Want to learn more about effective giving, effective altruism, and how to do the most good with your resources?
This collection of videos, books, podcasts, essays and articles is a great place to start learning more about how to use your resources to best help others.
Featured videos
Featured books
Featured podcasts
Featured essays
The moral imperative towards cost-effectiveness by Toby Ord
Conversations about the ethics of global health usually focus on traditional moral issues such as justice, equality, and freedom. While these issues are important, they are often overshadowed by cost-effectiveness. In this essay, Toby explains how this happens and what it means for global health.
Giving without sacrifice? The relationship between income, happiness and giving by Andreas Mogensen
A perfectly natural response to the idea that one ought to donate a percentage of one’s income to fight poverty in the developing world is: how will this affect me? Won’t it make my life much worse? Luckily, there is a body of psychological research that can help us to answer this question. This page summarises this psychological research, in relation to how giving 10% will affect your happiness.
Famine, Affluence and Morality by Peter Singer
This highly influential essay started a public discussion about our obligations regarding global poverty. Prior to its publication, the issue of global poverty rarely arose within the academic field of ethics. Singer changed this by forcefully arguing that donating to stop poverty was not merely a nice thing to do, but was morally urgent, and that we all had an obligation to donate a large part of our income. Moreover, he did so without invoking a particular moral theory: instead, he derived the obligation directly from our most basic shared moral beliefs.
List of recommended videos
| Title | Speaker | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| What are the most important moral problems of our time? | Will MacAskill | Effective Altruism |
| Why I'm Giving 10% of my Income to Charity | Ali Abdaal | Effective Altruism |
| Effective Altruism | Beth Barnes | Effective Altruism |
| The why and how of effective altruism | Peter Singer | Effective Altruism |
| How Using Science Can Radically Increase Your Social Impact | Gabriella Overödder | Effective Altruism |
| Giving What We Can | Jonathan Courtney | Effective Altruism |
| The Most Good You Can Do | Peter Singer | Effective Altruism |
| Introduction to Effective Altruism | Ajeya Cotra | Effective Altruism |
| How to save hundreds of lives | Toby Ord | Global Health & Development |
| Experiences of the Giving What We Can Pledge | Giving What We Can Members | Effective Altruism |
| Social experiments to fight poverty | Esther Duflo | Global Health & Development |
| New insights on poverty | Hans Rosling | Global Health & Development |
| The way we think about charity is dead wrong | Dan Palotta | Global Health & Development |
List of recommended books
Philosophy & Applied Ethics
- Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill
- The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically by Peter Singer
- Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit
- Practical Ethics by Peter Singer
- Effective Altruism Handbook by Ryan Carey (Editor)
- Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others? by Magnus Vinding
- The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant by Nick Bostrom
- The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress by Peter Singer
- Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help by Larissa MacFarquhar
- The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology by Peter Singer
- Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things that Matter by Peter Singer
- Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence by Peter K. Unger
- Essays on Reducing Suffering by Brian Tomasik
- Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away by Rebecca Goldstein
- Moral Uncertainty by Krister Bykvist, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill
Animal Welfare
- Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
- The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists Are Building an Animal-Free Food System by Jacy Reese Anthis
- How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach by Tobias Leenaert
- The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer
- The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer
- Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals by Hal Herzog
Behaviour, Science & Decision Making
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- How Change Happens by Cass Sunstein
- Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky
- Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua D. Greene
- Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom
- Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck by Eliezer Yudkowsky
- Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
- The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler
- Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian
- Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock
- A Taste of Irrationality: Sample chapters from Predictably Irrational and Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely
- Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us about Spreading Social Change by Nick Cooney
- Judgment under Uncertainty by Daniel Kahneman (Editor)
- Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett
- Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes
- Choices, Values, and Frames by Daniel Kahneman (Editor)
- Good Thinking: Seven Powerful Ideas That Influence the Way We Think by Denise Cummins
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
- Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
Big History
- Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
- The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
- The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
Career & Lifestyle Advice
- 80,000 Hours: Find a fulfilling career that does good by Benjamin Todd
- Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
- Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World by Matthieu Ricard
- The Well-Balanced World Changer: A Field Guide for Staying Sane While Doing Good by Sarah Cunningham
- The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox-Cabane
Global Health & Development
