SPENCER: Sjir, welcome.

SJIR: Thanks for having me, Spencer.

SPENCER: Is it true that some charities do a hundred times more good than others?

SJIR: I think so. Yes, but there's an even more interesting fact, which is that a person can do 100 times more good with their money than they currently do. So it's not really about the charities being better than other charities, but whether your money can do more good than you think. That's kind of a surprising fact, I think.

SPENCER: Now, of course, if the average charity or the average donor did no good, did zero good, then you could do infinitely better, by doing any amount of good. So how do we make sense of that claim? You're saying that compared to an average donor, you might be able to do a hundred times more good. Is that because we think the average donor doesn't do almost any good? Or how do we think about that?

SJIR: Yes, I wouldn't even say the average donor necessarily. The claim I would specifically make is that many, if not most people can probably do more than a hundred times as much good as they do, if they knew about these other opportunities and by their own values, so by their own worldview. So it's really a claim about many people, I think most people who haven't heard about many of these amazing opportunities out there for giving. If they'd reflect more on their values, and if they were aware of all the evidence available, they, by their own lights, would be able to do a hundred times more good. Now, a hundred times differs a lot. It depends on your starting point, it depends on your values, it depends on many things. And so there are many ways to describe and define this claim. We can get into those if you want. I can give specific examples of charities where you can see this difference, or you can look more at the underlying principles of why this is. I think everything together, all the indirect and direct arguments together, for me, make it very plausible that this is true.

SPENCER: So let's consider a kind of very standard donor. Maybe they're giving away a little bit of money every year. They're giving it to the standard charities that everyone has heard about, maybe the Red Cross or whatever kind of standard thing it is. How do you think about doing much better than that? What is your general approach?

SJIR: Yeah. So there are, again, two ways to push. One is just comparing what we know about the charities that we do have data on. One problem we have is that for many of these really large charities, we actually don't know exactly how much good your dollar does there because they don't publish this themselves. It's really hard for you as an individual donor to see how much your dollar would add, even if you knew, which you often don't, what the charity does in total. You don't know whether your extra dollar has a lot of impact there. So we don't often know for the very large charities, but for some we do. One example we do know about, or can at least kind of surmise what it means, is the Make-A-Wish Foundation that you might have heard about before. This is a charity that very laudably helps severely ill children by granting their wishes. We know a bit about what they do because we can kind of at least imagine what it means for this wish to be granted to them and to their family and friends and everything around them. This is a really positive thing. It's quite clearly a good thing. There is even some evidence supporting that the healthcare savings from granting a wish might be more than the costs of granting the wish. This is actually a pretty good charity by most standards because they've collected some evidence. Now, still, if you compare the costs of granting such a wish, which is about $10,000 of philanthropic capital on average for one wish, if you compare that with what you could do with that $10,000 for other children, maybe not children in high-income countries where the Make-A-Wish Foundation is active, but children in lower-income countries where there's no Make-A-Wish Foundation, but children still die of malaria or other preventable diseases, we know we can reliably save, on average, one child per $5,000. So rather than improving the life of one child for $10,000 significantly, we could save the lives of two children suffering from, say, malaria or another preventable disease. I think that kind of illustrates with one concrete example. Of course, all this depends on your values and starting points, but it shows why there are such large differences. Now, the other way of approaching your question is not a concrete example, but thinking about the underlying principles that are at work here. On our website, we write about five principles that can help you find the most effective charities that might allow you to do a lot more good. Just to give you one principle at work here is the idea of considering where my money is most needed. In this case, the difference between a child living in a high-income country and a child living in a low-income country is that in a high-income country, we already do a lot of the basic things. We already provide for basic healthcare. That's why people in the US no longer die of malaria. They used to. But now in low-income countries, there are still these preventable diseases, and there are much fewer resources to prevent these kinds of things from happening. Just by thinking about where there are already resources and where there aren't, you can do more good by shifting your resources, maybe from supporting children in high-income countries to low-income countries. That's one of those principles.

SPENCER: So we go back to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. With that $10,000, they're going to do something that the kid really wants. I don't know what it is, to meet their favorite basketball player, or be Batman for a day, or whatever it is, something really heartwarming. A very natural human reaction is to say, "Why would you criticize that? That's such a nice thing to do." You imagine a kid getting their dream met, and it feels really good. It feels like raining on a parade. It feels really bad. I think you're pointing out that if we try to do this in a symmetrical way and say, "Okay, but if we give the $10,000 to the Make-A-Wish Foundation to make this kid's dream come true, then essentially we're not helping these two kids that are literally going to die, that we could prevent from dying, on average, for $5,000 each." Then you start to see that there are much better things we could do with our money, even if they don't necessarily feel as heartwarming.

SJIR: I actually would even go one step further. I wouldn't necessarily hope it was clear that I don't criticize the Make-A-Wish Foundation for the good work they do. I think they're doing good work, and I think it's a great thing to give to people, just like it's a great thing to help your neighbor and to be a kind person overall. It's not something I would combat. I would rather, and this is also our general message, as Giving What We Can, that we want to see people give more and give more effectively. Because of the opportunity of saving a child's life for $5,000, maybe when they were already giving to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, they could also give $5,000. I'm not necessarily saying that the money has to move away from the Make-A-Wish Foundation. I'm just saying there are these other opportunities many people don't know about, and if they knew about them, they'd probably give to them as well. That's really what our core message is about. It's not about making the good the enemy of the perfect, or perfect the enemy of the good, I think is the saying. It's really about what we're probably spending. Every year, many of us are probably spending $5,000 somewhere, and they can think about whether they'd rather spend that on saving a child's life. It doesn't have to move away from where they're spending it already really well on others. Obviously, that's ultimately a choice for the person. We're not trying to guilt people into doing this. We're trying to make people aware of these opportunities that are out there that many are not aware of.

SPENCER: So you don't have to feel bad if you're giving to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. But I do think that this kind of mentality of trying to do charity effectively can have that effect where it feels like you're saying, "Well, you're doing something wrong if you're only helping a child get their wish when you're not saving two children's lives." Do you think that is a marketing issue, or do you think that's a fair critique, that this kind of mentality can make people feel guilty about not doing hyper-optimized charity?

SJIR: It's a bit of both. I think there are some really deep fundamental questions to ask about when is it enough. When is doing good enough? I think that's something we just have to deal with, find our own answer for, and think philosophically about. But I think it's also really a marketing issue in that we don't advocate for everyone to shift their charitable spending only to what we define as some of the most effective charities. One really useful analogy I've heard is this idea of separating this out into three different pots of spending, three different buckets. The first bucket is for spending on yourself. Everyone spends money on themselves and on the people around them just to live a really good life. The second bucket is for spending on things you're really passionate about and care about, such as maybe the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which might particularly appeal to you. The third bucket is for spending on these more evidence-based, higher-impact charities. What we're advocating for is not necessarily to empty the first or the second bucket. This is just to move some money from somewhere to that third bucket because most people aren't aware of the third bucket even existing. I think that's a really helpful way for me to think about it, to not have those things necessarily be contrasting. But think for yourself, "How much do I want to put in each bucket and then distribute accordingly?"

SPENCER: That approach is really appealing. It comes across as non-confrontational, just saying, "Hey, why not think about spending some of your money, allocating it towards trying to do the most effective good that you can, and also taking into account your own values based on what you think actually matters?" But then it also raises the question, "Why not push to move the entire charity bucket into the effective bucket?"

