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Stephanie Tam

GOOD READS: 6 Books, Poems, and Essays Inspiring Thoughtful Giving

This holiday season, I would like to recommend 6 reads that inspire thoughtful giving to warm up with on a cold, wintry day. While the needs of others may seem distant from our comfortable curl by the fire, there is no season like the present for hospitality, and we can begin by welcoming the wisdom and words of others into our homes – inviting not only the potential for transforming other lives, but also opening our own to the possibility of being transformed.

Extreme poverty contributes to a host of problems around the world, including limited access to clean drinking water, poor education and literacy rates, and death by preventable diseases. [1] But while these problems may seem overwhelming, evidence suggests that your thoughtful giving – the careful selection of social interventions and programs you support – can actually have a real impact improving the lives of others in the fields of education and health. [2] From a domestic short story about giving between lovers to a novel based on the true story of a Sudanese refugee, these reads challenge us to expand our charity and comfort zones.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘Kindness’: A Poem [3]

First up, we have Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, ‘Kindness’, which invites us to begin the journey of caring for others through opening ourselves up to the possibility of loss: ‘Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things . . . ’

Certainly, there is a sense in which the very ability to give is a profound privilege – it may be ‘better to give than to receive’ – but the reality remains that behind every gift is a loss, and such a loss can be difficult to appreciate as privilege without its lived experience. Nye’s words highlight the wisdom that our own giving is enriched by a personal knowledge of the world in all its beauty and poverty, to walk in the footsteps of strangers and discover ‘how desolate the landscape can be / between the regions of kindness.’

O’Henry’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’: A Short Story [4]

‘Charity begins at home’, goes the clichéd proverb, and so we come next to a short story about domestic love in O’Henry’s short story ‘The Gift of the Magi’. A Christmas classic, the narrative begins with Della’s dilemma of what to buy her beloved husband for Christmas with a meagre $1.87. The story is a sweet if somewhat sentimental read, following the couple’s attempt to sacrifice their own prized possessions to buy a gift for their beloved.

In a contemporary culture grown cynical about the consumerism of the winter holiday season, this little story casts consequence to the wind, focusing instead on the charitable orientation of the heart that gives – ‘charity at home’ in both the metaphorical and literal sense.

Dave Eggers’s What is the What: Based on a True Story [5]

What is the What is a novel born out of an encounter between author Dave Eggers and Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, one of the 4,000 ‘Lost Boys’ who resettled in the United States after fleeing the violent devastation of their homes in southern Sudan. Eggers fictionalises Achak’s perspective, following Achak’s flight across South Sudan and his struggle for survival in a hostile landscape of wild animals, violent militia attacks, and aerial bombardments. A story of childhood tumultuously displaced civil war, it bears witness to the consequences of a horrific conflict later labelled genocide in 2002. [6]

The book demands the reader’s attention – ‘Do you have any idea? . . . Can you imagine?’ – even as it artfully commands it through masterful prose. The book is also a gift that gives: all of its proceeds go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which provides educational opportunities for those affected by the conflicts in Sudan. [7]

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky: Nonfiction/Journalism [8]

Expanding to the global, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky travels across ten different countries – Cambodia, Kenya, India, Sierra Leone, Somaliland, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Liberia and the United States – to tell the stories of extraordinary women and girls resisting oppression. This Pulitzer prize-winning team presents a simultaneously inspiring and heartrending case for considering gender inequality as the central moral challenge of the twenty-first century.

Investigating worldwide problems of sex trafficking, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality, Half the Sky provides compelling evidence for the urgency of the situation – interweaving statistics and stories to give a face to gender inequality. Highlighting the ways in which we can help even from a distance, it follows the work of several NGOs, charities, and other groups working to solve these problems.

Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother: An AIDS Memoir [9]

The question of distant suffering is personalised by Jamaica Kincaid’s AIDS memoir, My Brother. Her writing grapples with the trauma of her youngest brother’s death from the disease, revisiting memories of their childhood and her attempts to care for him. Concerned with the question of how to relate to the suffering of a man who is simultaneously family and stranger – she left home as a teenager, while he was just three years old – her writing negotiates feelings of pity, superiority, and confusion in caring for her brother.

‘I shall never forget him because his life is the one I did not have, the life that, for reasons I hope shall never be too clear to me, I avoided or escaped’, Jamaica Kincaid writes, reflecting that his fate could easily have been hers had she not left her impoverished family and Antigua to become a famous writher in the States through a combination of luck and talent.

