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Yuan Yang

How to present statistics to donors (Part III: International Dollars vs Real Dollars)

 program ("Choosing Interventions that are Cost-Effective") presents DALYs saved per international dollar - most commonly the "Geary-Khamis" dollar. In short, an international dollar is an imaginary unit of currency that has the equivalent purchasing power parity of a US Dollar at some specified date. For example, a 2000 Geary-Khamis dollar is a unit of currency that buys you as many goods and services as a US dollar would have bought you in the US in the year 2000.

The WHO uses the Geary-Khamis dollar because it is an international organisation giving information to a range of donors who use different currencies, who are also choosing between investments in different countries with different goods and price levels; a Geary-Khamis dollar compacts all of the variation in nominal currency and in price level into one measure of real currency, i.e. currency that buys a certain amount of goods and services.

Now, there are many problems with the Geary-Khamis dollar from the point of view of economic theory and international justice. Thomas Pogge and Sanjay Reddy argue (in their paper 

) that the use of international purchasing power metrics such as the Geary-Khamis dollar obscures economic reality and leads one to overweight the importance of aiding some countries over others.

From the point of view of writing about cost-effective charity donation, the take-home message is that Geary-Khamis dollars are fairly complex economic fictions that are not easy for donors to understand. Nobody actually uses Geary-Khamis dollars (apart from, well, people who lived in the US in the year 2000). So it is of no motivational or emotive relevance to say to someone: "You could get that for 40 Geary-Khamis dollars!"

For a general audience we should use real dollars (or pounds, or whatever currency your audience understands), and make sure to either date the currency to a particular year, or adjust your statistics for inflation year upon year. If there are significant purchasing power disparities to take into consideration, you should give the headline statistic first and then explain what the purchasing power disparity does to your cost-effectiveness measure; don't just bundle it into the piece of confusing economic terminology that is the Geary-Khamis dollar.

I have argued that we should take responsibility for the rhetoric we generate when making statistical arguments for cost-effectiveness and moral decision-making. My three key recommendations are:

Write an executive summary highlighting the decisions the desired reader should make;

Present cost-effectiveness data in DALYs/dollar not dollars/DALY - the former is a better frame;

Draw linear graphs - they are clear to understand - and highlight a single comparative message; and

Use real economic metrics, such as US dollars, that are used by people in their daily lives.

Joined us at part three? Check out Yuan's posts on 

Brenton Mayer

The Run to Better Days

The Run to Better Days is a fun example of how members of Giving What We Can in Australia - and their friends - are trying to spread the word about effective altruism. Here, organiser Brenton Mayer explains how the run works and asks how effective it's likely to be.

 we ran 1,200 kilometres in a relay format up the coast of Australia. We raised $27,000 and stopped in along the way to speak at schools, Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs and universities, presenting to around 10,000 people in total.

"We tried to frame global poverty as an ethically challenging issue which Australians can and should act upon, and we gave away 600 copies of Professor Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save to interested people.

"This year's run will be even bigger and kicks off today!

"Dan Charles started the Run to Better Days four years ago after reading Singer's book in his final year of school, knowing that he wanted to communicate its message to kids in schools in an exciting way. During the run, each runner covers about 10km each in a relay format. Fresh runners are brought by car every few hours, and in this manner we crawl along at roughly 100km a day. Our big not-so-secret secret of course, is that athletically it's not really that impressive, and the point of the run is all about talking to people about poverty.

"This year we have five speaking teams of two people. While the run is happening, they will drive to schools in the vicinity, and give presentations to students in their final two years of school. After this we speak at society meetings (primarily Rotary and Lions Clubs), with an appropriately adjusted pitch with more space for questions at the end, and give away just a couple of books. In my experience these are invariably pleasant evenings where we're made to feel very welcome by club members, and last year we were pleasantly surprised by just how many groups donated generously towards the run. The team members who aren't speaking drive to the accommodation. From there we organise the the next day, monkey around for a bit like groups of 20ish 20ish year olds do, and vote, upon hearing the embarrassing tales of the day, for who should be forced to wear the 'Donkey of the Day' pants for the next 24 hours."

Is the Run to Better Days effective altruism?

