Hi. This week, you'll have the opportunity to participate in a giving game. That means, you get to think about which organization can do the most good with $1,000. And you pick the one you think is best. So whether you think of yourself as an effective altruist or not. In this game you get to be one. Here's how it works. Your job is to choose which organization should receive a donation of $1,000. You'll have a choice between four different organizations. Each of these organizations do a good job of helping people, but in really different ways. So your first job is to study each organization and learn more about what they do and how they seek to help people. Then debate the strengths and the weaknesses of the organizations with your classmates. Think about what considerations are most important when you choose where to donate money. What kind of suffering do you think is most important to alleviate? Should we be more concerned about problems that exist here and now? Or should we be thinking in a more long-term way, about the future? When you've thought about these things, you'll be ready to make an informed choice on how to spend your money, and to rank the organizations that have the biggest impact in making the world a better place. Now you might wonder, why are we doing this? Why are we having this game? Why do I want you to think about which organizations can do the most good with the money? One reason is that individual donations really matter. A lot of people think of philanthropy as something that's for billionaires, big corporations, big foundations, but really that's not the case. Here's a few numbers to show the impact that individual donations can have even when compared to huge foundations like the Gates Foundation. In 2013, individual donors in the United States responsible for 72% of all U.S. charitable giving. That's $240 billion. Compare that with the Gates Foundation, the biggest of all the foundations. It gave away about 3.6 billion, in the same year. So in the United States, individual donors gave more than 65 times as much as the Gates Foundation. Or if you want to look at foundations as a group, all of them put together, they're only responsible for about 15% of all charitable giving. Individual donors are, in other words, by far the largest group of donors. Now given how important individual donors are and how much they give, where do they usually decide where to give their money? Well, it turns out that when people donate money, they often do it pretty carelessly. And without spending much time at all in thinking about how much good the charity can do with their money. As compared to other charities that they might have donated to. There's a study called money for good. It shows that while most people say that they care about the performance of a charity, few people actually do any research into the impact an organization has. In fact, the study found that two-thirds of individual gifts in the United States are made with no research behind them. That means zero research. Not even a few minutes poking around the charity's website. And even among the minority of donors who do conduct research, most don't do it carefully at all. For the most part they're looking for simple anecdotes, nice stories of what the charity can do rather than representative of facts of what it typically does with donations. All they're looking for assurances for the organization is a legitimate charity rather than a fraud. And it's reasonable to look at that but the vast majority of charities are legitimate. Frauds are a tiny number of them. So only 3% of donors actually investigate the relative performance of different charities, but that should be critical. because if you're trying to find the charity that'll give you the most of whatever it is that you value, you need to compare different charities. Just as you can compare different cell phones or different washing machines and try to get value for money if you are buying those consumer items. So this giving game gives you the opportunity to do what most people are not in the habit of doing. To think about how you can do the most good with, for example, a $1000. I hoped you'll use the resources on our course page to study the four organizations, and that you'll discuss the impact with your classmates. Good luck in making your choices.
