The Exchanges

Q Yeah, I want to come to that in a second. Um, why does giving away money seem like such a difficult thing to do properly? I mean, intuitively, it seems like it would be pretty easy. I mean, it's all upset, right? Any dollar would help, but it doesn't seem to work that way in reality.

A Yeah, well, again, think about the analogy with investment. So, I mean, firstly, we wouldn't think, oh, investing your money is easy, you know, especially if you're, you know, doing seed or angel investing and trying to pick companies. Think, no, it's incredibly hard because different companies can vary so much in their productive capacity, their ability to take an early investment and turn it into really rapid growth. And so, firstly, you've got that exact same difficulty when it comes to non-profits. But then it's even more difficult again, because in the case of the for-profit world, there's a kind of natural evolutionary mechanism. The companies that aren't able to turn a profit will eventually die. Um, you know, the bad companies will get kind of kicked, you know, will get killed effectively, but that doesn't happen in the nonprofit world. In the nonprofit world, The charities that aren't having any impact because the beneficiaries aren't the funders. It's not inevitable that they'll get killed off because you could be a very bad charity, but still extremely good at fundraising and marketing. And when you donate, you don't get the feedback of did this actually have an impact or not? You have to rely on the charity itself. And sadly, that means that we can just have, um, incredibly, I often think incredibly misprioritized spending. Resulting in the fact that we have some ch…

AI assessment note: “In the nonprofit world, The charities that aren't having any impact because the beneficiaries aren't the funders.”

Q million that he's got left. I would love to live on a few million, but hey. Uh, I think Warren Buffett has a similar plan. I mean, he wants all of his money to kind of be giving, uh, given away in a limited time period. What's the appeal to this approach as to something like the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation, which has existed for, you know, decades?

A Yeah, I mean, I'm extremely pro limited life foundations and very skeptical of, um, perpetual foundations, um, where within that I'd include universities as well. Um, it kind of baffles me that organizations, that, yeah, organizations like Harvard and Stanford are, um, requesting donations from their alumni while at the same time sitting on an endowment of thirty-five billion dollars that they could be spending down. Um, and the reason is just that, well, I mean, there's a few things. One is just that, um, foundations that have been set up in perpetuity often have this weird relationship with their founder, where the founder might set up a foundation for the purpose of solving a particular social problem, um, and then that problem just goes away. Perhaps it's been solved, and yet you've still got this foundation that has to give up money to do this. One of the most bizarre charities I know of, um, is called Scott's Care. So I'm Scottish, and this charity exists in London. And, uh, it exists to benefit Scottish people who are poor in London, um, which is kind of a weird thing to do. It's like, well, we benefit, you know, people with brown hair in London or something. It's kind of like a quite, seems quite an arbitrary way to give out your charity. The reason it exists is because it was set up in the 17th century when there were a lot of Scottish immigrants to London as a result …

AI assessment note: “I'm extremely pro limited life foundations and very skeptical of, um, perpetual foundations”

Q How do you measure the return on that giving? Like, how does one go about saying, you know, hey, she's giving effectively, but he's not. I mean, what are the metrics by which you, you evaluate that?

A Yeah, so, um, there's at least a couple. So, one that, um, I like a lot is a health, a metric from health economics, which, uh, is called the quality adjusted life year, where that takes, it looks at two things. One is by how much you're extending someone's life, and secondly, by how much you're improving their quality of life. So, using survey data, they, um, find out how bad, basically on a scale of zero to a hundred, Is living with different conditions, like living with malaria, living with tuberculosis, and living with HIV AIDS. Uh, how bad, you know, how bad is that? So if I move someone from 50% health to a hundred percent health for two years, that would count as one quality adjusted life year. Or if someone was already at a hundred percent health and extended their life by one year, you know, by providing, let's say, a cardiac surgery, um, that would also count as one quality adjusted life year. And so that's health economists trying to directly answer this question of just how many people are you benefiting and by how much. Um, I think you can also do it with income. So in general, um, if you can increase someone's income by the same percentage, that's worth about the same, no matter how much, um, uh, someone's income is. So you can then look at just how much are you improving people's income, um, as a percentage, and then how many, for how many people have you increas…

AI assessment note: “a metric from health economics, which, uh, is called the quality adjusted life year”

Q Do you get criticized for your approach to philanthropy?