SJIR: Yeah, I think it does. I think it's a fair challenge. Everyone has to do it for themselves. I can talk to myself about this. I currently don't. I do give in the second bucket as well. For example, when a friend comes to me and does a charity race, I might contribute to the charity race. My reasons are partially just, in a sense, you could say selfish or social. They make me feel good about that. They are for me wanting to support that friend. They are for me having a personal connection with that cause. I think that's a way that I almost would put into the broader bucket. I've reserved these bucket ones and twos that help me live up to my personal values. I also think some part of my life should be dedicated to really doing the most good. I guess the broader point I want to make is there is a really difficult, intrinsic challenge here, but from a global perspective, the biggest improvement really is not in getting everyone to spend 100% on themselves to maybe spending 20% on themselves and 80% on other things. I think there's so much to be gained from us just starting to even spend in that third bucket at all. I'd love to engage on this question. I have my own views about it, and I try to both live a happy, fulfilled life to what I need, and then everything above that, I try to spend on these effective charities. But I think for most people, even being aware of the third bucket might motivate them to figure out how much they want to spend in it. So yeah, I fully take your point. It is an intrinsic thing. The other thing I want to say, which I think is really important again, is why necessarily compare the already well-spent money on the Make-A-Wish Foundation with the effective charities? There could also be other things in your life that you think maybe you should spend a bit less on, like going out to dinner or that holiday, because you think that money is actually better spent on those other children, if you also still care about the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It's natural that we compare, of course, to other charities. But there's no need necessarily for more money to move away from other charities, such as more need for charity generally.

SPENCER: The three-bucket approach that you mentioned — the self bucket, the community bucket, or things that make you feel passionate about or excited about giving, which are often things in our community, and then the effectiveness bucket. I think this maps fairly well onto my worldview, which I call valueism, which is this idea that you should try to figure out your intrinsic values, and then once you've done that, you should try to act effectively to create what you value. It's not a moral philosophy. It's just a life philosophy. It's just saying, "Hey, here's a way of living you might want to consider." I think the reason it fits well is because, for most people, if you map out what you intrinsically value, the things you fundamentally care about, you'll realize that you care about your own happiness and the happiness of your loved ones. That's a different kind of or set of values than caring about other things, which you also care about, like wanting to reduce suffering in the world, wanting to increase happiness in the world, and then you may have other values as well, around maybe making a contribution in your community, or maybe making the world a fair place, or whatever. The point is that some of those things you fundamentally care about will map onto some of those buckets, and some will map onto others of those buckets. In your bucket of wanting the world to have less suffering in it, that's a really nice fit for trying to give to the most effective charity for reducing suffering. But the bucket of really caring about human connection in your intrinsic values maps less well into that, and that might go better in one of your other buckets. I just think there's some analog there.

SJIR: I like that. I think indeed, what we're trying to avoid is some kind of bad compromise, where you're trying to justify everything at the same time and end up with the worst of both worlds. That's why I like that approach, acknowledging that we are not as simple as one value that we're trying to optimize for. Instead, if this is true for you, acknowledging the fact that you have multiple values and acting accordingly, doing well by all those worlds, by really giving the value you're trying to work towards specific attention. That's really what this third charity bucket is about. It's about isolating this separate thing of wanting to leave the world in a better place. I want to be an impartial, good person from a zoomed-out perspective, not just from the perspective of myself or my friends. By some broader way of doing good, I want to do something there, and then you can allocate some of your time, some of your money there. That's the way I think about it. For me, that's a relatively high percentage, maybe 50-70%, if you include my time, 80% of my time. It is really helpful to separate it out and not to feel guilty every moment I spend the other 20-30% of my time and money. I really like that perspective.

SPENCER: You mentioned five principles for thinking about how to give effectively, and you gave the first. What's the second principle?

SJIR: One other is a very simple one: just using evidence at all, so giving based ideally on independent evaluations of charities. Obviously, it's already great if a charity has any evidence that's self-generated, but even better if it's independently evaluated by an impact-focused evaluator. There are now about a dozen or so impact-focused evaluators out there that publish some of their research, evaluators and grant makers. Just going by those evaluations will give you a big step up and can be a multiplier on your giving, depending on what you start with. I think that's a really important one, and maybe the most obvious one. But one is easily, or maybe not obvious to many people who have never heard of those before.

SPENCER: It's funny, because I think there's the kind of situation where something doesn't have a lot of evidence because it's a novel idea. It's a small project, and I think in some cases, it can make a lot of sense to fund things as experiments. But then there's the situation where something doesn't have a lot of evidence in the sense that this thing's been around forever, the studies don't look very impressive, or show that it doesn't do a very good job of achieving its own ends. It's a very different kind of situation where, "Oh, there's no evidence that this is a good intervention."

SJIR: Yeah, I think that's right. Unfortunately, often we are not in a position to distinguish between those as easily without looking into the evidence properly, and we don't have the time or expertise to really look into this. Ultimately, we might end up deferring to which charity has the best story or marketing prepared for us, because that's ultimately what's underlying these differences, to a large extent. The charitable market, if you will, is not very efficient, because what's ultimately driving us to give is whether a charity is able to persuade us that we should give to them rather than whether they're actually delivering value to those they are trying to help. That lack of feedback loops and these wrong incentives might lead, on average, to more money going to charities with better marketing rather than to charities that have the most impact. We're trying to change that, at Giving What We Can, by promoting the idea of giving according to evidence and independent evaluations, so that there is actually an incentive for these charities to live up to their impact promises, because now they have to show them before they get money. I'm not making any claim about any individual charity that doesn't have these evaluations, that they're doing bad work, that people are not well-intentioned there, or that they're not having any impact at all. It's just that currently, the incentives in the space are wrong, and we're all victims of that, basically, and so we're trying to improve that situation.

SPENCER: I think a lot of people are aware that for-profit companies can have strange incentives with regard to improving the world, where sometimes making money is sort of the same as helping the world. Let's say you're selling some incredibly helpful medicine, but sometimes making money can be at odds with helping the world. Maybe you're selling some supplement that doesn't do anything, and you're having to convince people that it does something. The more you sell, the worse the world is, essentially. A lot of people see that with capitalism. They know companies are not as incentivized to do good, and a good regulatory regime will be one that makes it so you can't make a lot of money by harming people, ideally. But I think people often think about charities as having solved that problem, that they have aligned incentives. In fact, as you point out, the incentives of a charity very often have to do with what will persuade donors. While maybe that's somewhat more aligned with helping the world, in reality, there are a lot of ways to persuade donors that you're doing a good thing and they should give money to you that has nothing to do with helping the world. For example, focusing on one really sick child and talking about their story might be more persuasive than talking about your randomized control trial and the statistics around it.

SJIR: Exactly. That's the core problem here. Ultimately, we're going back to incentives in a system that's wrong. The nice thing is, there is a solution to this. It's not a perfect solution. You still need a lot of checks and balances. You need peer review between evaluators. You need to set up a system that's actually independent and has the right incentives in place as well. But it's a big step up to relying on these independent evaluations rather than just going on your gut and on the marketing that a charity provides, because they have the incentive in order for them to stay alive. And they'll really feel it this way. I've been on both sides of this. I have fundraised and evaluated charities, and I've noticed both pressures very strongly. If you're an evaluator, you see charities really wanting to persuade you to recommend them, whatever the cost, because they really care about what they do and they really believe in it. When you're a charity and you're in a charitable situation, you also really believe in what you're doing, and you're trying to make the argument as strong as you can. That's just a very natural position to be in, but it doesn't bring out the best out of the system, as you say.

SPENCER: I've also noticed a more subtle kind of distortionary influence, where a lot of times, funders have a certain idea of what it looks like to help the world, and then charities will apply for grants or apply for funding, but they're going to craft their messaging to appeal to that particular viewpoint of the funder, which often means that if they do get funding, they're not necessarily doing the thing that they think is the totally best thing to do. They're doing the thing that they think is the best thing to do under the constraints of what they think this funder will fund, and they end up with a lot of earmarked funding that doesn't actually give them the full flexibility that would be ideal for a charity.

SJIR: That's right. And again, there is the problem of the incentive there. There's no incentive for this charity to be completely transparent and honest, because they think that if they aren't that way before getting the money, they might not get the money. Indeed, in a situation that's worse for both the fund and the charity, likely because the charity doesn't know whether the funder actually has these preferences or whether they just have an idea that they want to be challenged on. Even if a funder says, "I want to be challenged on this," the charity doesn't know whether to interpret that and whether that's really true. So it's a tricky situation. And again, the optimistic message here is that as a donor, you have quite a lot of power and positive power as well to let yourself be guided more by independent evaluations and evidence on the impact of the thing you ultimately care about, rather than by marketing or your own intuitions about what works.

