Joshua Greene

The challenge we have there is that there's this kind of dilemma between giving with the heart and giving with your head.

And the heart we're all familiar with, right?

That, you know, you love animals and you want to support the local animal shelter, or your aunt died of breast cancer and you really want to support breast cancer research to help people so that others don't have to suffer what she suffered from.

And, you know, those are,

Those are some of the most powerful and sort of beautiful and noblest motives that we have.

At the same time, the things that we're most compelled by are not necessarily the most effective.

And when I first learned about this, I thought, okay, well, a more effective charity might be like the difference between someone who's very tall and someone who's not so tall, might be a difference of 50%.

Someone who's really tall is 50% taller than a relatively short person.

But in fact, when it comes to charitable giving and impact, it's like redwood trees and shrubs that the most impactful charities can be over 100 times more impactful in terms of lives saved for dollar or the amount of good it does to improve somebody's life.

And there are a lot of examples of this.

A classic example now is in the case of blindness, for example, in the United States, training a seeing eye dog to help someone in the US.

It might cost $50,000.

In some parts of the world, people lose their vision to a disease called trachoma, which can be treated and eliminated with a surgery that in context costs less than $100.

Now, we don't want to say, I at least don't want to say that we should abandon blind people in countries like the US and say, okay, everything goes only to people overseas.

I think we shouldn't ignore that opportunity as well.

The connection with GiveDirectly is GiveDirectly is one of these highly impactful charities.

And it's an interesting story about how the impact of this strategy was discovered.

So GiveDirectly just gives people cash directly and in some of the poorest places in the world.

And this has really been made possible by the revolution in digital banking.

reaching far flung and poor villages where there's satellite networks up in the sky and one person in the village could have a flip phone and that can enable financial freedom for the entire village.