A Yeah, sometimes. Um, more so than you might expect, given that we're really aiming just to be a bunch of people who are trying to improve the world and trying to figure out, honestly, um, how we can do so as well as possible. Yeah, a few different angles. Um, so one set of criticisms came from existing charity evaluators, so, uh, the people at Charity Navigator were really quite critical of our approach, where what Charity Navigator does is Assess all sorts of different charities, but just by looking at, kind of, financial metrics. Um, the most famous of which was the overheads ratio. The amount that a charity spends on administration costs rather than program costs. Um, and we, for a long time, have said that that's just a really poor metric if you want to actually try and do as much good as possible. Because imagine if you've got a really lousy charity, something that doesn't do any good at all. It's working on a program that's just completely ineffective. But has zero administration, percent administration costs, perhaps everyone's volunteers and so on. Well, then it's still a bad charity. It's just in some sense an efficient bad charity, where there's perhaps something needs to invest, um, charity needs to invest a lot in, um, you know, monitoring and evaluation and other sorts of operations in order to do what it does extremely well. And they criticize this on the grounds …

AI assessment note: “Yeah, sometimes. Um, more so than you might expect”

Q What sort of people or organizations would you point me to or the models for effective, efficient, I would say effective first, efficient second, if I wanted to do a better job at, uh, who would you point me to as a model?

A Yeah, so the organization that tries to find the most effective giving opportunities, um, and recommends charities on that basis is GiveWell, and they're, um, just, you know, incredible at what they do, which is finding the best giving opportunities within global health and development. Um, and they're extremely transparent, so you could read literally, I think, millions of words, um, that they've written up on the justification for the, um, charities they've chosen, and that includes Against Malaria Foundation, which I mentioned that describes, uh, distributes insecticides to the bed nets, um, it includes, uh, schistosomiasis control initiative and deworm the world, um, that treat children for intestinal worms, which, Makes them very sick. Uh, and then also give directly, which simply transfers cash to the poorest people in the world. Um, however, they do only focus on extreme poverty, and I think there are just many extremely pressing problems in the world. And so, a separate organization called the Open Philanthropy Project, um, is actually advising a large foundation. Um, Dustin Moskovitz and Kelly Tuner's foundation. Dustin Moskovitz was one of the Facebook co-founders. Um, and I just think this is the model, um, foundation. Again, extremely transparent in terms of how they're choosing causes. Being extremely strategic in what cause areas they choose to focus on. And, They…

AI assessment note: “the organization that tries to find the most effective giving opportunities... is GiveWell”

Q It, it seems like there's increasingly a feeling amongst well-developed nations, perhaps, that, ah, taxes are a form of charity. How would you respond to that?

A Uh, yeah, this is, you talked, asked about criticisms of effective autism in the past, um, earlier as well, and sometimes people do say, oh, I already do my bit, I pay taxes. Um, and I just think that's just a misconception of what taxes are, where there are so many goods that only are available, like, Our ability to make an income is very heavily dependent on a very large number of, um, public goods, um, goods that are provided by, uh, the government. So I'm only able to make the income I have because there is a village to be protecting the country, and because there are roads that allow me to get to work, and there's a functioning legal system that, um, uh, you know, will protect my property, and so on. And so it's a kind of weird argument to me to think of taxes as, uh, charity, as if, It's something that's, um, this additional thing. They've earned, you've earned this money, and then you're losing some of it in order to be able to, um, you know, give to the government to help others, because at least for the very significant faction of that, um, Uh, of those taxes, you're paying for prerequisites of, um, the money that you're earning. Um, so I think actually it's only a kind of small proportion of, um, you know, in general, yeah, the taxes that you're paying is like contributing to a well-functioning society. That is precisely what allows you to make that money in the first…

AI assessment note: “I just think that's just a misconception of what taxes are”

Q What's the most common mistake that you see people make over and over?