The run has been designed to maximise how many people we can get to think seriously about Singer's arguments on poverty. Our presentation starts off by introducing Singer's drowning child thought experiment, covers the basics of what extreme poverty is, compares extreme poverty with our own growing wealth, and then looks how much our society and our government are doing towards poverty alleviation at the moment. We then challenge our listeners with the question of, given all the above, what should we be doing? To help them answer that, we present some of the wonderfully straightforward calculations that show how much people living in developed countries can do for others, examples of which you can find 

"After the talk we suggest that 'if anything we've said has struck a chord or seemed interesting, then the best thing to do is to read this book; The Life You Can Save.' We offer a free copy of the book, as well as a letter, to all who are interested and want to engage more with the ideas, spreading the message about how and why they can improve the world in the best way.

"Last year was the first year we did the run, so this year we have the opportunity to put into practice everything we learned from the operation in its test run, including follow up and keeping track of how many people remained interested. In the absence of that data, here are a couple of points on the way we've designed the The Run to Better Days that I hope point towards it being quite effective:

By speaking at schools we reliably get large audiences for solid lengths of time, with little effort on our behalf relative to the difficulty in procuring other audiences. The basic idea is that we're young people with a little bit of street cred left, and we can say - "Hey kids, social justice is cool!"

Kids in their final years of school are some of the best people to speak to about poverty because they're old enough to follow what you're saying, whilst being open minded and not automatically sceptical.

The Run has allowed us to speak at a huge range of venues, including classes of 800 medical students, 1200 allied health students, and a Masters of Public Health class.

We don't need a large percentage of people to read The Life You Can Save for giving out books to be effective: if 1% of the people who ask for a copy are affected, that makes 15 new people questioning seriously whether we should do a lot more about poverty.

The run ends up being a common topic of discussion, so as a result we are prompted to explain Singer's idea and often have discussions as a result. If you'd like to get an idea of what's in the talk, get in touch as I can send you a low quality podcasted talk. Additionally, we would be happy to give out a transcript and a copy of our visual aids as well, if you'd like to present something similar.

"So, to summarise my answer to 'is the Run to Better Days Effective Altruism?': We're putting in a solid effort to try and make it as effective as possible, and with proper follow up, we will find out for sure this year."

Rob Wiblin

Interview with GiveWell: giving to learn, research methods, and the added value of AMF

Research Director Robert Wiblin interviewed GiveWell co-founder Elie Hassenfeld on a range of issues suggested by volunteers and members of Giving What We Can. This is the second post, which covers when to donate, how GiveWell's research has changed over time, and exactly what the Against Malaria Foundation are doing that makes them GiveWell's number one charity. An unabridged transcript of the interview is available 

RW: Do you think donors should consider waiting a couple more years in the hope that you or someone else will be able to find a significantly more cost effective option that AMF or your other recommendations?

 on a while back, but I think there's a couple of things to think about. I think that if I had to bet, I'd bet that our recommendations three years from now will be better than our recommendations today. I do think there's a couple of pretty important counter-arguments to that and reasons why I personally give to our current recommendations, rather than just waiting around for our recommendations a few years from now. One is I think that it's helpful to become habituated to giving to charity. I think that there's a non-negligible danger of allowing yourself to hold on to the funds and never quite being ready to pull the trigger. Obviously, there's an easy way to deal with that problem, which is using a mechanism like a donor-advised fund where you actually get the money out the door, but you don't select the organisation to which you're giving.

The other factor that I also think is important is giving to learn. By that I mean giving money and then following up with the organisation to find out what happened. You gave the money as a means for improving your understanding about how the charity world works. And this has been one of best learning mechanisms that we have found at GiveWell. It goes back to our recommendation of VillageReach and all of the work we've done to follow them over the years to understand what went well and what went poorly for that organisation. But the same is true for SCI, AMF, GiveDirectly. Following closely on the ground is the way we learn about effectiveness. If everyone were to decide not to give and to hold out, I think the quality of GiveWell's future research would fall because we wouldn't have that opportunity to direct money and learn from how we directed that money.

RW: Related to that, one of our members sent the question "How many charities do you need to investigate in each field before you get confident that you're getting near the best?" I guess I have a similar question: how your recommendations have changed over the last seven years? Have they been getting better or worse and why, and does that inform your best guess as to whether your recommendations will get better or worse in the future?

EH: Let me answer those in turn. The first question was about the number of charities you investigate in a field before feeling confident that you're getting 'near the best'. I don't really think the set number is the right way to think about it. You want to do enough work in a given area that you start to see patterns in the organisations you're finding and you're not surprised by the results that you find. You're not bumping into new organisations, new approaches, new ideas that are things you haven't investigated at all or can't really know how they would match up to our top charities. For us, in the area of global health and development, over the years we've been in business, we've looked into this area sufficiently that we haven't been surprised for a long time at something that's just popped up on the scene, we generally see the same stories popping up over and over again.

