Benjamin Todd

These discoveries caused many of us at 80,000 Hours to start giving at least 10% of our incomes to effective global health charities.

No matter which job we ended up in, these donations would enable us to make a significant difference.

In fact, if the hundredfold figure is correct, a 10% donation would be the equivalent of donating 1,000% of our income to charities focused on poverty in rich countries.

However, everything we learned about global health raised many more questions.

If it's possible to have 10 or 100 times more impact with just a little research, maybe there are even better areas to discover?

We considered lots of avenues to help the global poor, like trade reform, promoting migration, crop yield research, and biomedical research.

To go in a very different direction, we also seriously considered working to end factory farming.

The idea, in brief, is that the interests of animals get very little protection by our current economic and political systems, but there are huge numbers of them.

Around 100 billion animals die every year in factory farms.

For example, we helped to found Animal Charity Evaluators, which does research into how to most effectively improve animal welfare.

We still think factory farming is an urgent problem, see Appendix 9.

But in the end, we decided to focus on something else.

Why focusing on future generations might be even more effective than tackling global health.

Which would you choose from these two options?

One, prevent one person from suffering next year, or two, prevent 100 people from suffering the same amount 100 years from now?

Most people choose the second option.

It's a crude example, but it suggests that they value future generations.

If people didn't want to leave a legacy to future generations, it would be hard to understand why we invest so much in science, create art, and preserve the wilderness.

We would certainly choose the second option.

And if you value future generations, then there are powerful arguments that helping them should be your focus.