Benjamin Todd

One life saved per year would amount to 40 lives saved over a 40-year career.

In the previous chapter, we estimated that a typical doctor in clinical medicine saves three lives over their career.

So by donating 10% of your income, you could achieve around 10 times as much impact.

We've just used the Against Malaria Foundation and GiveDirectly to provide a concrete lower bound on what you can achieve.

We actually think there are many charities that are even more effective.

Some charities work on issues that seem even higher stakes and more neglected, such as preventing a catastrophic pandemic.

We'll discuss why we think pandemics are more pressing than global health later in the guide.

If everyone in the richest 10% of the world's population donated 10% of their income, that would be $5 trillion per year.

That would be enough to double scientific research funding.

raise everyone in the world above the $2.15 per day poverty line, provide universal basic education, and still have plenty left over to fund a renaissance in the arts, go to Mars, and then invest $1 trillion in mitigating climate change.

None of this would be straightforward to achieve, but it at least illustrates the enormous potential of greater giving.

How is this possible?

It's astonishing that we can do so much good while sacrificing so little.

How is this possible?

There's a graph here with percentile global income distribution 2008 on the x-axis and income per person on the y-axis.

The line drawn on this stays really close to zero until you get to about the 50th percentile, then it starts to gradually increase, and then it zips up right at the end.

It looks like around 50% of the area under the curve is found on the 90th percentile and above.

There's an arrow pointing about halfway up that big spike at the end, and it says, you're here, roughly.

Consider one of the most important graphs in economics, the graph of world income.

The x-axis shows the percentage of people in the world who earn each level of income, as indicated by the y-axis.