I think we have a good sense of the characteristics of an organisation that would make them promising in our process - that they are largely implementing a program that has strong evidence behind it, and is cost-effective, and that they are willing to be transparent. You do those things, that's great. You don't do that, that's less promising. And we've got to the point where we're not just bumping into organisations that have those characteristics that we haven't heard of before. So that means that at this point, with our global health and development organisations, I'm less optimistic that we're going to find new organisations. I know who the next ten contenders are and we're trying to encourage them to engage us, but we also have a very good sense of the lay of the land.

On the second question - of changes over time - I think that our research has become significantly more intense and in-depth, and I do think the recommendations that are on our site now are better in some aggregate sense than the recommendations we made in the past. We went full time in 2007. In our first full-time period, we received grant applications from organisations and we had very little information. We tried to do these very explicit cost-effectiveness calculations for the organisations that applied, and we recommended Population Services International and Partners in Health based on these very explicit cost-effectiveness calculations. With Partners in Health, there was some of the case that was not explicitly quantifiable. All of these archived reviews are available on our website if people are interested in seeing the 2007 version of GiveWell's research.

Our research back then was limited both by the set of organisations that applied, but also our understanding of what we should be looking for. In 2009, we changed our process, we reached out to new organisations, and that's when we recommended Village Reach and Stop TB Partnership as our top organisations. Both Village Reach and Stop TB Partnership are incredibly outstanding organisations, certainly in terms of the programs that they work on, how transparent they are, the quality of people involved in their activities. But they have weaknesses that they have that our current charities do not have.

In the case of Stop TB, we couldn't get compelling information on room for additional funding. What was really going to happen to Stop TB's programs because of additional funding from GiveWell directed donors? At the time of our review, we thought they were going to provide more basic treatments for TB. Back to that learning idea, we were going to follow that up, and we learned later that the funds were not needed for first-line TB drugs - the basic TB treatment. We wrote in the latest review of Stop TB Partnership that we don't have sufficient understanding of room for more funding to recommend this organisation.

Today, our recommendations are ones where the room for more funding - what impact an additional dollar donated to the organisation has - is a major part of what we're focussed on. In the case of Village Reach, we knew that they were taking a riskier approach to development than we had been hoping for when we started looking for top charities. The thing that they didn't have was that really iron-clad evidence-based case that their programs made any difference. I think they had a lot of evidence that it did, but there are also questions that were not answered by the types of data they were able to present, more post-hoc assessments of what occurred, and using some qualitative assessments of the likely causes of changes driven by their programs. AMF, Givedirectly and SCI are all organisations whose programs are informed by multiple Randomized Controlled Trials. This is a standard of evidence that is significantly higher than the standard we held Village Reach's programs to.

In the very big picture, the way I would describe the change in our recommendations over time is that we've become more sensitive to the issues that are most important to investigate deeply and we've significantly increased the depth of our research. I look at GiveWell today, and I think what we've done for global health charities is outstanding, but I also recognise that there are certain types of activities that we have not looked into solely because we haven't had the time yet to get to them. Activities like funding scientific research, or potentially trying to influence government action. These are things that large-scale philanthropists are very involved in.

It seems to me intuitive that they might be significantly more impactful than organisations that provide direct services, and therefore we must look into that. We might not find anything. But my instinct is we'll find things that at least for some donors are significantly more appealing than the organisations that we recommend today. I think that will largely come by broadening the scope of the research we've done to remove the criterion of significant evidence of effectiveness.

RW: You mentioned earlier that it seems like you can both give now to your best charities and support incredibly valuable research into what works. So what kind of research are the charities you recommend - AMF, SCI and Givedirectly - doing? What's a specific project that they're conducting which excites you and is going to produce useful information for GiveWell and others?

EH: Well, AMF is on the ground giving out bednets and then they're tracking what's happening to malaria rates in communities in which they're working. They're tracking net usage and posting it all on their website. They're also intending - though I don't have the specific details into when and how this will play out - to track any evidence of mosquito resistance to insecticide-treated mosquito nets. Obviously they're tracking malaria rates, so that's helpful.

These are the things that if I had never come into contact with the malaria community before, I would have thought these must be tracked - it's obvious - you track malaria rates, track usage, track insecticide resistance, but this data is not readily available. If you look at the page that we published on insecticide-resistance and malaria nets last year, you'll see that there is very limited information out there about this.