A Um, Not investigating how to do something. So people, for any given task, if I want to know, so if I have a given task, a given goal, the first thing I do is just find out who else has attempted to do this, what information is there on how to do this well, and then, and if, you know, if there's publicly available information, that's great. If there's books and so on, that's great. If not, then find people who did it and ask them for the advice. So I paid my way through grad school through A variety of nine different scholarships. Um, and Uh, so I got, like, really quite good at applying for scholarships, but it was just the same thing at the time, which was, there's a particular scholarship, the committee are going to have particular things that they're kind of looking for, talk to people who successfully got the scholarship, and then, um, ask for their advice, like, ask for their advice, ask, like, figure out kind of what are people actually looking for, and play into that, whereas just over and over again, I see people, they've got a kind of aim, and even though many other people have tried to, um, do the same thing, they try and, you know, Invent the wheel. Reinvent the wheel. We can work on this stuff from scratch. And, um, yeah, that doesn't make sense. That just doesn't make sense to me.

AI assessment note: “Not investigating how to do something.”

Q making philanthropy a career choice rather than something you do after you've already had your career, presumably a successful one, or while you're in a career? I know you've personally advocated for basically making as much as you can legally and morally so as to maximize the amount you can give to others. That would seem kind of at odds with pursuing a career in the non-profit sector, wouldn't it?

A Uh, yeah. So I think the main point I want to make is just that when young people, people on college campuses are thinking, oh, I really want to have an ethical altruistic career. Um, they typically think, oh, therefore I want to have a nonprofit career. And they don't realize that just very many ways of having a positive impact on the world. Um, so that could be going into government because, um, we definitely know that, uh, having confident leadership is extremely important to ensuring the world goes well. Could be going into the search, could be going into, uh, certainly some areas of business as well. Um, but then, you know, one stark comparison is just to think about, well, supposing you do go into business, go into finance or investing, and then you just donate kind of every year. Is it the case that through your donations, you could pay for someone better than you to be going into the nonprofit sector? Um, and often it is the case. So often you can actually have more of an impact by going into, um, A higher earning career and donating a very significant proportion of your earnings than you can by simply working at a nonprofit. And I know a number of people, um, who've chosen to do this, and actually just some of whom are just a few years out of college and already are able to donate on the order of a million dollars per year. So if you're really passionate about that are…

AI assessment note: “often you can actually have more of an impact by going into a higher earning career”

Q Talk to me about that, because sometimes we're passionate about things that we don't know that much about. I mean, we're passionate about learning, and we're curious about it. How do you see that?

A Yeah, I mean, when you look at what people are actually passionate about, the vast majority tend to be passionate about things where it's extremely hard to have a promising career. So that's the arts, that's music, that's sport, and that's not a coincidence. The reason it's so hard to become a professional sports person is because so many people are really passionate about this thing, and therefore they want to work in it and make it extremely competitive. Um, but I think the whole framing kind of misconstrues the way that You know, passion and deep interest actually works, where I feel like this idea of a vocation or a calling conjures up the idea that you just close your eyes and you look deep inside in yourself, and you see this burning desire for something that's, you know, very specific, and then you pursue that thing. Firstly, most people don't have that outside of arts or music or sports. And then secondly, that's just psychologically not the way deep interest works. Um, instead, kind of, as I said, what happens is you learn an area, you become good at it, and then you start to develop a kind of mastery of that area, and that results in a kind of a passion or a compulsion. Um, and I think it's very hard to judge what those are going to be just by kind of looking inward at yourself. Um, rather what I'd recommend is try out a bunch of different types of work. You know, the…

AI assessment note: “you learn an area, you become good at it... that results in a kind of a passion”

Q Are there things that need to be done in the world that can't be solved by philanthropy that are going to need capitalistic solutions or government driven solutions? And what do you see, uh, as those problems?

