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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

effective altruists suggest that if you have a talent for making money and you also have the character to stick to the resolution, to give away a significant share of your income and not kind of get seduced by the expensive toys that people in the finance industry often end up buying, that could be a very ethical career choice.

And I had a student at Princeton who was influenced by this way of thinking.

And although he could have had a career as an academic, he was very good at philosophy too.

He went to Wall Street and ended up writing algorithms for a commodity trading company.

And now I guess it's something like this is eight or nine years ago.

He's been giving away half of his income ever since.

So he's done an immense amount of good with that kind of money because he was earning a six-figure salary, I think, from the year he started.

So that's one possible career choice.

Obviously, it's not the only one.

You can do good by working for a nonprofit organization and making it more effective.

You can do good by going into research and finding ways to have clean energy, or let's say at the moment, helping to develop a vaccine against COVID, the virus that causes COVID-19.

So there's lots of other options, but if you're interested in that, there's a website for that too.

And it's called 80,000 hours, which somebody calculated as the number of hours most people spend in their careers.

So I thought there is appealing mostly to younger people who haven't settled into their career.

Spend some time thinking about what is a good career for you, but also an ethical career, a good career for the world, which may make your life more fulfilling and satisfying anyway.

And that website offers a lot of options and discussions about effective careers.

It's a difficult question to answer in the abstract, certainly.

But, you know, I tell people not to stress about finding exactly the right line, but rather to start somewhere.

And, you know, sometimes for people who are,

pretty comfortably off already, as perhaps successful investors anyway are, I say, look, start by giving away 10% of your income.

Showing 821–840 of 866 · page 42 of 44