AMF is on the ground doing a few things: first, obviously, the malaria nets save lives, but because they are transparently sharing everything that happens on their program, they are helping us understand the challenges of direct provision of nets, they are also collecting and sharing information that I think will help the malaria community more broadly. In the event that AMF gives out nets and malaria rates don't fall, that will certainly be an instance where one will be able to learn a great deal about the circumstances in which nets may not work. So far, malaria rates have fallen significantly since the nets were distributed.

The same is true for GiveDirectly. They are collecting and sharing information about how people use the funds that they receive. GiveDirectly itself is involved with an RCT on the impact of cash transfers and studying cash transfer mechanisms, for example giving to a subset of a village versus giving to every single person in a village.

Giving What We Can Cambridge

Interview with Peter Singer-Part II

give a talk on effective altruism and Giving What We Can at the Cambridge Union.

 took the opportunity to discuss effective altruism and effective careers with Professor Singer.

In the second part of the interview, published below, Singer answers questions on effective careers.

Applying effective altruism to career choices – the idea behind “effective careers”

GWWC: How would you define an effective career?

 An effective career is one in which you seek to make the biggest possible beneficial impact on the world. That would be the most effective career but not many people will reach this. What you see instead is people striving for the most effective career and changing their career choices in order to have a bigger impact, if not the biggest. Overall this is adding another dimension to what effective altruism is all about.

GWWC: Is there a set of stable criteria that identifies a career as effective or good? Or does it differ from person to person? Because ultimately it is very hard to anticipate what impact these big life choices will have. With all that in mind what advice would you give to university students and young people interested in making these decisions?

 The main advice is to think about your career as something you are going to spend a large amount of time and energy on – 80,000 hours – and therefore not just to fall into one career or the other but to make a conscious choice to end up in a career where you can make a significant difference, and expect to get some satisfaction and well-being from doing so. But that’s very general advice, I can’t give advice to students saying either you should become a doctor to go and help people abroad who need health-care, or you should become a scientist so that you can discover renewable energy that doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, or you should go into finance so that you can earn a lot of money and donate to these organisations. That decision is going to depend on the individual’s talent and character. Each individual has to think for himself or herself “what can I contribute and where can I have the greatest impact” and then commit to doing so.

GWWC: In your own academic career and your career as a public figure, you have spent a lot of time persuading other people to be more compassionate. Looking back on all the things you have worked on and the impact you have made, would you go into an academic career again? What are you thoughts about your own impact?

 I think I’ve been very fortunate to have made the choices that I did, without knowing exactly where it would lead. But certainly, I always had some sense that I wanted to affect opinions on what we ought to do and how we ought to live, that was why I became interested in ethics. I was lucky that when I started doing philosophy it was a period of transition as the rather sterile philosophy of linguistic analysis was giving way against the background of issues such as the Vietnam War, racism and sexism to which philosophy needed to be made relevant. That became a climate in which you could once again do applied ethics. Because it was a fairly new field it was possible for me to do more and to have a bigger influence with articles such as “Famine, Affluence and Morality”.

GWWC: Do you think there is a way in which the idea of effective altruism as an investment banker is just fundamentally at odds with conventional ideas of morality, where it is about what I myself do and not necessarily about consequences for everyone else?

 Well, you’re seen in some circles as an immoral person as a banker. Maybe this is the predominant view among students but I don’t think that’s the general view. And that may also be something where there is a difference between UK and the US, where there is generally a more positive view of capitalism and money, so that Americans see altruism and banking as less of a conflict. But I agree, it will take a real shift and in a way you have to grasp the argument that Will Crouch has put forward: if you don’t become an aid worker, someone almost as good as you will, and will have almost the same impact as you, whereas if you don’t become an investment banker someone else will and will probably do pretty much the same bad – or lets just say morally dubious thing – as you, but they won’t have given a significant portion of their income to charity, which you would have.

GWWC: What do you think are the questions that are still open in this field, in terms of moral responsibility, effective careers, effective giving and tying all these concepts together?

