Are you an Effective Altruist? What are you doing to make sure that your giving best serves the most people? Is this important to you? It’s a complex issue but keep in mind that this doesn’t just simply mean giving money to charity – ‘most people’ may be best served if your company is super profitable, especially if you’ve embedded philanthropic activity into your business strategy.

…the most significant people in effective altruism have been people who have had backgrounds in philosophy or economics or math. [Peter Singer]

Singer references the efforts of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet as the most effective altruists in history with estimates being that they’ve already saved 5.8 million lives, not to mention those who have avoided illness and incapacity altogether due to the preventative measures taken.

To further illustrate the point, Singer tells the story of Will MacAskill, a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford. Will, amongst other things, encourages aspiring effective altruists to pursue a career in banking, in order to earn significant money and, as a result, do the most good in the world. (Note: there are parallels here to a point made by Dan Palotta in our previous post)

If you spend your money wisely, you can do much more good by taking a lucrative career such as banking than by pursuing a conventional ‘ethical’ career such as charity work. [Will MacAskill]

As far as Change Giving is concerned, you’ll note that there are touches of effective altruism in our mission and core values. We believe that we can make the greatest positive impact by focusing on our strengths: making world class digital experiences and engineer them to best serve businesses, consumers and the planet.

How does your business currently give? What is the impact of your giving? Is it enough? I invite you to reflect on how  improvement may not mean giving more, simply giving better.

The things we’ve been taught to think about giving, charity and the nonprofit sector are undermining the causes we love and our profound yearning to change the world. [Dan Palotta]

There are many good things to say about this timely presentation by Dan Palotta – indeed, it’s hard to know where to start. How about that, under the heading of personal motivation, the 20 minutes I invested in watching this talk are right up there with hearing Steve Jobs asking us to put a “dent in the universe” and Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech.

Dan wants us to change the way we think about changing the world. He believes that society’s antiquated belief system discriminates against the nonprofit sector and that we are generally guilty of confusing morality with frugality. His video on TED has amassed almost 2 million views in three months as it continues to strike a chord with audiences around the world.

There are so many quotable quotes though perhaps this passage is the one that resonated the most:

So in the for-profit sector, the more value you produce, the more money you can make. But we don’t like nonprofits to use money to incentivise people to produce more in social service. We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people. Interesting that we don’t have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people. You know, you want to make 50 million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it. We’ll put you on the cover of Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, and you’re considered a parasite yourself. [Dan Palotta]

Whilst we haven’t been at it as long as Mr Palotta and friends, all signs seem to be pointing to a momentum shift in terms of how we are all seeking to change the world, and the means by which we will achieve these ends.  The outtake is that if we can help to inspire business to participate in the process by making it an appropriate and commercially viable option, the rest is simply a matter of time.