SPENCER: I also think there's a kind of meta problem, which is that if you think about a world where you have some really good marketers who are really good at fundraising, and then some really good do-gooders who are really good at doing good, it seems almost assuredly, almost by definition, the ones that are really good at marketing are going to grow. Because that's how you get money by being effective at marketing. You might think that the charities that get really, really large tend to be the ones that are focused on marketing, that are really effective at it, and so there might be a weird selection bias against the largest charities as ones that are a good idea to put money into. What do you think of that idea?

SJIR: I don't think it's necessarily a full selection bias against it, because I think things are almost independent. You could be independently good or bad at marketing and independently delivering results. That said, the fact that you're getting more money probably means that you need less of it, that you're able to do more of your actual plans. Obviously, getting more money might also unlock more opportunities, but maybe on average, in the long term, you might expect diminishing returns to having more money. In that sense, I do agree with you; there might be some negative selection effect there that the larger charities generally aren't the ones that will do the most good with your extra dollar. You want to search for those charities that aren't as good at marketing but do have really good impact evaluations. Let me give you one example of this. Back when I used to work at Founders Pledge, which is one of those impact-focused evaluators, I had to look into the issue of women's empowerment, and in particular how we could support, in this case, women to get out of extreme poverty. There was a charity in India called Bandhan, which was implementing this very evidence-based approach, the graduation approach, which came down to really providing this full program, including an asset transfer, training, and various other things to help someone graduate from poverty. This wasn't just a small program. The Nobel Prize for Economics was actually awarded to the authors of the paper in which Bandhan was also included. It was a pretty well-known study with some really interesting results that this approach worked. Now that all sounds great, and maybe it's a good starting point. But when I looked at Bandhan's website, I was just immediately like, this can't be a strong organization. It looked like a 90s website. At the time, I was a very junior researcher. I went to my manager and said, "This doesn't look like a very competent organization, so even if they're doing this intervention, maybe it's just not worth looking into them further." She said to me, "Okay, maybe just have one more look and have a chat with someone who's independently working closely with them in the area." I did, and I'm so happy I did, because it turned out, looking further into the specific evidence for that program, they were delivering their interventions so well, but they didn't have a good marketing department, and they weren't used to catering to larger donors or a broader audience than the foundations in India that fund them. We ended up with Founders Pledge moving over a million dollars there. Ultimately, our members at that point, Founders Pledge members, gave that money because of the recommendation we made. I'm quite confident if my manager hadn't pushed back on me, I would never have recommended them. If we hadn't recommended them, these people would have never given it to us. There are really these kinds of nuggets of impact out there that just need to be found. That's why I'm so excited about this whole field of impact evaluation.

SPENCER: It reminds me of the way that people react to style, as though it's the thing itself. An interesting example of this is with high-tech companies. Let's say it's started by four really good engineers, and you ask the question, "What do you expect their website to look like?" If they actually build the website themselves, these four engineers who have never done design in their lives, but are incredible engineers, the website probably looks terrible. You really look at it and think this company sucks. What we perceive as high-tech is actually what a designer does, putting in all these stylistic elements that signal that this is high-tech, which has nothing to do with being high-tech. It is just about what gives our brain the concept of high-tech. Apple is really good at this; they're really good at making it seem high-tech. But if you actually look at what they're doing, these are design elements. I think a similar thing goes on. You think, "Well, this charity must suck because their website sucks." It turns out making a beautiful website has nothing to do with making an effective charity at its core if you're really just talking about making interventions that work. Maybe you can use a meta principle and say, "Well, if they're really that competent, maybe they would know that you need good design, and maybe they'd figure out how to hire a designer or something."

SJIR: Yeah, indeed. Some of the very best charities do both, but those charities might be really good charities, and they might need your money less because they're already able to market well. The job for impact-focused evaluators is really to correct for this difference and to make sure that they market independently for these less marketing-proof and maybe harder-to-tell stories, because often some of these very best things are quite boring. What Bandhan was really good at is graduating someone out of extreme poverty — for about $300 — by having them go through this program. That was just a lot of hard work, setting up shop, and always doing the exact same program over and over again in different districts across India. That's not a super interesting story to keep telling. You could tell it really well if you have a good marketing department, zooming in on the lives of these individual women, but that's not what they naturally tended towards. They would just talk about the program they ran and not maybe about the individuals as well. It shows the opportunity that there might be stories in there, but also that they often aren't told.

SPENCER: Yeah, and it's complicated telling these stories. If you take something like the Make-A-Wish Foundation, it's almost optimized to tell incredible stories. Because it's this child who wishes for this thing, then they're delighted when they get the thing. You get all these great photographs and videos. With something where you're saving lives from malaria, it may take more work. You could tell an incredible story, but it'll take more work. If you were to track the lives of those families — last year their child died of malaria, and this year their child didn't die because now they're getting help — you could tell an incredible story if someone puts the time and effort into that.

SJIR: Yeah, although there's also a bias against it because prevention is often one of the most effective things. These anti-malarial charities are preventing someone from getting malaria, but that's a harder story to tell than someone actually being cured, for example.

SPENCER: Because you can't say for sure that their child would have had malaria, so it makes all the storytelling that much more challenging.

SJIR: Exactly. Yeah. Another effect, I think I heard Rachel Glennerster, who was at that point the head of DFID (Department for International Development) in the UK, talk about, which I think is a really good point, is that many charities, for this reason, for wanting to tell a story, often implement multiple interventions or take this holistic approach where they feel they have to work with their beneficiaries in all kinds of ways to be able to tell their full story and then show to donors, "Hey, we're working with them in all these ways," whereas often the more effective thing might just be to really focus on one aspect, like delivering bed nets for malaria, which is much more boring than a story about how you provided money and education and a bed net here and there for a charity. And so this ends up in the worst situation where someone is not specializing.

SPENCER: If we imagine we live in a world where there's a huge distribution, maybe a parallel distribution, in how effective things are, then you could imagine that for a given charity, if they have 15 different programs, there may be one program that's way better than all the other programs on a cost-effectiveness basis. Now maybe that doesn't have room for more funding, and so you can imagine there could still be really good reasons to have multiple programs, but it's just interesting to think about how they might be leaving effectiveness on the table by trying to do too many things.

SJIR: Yeah, exactly, and brought for the wrong reasons, maybe, because they feel a pressure that donors want this, as we previously discussed.

SPENCER: I think there's also a side wrinkle here, which is that marketing sometimes almost guarantees bad use of funding. Certain organizations, not all, but certain organizations, the way they do marketing is that, let's say they make $1 from their donors. They can put 90% back into marketing, or 80% back into marketing. The calculus gets very, very weird. You're like, "Well, okay, most of my money I give you is actually just going to market to get other money. Is that really a good use of my money?" Maybe you could make an argument that, "Well, if they can grow and increase the pie and get people to donate more than they would, maybe that's still good," but it seems suspect from the point of view of effectiveness.

SJIR: I think that's right, and I think that's really important. For these impact evaluations, you always look at the total money going in, total money going out, and total impact coming out. In a way, you're taking all of this into account. You're taking into account how much is spent on marketing, how much overhead, how much is spent on the program. But most importantly, you're looking at whether the total amount invested generated the outcomes you're looking for, and whether it's cost-effective in that sense. This is actually one of the other principles: looking at cost-effectiveness rather than just evidence or impact. So taking costs into account and looking at whether this way of implementing the intervention is actually the most cost-effective way.

SPENCER: It's funny how our brains often just don't put in the denominator. It's just like, "Well, how much good are you doing?" We don't think about per unit effort or cost, and it can massively change things.

SJIR: Yeah, it does. We're bad with large numbers, and we're also bad at including this idea of costs into our calculations, into our feelings.

SPENCER: I find this with product prioritization, where we're thinking about what feature to work on. Often, you're driven by how exciting is this feature? How much do you think this feature will add value to users? Those things are very salient. The amount of effort it takes may be less salient. When you force yourself to go through the exercise of, "Okay, but how much effort is each of these features going to be?" Let's start looking at it on an effort-adjusted basis. In my experience, it can completely change your perspective on which features are worth implementing. I think it can be a bit of a trap because you don't always want to do necessarily the thing that's the best value per effort. You sometimes need to take big, bold bets, but it really is shocking the degree to which adding in that denominator can change your perspective on things.