 So I think there are still a lot of open questions regarding what things we ought to be working on. We’ve been talking about effectiveness, and I guess we have some background assumptions that we’re trying to reduce global poverty, but even within that area there are different things that we could do. There are things like getting bed nets out to kids so they don’t get malaria, that’s pretty straightforward. There’s things like trying to change the global economic order, the World Trade Organization or the way in which the US and Europe subsidise their agricultural products which is disadvantageous for developing countries. So there’s that more political route, and there’s things like working with climate change in the long run. So I think those questions are still quite open. And then I think there are reasonable questions that should be raised as to whether global poverty is the issue that we should be focused on. Some people think that existential risk – a risk of something causing the extinction of our species – is an issue we are neglecting the opportunity to reduce the odds of. And even if we reduced them quite slightly, taking into account the long future of the species and all that might be achieved and realised if we survive for the next couple of centuries some people think that’s a more important issue to work on than global poverty. And some people, and indeed I, think, that animal suffering is a very important and relatively easily preventable form of suffering. So you can debate whether if you are interested in reducing suffering with a limited amount of resources those could be used more effectively in eliminating global poverty or trying to persuade more people to be vegetarian or vegan so that there’s less animal suffering, and fewer greenhouse gas emission. So there are a number of different strategies within each cause and there are a number of different causes – this is a debate that needs to be pursued.

GWWC: To wrap up – what are your next steps?

 Currently I am working on transforming a series of lectures on effective altruism I gave at Yale into a book-length manuscript. Also I am working with 

, which is an organization in some respects parallel with Giving What We Can - we work closely together. The aim is to spread the idea that to live an ethical life you should give a significant portion of your income to alleviating poverty.

You can read more about effective careers-and whether it's better to be a banker or an aid worker-on 

This is a slightly compressed and edited version of the original interview.

Thanks to Sophie Hermanns, Luke Ilott, and others for leading the interview and Markus Anderljung for transcribing the interview!

How to present statistics to donors (Part II: Representation)

Although we are familiar with the idea of criticising journalists for using misleading language in their verbal rhetoric, we are not as quick to point to the use of misleading data representation in statistical rhetoric, which is often non-verbal and highly visual. Graphs give a writer the opportunity to present statistics clearly, but also the opportunity to be confusing in two dimensions and multiple colours.

In a second post on on the importance of conveying information persuasively when discussing moral issues, Yuan gives her recommendations on representing data in graphs in an easily understandable way and on minimising the 'lie factor'.

Watch this space for Yuan's third post in this series where she'll wade into the international Dollar vs real Dollar debate.

Graphs give a writer the opportunity to present statistics clearly, but also the opportunity to be confusing in two dimensions and multiple colours.Representing numbers visually is much more arresting than presenting statistics numerically - so long as the graphics are easy to correctly interpret.

A common mistake among those graphing cost effectiveness data is to present differences on a logarithmic scale. This compresses differences in cost effectiveness of ten, a hundred or a thousand-fold into apparent visual differences of just two, three or four-fold. A good example is the linked figure on 

 from the Poverty Action Lab. While the true variation may be understood by the academics reading these reports, it’s isn’t appreciated by most others. Even if someone does understand on an intellectual level that the differences are ten times larger than they appear - and many do not - the logarithmic scale makes this point less emotionally compelling. As a result, we strongly recommend retaining a linear scale to show just how much better some approaches are than others.

A badly presented graph can place even more mental strain on interpreting the graph than simply presenting a table of numbers. Edward Tufte’s book, the Visual Display of Quantitative Information (

) is an excellent guide to principles of graphical representation of statistics. In short, your images need to have graphical integrity: to present information as succinctly as possible, and to present information in a way that is not visually misleading (to minimise what Tufte calls the “Lie Factor” of a graph). Graphical integrity has a huge impact on people’s perception of the data presented.

Although we are familiar with the idea of criticising journalists for using misleading language in their verbal rhetoric, we are not as quick to point to the use of misleading data representation in statistical rhetoric, which is often non-verbal and highly visual.

Tufte’s key recommendations are as follows (with my comments in square brackets):

“1. The representation of numbers, as physically measured on the surface of the graph itself, should be directly proportional to the numerical quantities represented [i.e. no log scales; use the numbers in absolute values]

2. Clear, detailed and thorough labeling should be used to defeat graphical distortion and ambiguity. Write out explanations of the data on the graph itself. Label important events in the data.

3. Show data variation, not design variation. [Meaning: Do not let the presentation style obscure the variation in the data that you are trying to display, or introduce new variation when there isn’t any. Ask yourself: What comparison am I using this data to display? Consider that humans find it hard to make multi-layered comparisons, and simplify your graph into multiple graphs if necessary.]

4. In time-series displays of money, deflated and standardized units of monetary measurement are nearly always better than nominal units. [I will look at this in the next section.]

5. The number of information carrying (variable) dimensions depicted should not exceed the number of dimensions in the data.

6. Graphics must not quote data out of context.”

Interview with Peter Singer-Part I

a talk on effective altruism and Giving What We Can at the Cambridge Union

 took the opportunity to discuss effective altruism and effective careers with Professor Singer. In the first part of the interview, published below, Singer answers questions on giving and altruism.

