Peter Singer

But unfortunately, it's very difficult politically to get governments to do that.

And no government is giving really much more than 1%.

In fact, I'm not even sure if there's maybe 1%.

One or two that are close to 1% of gross national product.

But most of the others, including, say, the United States, is giving very little now.

It's giving like a quarter of 1% or maybe a bit less than that.

I'm speaking to you from Australia, which is also around that pretty deplorably low level.

United Kingdom is a little bit higher and several of the European states are higher.

But as I say, none of them really above 1 percent.

Then there's a further question about is government aid as effectively directed as non-government organizations?

And there's some evidence that it may not be, that it's influenced by geopolitical sort of policies.

Certainly that's been true of USAID.

It's gone to countries that the US had an interest in.

For many years, Iraq was the number one country for USAID, although it was certainly not the poorest country.

So while it would be nice to increase government aid and make it more effective, those are long shots.

Individuals, I think, relatively easily can give.

And in a way, I direct a lot of my argument towards individuals because I think some of them do respond then and

um the effective altruism movement which has been going about 15 years now has encouraged that and encouraged people to think about giving as effectively as possible uh i've uh i wrote a book in first published in 2009 called the life you can save which talked about the most effective organizations that you can give to and develop the arguments that i've just briefly summarized um and the life you can save is an organization that encourages people to give effectively and

It's distributed so far about $120 million which is significant but not huge to effective organizations.

GiveWell is another organization that tries to locate, does research on the most effective organizations and it's been supported by what used to be called open philanthropy is now called coefficient giving.