SJIR: That's right, and I think there's also an important nuance you mentioned, which is you can take this principle too far. You want to also make the big bets and maybe do the things that have some probability of having a really large effect and might have a lot of upfront costs, but might be worth it in the end. You really want to look at cost-effectiveness in this overarching sense of, in the long term with these investments, am I expected to have a large impact through this donation? Various donors take slightly different approaches to this and have different worldviews in this sense; they might be more risk-averse or risk-neutral in this respect. Generally, we think there are some really good opportunities out there, also some more risky ones. So we're talking here mostly about the more evidence-based, clear interventions, but there are also some really promising other interventions out there that are more risky in the sense that they might not succeed, but they might be worth the big bets.

SPENCER: So we've run through only two of the principles. What's the next principle?

SJIR: Yeah, so I think we've gone through impact evaluation, relying on evidence. We've gone through cost-effectiveness. Another principle here is thinking about what's included within your moral circle of concern. Who is included in there? Am I just looking at humans, for example, living now? Am I just trying to help sick children currently in the world, like in the example we already looked at? Or should I look beyond this? Are other beings maybe worthy of my concern? This could be other beings, like animals. It could also be future generations of children. If you do that, you'll find these new potential beneficiaries of doing good. You could help animals; you might be able to help in much larger numbers because the problems facing these beneficiaries are much larger and often much more leveraged. For example, when talking about animals, we know there are billions of animals currently in factory farms. Those are much larger numbers. If you give those animals any serious moral concern, you might want to include some of these animals in your concern and give to very effective charities working on those. That's another way, depending on your values, because it depends on how you view this, you might be able to multiply your impact on reflection.

SPENCER: So some people will say, "Well, my moral circle of concern is only humans, or maybe even only humans alive today, or maybe even only humans in my country," and that's going to greatly change what's the most effective action to take charitably.

SJIR: Yeah, it will. It will depend on how much potential there is for you to improve it as well. I think most people, on reflection, in my experience, won't end up in the most narrow circumstance where they think it's really only about people in my country, because they will agree that in some ways, at least, drawing the boundaries at the country level probably doesn't make sense. The animal question and the few generations question are a bit more difficult, and people differ in their views on that. But the point here is not which one is true; the point is that many people don't actively reflect on it or aren't aware of the fact that it could have a really large impact on these other groups. And that's what we're kind of trying to point out.

SPENCER: Do you think that people should strive to increase their moral circle, or do you think, upon reflection, it's going to differ for different people, and sort of whatever your moral circle is, is what it is?

SJIR: So, at Giving What We Can, we think this idea of impartiality and not prioritizing ourselves over others is a really important principle that we uphold as a value as an organization. So we're trying not to be too dependent on what we think is most important or only consider our own interests or well-being or other preferences. That said, how far that goes exactly, people just differ in their views there, and I have my personal views which go quite far. I think, upon reflection, I end up including quite a lot of beings in my moral circle based on what I've heard about the evidence of their ability to suffer, for example. But that's something I think people need to explore for themselves. So as an organization, Giving What We Can, we don't have a strong position there. We try to support a variety of donors because we think the big message we're trying to bring is not one particular cause or one particular way of giving or one particular philosophical viewpoint. It's really about this unique opportunity that we think many people aren't aware of. You could probably improve your impact 100-fold, given your values.

SPENCER: And is there a final principle we haven't covered yet?

SJIR: Yeah, there is the multiplier principle, which is actually my favorite. It's also a bit counterintuitive, although I think it becomes less so with reflection. There are a few things you can take into consideration that could really multiply your impact. A multiplier is just a big thing. I'm talking here about leverage, basically, not the multiplier. These other things can also multiply your impact, but I'm talking about leverage in terms of numbers. Examples here include trying to influence government spending, which is a lot larger than your own spending, trying to leverage larger actors and influence them. Often, policy advocacy interventions might be, say, in the climate advocacy space. You can spend money reliably on planting trees and maybe do a little bit of good there. But if you're able to move government budgets to much more effective spending, for example, on innovation in climate, you might be able to do a lot more there. So that's one category of multipliers. Another one is related to my own work, and it's why I actually do this work. It's this really weird thing that if you can inspire one other person to give as much as you give, you might be able to double your impact. There are some assumptions there, but the underlying idea of inspiring others to do more good being a multiplier is just crazy. I know for a fact that my impact from my own giving is lower than the impact of the people I've inspired. Obviously, that's also my job, but even in my personal life, talking to my friends and family about my giving has probably had more impact than my own giving. That multiplier is, in a way, boring, but it's also really measurable and really clear. This is what we do on different weekends. We measure our own impact, and we find that, on average, our best guess is that we multiply the money given to us by six in terms of how much more money goes to highly effective charities. That's accounting for a lot of things, like whether we would have existed or not, whether donors themselves say they would have given without us or not. That is just crazy if you reflect on it; you can 6x your impact. So that's another very important principle if you want to go one step further.

SPENCER: When you think about influencing large actors, to get a multiplier, like influencing the government, which could unlock a budget, you obviously have to take into account the difficulty of that unlock. You could say, "Well, yeah, it's a huge budget, but maybe it's that much harder to unlock, and so maybe it's not actually that much more promising." So how do you think about that?

SJIR: Yeah, it's really fair, and it doesn't mean that every policy advocacy intervention is going to be better than any kind of individual thing. Some of the most cost-effective things we are aware of in global health, say, are these quite direct interventions of delivering bed nets to people to prevent malaria. There might be more leveraged things there, and those are more speculative, so we don't know exactly if they are more effective. For example, maybe lobbying a government to spend more on vaccine distribution. But then we don't know exactly how likely we are to succeed there. The way independent evaluators currently evaluate these types of things is often through subjective judgments, going on track records, references by experts, or looking at similar interventions, trying to get a sense of the likelihood of success with these kinds of interventions, and then multiplying that by the impact that could be had, accounting for various factors again, such as whether it would have happened anyway by other actors, how many actors are involved, and all those kinds of things. It's a very difficult calculation, not a perfect one, but it can often give you a good sense of the order of magnitude. If you come out of such a calculation and many other pieces of qualitative evidence find that, "Hey, this could actually be 10 times more effective than just doing the thing directly," that might often be a good reason to prioritize that intervention.

SPENCER: So there might be certain kinds of low-hanging fruit opportunities where the difficulty of unlocking it versus the amount unlocked is very favorable, whereas in other cases, there might be a huge amount of leverage that could be unlocked, but it's so difficult to unlock that it's actually not a high priority or not very effective to try.

SJIR: I think that's right. One example to make it really concrete is the Lead Exposure Elimination Program, which was rated highly by certain impact-focused evaluators. I think it's a really good example of where you see clearly why it was easy to move the needle here. For example, they persuaded the government in Malawi, which already had a policy in place to not have lead in paint, which we know harms children, to enforce that policy by just showing them how harmful things could be and that lead was still in paint and that it wasn't enforced. It was really just bringing people — in this case, a government that was already wanting to do this — the information they needed to actually act things out. There are other low-hanging fruits out there where it's just really about information. In effect, what we're doing as Giving What We Can is a similar thing. We're trying to give people the information they need to do what we think is something they already want to do; they just don't know that they can yet. In my experience, there are so many things out there that fit that bill.

SPENCER: With regard to an interpersonal multiplier, inspiring others to give more or to give more effectively, what do you see as the key unlocks that can actually help people do that?