Effective Altruism and some of the key questions behind it…

GWWC: How would you see the relationship between 

? Where would you place an emphasis? Do you see them as being equally important?

: They are both important. I think really what I'm interested in is the impact that we end up having on problems that need to be dealt with, let's say particularly the issue of global poverty. So it's like saying: if what you're interested in is how much water you get into a bucket then it depends on how wide or narrow the stream is as well as the force, the pressure, with which the water is coming out. You want altruism because that will mean that people do more, but you want it to be effective because that will mean it will have a bigger impact.

GWWC: In a nutshell, what is wrong with the morality exhibited by most people, and what is your alternative?

: What is wrong with it is that people tend to look predominantly at what they actually do as determining right or wrong rather than what they omit to do. Very often when we allow things to happen that we could have prevented, the consequences might be much more serious than infractions to moral rules that people take quite seriously. So I think that our attitude towards morality, to what is involved in living well, is warped by too much of a distinction between acts and omissions.

GWWC: In your experience do you think it's easier to get currently effective people to be more altruistic, or currently altruistic people to be more effective?

: That's a good question but I don't know the answer. I think it varies with the individual person - it will depend on who they are. You can also ask about people who are not presently altruistic - trying to make them altruistic is another step that's very important. Different people are moved by different things: Some people will be moved by how great the need is and how easy it is to have a large impact. Toby Ord tells the story of how he decided to get involved in 

 by calculating what he would make over his academic career and how much he needed to live on. He then realized that the remaining money could prevent 80,000 cases of blindness. Some people when they realize this will be motivated enough to become effective altruists. Other people will say "well I don't really care; I don't know these 80,000 people, whoever they are". Then I think it is a matter of connecting it with something they do care about. Most people want to feel that their life is fulfilling and satisfying and that they will be able to look back on it and feel that they made good choices. Contributing to something larger than oneself is one way of achieving this.

Do you think that the current concept of charity is misguided with its implications of generosity?

: The implication that I think is somewhat misguided is the idea that it's optional because it's charity; it's not an obligation in any way. This strikes me as a problem. Assuming that you're in the category that has an 'adequate' income then effective giving is an essential part of an ethical life, as essential as not violating the 'thou shalt not murder' principle or other fundamental principles.

GWWC: So if it's not about optional giving to 'buckets and collectors on the street', what is 

 For me there's an ideal level beyond which you wouldn't really want anyone to go and that's a very extreme level given that we have so much and that there are people in such need. That would be a level at which you can't do any more good by giving more. You might not be in the same condition as the people you're helping, but it might be that you wouldn't be able to hold down a job if you were to give more because you need to have decent clothes to wear, or you need a car to get around. This would be a stopping point where if you gave more you'd actually end up giving less.

GWWC: One of the things that characterizes effective altruism as opposed to conventional views of charity is an emphasis on rationality. Are there potential dangers of an over-emphasis on rationality?

: It is always possible to get carried away with reasoning I suppose and to lose track of what people are like and how they are going to respond. That's the kind of thing that I want to guard against when I say that we should try and set a standard that is achievable for most people. If you are purely following the logical implications of the position you would say: "well it's wrong to spend more on yourself or your children or a sick relative, rather than to give it to where it's most effective". But what I suggest is that we try and get people to do something that is effective without being too critical of them if they don't go the whole way. We must have a morality that is tailored to the way people are and not just to 'rational' beings. Giving What We Can takes the 10% standard as part of the pledge; in my book the Life You Can Save and on the website I set up of the same title there's a somewhat different standard which starts off lower and ends up higher depending on how much you earn. What we want to do is make sure that people are aware of the issue, are aware of their obligations, and are committed to doing something significant towards it. Hopefully, once you get people doing something significant they find it actually not that difficult, in fact they will find it rewarding, and then they can work their way up to something more.

GWWC: Do you think there's a risk that if the aim is to try and get people to be more altruistic, by confronting them with the notion of effectiveness, you also confront them with the notion of ineffectiveness which may actually decrease giving?

: There's a worry about how rigorously you maintain this standard of effectiveness. There is a concern that when people go to 

 one of the first things they see is this pie chart which says that they've evaluated hundreds of charities and there's only this thin sliver, or 1% of charities as they say, that they've ranked as highly effective. It's natural for people to get the idea that '99% of charities are not effective', but that's not what GiveWell is saying. I've been in discussions with them and I think they've made it a little clearer now that what they are saying is that these other charities have not been able to demonstrate to their satisfaction that they are effective. They may well be effective and may well be as effective as the ones that they do rank, it's just they may be doing work of the kind where you can't perform randomized controlled trials, or where in other ways it's harder to get a handle on how much they contributed to the solution of the problem as against other factors.

