 

A lot has been happening over at Giving What We Can, here are the 

Our co-founder Toby Ord was featured in a Vox article all about Giving What We Can: 

This man has donated at least 10% of his salary to charity for 11 years running

We've been featured in a number of podcasts including 

We recently launched a publication about 

How to do the most good with your stimulus check if you don't need it

The behavioural science of donating to charity

: Why we sometimes fail to do the most good we can, and what can be done about it

Social change happens one person at a time, so start multiplying your impact!

: "If spending... can improve my life only marginally, and someone else's life considerably... then it makes more sense to spend it on someone else. I couldn't live with myself if I did nothing."

: "As long as there's that huge inequality, then I am motivated to keep donating a part of my income."

 in January, including two online Meetups (Jan 9/10) and an Open Forum (Jan 21).

Keep reading below for news & updates from evaluators, grantmakers, incubators, our community, and various cause areas!

. They also released the results of their survey to 

find the most promising avenues for new EA meta-charities

 have recent payout reports available for 

held an 'Ask Us Anything' on the EA Forum

the implications of Biden's victory on climate change donation recommendations

updates from 28 effective altruism organisations

 -- all the way from 80,000 Hours to Wild Animal Initiative!

 is a new network for people working in healthcare and interested in effective altruism.

In Sweden the new site geeffektivt.se launched to promote effective giving to a Swedish audience. With zero transaction costs you can support global health, climate and animal welfare charities.

The talks from Effective Giving Day are 

 (Women and Non-Binary Altruism Mentorship) is now accepting Expressions of Interest for mentees.

This Vox article by Dylan Matthews provides some 

effective giving recommendations for 2020

Giving money away makes us happy. Then why do so few of us do it?

: A short history of Giving Tuesday, the international day for giving back.

: The case for giving sooner rather than later

Is the pandemic making people more generous --- or more selfish?

 The data on how people are giving in 2020 may surprise you.

first country to approve a cell-based meat product

 has launched with a mission to develop a collaborative and effective animal advocacy movement in Africa.

How affluent people can end their mindless overconsumption

. Every energy reduction we can make is a gift to future humans, and all life on Earth.

, a new initiative incubated at IDinsight that aims to guide donations towards evidence backed climate change projects.

 has been launched and is open to donations from individuals via 

, allowing individuals to donate to the highest impact options in the climate space 

Vox author Kelsey Piper writes about reading The Life You Can Save during the pandemic: "

The world's problems overwhelmed me. This book empowered me

HLI have released a systematic review and meta-analysis on 

the impact of cash transfers on subjective well-being and mental health in low- and middle-income countries

how pandemics allow us to understand why our ancestors lived in poverty.

2021 is shaping up to be "the worst humanitarian crisis year since the beginning of the United Nations" 

says World Food Programme (WFP) chief David Beasley

Good News: There has been a large decline in the number of people with lymphatic filariasis, a neglected tropical disease: 

from ~200 million people in 2000 to ~50 million people in 2018

Good News: Cambodia is closer to eradicating Malaria with a 

70% reduction in cases this year compared to last year

"Patient vs urgent longtermism" has little direct bearing on "giving now vs later"

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk released a report on 

promoting epistemic security in a technologically-advanced world

Toby Ord was published in The Economist: 

The pandemic showed up humanity's vulnerability. It also showed the need to prepare for future risks.

what philosophers do (and don't) mean by 'well-being'

A great way to multiply your impact is to simply tell people about effective giving. Here are just a few ways you can help advocate for effective giving:

 (or pin, cap etc) that advocates for effective giving

recommended videos, books, podcasts, and essays

 on our blog or externally (e.g. your own blog, a local newspaper, student magazine, professional journal, company newsletter etc).

Report your donations with your pledge dashboard

 with Giving What We Can and effective altruism

Do you have questions about the pledge, Giving What We Can, or effective altruism in general? Check out our 

This is the online edition of our December 2020 email newsletter (

If you are considering donating your stimulus money to charity, here are 3 ways to do the most good with your charitable donations to help you figure out where to donate your stimulus check.