SJIR: I think in my personal experience, I've been very positively surprised by what's possible here, but to do this well, I think there are really a few tips to take into account. One is that people might find it awkward to talk about their giving and to try to bring others in because it might seem a bit preachy, and it might seem like, "Oh, I'm showing off how good I am," and that's fair. A lot of people have that feeling, and it's also not the right way to go about it, of course, to be preachy and to show people, "Hey, this is what I'm doing. Look at me being good." I think the genuine way for many people to invite others in is to share your own experience, what you draw from it, why you're doing it, and ask others what they think about this for themselves. Ask others whether they have thought about this and what they think of what you're doing. In my experience, talking to my own friends and family, just asking that question unlocks really interesting conversations and can actually strengthen your relationships rather than reduce them. I had friends that I thought weren't interested at all in this whole space that I was involved in, friends from primary school with whom I had a very different relationship. One day, for my birthday, I asked my friends to give me 30 minutes to talk to them about effective giving, about my work, and about the pledge, and many of them did. I remember going for a walk with one friend and asking him what he thought about this, and he was actually quite interested and excited. He said, "Yeah, why not? Why would I not? I could miss 10% of my income. This is about the 10% pledge that we advocate for as Giving What We Can, and I think it's probably better spent on these people. It's not something I care deeply about or something I'm going to spend a lot of time on, but I could. I'm privileged; I know this. So yeah, maybe a month after this, I'll take a trial pledge. I'll try it out and pledge, maybe not the lifetime 10% pledge, but try out giving for a while." That was just such an eye-opener for me that I had never asked him to even consider it because I thought he probably wasn't interested in it. He was a very different person. But having this conversation just opened up this whole new wave of connection for each other because now I know he's interested in this, and we can talk about these meaningful parts of my life and have interesting conversations. In a way, it can be a win-win. This person might give more in their life than I might, depending on who it is. My approach, I think, has been beneficial for both me and the world in bringing in more people. It has really been not to pitch, not to preach, not to say everyone should do this, but just to share that you're excited and then invite people and ask them what they think about it and what's blocking them from doing it themselves, if they're interested. I often find people are actually much more interested than you expect.

SPENCER: One roadblock I've seen happen in these kinds of conversations is that people will make assumptions about the other person's values or assume that the other person's values match their own. I feel it's helpful to explore what this person really cares about when it comes to helping the world and not come in assuming that, let's say, you care about suffering, that their goal is to minimize suffering.

SJIR: I think that's right. Our 10% pledge, which is again, the pledge that Giving What We Can promotes, is a pledge to give 10% of your lifetime income to wherever you think it can do the most good. This accounts for this, and often people don't even know this. When I start talking to people about this 10% pledge, they might assume, "Oh, you have to give to where Giving What We Can thinks is the best place," or "You have to give in accordance with what we think you should give; otherwise, you kind of don't count." That's one of the misunderstandings many people have about this space: that there is one truth or one effective charity that's being promoted. What's more important than what we're trying to promote is this idea of using these principles to have a higher impact according to your own values. I agree that many people, when they get excited about their own values, start pitching to friends, "Hey, you also want to do this," but it's much more effective in the long term, I think, to indeed ask them, "What do you care about?" You might end up in a more similar place than you think, rather than by focusing on your own values to start with.

SPENCER: I think explaining why you care about what you care about can also be helpful because a lot of times people do have a number of different values, and they might say, "Oh, that resonates with me." But I think trying to convince people to care about a value when they don't is actually kind of a failing proposition.

SJIR: Yeah, and it's not going to bring you closer together. It's not going to get you to a productive point if your goal is to spread your values; it's probably not going to really help. It can be nice if they ask you to lay out why you have your values and to share your inspiration. If they're friends, they're probably interested in you and what your values are, and that can just be a good conversation to have. But you shouldn't start a conversation like this thinking, "Oh, I'm going to persuade them of my values." What's much more interesting, I found, in terms of conversations, is actually finding out what their values are and then trying to help them with all the information available now for how they can live up to them. That's a win-win again. You're helping them instead of trying to impose something on them.

SPENCER: I think animals are an interesting example here where many more people care a lot about not harming animals than live up to that role of caring about not harming animals. That's an interesting one where people don't necessarily live up to their own values. They could be, "Oh, hey, you actually do care about animal suffering. You don't like that they live in factory farms or suffer a lot. There are actually things to be done to help improve that situation."

SJIR: Yeah, I think that's right, and that doesn't mean we have to approach the conversation in a way of, "Oh, look at you. You're not living up to your values." I think we're all failing to live up to our values in so many ways. A value of humility, for me, is a really important one, just exploring whether they have values there. Like I said about my friend, I didn't know he was so concerned about this in the first place. Rather than projecting that you think, "Oh, they probably don't have those values because they're not acting in accordance with it," maybe they're just missing the information to be able to do this, or they've never had the time to properly reflect on it. You can help them figure that out rather than imposing yours.

SPENCER: We'll come back to the pledge in a moment. But before we get to that, I want to take a step back here and say, "Okay, at the beginning of this conversation, you were saying this bold claim that many people could do 100 times more good according to their own values than they're currently doing." We talked about these different principles that can help you. Could you put that together? How does someone think about doing 100 times more good than they're currently doing according to their own values?

SJIR: Yeah, so the way to put that together is each of these five principles by themselves can give you often a 10x multiplier. It depends on exactly where you are starting from and where you're going, and there's some overlap between them as well. Depending on who you are, you might want to apply some of these principles that you aren't applying yet. Often you'll end up applying two that are non-overlapping, giving you the 100x. For example, if you start from the Make-A-Wish Foundation, maybe you agree that starting to include the principle of looking where it's most needed, where the money is most needed, and including children on the other side of the world might immediately give you 100x, or maybe you think it's only a 10x difference. Then you add another principle, say the multiplier principle. Now you're going to fundraise for the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes bed nets, and it gives you another 5x or 7x multiplier. You can combine these multipliers, and they multiply with each other, though there's also some overlap. These five principles show that for many people, there are big opportunities to still grab, and depending on where your values and your starting point are, it might be 10x for you, it might be 100x, it might be 10,000x. The other way of seeing this, of bringing these things together, is again, looking at examples for particular cause areas. I've given one, and I'll give you just two more to give you a sense of different cause areas. It's easy to talk about global health. In animal welfare, for example, many people give to cat and dog shelters. To give you a sense of the cost there, which is also something we discussed, it costs about $3,000 to care for a cat or a dog for a year in a cat and dog shelter, according to one of these dog shelters themselves. Now for those $3,000, we know from higher-risk interventions, we can help 30,000 chickens live much better lives, reducing their suffering in incredible amounts by lobbying for them to be released from cages for a year. That's a pretty big difference. It depends on how you see chickens versus cats and dogs, but that's such a big difference: one dog or cat versus 30,000 chickens, and also in the amount of suffering you're preventing. There's a really big multiplier there. Similarly, in climate, there are offsets many people often buy when they take a flight, which might, if you're lucky, give you about $100 per ton in terms of impact, if they're really well-justified offsets. But there are high-impact climate interventions that are more policy-oriented, and Founders Pledge has a few that they support. If you want examples of what types of things you could do here, I would encourage you to look that up. There are some that seem to have yielded better results than $1 per ton. Again, the 100x kind of seems to be rolling out. These are hard calculations, especially for higher-risk or probabilistic interventions. But there really seems to be a trend across cause areas that you can often do a lot more good by implementing these principles.

SPENCER: Looking at these five principles, where is it most needed, use evidence, consider cost-effectiveness, consider your moral circle, and consider multiplier effects. Obviously, that's a lot of principles to think about. Most commonly, which principle or principles do you think people get the most benefit from immediately or are most likely to be missing?

SJIR: I think the easiest win is just starting to follow the recommendations of impact-focused evaluators. So just going with the impact evaluations, and those often already include some of the other principles. It's a bit of a cop-out. It's like using most of them directly because these impact-focused evaluators often apply these other principles themselves. They will often be focused on causes that consider a larger circle of concern. They'll often look at cost-effectiveness. That's why they're impact-focused evaluators, to some extent. They'll look at multiplier effects, so look into more speculative interventions. I think you can get a lot at once by looking at the work of GiveWell or Animal Charity Evaluators or Founders Pledge, which I've mentioned before in some of these areas. At Giving What We Can, we host recommendations of these evaluators on our website. We've also looked into the methodology these evaluators use to check whether it's actually in line with these principles of impact-focused evaluation. We're trying to collect all the best information out there on where you could give effectively according to these independent evaluators.

SPENCER: Let's switch now to talking about the 10% pledge. What is the 10% pledge exactly?