The text draws attention to how the suffering of those in ‘developing countries’ is not so distant – how the major differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ may often be matters beyond our own achievement, gifts that we have not earned, but that can nonetheless become opportunities to give back.

David Foster Wallace’s ‘This Is Water’: An Essay [10]

Moving from heart to mind, David Foster Wallace’s essay adaptation of a commencement speech, ‘This Is Water’, encourages readers to cultivate generous modes of thinking. He calls our attention to the ways in which our default perception of the world is through a lens of egocentrism – the default and deep belief that we are the centres of our universe, a reality that we inhabit as unconsciously as fish inhabit water.

Examining a stressful, everyday experience – heavy traffic and long grocery lines – DFW proposes that we have the choice to read these situations through egocentric or altruistic mindsets. We have a choice to read such a situation with ‘the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home . . . like everybody else is just in my way’ or with the generous consideration that ‘the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick . . . in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am – it is actually I who am in his way.’

Though cultivating such generosity is by no means easy, the result may be a gift to ourselves as well as others. When we choose to think charitably, such tedious situations become transformed: we experience ‘a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.’

The fact remains that sympathy for literary characters does not necessarily translate to concern for real people, even as the practice of reading engages the imaginative exercise of empathy. But as David Foster Wallace suggests, the content of what we choose to read shapes the way we think and perceive the world, just as the way we choose to give shapes our impact on it. For at the end of the day, the thoughtful giver is one who is not only able to ‘read’ the world and recognise its problems, but who is also able to ‘read’ herself into its narrative – and recognise the subtle ways in which she may potentially contribute to it.

The World Bank’s 2014 report on World Development Indicators

The Guardian: a lost boy who found his voice

The Guardian: David Foster Wallace's commencement speech

David Kell

The effective altruists of the Nobel Peace Prizes

The list of Nobel Peace Prize laureates is a rather extraordinary collection of famous (and infamous) figures whose impact on humanity is undeniable. But many of these people underwent extreme hardship to help others, and it's daunting to think that we could ever emulate them.

However, there are some interventions into global poverty which have, comparatively, quite a low effort to impact ratio (or at least, involve little personal sacrifice). To show this, I have selected a small group of the prize winners who show that all of us, without radically changing our lives, identify such opportunities to help and so change the world for the better.

These are, if you like, the effective altruists of the Nobel Peace Prizes.

Fridtjof Nansen might be world famous on the basis of 

, but he's included here for his work with the League of Nations after World War One. Norway maintained neutrality throughout the war, and it's interesting to see how Nansen advocated and achieved Norway's inclusion in the League in 1920, and then to follow his further tireless efforts in the repatriation of post-war refugees and prevention of famine throughout Europe. That included returning 400,000 prisoners to 30 different countries in the immediate aftermath, the successful swap and financial compensation of half a million Greeks and Turks in the aftermath of the Greco-Turk wars, and the eponymous 

 which allowed the movement of stateless persons. It was work that the League's Assembly said "would contain tales of heroic endeavour worthy of those in the accounts of the crossing of Greenland and the great Arctic voyage." (ref: Nansen, E. E. Reynolds p. 222-223)Nansen reminds us that we can make a huge difference in situations of extreme poverty that nominally have no relation to us, a idea that Giving What We Can firmly believes in.

One of the basic findings of Giving What We Can has been that the most effective interventions - at least, if we care about giving people more years to live of genuine quality life - involve guaranteeing the basic health of those in extreme poverty. And at least in the UK, no figure has had such an effect on our basic level of nutrition than Lord Boyd-Orr. His research into nutrition found that more than a third of the population of the UK were unable to afford the required amount and variety of food in order to maintain basic health. His research was used to develop the wartime food policy of 1939-45 which, despite rationing, meant that the women and children of poorer classes were 

healthier at the end of the war than they had been at the beginning

the first Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation

Jody Williams (2010) (+ International Campaign to Ban Landmines)

It is estimated that 15,000-20,000 people die every year from landmines, and that approximately 80% of these casualities are children (ref: Walsh & Walsh). Many of the 

countries with high unexploded landmine count

 are often also regions of extreme poverty. As chief strategist of the International Campaign to Bad Landmines, 

 led to the Ottawa Treaty, an international treaty which bans the use of landmines and which has been ratified by most of the world's countries (though notably not Russia, China or the USA). You can see her speak about this, and more broadly about her vision for world peace, 

Walsh, Nicolas E., and Wendy S. Walsh. "Rehabilitation of landmine victims: the ultimate challenge." Bulletin of the World Health Organization 81.9 (2003): 665-670.