GWWC: To stay with the problems of effectiveness, when you allocate money to charities and you try to do it in an effective way, often it involves a decision not just for an effective charity but also against an ineffective charity, and I was wondering where you think one has to draw the line between the heart and the brain? So for example, a charitable intervention for, say, a relative, for a medical intervention, is probably a lot less effective in financial terms than giving to charity. But what reason do we have to prioritise a relative or someone we know over the many people that we could help by giving money to a more effective charity?

: I think we're impelled to help relatives by strong bonds that we have, strong attachments, which essentially are emotional rather than rational. So you asked what reason we have - I think ultimately we don't have a reason, we simply have… this is the way we are, this is what we want to do, and we're following that kind of inclination. I would see this as quite separate from the sorts of things that one does when one acts as an effective altruist. Which is not to say that you shouldn't help relatives, but just to say that helping relatives is on the spectrum of things like treating yourself to a good meal at a restaurant or something similar. There's a spectrum that goes from that to helping the relative who is ill and needs some assistance, towards helping those to whom there aren't the same sort of bonds but where you're making a bigger - the maximum - difference. If we're really speaking about effective altruism then helping your relatives is not a part of it. It may be something that's a nice thing to do, that shows the kind of person you are, but if you're living in a country like the United Kingdom it's very unlikely, almost impossible, that this could be the most effective thing you could do with your money from an altruistic point of view.

GWWC: You've mentioned GiveWell and Giving What We Can. I wonder if you have a picture of how charity is changing, how the effective altruism movement fits into this, and how new technology and data is changing the way we approach altruism and charity?

 I think it is changing! I think it's changing in part because of the emphasis on effectiveness, which has been around for a while and is increasingly taken seriously. If you go back a decade or so there was not much going on in the way of assessment. There was an American site called Charity Navigator which people would go to if they were looking for the 'good' organizations, but all charity Navigator did was to tell you how much of organizations' revenue went for administration and how much went for programmes. That's really a very naïve way of looking at how effective a charity is. Of course you can reduce your administrative expenses by not employing staff who will find the best programmes to fund. Then even if 95% of your revenues go to programmes these may be no good. Around that time we started getting people looking seriously at evaluation. There was the Poverty Action Lab set up by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee at MIT which then had a spin off at Yale, Innovations for Poverty Action. Then GiveWell started alongside other organizations in other countries and Giving What We Can.

You're right that the availability of more data has been a part of this change, as has the Internet in bringing people together. If you ask "where are people really discussing effective altruism"? Sure, Esther Duflo and Dean Karlan at Yale are publishing studies in academic journals, and that's significant, but the lively discussions have been going on online, and they're enabling people from what was really quite a small community of interest to start with (and though growing remains small) to find each other. People who thought they "are the only ones to be bothered about this" are starting to see that there are other people with good ideas and similar concerns.

GWWC: We talked about effective altruism and it seems a demanding - or what some people might think of as a demanding - lifestyle. Do you think that without religious commandments or the categorical imperative of other moral systems there is enough impetus there to follow this sort of ethics?

r: I think there is enough impetus for people to follow a kind of ethics which points in the direction of altruism. I think one of the interesting things about the effective altruism movement is that it includes a lot of people who are secular as well as a lot of people who are religious, and they agree on the goals. On the basis of the evidence we have so far, I would say, that there are plenty of people who are motivated sufficiently by knowing what difference they can do without needing any kind of religious backing. I think the movement will continue to grow but maybe at some point it will begin to plateau and that may be because there are people who are not sufficiently motivated by the difference they can make. But to some extent that depends on the culture and the people they are surrounded by. We have to wait and see how the movement continues to expand.

GWWC: If we're talking about effectiveness and consequentialism, do you think there is a case for instituting charitable targets in law?

: To some extent, that already happens because the government legally taxes you and gives some of it to foreign aid. I don't favor a law that says everyone must give x percent of their income to charity. I think that if a government wants to do something like this, it can increase the money given to foreign aid. The government can also educate people and make it easier for them to give, as can corporations. I don't want to make it compulsory.

Look out for part two of this interview - in which Peter Singer discusses effective careers - coming soon.