SJIR: Yes. The 10% pledge is a personal commitment to give 10% of your lifetime income to wherever you think it can do the most good. That's ultimately all it is. It's that sentence, but that's all in there. Let me back up a little.

SPENCER: And you fill it out on the website, check a box, and send your name. Is that how it works?

SJIR: Yes, you sign it on the website, and you get on the list, you get your account. You get all these extra things. If you report on your donations, you might receive a pledge pin, so there are these bonuses, but the core of it really is this personal commitment that you intend to give 10% of your lifetime income to where you think can do the most good. I think it's important to emphasize some words in there. One is personal commitment, and this is to do what we talked about before. We think this pledge is really about you as a person, pledging to yourself and to others that you're going to do this. It's not a pledge to Giving What We Can, and we are not there to police people. We're there to support people in fulfilling this pledge, making it easy for them to fulfill this pledge, and, of course, helping to spread this pledge to a lot more people. Recently, we went past the 10,000 mark, so we now have 10,000 people who've taken this pledge, and we want to reach a lot more people with this. But really, it's not for these 10,000 people to look over their shoulders and say, "Have you actually held up to this pledge?" No, we're there to make it easier for them to hold up to this pledge, to fulfill it by, for example, providing them with the best possible recommendations we can find without asking them to necessarily give to our recommendations only. So that's an important thing to emphasize. The other thing to emphasize, I think, is the lifetime aspect there. That's both one of the things that makes the pledge really flexible, but also one of the things that makes it really stringent. It is a really big commitment, a serious commitment, and we don't expect everyone to immediately say, "Yes, I'm going to take the 10% pledge," because 10% for the rest of your life is a lot of money. This is why we have a trial pledge at Giving What We Can, which is why you choose your own percentage and you choose your own duration, so that you can start off with a smaller percentage if it feels more comfortable and not immediately commit your lifetime. The thing that makes a lifetime pledge more flexible, though, and that's something many people also aren't aware of, is that it's not a pledge that you have to give 10% every year exactly. It's just that you expect that over your whole life, you'll be able to give 10% to where you do the most good. There might be moments where you're able to give a bit less, and there might be moments where you're able to give a bit more, but you ultimately expect to be able to do this, and that gives a lot of people more flexibility. It's not the idea that, "Ooh, next year I might have to pay for my kids' tuition, and I can't do it, so maybe I shouldn't take this pledge." No, those people are also welcome, and they might give 20% in another year and 0% in one year.

SPENCER: And why 10%? Is it because that's the sort of tradition of tithing?

SJIR: Yeah, that's one reason, you could say. There are various reasons why 10% has been chosen. There's ultimately no fundamental good reason to choose a percentage here, but we think that 10% has a few advantages. One is indeed that we know that a 10% pledge tithing in the Christian tradition, has actually been quite successful in reaching a lot of people, and people have been able to live up to that to some extent. So it's already an existing thing. Another is that it just seems significant, but it's also doable for a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, just a broader audience of people living in high-income countries currently, although also quite a few people currently in low-income countries taking the pledge. We have a tool on our website called the How Rich Am I? calculator, which enables you to see where you fit in the global income distribution. Most people I know who fill out that calculator have found out that they are in the top few percent of the world and are often quite surprised by that. Most of these people, again, I'm saying most because there might be exceptions, are just currently in a situation where they need more money for health situations or education or anything like that. Most people find that when they have 10% less to use on themselves, and so use in this third bucket that we've discussed, it will actually not reduce their quality of life that much. They'll be able to make do, and they will be able to do a lot of good with that 10%. So we think 10% is a really good amount there, because for 50%, that wouldn't be the case; they wouldn't be able to live the same lives. It would be much too high of an ask. But 10% sets a really nice bar. There are various reasons. It's also just aesthetically, of course, a norm that can spread quite well. We think the 10% pledge sounds better than the 13% pledge or the 7%.

SPENCER: You've got 10 fingers, so there's that, right?

SJIR: Yeah, it's intuitive. Ultimately, of course, you don't have to pledge 10%. There are people who pledge more that you can find on the website, or less, you can also find on the website. I've personally now pledged 20%, and I hope to up that over my lifetime, but the 10% is a really good thing that we can talk about and that we think most people in this top 10% of the world might be interested in.

SPENCER: For people who live in places where they're going to pay income tax, presumably it ends up being slightly less effective. They don't actually end up paying the full 10% because they're going to get some tax deduction.

SJIR: The pledge, or guidance for how to interpret the pledge, is that you're giving 10% of your gross, so pre-tax income, and if you get charitable deductions, that means this will kind of be the equivalent of giving 10% of your net income after tax, because you'll get back the income.

SPENCER: Got it. Suppose that these 10,000 people stick with their pledge. What's the estimate? I presume that's a massive amount of money given to effective charities if they were to all actually stick with it.

SJIR: Yeah. We don't know exactly how much because we don't know everyone's income data, and people aren't obliged to provide us with that. We have some of that data, but we do know how much people have given to some extent over time, and that's really impressive. Our community of pledgers have given over 300 million over the past years so far, and they give a bit more than 50 million every year. We've also done estimates; we now have 15 years of data on this, of how much an average pledger gives over their lifetime. We think that's expected to be about $100,000 per 10% pledger. That's a really significant amount. If we take that estimate, our current community of 10,000 pledgers is expected to give a billion dollars to charity. We have big ambitions, of course, to reach a lot more people.

SPENCER: Now, why should someone take the pledge? Because they could just decide on their own how much money they want to give away.

SJIR: It's a great question. I think it's good to separate the question of why would I give or give effectively from why would I pledge. We've talked a bit about reasons to give effectively. But why, then, even if I believe I'm going to give 10%, would I not pledge? I think there are three categories of reasons why people generally pledge, which we hear from our pledgers in our community, and some of those are more intuitive than others. The first is accountability and holding yourself accountable to yourself and to other people. You could compare this to someone who wants to run a marathon but never really gets to putting their running shoes on. Once you subscribe for a marathon and you've told your friends you're going to run this marathon, now you have to get to work. The pledge can have a similar function as a commitment mechanism; you're saying you're going to do this, and now you actually have to hold up to it because you've told yourself and others that you're going to do it. Promises tend to work quite well. There's even some evidence that suggests the pledge might be even better at this for effective giving than most commitments are. So that's the accountability mechanism part, which is maybe the most obvious one. The second, maybe less obvious one, is that I've experienced this myself: it's just a lot of fun. Your experience of giving is enhanced when you pledge, in my experience, in various ways. One is that rather than having to think about how much I'm going to give this year, I'm going to lose this money, I'm not going to spend it on this, and then trading off whether I should give to this charity versus spending extra on my holiday, I just know I've put aside this 20%, and now I'm going to allocate it to where I think it can actually do a lot of good. I'm not going to think about what I've lost because I've already put it aside. Instead, I have this moment every year where I think, how can this money really do a lot of good in this world? It's going to be exciting, and I'm going to share it with friends who have also taken a pledge. There's another aspect of it: there are other people who've taken the pledge that you can share your experience with. I host this pledge party with my friends every year where people I know have taken a pledge come together to discuss where they think they can do the most good. There's this fun experience aspect that people take in various ways in the community. The third reason, which I think is even the most important, is one we've already touched upon: the ability to inspire others. I think the pledge is a very effective tool for this. We see this in how the pledge is currently growing. More than 10% of our new pledges are attributable to people hearing about the pledge from their friends and family because they've also taken the pledge. More than 20% comes from people hearing about some of the people they are fans of, are following, or look up to taking a pledge. These are people like Sam Harris, Rutger Bregman, or Peter Singer. We know that people taking a pledge and talking about it to others inspires others to do it as well. The pledge is just a really easy way to start talking about effective giving because it's much less random than saying, "Oh yeah, I'm giving money." Now you have this pledge as a thing to talk about. Those are the three reasons, and people in our community do various things in all three buckets.

SPENCER: When you think about the pledge as a commitment device, would you say it's a little bit like, "Okay, if you decide to get a gym membership in advance, that's going to make you more likely to actually go to the gym than if you don't have a gym membership?"