What charity should you donate your stimulus check to?

The United States government has finally passed a $900 billion Covid-19 stimulus, including a one-time $600 payment to individual Americans.

For many people, this will be an essential part of helping them meed ends. The pandemic has 

furthered the inequality already present in America

extreme poverty across the globe is set to rise this year for the first time in more than two decades

You might be one of the fortunate people who has been able 

 (e.g. due to less commuting, eating out, travelling etc) and therefore you might be considering donating your stimulus money to charity.

If so, we applaud you! And here are 3 ways to do the most good with your donation.

Funds strike a good balance between being very easy for donors and highly effective. They help donors to pool their money together so that they can find outstanding giving opportunities that are evaluated by expert grantmakers and charity evaluators.

Using a charity regranting fund is similar to using an investment fund instead of trying to pick which individual stocks will be the best investments.

2. Follow the advice of charity evaluators

Another easy way of donating to highly effective charities is to follow the advice of charity evaluators who prioritise effectiveness in their charity reviews. We recommend checking out the following evaluators:

You can donate to many of the charities they recommend in one place using 

3. Donate to individual effective charities

It can be valuable to do your own research to find excellent giving opportunities. If you’re going to do your own research, decide how much research to do based on (a) how much you’re giving; and (b) how much you might give in the future. If you’re giving a lot now, or in the future it can be worth the time invested.

If you’re donating to individual charities we also recommend discussing your options with other people interested in effective giving (such as the Giving What We Can community), looking at the research conducted by charity evaluators, and reading our guide on 

our list of top recommended individual charities and non-profit organisations

We applaud your generosity and commitment to helping others.

For a more detailed guide to donating effectively, check out our 

Julian Hazell

Instead of relying on heuristics to donate, slow down your thinking so you can be scrutinous about where your donations end up. A few hours of research can help you make more informed choices so your generosity can be even more effective at creating good in the world.

The behavioural science of donating to charity: Why we sometimes fail to do the most good we can, and what can be done about it

We overeat even though we would like to be fit and healthy (I'm currently writing this article with a pint of Ben & Jerry's half baked ice cream sitting next to me), we smoke cigarettes even though we know that doing so is bad for our lungs, and we fail to save even though we wish to go on holidays and spoil our grandchildren when we retire.

Sometimes we do irrational things because we are susceptible to cognitive biases, which describe the mental processes that cause us to arrive at outcomes contrary to what standard logic would typically predict. One such bias is 

 --- the reason why losing $100 feels about twice as bad as the equivalent happiness we feel from finding $100. Another is 

, which describes why we tend to leave things as they are even if the default option might not be the right choice (think of leaving the "yes you can send me promotional emails" box checked even though you know that the emails will probably annoy you later on).

Biases are sometimes by-products of heuristics --- ways in which we simplify complicated problems so we can reach satisfactory results quicker than if we spend all day mulling over our options and calculating the probabilities involved.

Here's a semi-ridiculous example of a heuristic: Imagine someone places a yellow plate in front of you with some unrecognizable food on it. How would you figure out if the food is going to taste good? You could feel it with your hands (not recommended), smell it, compare it to images on Google, ask a friend, take a sample of it to chemically analyze, post a picture of it on Reddit, spend hours thinking about similar foods you've eaten --- or you could just employ the 'well my mom used yellow plates when I was a kid and she's a pretty good cook' heuristic to save time. That might work 99% of the time. If you're eating at home, it becomes a no-brainer. When you see a yellow plate of food, it simply isn't worth the mental energy to worry about. Just dig in! But what would happen if I put a bunch of worms on a yellow plate and put it in front of you? You might start chowing down if your brain uses this shortcut, leading to an obviously bad outcome (the effectiveness of this vignette is based on the assumption that you do not like eating worms). See what I'm getting at?

