Want to learn more about effective giving, effective altruism, and how to do the most good with your resources?
This collection of videos, books, podcasts, essays, and articles is a great place to start learning more about how to use your resources to best help others.
Conversations about the ethics of global health usually focus on traditional moral issues such as justice, equality, and freedom. While these issues are important, they are often overshadowed by cost-effectiveness. In this essay, Toby explains how this happens and what it means for global health.
A perfectly natural response to the idea that one ought to donate a percentage of one’s income to fight poverty in the developing world is: how will this affect me? Won’t it make my life much worse? Luckily, there is a body of psychological research that can help us to answer this question. This page summarises this psychological research, in relation to how giving 10% will affect your happiness.
This highly influential essay started a public discussion about our obligations regarding global poverty. Prior to its publication, the issue of global poverty rarely arose within the academic field of ethics. Singer changed this by forcefully arguing that donating to stop poverty was not merely a nice thing to do, but was morally urgent, and that we all had an obligation to donate a large part of our income. Moreover, he did so without invoking a particular moral theory; instead, he derived the obligation directly from our most basic shared moral beliefs.
| Title | Speaker | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| What are the most important moral problems of our time? | Will MacAskill | Effective altruism |
| Why I'm giving 10% of my income to charity | Ali Abdaal | Effective altruism |
| Effective altruism | Beth Barnes | Effective altruism |
| The why and how of effective altruism | Peter Singer | Effective altruism |
| How using science can radically increase your social impact | Gabriella Overödder | Effective altruism |
| Giving what we can | Jonathan Courtney | Effective altruism |
| The most good you can do | Peter Singer | Effective altruism |
| Introduction to effective altruism | Ajeya Cotra | Effective altruism |
| How to save hundreds of lives | Toby Ord | Global health & development |
| Experiences of the Giving What We Can Pledge | Giving What We Can Members | Effective Altruism |
| Social experiments to fight poverty | Esther Duflo | Global health & development |
| New insights on poverty | Hans Rosling | Global health & development |
| The way we think about charity is dead wrong | Dan Palotta | Global health & development |
| Name | Hosts | Description |
|---|---|---|
| The 80,000 Hours Podcast | Rob Wiblin | Conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. |
| The Giving What We Can Podcast | Luke Freeman | Join us on our very own podcast as we explore how to use our resources to do the most good. Learn more about effective giving, high impact charities, philanthropy, and effective altruism. |
| Doing Good Better Podcast (3 episodes) | Stephanie Tam, Sam Deere | This three episode podcast covers the why, how, and what of effective altruism: the idea that we shouldn't just try to do good — instead, we should try to do the most good that we can. |
| Effective Altruism: An Introduction | Rob Wiblin | Ten curated episodes from The 80,000 Hours Podcast, to quickly get up to speed on the school of thought known as effective altruism. |
| The Life You Can Save | Peter Singer | Enjoy hearing Kristen Bell, Paul Simon, Stephen Fry, and more celebrity supporters narrate this compelling book, and learn how you can be part of the solution. |
| Future Perfect | Dylan Matthews, Sigal Samuel | Future Perfect explores provocative ideas with the potential to radically improve the world. They tackle big questions about the most effective ways to save lives, fight global warming, and end world poverty to create a more perfect future. |
| Hear This Idea | Fin Moorhouse, Luca Righetti | Showcases new thinking in philosophy, the social sciences, and effective altruism. |
| AI Alignment Podcast | Lucas Perry | Explores the AI alignment problem across a large variety of domains, reflecting the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment. |
| Clearer Thinking | Spencer Greenberg | Enjoy learning about powerful, practical concepts and frameworks. Listen to deep, intellectual conversations. |
| Rationally Speaking | Julia Galef | Explores the borderlands between reason and nonsense, likely and unlikely, and science and pseudoscience. |
| EA Radio | EARadio consists of talks on topics relevant to effective altruists. Much of the content is from online videos, packaged for easy listening on the go! |
| Title | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|
| The moral imperative towards cost-effectiveness | Toby Ord | Conversations about the ethics of global health usually focus on traditional moral issues such as justice, equality, and freedom. While these issues are important, they are often overshadowed by cost-effectiveness. In this essay, Toby explains how this happens and what it means for global health. |
| Giving without sacrifice? The relationship between income, happiness and giving | Andreas Mogensen | A perfectly natural response to the idea that one ought to donate a percentage of one’s income to fight poverty in the developing world is: how will this affect me? Won’t it make my life much worse? Luckily, there is a body of psychological research that can help us to answer this question. This page summarises this psychological research, in relation to how giving 10% will affect your happiness. |
| Famine, affluence and morality | Peter Singer | This highly influential essay started a public discussion about our obligations regarding global poverty. Prior to its publication, the issue of global poverty rarely arose within the academic field of ethics. Singer changed this by forcefully arguing that donating to stop poverty was not merely a nice thing to do, but was morally urgent, and that we all had an obligation to donate a large part of our income. Moreover, he did so without invoking a particular moral theory; instead, he derived the obligation directly from our most basic shared moral beliefs. |
| All animals are equal | Peter Singer | Peter Singer argues that, in deciding what to do, we should give the interests of non-human animals as much weight as the interests of members of our own species. |
| Prospecting for gold | Owen Cotton-Barratt | Discusses a series of key effective altruist concepts, such as heavy-tailed distributions, diminishing marginal returns, and comparative advantage, illustrating them with metaphors. |
| Crucial considerations and wise philanthropy | Nick Bostom | Explores what “crucial considerations” are and what they mean for effective altruism. |
| Misconceptions about effective altruism | Benjamin Todd | Effective altruism is widely misunderstood, even among its supporters. This article by Benjamin Todd goes through four of the most common misconceptions. |
| You have more than one goal, and that's fine | Julia Wise | This essay frames one way in which to pursue finding a balance between a commitment to helping others with the other things we care about. |
| Introduction to effective altruism | Centre for Effective Altruism | An accessible introduction to effective altruism and examples of how this approach is used in practice to work on pressing global problems. |
| Understanding cause-neutrality | Centre for Effective Altruism | Clarifies different ways in which the concept of “cause-neutrality” is being used in effective altruism. |
If you’ve made it this far, we hope you’re inspired to give more, and to give more effectively.
Join the Giving What We Can community by taking a pledge to donate a meaningful portion of your income to help improve the lives of others. It can help you to live up to your values, meet like-minded people, and inspire others to follow suit.
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