Treat donating like shopping — Peter Singer on altruism. #shorts

If you are going to donate, make sure it does the most good that it can. We all have this attitude to everyday purchases. If you need a new phone and if you came home and showed your phone to a friend, and your friend said, "How much did you pay for that?" and you tell them, they said, "What? I could have got that for you for half the price!"

You'd feel pretty stupid. But strangely, that attitude doesn't apply to charities. So, if you go and give your money to a charity, let's say it's a charity that's raising guide dogs for blind people, and you don't do research before you do that, you don't ask, "Is there some other way I could help blind people that would help more people for less money?"

If you did ask that, you would find that giving money for guide dogs is not the best value for your money. Because it costs a lot of money to raise a guide dog; it costs about forty thousand dollars in the US. It's a good thing to do, but you can restore sight in someone who has cataracts, and you can prevent people from going blind from trachoma, which is a preventable cause of blindness.

If you want to do good, do some research, find the most effective charities, and give to them.