Kristian Rönn

The Copenhagen Consensus: making a bet on catching a big fish

We are currently looking into a promising opportunity to influence how large sums of development aid are allocated. The 

 (CCC), known for research forums organised to prioritise which global problems are most important to address, is aiming to influence the next round of Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) through further research and public advocacy. Here we will discuss this opportunity in further detail. We will start by giving you some background. Then we will give you some information about what we like about the CCC, why we think their undertaking might be effective, and what doubts we have. Finally, we will give you some insight into our current research approaches.

Over the fifteen years this second round of MDGs will be in place, the world is projected to spend some $2.3 trillion on development assistance of various kinds. While the MDGs are not a binding treaty regarding how organisations should spend their money they do draw a lot of attention to particular issues, and are therefore likely to have some influence over how that money is spent. Unfortunately, a significant share of that money will currently go to project that are either unproven or likely to result in far smaller benefits than could otherwise be achieved.

To coincide with this, the CCC will coordinate a new round of research from subject experts. This will build on their previous work in order to determine which of the goals the UN is choosing from would do the greatest good with limited aid budgets. They will then take the conclusions and promote them in person to decision-makers in the post-MDG process, including UN ambassadors, missions, agencies and NGOs, as well as the public through a user-friendly website and interviews and op-eds featured in major newspapers. The aim will be to replace strategies that do not deliver value for money with those that will. At the same time, the campaign will raise support for cost-effectiveness as a key guiding principle for the allocation of development assistance more broadly.

This research is expected to cost around $0.8m, and is already largely funded .The associated promotional activities will cost up to a further $1.2m, and will ensure this research is read and taken seriously by the people who most need to hear about it.

The CCC has a decade of experience undertaking research and are generally held in high esteem. We have, as some of you might already know, relied on the Copenhagen Consensus as a source in our own research, and we know from experience that they have produced useful reports highlighting neglected opportunities in the past.

They also seem to have some track record of influencing policy makers. Quoting Bjørn Lomborg’s book “How To Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place”:

Micronutrient delivery programs in Africa and elsewhere received significant attention and greater resources after they topped the Copenhagen Consensus list in 2008. The World Bank quoted Copenhagen Consensus research and findings in 2006 when it created its new strategy on combating malnutrition. In 2006, Copenhagen Consensus United Nations brought together 24 United Nations ambassadors, including the Chinese, Indian and American ambassadors, and set them the task of prioritizing limited resources along Copenhagen Consensus lines to improve efforts to mitigate the negative consequences of global challenges.

Although entirely plausible, we will of course try to independently verify those claims by speaking to policy-makers the CCC has been involved with.

Björn Lomborg’s fame seems to give the Centre the unique position to arrange meetings with highly influential people. Lomborg was selected as one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people of 2004 and was named as one of the 50 people who could save the planet by The Guardian.

Their track record of getting significant media attention for their findings is also quite good. An example is the collaboration with 

 on the importance of priority setting they had last year. Lomborg also publishes regular op-eds in major newspapers.

So far they have been able to provide a clear plan for the project and sensibly answer most of our questions. They are also keen to participate in our evaluation process and take our ideas seriously.

Unfortunately, the people we have spoken to do not know who or what is most influential in the UN decision-making process. A lot of interest groups will have some involvement. Currently the debate is centred on the ‘

’ dominated by Indonesia, Liberia and the UK, which has just released 

 making recommendations about the next set of MDGs - a report which cites the Copenhagen Consensus five times. We do not know whether these recommendations will have a lot of inertia, or whether the final goals will still be up for grabs next year. This will hopefully become apparent over the next few months.

Another worry is that, there will be many groups who will notice this opportunity and try to influence the next round of MDGs. For instance, the 

 was launched by Academics Stand Against Poverty with a similar intention - to promote the inclusion of a target for reducing illicit financial flows. As a result, the Copenhagen Consensus Centre could be ‘lost in the crowd’.

We also worry that the research budget is not sufficient to accurately determine which goals are the best to include. The Centre will be spending under $1m to assess dozens of possible targets over a period of months. The modelling required for this is obviously challenging. Even granting their ability to get leading experts to work for low wages because they regard it as important research, they run the risk of promoting unreliable cost-effectiveness figures. More realistically, the project will consult existing experts on what are generally regarded as the best buys in development. While far from perfect, we expect that advice to be a significant improvement on other competing messages.

Finally, there is little research on how much money the last set of MDGs shifted, and it is a very hard question to answer quantitatively. The impression of most in the development community is that they were very influential - perhaps more influential than they deserve to be. However, it could be that the MDGs were chosen because they were popular, rather than the goals being popular because they were included in the MDGs.