A Yeah, I mean, in a sense, I think that most problems in the world shouldn't be addressed with philanthropy. Um, I mean, my views, uh, in terms of, you know, structure of society are in general, like, just, you know, fairly, you know, mainstream from a kind of economic perspective. In a certain sense, I think, you know, the default is that you want to have markets. There are certain predictable ways in which markets fail. Um, you want to correct for them, um, whether by, uh, Um, taxes or kind of some amount of regulation. Um, I do think certain ways in which, um, I'd, you know, depart from the mainstream, in particular, placing so much value on, um, uh, those who don't yet exist, people in the future who don't get to participate in markets, they don't have a vote politically, so I'd want to kind of structure society a bit, um, in order to, that we're kind of more responsible for future generations. Um, but in general, I think that, like, the ideal is that most, um, most of the world's problems just get solved by markets, and, um, when they fail by market, kind of, uh, by government forces. Philanthropy is really that, like, last line of defense, as it were, where you've both got a kind of market failing and democratic failing, and I think that applies for people in very poor countries who, you know, they don't get a vote over who's U.S. president, even though The president's act…

AI assessment note: “I think that most problems in the world shouldn't be addressed with philanthropy.”

Q How did you get into this, like into this world? I mean, you started off studying philosophy, right? And, um, What led you to this exploration of effective giving?

A Yeah, the initial impetus was from a philosophical argument, actually, from a philosopher called Peter Singer, and he made the following argument, which is that imagine you see someone walking past a shallow pond And that person sees a child who's face down in the water, uh, this child at almost no cost to themselves. They can just walk into the water and pull the child out. But then they realize they're wearing this really expensive suit. In fact, it's such a nice suit. It costs several thousand dollars. And now suppose the person thinks, well, you know, obviously it'd be nice to save a kid and all, but I don't want to ruin my seat, my suit. This is like, it's, you know, a nice suit. And so they walk on by, um, and they let the child drown. Now, like, how would you react morally to, um, someone who chose to do that? Um, in moral philosophy, we have this technical term that we'd use to describe someone like that. We'd call them an asshole.

AI assessment note: “the initial impetus was from a philosophical argument, actually, from a philosopher called Peter Singer”

Q How did you, and how, it's a remarkably young age to be a tenured professor at such a prestigious university. How did that come about?

A Uh, yeah, I mean, surprisingly as well, it didn't have that much to do with the work I do on effective altruism. It was actually much more on my, um, PhD work, um, and, um, it's been one year out of my PhD, um, and I'm still a little bit unsure how that happened. Um, I don't, I definitely don't claim to be the best philosopher in the world or anything. Um, but I think one thing that does differentiate me from, um, other people within academia is I am Like quite a bit more action oriented. Um, and obviously that's evidenced by, um, having set up various nonprofits and so on, but it also means I think more about, you know, I think very carefully about the research topics I choose. The research topic I wrote my PhD on was, um, Extremely neglected, and it was clearly, like, a very right field for search, so rather than just, like, adding a little bit of knowledge to, um, firstly, rather than having to spend an entire year understanding the literature, and then after that, like, trying to make some contribution in a very crowded field, um, instead it, you know, took me two weeks to read the whole literature, because there was so little written on it, and it meant there was just a very open field, and, and therefore, you know, very fertile ground for being able to publish a lot of articles, um, Uh, quite quickly. Um, and that was definitely kind of, yeah, so that was definitely a hug…

AI assessment note: “fertile ground for being able to publish a lot of articles, um, Uh, quite quickly.”