SJIR: I think it is like that, and we actually have some evidence. This is an interesting study that was recently done in the Netherlands, at the University of Maastricht, by Paul Smeets and Janis Kesternich, who looked at whether people give differently when they pledge or not. They had a control condition in which people were asked to distribute money over two charities; it was a lab study. They had a treatment group where people were first given the ability to pledge how much they were going to give and then only asked where they actually wanted to give and how much they wanted to give, a week later. The pledge treatment group gave more and gave more effectively. All the extra gained money went to the most effective option. They had two options presented, one of which was clearly more effective at achieving the same goal than the other option. This is a promising piece of preliminary evidence. It's a small lab study.

SPENCER: But why did that work? Did the pledge involve giving to effective charities?

SJIR: The interesting thing they found was that they had a treatment group for both the general pledge of how much they give and for an effective giving pledge. That didn't make much of a difference. I don't think they found a very significant difference there. It was really the difference between a pledge and a non-pledge. Their explanation for this is actually why I'm bringing up the study, not because I think it proves a point by itself. They're currently testing it out in a real-world setting, which I think will be a lot more interesting than this lab study of a couple of hundred people. The hypothesis for the effect is really interesting, which involves two separate things. First, they hypothesized that by separating the decision of how much to give from where to give, you might pay more attention to where to give, and hence you might give to more effective charities. You're not trying to decide both at the same time, so you think more about where you give and treat it as a separate decision. The second thing they hypothesized is that by lowering the barrier, by pledging first and only then donating, you might actually give more, because it's much easier to say, "I'm going to give this next week" than to give it now. These two effects they hypothesize might explain the really large effect sizes in the study, like people giving 40% more. But it's a really small study again, so I don't think we can take too much from it yet. These effects are really interesting, and I've also experienced this myself quite a bit. I don't think I would have given 20% of my income if it wasn't for the pledge. It's really that I have this very specific commitment I've already made that I'm now living up to. Otherwise, it would have just never happened, because I wouldn't have found the time to do it, and now I have to. I think this suggests some really interesting things going on there. These are small examples, but where we really see it in action is the data we just discussed on that people actually do give and give about $100,000 over their lifetimes.

SPENCER: Who is the pledge not appropriate for?

SJIR: Great question. That question assumes, and I think you're right, it doesn't work for everyone, although I think it might work for more people than you'd expect initially. The pledge, first of all, a 10% lifetime income commitment might just be too much for many people in the world. I've mostly been talking about our main target group for Giving What We Can to promote this 10% pledge, which is the top 10% of the global income distribution. The fact is, I think most people that listen to this episode, and most people that I know, are in that group. Again, we have this "How Rich Am I?" calculator on our website, where you can look at that for yourself. You'll be surprised.

SPENCER: It's not the top 10% in your own country, it's the top 10% in the world, that's what you're talking about. There's a huge difference.

SJIR: Huge difference indeed. To belong to the top 10% of the world, in the US, you have to earn about $23,000 post-tax to be in the top 10% of the world, and that's already adjusted for purchasing power parity. We're not making the case here that everyone in the top 10% should give 10%. But why I'm bringing this up is that I think there are many people in the world, including some in the top 10%, where it might be too much to give 10% currently. That's also why we have a trial pledge that allows you to specify a lower percentage, and there are quite a few people who might think the trial pledge is more appropriate than the 10% pledge. The amount might differ, but as we have already discussed, it's a lifetime pledge. It might be that currently you're not able to give 10%, but over your life, you do expect to be able to give 10%, and for those people, a 10% pledge might also be appropriate. Another reason you might not want to take a 10% pledge is a more principled reason, or a reason why you think a pledge generally is not the way you want to live up to your values. I think, Spencer, in the past, we once had this conversation, and I'm really curious how you think about this. I don't think you're a Pledger, but you seem to be a supporter of effective giving and giving 10% more generally. I'm curious why you haven't pledged and what your underlying reasons for that are.

SPENCER: One of my life principles is that as long as I'm able, physically and mentally, to devote a significant amount of my efforts towards trying to improve the world, it's something I care deeply about. To me, the idea of a pledge is actually quite unappealing because I think I keep getting wiser over time, and I trust my future self more than my present self. The idea of pre-committing myself is, because of that, actively unappealing.

SJIR: I think that's one reason we hear more often, and I think that can be fair. I can even be sympathetic to that reason myself. I'll talk about my personal reason why that, for me, doesn't change things, which is that whatever changes I'm going to be making, they're not going to be against the pledge. It's very unlikely that I'll live in a world in the future where I think I don't want to devote at least 20% of my income to where I think it does the most good. Those principles are so fundamental to my life that it would have to be a complete turn of events. This is maybe where another thing that people don't know about the pledge comes in. You can actually de-pledge. There are situations where people might justifiably de-pledge because something really big has happened. A good comparison here is marriage. Marriage is also a really big commitment, and not something you enter into lightly, but many people separate for good reasons. I hope we don't see as many de-pledges as there are divorces in the world. But I do think that shows we don't always know what's going to change in our lives. Indeed, our values might change, our view of things. I think that the option to de-pledge is an important one, and we don't see the pledge as an overarching thing. Our founder, Toby Ord, once told me this example, which really hit home for me: if you promise to pick up your children or your neighbor's children from school, but on the way to school, you hear your house is on fire, they won't blame you for going back and making sure that things are in order in your house and not picking up their children. That's a promise you can break because there's a good reason for it, and a similar thing holds for the pledge. It's a serious commitment, one not taken lightly, but there might be situations in which you can no longer live up to it.

SPENCER: What is the de-pledging process? I assume you have to cut off one of your fingers or something like that?

SJIR: Exactly. There's a whole ritual involved. No, there's [just] a formal line as well that you can fill in, and you'll be taken off the website. That's completely fine. That might be a good reason for it, and some people use it, and we think that's right. This is not going to be a norm; it's not going to spread far if it's going to be this stringent thing that you have to hold up to.

SPENCER: Yeah. And so are the pledges all public?

SJIR: Yes, there's a public list. It is possible to request for your name to be changed to an anonymous name, but we generally encourage people to be public about this. For the third reason I mentioned for pledging, which is your name, even being on that list might inspire others to give. Showing that you are giving might just bring a lot of your friends and family along as well, if you do it in a positive way, as we've discussed. So we really encourage people to be public about it, but you don't have to.

SPENCER: What is known about the extent to which people stick to their pledges?

SJIR: Yes, it's a great question. That's something obviously we are very interested in ourselves. So we don't know exactly how many people stick to their pledge because we don't know exactly how much people earn; they can submit this to us. We don't make this mandatory because we want to make things easy for people, and it's not important for us exactly to know how many people give also because, again, we're not there to police people. We're there to support them in fulfilling that pledge. Now what we do know is how many people actually record how much they give via our platform, and we know how much those people give. In their first year of the pledge, about 60% of people record their donations via us. It's also worth noting here, you don't have to if you're a pledger, so you're welcome to just do this for yourself. You don't have to record via us. But we like it, of course, because then we get helpful data to answer questions like this, and we see that drop off over time to about 30% over five years and then become stable. So that's a relatively low percentage, we think.

SPENCER: That's filling it out though, we don't actually know what's happening to the remainder.

SJIR: Exactly. We don't know about the other 70%, and we also don't know if the 30% actually are fulfilling their pledge to the letter in terms of the amount of money, the percentage that is of their total income. But we do know they are giving, and they are giving to certain places. Part of that recording is actually people giving via our website, because you can give to certain charities via our website, and part of that is just people reporting that they've given to other places.

SPENCER: What's your best guess as to what percent get close to fulfilling their pledge on a yearly basis?

SJIR: It's something really hard to estimate. I've actually become more pessimistic about this recently because of our recent impact evaluation. We're trying to look into this more, and we found low response rates when we tried to follow up with non-reporters. For the ones that did respond, there weren't many cases among them who actually fulfilled their pledge, maybe not even one case. I'd have to look at other data to look that up.

SPENCER: So the more regular responders who are filling it out, they're the ones who are much more likely to be giving.

