Peter Singer

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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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Australian Finance Podcast · Making effective donations to charity with Peter Singer · 8 Nov 2020 podcast

Right.

Well, I think the question, how much does it cost to save a life, is not at all, you know, too crude a question.

I think those are the sorts of questions we ought to be asking when we're comparing different organisations.

Can this organisation, well, different organisations that are trying to save lives, of course, there are some organisations that might be doing things like

restoring sight in people who have cataracts or preventing people going blind.

That's a different comparison, but let's just focus on organizations that are doing things like saving lives.

One example of this would be the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes bed nets in malaria prone regions.

And it can be pretty clearly shown that when families and particularly children sleep under bed nets,

they are less likely to die from malaria, less likely to get malaria, obviously, and some of those who get malaria then die.

So you can ask yourself, how much does a bed net cost?

And the answer to that is very little, $2 or something.

But that's not the cost of saving a life because you have to distribute the bed net, you have to educate the families on how to use it.

Plus, obviously, not every bed net is going to save a life.

You have to distribute a lot of bed nets to have confidence that statistically you will have saved a life.

So an organisation called GiveWell has assessed this and it's come up with a figure of around US$3,000 to save a life by distributing bed nets, which is a long way from US$2.

But on the other hand, it's also a long way under what affluent countries, including Australia, spend to save a life of somebody who is seriously ill and perhaps has to go into intensive care where you might easily spend

a thousand dollars or more per day that a person is intensive care.

So, so it is very cheap by, by, uh, affluent world standards to, to save a life for that.

And I thought that's the second question.

So how much should people give, um, in, uh, in the book, the life you can save, which, uh, anybody can download for free from the life you can save.org or.org.au.

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