You're now probably wondering why we use heuristics if they can sometimes lead to bad outcomes. The reason is that 

heuristics may indeed have evolutionary origins

 and are sometimes very useful for decision-making. In this sense, they're features, not bugs. Even though these mental shortcuts might've kept us alive hundreds of thousands of years ago when quick decisions were needed to make sure we didn't starve to death or get eaten by larger, hungrier animals, heuristics can lead us astray now that we have access to Uber Eats and grocery stores.

The same logic applies when we make decisions about how much to donate and who should receive it. Thousands of years ago, it was probably okay to look around at our small social circles to decide who is deserving of our altruism. But now that we have the internet, we can send resources to those in need with a few mouse clicks and 23 or so taps of a keyboard. Yet our modern brains, and the heuristics that come with them, are still the same as they were thousands of years ago --- at least physiologically. Because of this, many still choose not to donate at all, or only to charities they're familiar with regardless of how effective those organizations might be. This is a problem that heuristics are ill-equipped to solve.

One heuristic seems to be dangerously common in the world of charitable giving: 

, which describes our tendency to use information that easily comes to mind when making decisions. The availability heuristic is why watching a news segment containing footage of a fiery plane crash might cause you to overrate the odds of getting in a similar plane crash, or why watching Jaws might cause you to similarly overrate the chances you get eaten by a shark the next time you go for a swim.

Charities that we only recently learned about or ones that we frequently hear about on social media might be easier for our brains to recall, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're better to donate to. By definition, charities are tasked with solving difficult problems that sometimes call for unintuitive solutions that only become clear after rigorous testing (if this wasn't the case, we hopefully would've solved these problems by now). Donating solely based on what comes to mind might cause us to exclude charities that we haven't heard of --- ones that can be highly effective at creating good in the world, and ones that are in need of our generosity.

It almost goes without saying that some of the things we can't see with our eyes are incredibly important (you're breathing in one of these things right now, actually). Since I don't own a microscope, I've never seen a SARS-CoV2 particle with my own eyes. Does that mean COVID-19 isn't a threat? I've personally never been to Sub-Saharan Africa. Does that mean there aren't important charities operating there that could use my donations?

To truly do the most good we can with our donations, we need to think beyond the things we see with our eyes by expanding our boundaries of moral concern to those who don't 

, speak like us, or live near us (or those who 

). Home-country bias --- which describes how investors tend to prefer investing in stocks within their home countries even if doing so leads to unbalanced portfolios --- shows how bad outcomes can occur if we focus only on what is familiar or close to us. Why do we sometimes do the same with charity, especially when a dollar goes 

significantly further in low-income countries

It seems foolish that familiarity causes the average US investor to 

park over 70% of their portfolio in US equities

 even though the US accounts for about half of the world's total stocks. The same kind of familiarity-driven thinking can explain why only 

 made by Americans in 2018 went abroad to other countries, which is about 

 the entire country spent on pizza that same year.

Something as important as preventing the suffering of other human beings requires us to make better decisions --- and if we spend twice as much on pizza as we do on helping those in dire situations, we're currently in bad shape. Indeed, heuristics may not be the right answer for charitable decision making.

All is not gloom and doom. Instead of relying on heuristics to donate, slow down your thinking so you can be scrutinous about where your donations end up. Often, the most intuitive answers that quickly come to mind are incorrect. A few hours of research can help you make more informed choices so your generosity can be even more effective at creating good in the world. I encourage you to think deeply about whether there are other charitable organizations out there that might be more effective at helping others than the ones you typically donate to. That way, you can be more confident that the availability heuristic and other pesky biases aren't interfering with your ability to do the most good you can. Beyond this introspection, here are some practical tips for being more effective with your charitable giving:

Blog

My end of month: Reflections on donating

December 2020 Newsletter

What charity should you donate your stimulus check to?

The behavioural science of donating to charity: Why we sometimes fail to do the most good we can, and what can be done about it

How does change happen? The power of social proof in behaviour change & successful movement growth

Member Profile: Alexandra Berlina

Member Profile: Pippa Gilbert

November 2020 Newsletter

How to buy happiness

Member Profile: Michael Aird