From a reasonably affluent American background, Borlaug's major scientific achievement was the development of a strain of wheat which was high yield and disease resistant; and his primary humanitarian achievement was the introduction of the crop in Pakistan and India, which were in the mid 1960s falling into famine. Against the background of the Indo-Pakistani war, Borlaug's work counteracted the imminent starvation and brought about the self-sufficiency in wheat production of Pakistan (1968) and India (1974). This has been called 

 and Borlaug has consequently been credited as 

By some metrics - his suffering, the effort the invested, the sacrifices he made - Borlaug ranks pretty averagely with other Nobel Peace Prize winners. But what Giving What We Can seeks to emphasise is that there is no law-like relationship between these metrics and the good you can do. So its worth taking the time to work out what your aim is, and then to carefully assess possible causes to see which best fulfils what you’re interested in. And if what you’re interested in is giving people more years of decent quality life, then I don’t think there is a Nobel Peace Laureate that stands out like Norman Borlaug.

In making the above short list, I set myself two fairly restrictive criteria, so as to keep with the concerns of Giving What We Can: one, that the intervention be clearly beneficial in alleviating the suffering of those in extreme poverty; and two, that the intervention did not require great personal sacrifice (my constraint that it was something we could reasonably aspire to).

Relax the first, and there are a host of distinguished politicians and activists who have campaigned throughout history to resolve specific conflicts, to de-arm nuclear weapons and promote the unity of the world through organisations such as the UN. It's very difficult to assess the effectiveness of these sorts of endeaviours (though the failure of the League of Nations to prevent World War 2 makes it difficult to view Nobel Prizes awarded in relation to the Kellog-Briand Pact as good candidates, say), and researching the effectiveness of charities that advocate political change remains 

an active area of research at Giving What We Can

Relax the other, and one thinks of Médecins Sans Frontières, who today fight to guarantee the basic health of Ebola sufferers in Guinea, Sierra-Leone and Liberia, or Malala Yousafzai's campaign for female education in Northwest Pakistan; or the work that the International Committee of the Red Cross or Amnesty International have done to guarantee human rights worldwide.

What I hope to have shown, is that it is possible, often at surprisingly little expense to your own happiness, to make a pretty clear difference in the world. And I hope the insights above - a cost effective nutritious diet, a passport for stateless people, a ban on land-mines, and a high-yield, disease-resistant wheat - offer some fleeting inspiration as to how we might do that.

Allan Saldanha

Quadruple your donation to AMF- in praise of donation matching

 that allows you to have your donation to AMF quadrupled this Christmas. This is a great opportunity to increase the impact of your donation! Read on to learn more about Allan's motivation for matching donations.

I have also always been keen on match fundraising. Not only does it increase the amount of money raised, it also involves collaborating with other people and psychologically makes people feel better about the money they donate. I always look for donation matching appeals at christmas time (when they tend to occur) to increase the impact of my donation.

There are critics of donation matching who argue that it can distract donors and lead to a misallocation of donations, and that donors should focus on donating to the most effective charities. Research by Givewell and other charity evaluators clearly shows that some charities are many times more effective than others, and clearly this can dwarf the impact of matching.

However I think it's possible to have the best of both worlds, and since I joined Giving What We Can, I'm keen to maximise the impact of my donations by looking for matching opportunities for the most effective charities.

 has kindly offered to match all donations to the 

 up to 31st December 2014, so I've set up the below fundraising page offering to match all donations up to a total of £5,000. After Charity Science's matching, this then means that donations to the page will be quadrupled (to raise a total of up to £20,000).

Many thanks for your generosity- please donate before the 31st December 2014 deadline.

Alison Woodman

Making the most of seasonal giving

It’s that time of the year again where we’re frantically buying presents for loved ones, decorating our homes and planning Christmas dinner. Despite the hectic nature of it all this is a great time to think more about giving, and to encourage others to do so too.

 took place on 2nd December and promoted just this; it asked people to donate to charities and to make their donations public, motivating more people to join in. The idea was launched in the US in 2012, and this is the first year it has been promoted in the UK as well. It was a cleverly timed antidote to the shopping frenzies of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and the event’s promoters, 

, reported a 43% increase in donations compared with any other Tuesday this year.

