Peter Singer
speaker
866 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2020
last heard 20 Apr
Peter Singer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, the life you can save is a charity that I
found it after I published a book with that title in 2009.
And it got quite a strong response with people wanting to give, because the book was about how easy it is for affluent people to save lives and not just to save lives, but to restore sight in people who are blind or prevent them becoming blind or provide healthcare that saves them, you know, all sorts of health problems and sometimes prolongs their life, of course.
And a lot of people wanted to know, well, which are the most effective charities to give to that are helping people in extreme poverty?
And of course, in a book, you can mention the ones that at the time you publish, but you can't keep updating and revising as you get newer information.
So we set up a website initially, which then became a full-fledged organisation, which now exists both in Australia and the United States and has tax deductible status.
But the organization's purpose is not really to attract donations to the Life You Can Save itself, though obviously it's nice to get a bit for the work we do, but to direct people to the most effective charities.
So we curate a list of about 20 effective charities, and they've been independently assessed by various research organizations, and we aggregate the research from different organizations.
most prominent is one called GiveWell, which has been in this field for about 12 years, I think now.
And they have a team that is completely independent of any of the charities.
And their job is just to make sure, not just that the organizations are well-run, that's something that's important, of course, but you could have a well-run organization that just was funding things that turned out not to be very effective.
So what the research does is it actually looks at the impact
organizations are having on the ground.
Do we know that this is helping?
Do we know that distributing bed nets against malaria is going to save the lives of children who would otherwise die from malaria?
That might seem kind of intuitively obvious, but we really want to know that that's right.
And we want to know roughly what it costs for the distribution of nets per child's life saved.
And you can do that if you have comparative studies of villages where bed nets are distributed and villages that haven't
yet anyway, received bed nets, then you can actually test that.
You can quantify it.
Showing 541–560 of 866 · page 28 of 44
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