SJIR: Yes, and so we don't have an exact estimate of this, but I would think it's likely in the order of maybe between 20 and 50% would be my best guess, people fully fulfilling it at any point. But I really want to, yeah, I may have error bars higher, so maybe it will be more like between 20 and 80% if I'm honest. Because we also, anecdotally, know a few people who don't record by our platform, but do fulfill it. And that just really tells me, and it's something we, of course, want to get more data on over the years. What we think is more important, though, in a way, even because we're again, we're not policing people to fulfill the pledge, is this 100,000 number that I mentioned before. So people, on average, give about 100,000 and this already takes into account all the people that we don't have data for and that we are assuming are not giving, basically. So even then you end up with this average of 100,000 over a lifetime, and so even if only 20% of people would fully live up to the pledge, this would be a thing worth scaling, I would say, and bringing it to a lot more people. That said, these results of a recent impact version have actually prompted us to do more work in this area of checking whether this is true, and also inspiring people to actually live up to the pledge, because we think it's only as inspiring as its community. And so we want to know whether our community actually lives up to its own values, if we go out there to say that we do.

SPENCER: It seems to me that people that are especially good candidates for the pledge are people that intend to give away this kind of amount anyway, and can use the pledge to inspire others to increase their multiplier, as you talked about, but also people who feel like the ideal version of themselves would do this, and they need a little bit of help sticking with it as a kind of commitment device. Would you agree that those are kind of good candidate cases for this?

SJIR: I think that's right. It kind of speaks to the first and the third reason I mentioned. So the people who need an accountability mechanism, and the people who really buy into this idea of inspiring others and have that multiplier on their own impact, I think those are really two groups that could benefit from this. And I think a lot of people fit into that category, and in particular, what I'm struck by, and this is what makes my job so much fun, is that, in my experience, I've hardly ever had a discussion with someone about why they should pledge. It's almost always been a discussion about, "Hey, what is this about? Oh, I thought this. Oh, I didn't know about these charities. What do they actually do? Oh, is this pledge really 10%? It seems a bit much, because do I have to give 10% every year? Oh, no, actually, it's a lifetime pledge. Maybe I can do it." Then it's often been mostly me sharing information and taking away misconceptions, and then people taking a trial pledge rather than persuading people, because the ultimate underlying idea of giving some percentage of your money to where it can do a lot of good for others seems quite appealing to people, so it makes me optimistic about these groups being quite large.

SPENCER: Yeah. And I guess the things that you mentioned actually suggest a third type that would be really appealing to those that maybe every year they're like, "How much should I give? I don't know." And then they spend a lot of time thinking about it. It's stressful, and they can't decide. And this is like, "Okay, you've already decided. You don't have to worry about it. You've got to make life simpler."

SJIR: That's a really good point. Yeah, I think I know quite a few of those people who just never get to it because it's too complex, and they never sit down because they have to look up the evidence, and they have to figure out how much to give and look at their expenses, and it never happens. Whereas, once they've taken the pledge, they can put it aside and make that choice. They also aren't aware of these easy ways of giving that are out there.

SPENCER: Is there another archetype you would point to, besides those three we mentioned, that you think is a really good fit for the pledge?

SJIR: Yeah, I think there is one more which also links to the others, but it is people who just really like rituals and routines and things in their lives. This is the second reason why people take the pledge. Sometimes improving their experience of giving. I think the pledge adds an identity to your life and a community to your life.

SPENCER: I'm a giver. I'm one of these people who's committed to this. Yeah, that's really nice.

SJIR: I want to connect to others as well. If you are someone who would like to share that again and also learn from others and share that experience with others, I think it can be a really good reason to join the pledge community and know when you meet all the people in the pledge that they're living up to these same values.

SPENCER: Do you have events for pledgers and things like that, where they can feel like a special community?

SJIR: We used to have a lot more events. We've actually dropped a lot of our self-organized events just by living up to our own principles, seeing that we didn't generate as much value out of those currently. But a lot of our pledgers self-organize events, and we have self-organized communities. Like I said, I myself every year with my friends organize events. And so that's also what we very much encourage people to do, is to work with the local communities, and also many of our partner organizations that we work with host events that people can join with the local communities.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, the other thing that I'm wondering about is, obviously, it's not enough to get people to pledge to have an impact. You want to have a causal effect. You want to say that either by pledging, they gave more than they would have, or they gave to more effective charities than they would have, or maybe they would have given the same money to the same charities, but they inspired others who got others to give more and more effectively. How do you think about that in your work, kind of demonstrating that causal impact?

SJIR: Yeah, so it's not something we can measure exactly, but we try to approximate it as best we can, and we currently do that mostly through surveys. We ask people to self-report how much they think they would have given if it wasn't for our work, for Giving What We Can's work. That's partially what informs our impact evaluations every year. There we find for our pledgers that they themselves attribute about 30%, I think to be exact, 33% currently, to this estimate allocated to Giving What We Can influence. Again, that's quite imprecise, and there are many conceptual problems with that question that make it hard to get precise on, but it gives us an idea that we're having a significant influence in the order of magnitude of maybe 10 to 50% of how much extra money is spent, and that's ultimately what informs the estimate of the six times multiplier that I shared with you before.

SPENCER: Well, but that's just giving more money, or is that giving more effectively as well?

SJIR: It's how much more money they've given effectively because of Giving What We Can.

SPENCER: So given effectively, take you both into account,

SJIR: Yeah. So we separately account for effectiveness, and so multiplied together, you get this. So it's basically the same. To be precise about this, we asked them how much more they've given because of us. But then we also separately account for where people give, and we put quite stringent criteria on there for what we count according to our definitions. That's definitely high impact, and as many other things that might be happening, we don't know. So we multiply those two together, and we end up with an amount that is informed by both.

SPENCER: What would the dream experiment be? If you could do any experiment to try to figure out their impact.

SJIR: The dream experiment would just be to get this information and various pieces of information in front of as many people as possible and see how they react. That's ultimately what we're trying to do right now. We're trying to go out there and spread the word. It's just really hard, and it's also what my birthday gift example shows. It can be so valuable to have people's proper attention, and then suddenly someone might be open to this. But so many things are vying for our attention today. Of course, many for-profits, many nonprofits are with their marketing, and having a moment to really sit down with someone and have this conversation, and doing that with lots of people, finding a way to do something equivalent would be a dream experiment for me. It's something we're trying to recreate, for example, by enabling all our members in our community, all our pledges, to talk to their peers better about effective giving.

SPENCER: Because it sounds like for some people, it just resonates immediately. Once they hear about it, they're like, "Oh, that makes sense. They may have follow-up questions." But there's a significant percentage of people that once they get the idea, they're going to immediately find it appealing.

SJIR: Yeah, I think the idea of giving 10% to where it can be used a lot better is generally very appealing, in my experience, to people. That's a good thing to exist. I have hardly ever heard someone say, "Oh no, you shouldn't do that. It's a really bad idea to give 10%." It gets really interesting in the details. For people to be able to ask those questions about, "Oh, what if I can't give 10% next year? Oh, what if I want to give to this charity? Is that really effective?" That's often where people find blockers. Having that in-depth conversation with people is often what does the magic, I think, and gets people to ultimately commit. Yeah, and that's the world we ultimately want to get to, I think.

SPENCER: So we've touched on a lot of different topics today. What would you like to leave the listener with? What do you want them to keep thinking about after this conversation?

SJIR: I think there's so much to learn and that there's this really meaningful, crazy fact about the world that we can do so much good with our money and actually add very little effort, but it takes a little bit of effort to take the first step there. I'd really encourage people, if they are at all interested in having a lot of impact with their money, to start trying this out. To take the first step, that's the thing I most want to leave people with. Have a look at, say, the trial pledge, which starts at 1% of your income for six months and see what it is like to pledge. Consider that. Or if you're not interested in that, think about why that is and reflect on that. I think even just asking that question to yourself can be really helpful and may help you figure out what else you want to do instead. That's the most important question I want to leave listeners with: what they think about this idea of giving and whether they are ready to take the first small step.

SPENCER: Sjir, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

SJIR: Thanks so much for having me, Spencer.