It’s fantastic that campaigns like this have an immediate high impact by increasing interest in charitable giving. However, such seasonal awareness-raising also bring new opportunities to encourage one another to think more deeply about charity. In fact, in the past few weeks students in Cambridge have been doing just this. A campaign, initiated by medical student Ravi Patel, is inviting people this Christmas and New Year to take Giving What We Can’s 

 to give 10% of their income to effective charities. So far it’s raised incredible support and this December Giving What We Can has already received more new pledgers than in any previous month. Besides 

, here are a few ideas for anyone who would like to really make a difference this giving season:

Keeping a lookout for offers of donation matching is a brilliant way to make your donations multiply in impact. This usually involves an individual or organisation offering to 'match' the amount donated to their cause. For example, for every £1 donated, they will add £1 of their own money. Excitingly, this December a member of Giving What We Can has offered to match donations up to a total of £5000 when made through his 

 for the Against Malaria Foundation, one of our top charities. In addition, Charity Science will double the amount raised, resulting in the original donations being quadrupled! For anyone considering where to give this December, this is an option well worth checking out.

Years of dedicated research have led up to Giving What We Can’s recommendations of its 

. These are all organisations which we believe will use your donation in the most effective way. If you find the evidence compelling, you could make a donation to one of these as a gift to a loved one, or ask your friends and family to donate on your behalf. One of the charities, the 

 for buying mosquito nets which allows the gift recipient to track where their nets go.

If you are already interested in, or perhaps already involved with, effective altruism, why not communicate this to others around you? We already list our pledgers’ names on our site to encourage openness and enthusiasm about giving. In addition, Christmas offers many of us valuable time to catch up with our friends and family, and can be a good chance to discuss the things which matter most to us. It can sometimes be difficult to persuade people to give more, and to more effective organisations. One of our 

 offers useful advice on ways to discuss ideas which encourage others to be more receptive to them.

 is an excellent option for people who want to increase their charitable impact but don’t feel ready to commit to the Giving What We Can pledge. You can choose what percentage of income you aim to give and how long you wish to donate for. After your initial donation period ends, you can then decide what to do next. If it worked for you, you can extend the period, increase the percentage you give, or take the pledge. This is a brilliant way to ensure that your charitable giving continues into the New Year.

These are just a few thoughts about ways we can all make the most of seasonal giving and maximise our impact on the lives of others as we move into 2015. Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from everyone at Giving What We Can!

Owain Johnstone

The use and interpretation of evidence

 I discussed how social problems aren't just lying around in the world waiting for us to discover them – we construct them ourselves by deciding what counts as problematic and in what ways.

In the next few posts I'm going to focus on different aspects of how problems are constructed, with each post looking at one of those aspects.

Evidence is something we all intuitively think of as central to defining any problem. We rely on evidence to tell us about the nature of the problem, its causes and consequences, and what solutions might be effective in addressing it.

Often, when we think we don't know enough about a particular problem, we will decide that we need more evidence before we can really tackle it effectively. And when we want to persuade other people that a problem is important we turn to evidence in order to make our case.

Those ideas about evidence tend to assume that we define and address problems based on the evidence that we find. In fact, the process can often work the other way round. 

The problems we decide need addressing and the ways in which we define them can dictate what evidence we collect and how we interpret any evidence that already exists.

A good example of a problem where this occurs is the heated topic of immigration in the UK. And a good example of evidence-gathering in this area is a recent piece of research by two academics at UCL that analysed the fiscal contribution made to the UK economy by migrants over the past 15 to 20 years.

Their report made for some attention-grabbing headlines, which split broadly into two camps.

The Guardian and the Financial Times enthusiastically proclaimed that EU migrants arriving in the UK between 2001 and 2011 had contributed a net £20 billion to the UK economy. [1][2] The Telegraph and the Daily Mail trumpeted the shocking finding that non-EU migrants had cost the UK a net £120 billion in the period 1995-2011. [3][4]

Both of those figures were from the same report. The choice of which figure to run with in the headline (and what kind of emphasis to apply within the article) is broadly down to the political leanings of each newspaper. That is, they chose from the evidence available the figure that would fit best with their existing view of the problem. (Although that's obviously a simplification – the Independent referenced both figures in its headline). [5]

This is an obvious point, but an important one. Clearly 

we do not rely entirely on evidence for our problem constructions if we decide which bits to believe or emphasise based on our existing ideas

Equally, the evidence itself is not innocent – it can, as in this report, be 

legitimately open to very different interpretations

. Evidence in the social and political world is usually quite messy, consisting of partial or ambiguous findings that may not always fit neatly with the problem definitions we want to employ.

This means that we argue a lot about the significance, relevance and reliability of different pieces of evidence.

There are several ways in which we can argue about evidence; I've picked out a few here from the media coverage of the report by way of illustration.

