The Life You Can Save

For Africa to end poverty by 2030, more than one person would need to escape poverty every second; instead, Africa currently adds poor people.”

Putting yourself in the place of others, like the parents of that boy, or the child himself, is what thinking ethically is all about.

Nobel Prize-winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon estimated that “social capital” is responsible for at least 90% of what people earn in wealthy societies.

If you live in a country that is lagging behind other countries in the proportion of gross national income given as foreign aid, then donating money yourself is not the only thing you can do. It is also important to be an active citizen in informing others about how little your country gives and letting your political representatives know that you want your country to develop an effective foreign aid program that meets the United Nations target of giving at least 0.7% of gross national income.

It is precisely because so few people give significant amounts that the need for more to be given is so great. This great need means that the more each one of us gives, the more lives we can save. If everyone gave significantly more than they now give, however, we would be in a totally different situation. The huge gulf between rich and poor means that if everyone were giving, there would be no need for them to take every penny they ever had and give it all to the poor of Africa.

One reason why we should not cut off aid to countries with high population growth is that there is an abundance of evidence that reducing poverty also reduces fertility.

Educating girls also reduces fertility. In Mali, women with secondary education or higher have an average of three children, while those with no education have an average of seven children.

This “identifiable victim effect” leads to “the rule of rescue”: we will spend far more to rescue an identifiable victim than we will to save a “statistical life.”

“the proportion of lives saved often carries more weight than the number of lives saved.” As a result, people will give more support for saving 80% of 100 lives at risk than for saving 20% of 1,000 lives at risk—in other words, for saving 80 lives rather than for saving 200 lives, even when the cost of saving each group is the same.

Among social animals, those who form cooperative relationships tend to do much better than those who do not. By making a fair offer, you signal that you are the kind of person who would make a good partner for cooperating. Conversely, by rejecting an unfair offer, you show that you are not going to put up with getting a raw deal, and thus you deter others from trying to take advantage of you.

Studies show that the amount people give to charity is related to how much they believe others are giving.

Since we know that people will give more if they believe that others are giving more, we should not worry too much about the motives with which donors give. Rather, we should encourage them to be more open about the size of their donations. By making it known that they give a significant portion of what they earn, they can increase the likelihood that others will do the same. If these others also talk about it, the long-term effect will be amplified, and over a decade or two, the amount given will rise. The need to be public about how much one gives, and not simply about the fact that one is giving, was revealed by a survey finding that 75% of American donors with a household income above $80,000 think they give more than average, whereas in fact 72% are giving less than the average.