SAMHÄLLE
SHOULD YOU GIVE AWAY ALL YOUR MONEY?
Should You Give Away All of Your Money? TEXT KAROLINA GUSTAVSSON, FILIP ZAWADKA, ROBERT PRAAS ILLUSTRATION FILIP ZAWADKA
How do you do good effectively? Turns out there is a science to how to have a positive impact — in a multitude of different ways! “On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about kneedeep. The weather’s cool today, though, and the hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep her head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull her out, she seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for her, and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work. What should you do?” ~ Peter Singer This scenario was posed by philosopher Peter Singer in the book “The Life You Can Save”. Most of us see saving the child as
not only a virtuous thing to do, but a moral obligation. Furthermore, if someone said that they walked past a drowning child to save their shoes and not to be late for work, we would most likely regard them as cruel. Nevertheless, we are subjected to a similar situation each day. Consider that the child is not drowning in front of you, but is dying from malaria across the globe, and you have to decide whether to save it or use the money to buy new shoes. Somehow, this example instinctively feels different. It might be the case because of the distance or the overwhelming amount of people suffering from malaria, but it’s very hard to find any morally relevant differentiation. In the consequence of that, the only moral thing to do would be to sell everything and donate it to charity. Living by those standards would be nearly impossible, and convincing anyone to do so is not the objective of this article. Meanwhile, we would like to show that helping is simpler than it seems and give some practical ways of doing the most good even with limited resources.
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Consider global poverty, for example, which seems to be a tractable problem as there are also many rich people. But, how much charity can we expect from the global rich?The Economist estimated it to take $65 billion every year on ‘basic transfer programs to lift everyone above the bare-minimum poverty line’. The history of such estimates shows they can largely underestimate this number. As the Economist is a trustworthy medium, twice the amount they state can be a fair and conservative estimate. That would mean we need $130 billion per year for the foreseeable future. Singer estimates there are around one billion rich people nowadays (estimates pre-covid). From this follows that we would need a $130 donation from the billion richest people to alleviate extreme poverty. It sounds like an achievable goal, and this number could be even lower for the average person if the super rich would donate proportionally to their income. For example, there is a community of individuals pledging to give at least 10% of their income to effective charities at “Giving What