, i.e. whether the facts and figures involved are really correct or not. The Telegraph and the Daily Mail both cited comments by the Director of MigrationWatch (a generally anti-immigration think tank) disputing some of the figures in the report.

challenge the authority of the source of the evidence

 – in this case the two UCL academics. The Telegraph noted that both MigrationWatch and Civitas had previously criticised research by the two authors. The Express noted an immigration-related prediction made in 2003 by one of the authors that subsequently turned out to be incorrect. [6]

challenge how others are using or interpreting the evidence

. The Telegraph said the the authors themselves 'emphasised their findings on the contribution of European migrants and gave less prominence to the findings on the costs of non-EEA immigration.' The Daily Mail said that the report 'sought to put an overwhelmingly positive gloss on the economic impact of mass immigration.'

 – especially numerical evidence – by recasting it in a different light, suggesting that it does not in fact show what others might think it does. Andrew Green of MigrationWatch (cited by the Telegraph) did this quite skilfully by suggesting that the total amount contributed by EU migrants to the UK economy (the £20 billion figure) actually worked out at less than £1 per person per week over the period examined in the report.

 found in the evidence. The Daily Mail argued that 'Critics will say the report is backward looking – focusing on the taxes paid by the influx of Eastern Europeans when they are young, single and healthy – but not the future burden their families may place on schools, hospitals and the welfare state.' Channel 4 noted that the report hadn't taken into account illegal immigration. [7]

I've concentrated mostly on the right-wing press here because in this instance the report itself did emphasise the £20 billion figure – so critique of the report came largely from the right whereas the left-wing outlets were mostly just endorsing it. The techniques of evidence interpretation and framing are easier to spot and illustrate in criticism than they are in approval.

That's not to say that the right-leaning press were somehow distorting the information that their left-leaning counterparts were faithfully presenting. The latter had their frames and interpretations too. The Guardian, for example, argued that the report 'reveals that Britain is uniquely successful, even more than Germany, in attracting the most highly skilled and highly educated migrants in Europe.' That, again, is a very partial interpretation of the evidence.

Unfortunately, much of this sort of debate is dismissed as 'spin'. We can tend to dismiss such comments as exactly what we'd expect of media outlets with particular political preferences. Actually, 

all of the techniques I've outlined above can be legitimate if used properly

 – although in practice they may often not be (for example, personal criticism of one of the report authors which clearly has no bearing on the quality or otherwise of the report's findings).

There are a couple of important points to take from all this.

evidence is, to an extent, what we make of it

The rider 'to an extent' is key, of course. I do not mean to suggest that all evidence is relative and all that matters is our interpretation. What I am arguing is that, 

when we come across evidence relating to a particular social problem, we tend to want to fit it into our existing preconceptions about that problem

. In order to do so we might find ourselves employing one or more of the methods outlined above.

we should be keenly aware of the ways in which evidence is debated and interpreted

Such interpretation can be dangerous if it leads to a basic misrepresentation of the evidence. It can also be dangerous if, more subtly, it leads us to cherry pick just those bits of evidence that happen to conform to our existing views. All that produces is unchanging opinions which struggle to respond to a changing world.

But looking at how others interpret evidence can also be very informative. A closer look at the interpretations they offer reveals a great deal about the preconceptions they have regarding the problem under discussion.

Finally, it is worth emphasising that, despite these issues, defining and addressing problems based on evidence is clearly better than just making things up as we go along. But evidence isn't the be all and end all, either. A better awareness of its uses and abuses, and of our own biases, can help us become more aware (and perhaps critical) of implicit problem constructions as well as put forward our own.

This has important implications for choosing which charities to support. As I discussed in my last post, choosing which charity to support implies choosing which problem to address. Evidence plays an important part in how we choose which problems to address and what to do in order to address them.

To the extent that such evidence is ambiguous and uncertain we need to be keenly aware of its role in informing our decisions.

More profoundly, it is worth asking ourselves whether our existing preconceptions about particular problems are influencing the evidence we collect and our approach to interpreting it. 

Blog

GOOD READS: 6 Books, Poems, and Essays Inspiring Thoughtful Giving

The effective altruists of the Nobel Peace Prizes

Quadruple your donation to AMF- in praise of donation matching

Making the most of seasonal giving

The use and interpretation of evidence

Some questions on the cognitive benefits of deworming

“Without this kind of work, we could make fantastically wrong predictions”: An Interview with Eva Vivalt

Our recommended charities for the year

80,000 Hours is seeking a Head of Research

Christianity and Giving