THE MOST GOOD YOU CAN DO? (Book Review)
If you’re looking for a good book on philanthropy to read this year, look no further! Many books are labelled ‘thought-provoking’ but very few truly are. For my money, I believe this is one of them.
‘The Most Good You Can Do’ by Peter Singer is creating quite a following in the US and UK amongst so-called ‘millennial givers’ (see my previous article on this phenomenon). With rave reviews calling Singer ‘the world’s most influential living philosopher’ (inside front dust jacket) and claiming that: ‘Reading this book can change your life’ (inside back dust jacket) this quasi-religious fervor for ‘effective altruism’ is grabbing headlines in certain circles where it is considered a donor ‘bible’. But is the hype justified?
Effective Altruism (EA) is a recent movement in the States which is picking up popularity amongst UK philanthropists and is eulogised in Singer’s book. One of the central tenets of Effective Altruism is ‘allowing reason, rather than emotion, to determine how we live’; while another is eponymous:
Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement which applies evidence and reason to determining the most effective ways to improve the world. (http://www.effectivealtruism.org/)
I don’t think anyone who believes in the efficacy of charity would disagree with this in principle. As an evidence-based voluntary sector researcher myself, I am in the ranks of those attempting to do just this, and yet, when it comes down to some of the details of EA, the book becomes a more challenging and, at times, uncomfortable read.
Some of the radical challenges this book lays down for anyone wishing to be an ‘effective altruist’ and do the most good they can do in this world include the following:
1. We should donate only to charities whose effectiveness has been proven (preferably by academic study and through randomised controlled trials);
2. We should donate only to those causes which can achieve the most good for our money, for example, those dealing with extreme poverty (and therefore should not donate ‘to the arts, and to charities focused on helping our fellow citizens’);
3. We should earn more in order to give more (see e.g. Macaskill’s article: ‘To save the world, don’t get a job at a charity; go work on Wall Street’);
4. We should live modestly in order to give more – ultimately to the point of marginal utility (where giving more means having less utility that the recipient would gain);
5. If we’re going to take ethical living really seriously we should consider major lifestyle changes such as giving away everything that might be considered a luxury (including donating a kidney or other ‘non-essential’ organ); and becoming vegan to negate animal suffering (subject of Singer’s previous book ‘Animal Liberation’).
I should point out that Singer does not expect everyone to go the whole hog. He acknowledges that we are human and very few are saints. This list is laid out as a set of ideals for the EA follower. But ‘bibles’ are risky things, tending to become untouchable accepted truths, and this should not go unchallenged. It’s pretty easy to pick an argument.
Let’s start with Singer’s hardline philosophy of rational utility maximisation. There are those, including myself as an economic psychologist, who believe that such a position has already been discredited by behavioural economists who have shown humans to be essentially irrational especially when it comes to dealings with money (e.g. Kahneman, Thaler & Sunstein). Whether we can or should strive to become perfectly rational is a moot point, but one which I suspect Singer would argue for. There are other philosophical issues to grapple with:
· Should we be working on Wall Street if we believe that the investment banking industry is at best socially useless[1], or at worst, social harmful?
· As a business owner, say, is it OK to make (perhaps obscene amounts of) profit out of relatively rich first world customers so long as you give the bulk of it away to the developing world? Can that be justified as social redistribution of wealth?
· Is it OK to be a capitalist, believing that making a minority richer is OK so long as enough of those people are effective altruists?
Then there are more practical questions:
· Will people still continue to donate if you take all the emotion (passion) out of charitable giving and restrict people only to certain causes[2]?
· What happens to the arts and culture, etc. if nobody donates to them anymore? How important is that to our society?
· Randomised controlled trials and rigorous academic examination is only available to a very few and often not even household name charities[3]; plus as Einstein noted: ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’
Whatever you may think of these ideas, I believe that this book contains some challenges to donors, charities and advisors alike which we would be foolish to ignore, because some of the sector’s major donors are likely to start asking these questions, whether they’re wealthy individuals, corporate partners or grantmaking trusts.
Firstly, charities need to be totally transparent about what they do and their cost effectiveness. The fact is that for many charities the only evaluation metric freely available to the public is the percentage of revenue spent on administration and fund-raising compared to spending on programmes. This misleading figure can be used to make all the wrong kinds of judgement[4].
Secondly, donors could think more carefully about how much they give (compared to how much they spend on inconsequential ‘luxuries’), and which causes they give to (if they want to achieve maximum impact). Does my £5 per month donation to ‘Save the Polar Bears’ really achieve as much good in the world as saving the lives of 20 African children by providing anti-malaria nets for the same money over a year? Or should I give money to save the life of a Syrian refugee rather than donate to make the dying wishes of a cancer victim in the UK come true?
Lastly, do we really need that second kidney? Should we really be eating meat? How socially useful is my job? Etc. There are some big life questions here which we often sweep under the carpet. Perhaps it’s time to lift the carpet, or sell it and give the proceeds to charity?
Singer himself points out that: ‘Doing the most good is a vague idea that raises many questions.’ (p7), and possibly the biggest unanswered questions for me is around the ultimate goal. Can extreme poverty be eliminated? After all, Make Poverty History and other initiatives have failed on this count. And since poverty is always relative, won’t Jesus be proved correct in saying that we will always have the poor with us (relatively speaking)?
This book will not sit well with everyone, but it should be read, not least because it contains some important, if uncomfortable, truths and challenges to us all.
‘The Most Good You Can Do’ by Peter Singer was published by Yale University Press in 2015.
[1] A few years ago, Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain’s top financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, recently described much of what happens on Wall Street and in other financial centers as “socially useless activity” (2009).
[2] Singer goes so far as to suggest that: “in some cases, leaving people to pursue their personal convictions does harm instead of good.” (p126)
[3] For example, current programmes of evaluation are unable to examine organisations which do many different things, e.g. Oxfam, Red Cross, UNICEF, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Save The Children.
[4] See e.g. the recent argument over the True and Fair Foundation’s report on charitable spending by UK charities: http://www.trueandfairfoundation.com/content/file/feature/review-hornets-nest-report-into-charitable-spending-UK-charities-12-dec-15.pdf; reported in The Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/12046438/true-and-fair-foundation-hornets-nest-charity-report.html; and soundly refuted here: http://blogs.ncvo.org.uk/2015/12/12/true-and-fair-foundation-report-is-neither-true-nor-fair/; here: https://www.croweclarkwhitehill.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/12/neither-true-nor-fair.pdf; and here: http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/finance/news/content/20961/true_and_fair_foundation_had_been_warned_or_inaccuracies_in_its_report;