Joshua Greene

It's giving people the money to buy the fishing rod that they know that they need and they know exactly the right one for them.

So it gives a lot more sort of freedom and agency than typical

charitable initiatives.

And recent research has shown that for every dollar that's given directly to somebody, there's a 2.5x multiplier in terms of the local economy.

So it really is sort of pulling people up in a broader kind of way and holding out the promise that there can be the kind of sustained growth that really makes it a long-term difference when it comes to poverty.

Okay, so we like give directly.

Pods fight poverty.

What are we doing?

So this started...

When Laurie Santos is an old friend of mine and I went on her podcast to talk about giving multiplier, where the idea is instead of saying to people, forget the breast cancer charity, you should just give to something like give directly.

We say, look, you know, your values, you know, do both.

And if you're willing to do both and if you're willing to expand and support a charity that you hadn't heard of before, like give directly, but that we know is very impactful, we'll add money on top.

This was research originally done with my former postdoc, Lucius Caviola, who's now a professor at the University of Cambridge.

We found that people really like splitting between a charity that they chose and that's close to their heart and one that's highly impactful, like GiveDirectly.

And we found that people were willing to do it even more if you had money on top.

And we found that people are willing to

pay to put money for future donors into a fund.

So a sort of pay it forward kind of system.

So Lucius and I started Giving Multiplier based on this research to try to create this virtuous circle.

And the great news is we've been doing this since 2020.