As a senior staring down the barrel of graduation, I have found myself increasingly unable to avoid the classic existential question: What the heck should I do with my life? More specifically, how can I leave my mark on the world? Medical school? Going into law? Nonprofit work? What’s the best way to help the most people I possibly can?
And yet, assuming we will all eventually find jobs (fingers crossed), purely as a result of our luck to find ourselves living in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, we will actually all be in a truly remarkable position to do good. If you earn $65,000 a year post-tax, you are in the top 1% globally. If you earn $100,000 a year (as a lot of us probably will), you land in the 99.9th percentile: the top 0.1%. You might argue that the cost of living in the US is far higher than other countries, and it is; but these percentiles are already adjusted for cost of living.
With such an incredible roll of the dice, we are given a huge gift: the ability to do immense good for other people without doing anything particularly extraordinary. How? Simply by donating a small part of our incomes to effective causes. Specifically, I’m talking about charities that aim to do as much good per dollar as possible and reduce the hundreds of thousands of deaths due to easily preventable diseases that happen every year. These charities work on areas like malaria medication and net distribution, access to vitamin A and increasing childhood vaccination rates. (GiveWell provides a great list).
To get a sense of how rich we really are, consider that if the top 1% of the world were to donate 10% of their income to the most effective charitable causes for just two years, we would be able to do all of the following (and still have some left over):
End extreme poverty for a year
End hunger and malnutrition
Provide clean water and sanitation for all
Prevent over 60% of maternal and newborn deaths
Massively suppress or eradicate most neglected tropical diseases
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Double the amount spent on research and development for clean energy sources
Of course, 10% is actually a pretty sizable amount of income to put aside, but consider something smaller, like 1%. With an income of $80,000, giving 1% a year means $800, or $66 a month. Over 5 years, you will have donated $4,000, which, according to GiveWell, is the amount the Malaria Consortium needs to save a human life. Most people will never get the chance to save even a single life during their time on earth, but if you donate 1% of an $80,000 income for 60 years, you can save a dozen lives. If you donate 5% of your income, then that’s 60 lives saved. If you are a high-earning banker (as many of us will be), then that number could easily reach into the hundreds.
What is perhaps the most remarkable thing about this is the extent to which it can be done without changing your life much at all. I don’t know about you, but I spend $66 a month just to satisfy my Depop addiction, and that’s without any real income (my ResLife paycheck aside).
Of course, it can feel pointless to ask an individual to step in and make small contributions to something as vast as fighting preventable disease when deep cuts to US foreign aid programs have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. An argument could also be made that a billionaire could sneeze and donate a million dollars to one of these charities, making an impact that would dwarf our lifetime donations. And to that, I would say: if you can find a way to increase foreign aid or convince billionaires to donate, then, for the love of God, do that instead. But if you have other plans and are simply looking to do some good in the world, then you might as well consider donating to the most effective charities. After all, very few people indeed find themselves in the incredible position we are in to save lives without even noticing.
