The Smarter Way to Change the World 🌎

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What’s the best way to help other people?

Should we volunteer to help others ourselves, like Mother Teresa?

Or are we better off giving money to professional charities?

Today’s topic, cause prioritization, is a philosophical framework for thinking about how we can do the most good in the world.

Cause prioritization is a key part of the Effective Altruist (EA) philosophy.

The Effective Altruist term comes from the idea that we need to think seriously about how our altruism (our efforts to help others) can be the most effective.

EAs believe that we live in a highly complex world, where doing good is not always easy or straightforward.

Because of that, we must use evidence-based thinking and critical reasoning to determine the best ways to help others.

Cause prioritization provides a systematic framework for comparing and evaluating altruistic causes.

Here’s the results from a 2020 survey of Effective Altruists on the charitable causes that they see as most important:

You can just give money to a charity… but you don’t know how effective that charity is or if it’s using the money efficiently.

Some charities are scams, and others are just ineffective because they exist to enrich their leaders and employees.

Groups like CharityWatch analyze how charities spend their money, with the idea of a Program % reflecting:

According to CharityWatch, a 75% Program spend rate is considered highly efficient.

CharityWatch lists the worst charities in America.

One group - the Committee for Missing Children - only spends 9% of the money it raises on actual charitable programs.

There’s also the question of how effective a charity is at saving lives or reducing human suffering.

Effective altruists have argued that charities funding mosquito nets designed to prevent the spread of malaria are among the most effective at saving lives.

More than half a million people die annually from malaria, which is spread by mosquitos in tropical & sub-tropical parts of the world.

Mosquito nets, which are treated with insecticide, have been shown to be effective at reducing the spread of malaria — and other deadly mosquito-borne diseases like dengue — in the places where infection rates are highest.

Other effective altruists might argue that spending money on mosquito nets just puts a band-aid on the problem.

Instead, they’d argue that we should instead use our money to help produce and distribute more malaria vaccines.

The first malaria vaccines were approved in 2021 and 2023, so that may be an area where our money could save more lives.

The point: Cause prioritization gives us a way of objectively comparing these options and determining how we can do the most good in the world.

If you're using cause prioritization to evaluate a problem, you might want to ask:

• how big is the problem?

• have groups already invested a lot of resources to solve this problem?

• to what extent can it actually be solved?

• will it make a long-term impact?

• how does this cause align with what's important to me personally?

LEARN MORE:

Here’s an example from the Effective Altruism Forum showing what a cause prioritization framework can look like:

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