- The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty by Peter Singer
- Famine, Affluence, and Morality by Peter Singer
- Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoğlu
- Why Cooperate?: The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods by Scott Barrett
- Give People Money by Annie Lowrey
- GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History by Diane Coyle
Long-term Future
- The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord
- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
- Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark
- Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom (Editor)
- Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser
- Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity by Olle Häggström
- Catastrophe: Risk and Response by Richard A. Posner
- Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell
List of recommended podcasts
| Name | Host(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 80,000 Hours Podcast | Rob Wiblin | Conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. |
| The Giving What We Can Podcast | Luke Freeman | Join us on our very own podcast as we explore how to use our resources to do the most good. Learn more about effective giving, high impact charities, philanthropy, and effective altruism. |
| Doing Good Better Podcast (3 episodes) | Stephanie Tam, Sam Deere | This three episode podcast covers the why, how, and what of effective altruism: the idea that we shouldn't just try to do good — instead, we should try to do the most good that we can. |
| Effective Altruism: An Introduction | Rob Wiblin | Ten curated episodes from The 80,000 Hours Podcast, to quickly get up to speed on the school of thought known as effective altruism. |
| The Life You Can Save | Peter Singer (author) | Enjoy hearing Kristen Bell, Paul Simon, Stephen Fry, and more celebrity supporters narrate this compelling book, and learn how you can be part of the solution. |
| Future Perfect | Dylan Matthews, Sigal Samuel | Future Perfect explores provocative ideas with the potential to radically improve the world. They tackle big questions about the most effective ways to save lives, fight global warming, and end world poverty to create a more perfect future. |
| EA Radio | EARadio consists of talks on topics relevant to effective altruists. Much of the content is from online videos, packaged for easy listening on the go! | |
| Hear This Idea | Fin Moorhouse, Luca Righetti | Showcases new thinking in philosophy, the social sciences, and effective altruism. |
| AI Alignment Podcast | Lucas Perry | Explores the AI alignment problem across a large variety of domains, reflecting the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment |
| Clearer Thinking | Spencer Greenberg | Enjoy learning about powerful, practical concepts and frameworks. Listen to deep, intellectual conversations. |
| Rationally Speaking | Julia Galef | Explores the borderlands between reason and nonsense, likely and unlikely, and science and pseudoscience. |
List of recommended essays and articles
| Title | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|
| The moral imperative towards cost-effectiveness | Toby Ord | Conversations about the ethics of global health usually focus on traditional moral issues such as justice, equality, and freedom. While these issues are important, they are often overshadowed by cost-effectiveness. In this essay, Toby explains how this happens and what it means for global health. |
| Giving without sacrifice? The relationship between income, happiness and giving | Andreas Mogensen | A perfectly natural response to the idea that one ought to donate a percentage of one’s income to fight poverty in the developing world is: how will this affect me? Won’t it make my life much worse? Luckily, there is a body of psychological research that can help us to answer this question. This page summarises this psychological research, in relation to how giving 10% will affect your happiness. |
| Famine, Affluence and Morality | Peter Singer | This highly influential essay started a public discussion about our obligations regarding global poverty. Prior to its publication, the issue of global poverty rarely arose within the academic field of ethics. Singer changed this by forcefully arguing that donating to stop poverty was not merely a nice thing to do, but was morally urgent, and that we all had an obligation to donate a large part of our income. Moreover, he did so without invoking a particular moral theory: instead, he derived the obligation directly from our most basic shared moral beliefs. |
| All Animals Are Equal | Peter Singer | Peter Singer Argues that, in deciding what to do, we should we the interests of non-human animals as much weight as the interests of members of our own species. |
| Introduction to Effective Altruism | An accessible introduction to some core frameworks used in effective altruism, some promising causes that are being considered, and what effective altruism might mean for you. | |
| Prospecting for Gold | Owen Cotton Barratt | Discusses a series of key effective altruist concepts, such as heavy-tailed distributions, diminishing marginal returns, and comparative advantage, illustrating them with metaphors. |
| Crucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy | Nick Bostom | Explores what “crucial considerations” are and what they mean for effective altruism. |
| Understanding cause-neutrality | Clarifies different ways in which the concept of “cause-neutrality” is being used in effective altruism. | |
| Misconceptions about effective altruism | Benjamin Todd | Effective altruism is widely misunderstood, even among its supporters. This article by Ben Todd goes through four of the most common misconceptsions. |
| You have more than one goal, and that's fine | Julia Wise | This essay frames one way in which to pursue finding a balance between a commitment to helping others with the other things we care about. |
Learn from our community
If you’ve made it this far, we hope you’re inspired to give more, and to give more effectively.
Join the Giving What We Can community by taking a pledge to donate a meaningful portion of your income to help improve the lives of others. It can help you to live up to your values, meet like-minded people, and inspire others to follow suit.
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