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4.07 AVERAGE
4.07 AVERAGE
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
The perfect compliment to [b:Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty|10245602|Poor Economics A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty|Abhijit V. Banerjee|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344679036l/10245602._SY75_.jpg|15145697]! Banerjee and Duflo's book was all about effective poverty reduction programs. In his book, Singer choses to focus on the moral imperative for action.
I was first introduced to Singer's Drowning Child argument in Joshua Greene's class my freshman year. It goes like this: If you see a child drowning in a lake, do you have an obligation to wade in to save him/her? Even if you will ruin your nice clothes? Singer continues: “Would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost — and absolutely no danger — to yourself?” Most answer it would make no difference, thus illuminating a huge moral inconsistency. This book tackles every argument that could be made against giving life-saving aid whenever you can, as well as reinforcing just how disparate the effects of a few dollars can be on reducing suffering in wealthy American lives vs. the lives of people living on the margins.
"My students often ask me if I think their parents did wrong to pay the $44,000 per year that it costs to send them to Princeton. I respond that paying that much for a place at an elite university is not justified unless it is seen as an investment in the future that will benefit not only one’s child, but others as well. An outstanding education provides students with the skills, qualifications, and understanding to do more for the world than would otherwise be the case."
"I guess basically one wants to feel that one’s life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one’s done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: What greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?"
I was first introduced to Singer's Drowning Child argument in Joshua Greene's class my freshman year. It goes like this: If you see a child drowning in a lake, do you have an obligation to wade in to save him/her? Even if you will ruin your nice clothes? Singer continues: “Would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost — and absolutely no danger — to yourself?” Most answer it would make no difference, thus illuminating a huge moral inconsistency. This book tackles every argument that could be made against giving life-saving aid whenever you can, as well as reinforcing just how disparate the effects of a few dollars can be on reducing suffering in wealthy American lives vs. the lives of people living on the margins.
"My students often ask me if I think their parents did wrong to pay the $44,000 per year that it costs to send them to Princeton. I respond that paying that much for a place at an elite university is not justified unless it is seen as an investment in the future that will benefit not only one’s child, but others as well. An outstanding education provides students with the skills, qualifications, and understanding to do more for the world than would otherwise be the case."
"I guess basically one wants to feel that one’s life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one’s done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: What greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?"
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I listened to audiobook for the 10th anniversary edition, which was recently published and is available for free on http://thelifeyoucansave.org. Each chapter is read by a different celebrity.
I had to pause the audiobook multiple times to think about the arguments I'd just read and consider how they made me feel and what they made me think. I nearly cried more than once while reading this book due to being moved by acts of generosity in it.
This will likely be the most impactful book I've read/listened to in quite a while and will read for a while. I'm not yet sure the extent to which this book will influence my actions, but I have some ideas for what I'll be doing next and how I might adjust the resources I commit to giving. I'm feeling very inspired.
Please read this book and consider what is within it.
I had to pause the audiobook multiple times to think about the arguments I'd just read and consider how they made me feel and what they made me think. I nearly cried more than once while reading this book due to being moved by acts of generosity in it.
This will likely be the most impactful book I've read/listened to in quite a while and will read for a while. I'm not yet sure the extent to which this book will influence my actions, but I have some ideas for what I'll be doing next and how I might adjust the resources I commit to giving. I'm feeling very inspired.
Please read this book and consider what is within it.
This book will make you think of poverty in a whole new life. It is filled with interesting philosophical questions and tips on what you can do to help, and reasons why you probably won't!
This book leaves me feeling very conflicted. On one hand, Singer’s proposition is very simple: why not take the insane excess resources many of us accumulate in life and redirect it to the most impactful ways to alleviate suffering across the world? On the other, why the focus on individuals and not on systems? Can this rigidly utilitarian view give us a way to make complex trades offs between things like preventing blindness or preventing the erosion of democracy? I think everyone can of course do more immediately in the world we currently live in (because obviously capitalist exploitation won’t be stopped overnight), but the ideas taken to their extreme here won’t eradicate suffering. It would just have better bandaids and palliative treatments for the ills of the world rather than getting at root causes. I’d like to see more ideas where individual giving can work in parallel with addressing structural issues that lead to extreme poverty.
I wanted to read this book after watching this video https://youtu.be/KVl5kMXz1vA, which was a really good summary of the argument of this book.
Peter Singer takes an extreme position that if most individuals in affluent countries must donate a significant portion of their income to foreign aid or they are doing something wrong. He reaches this conclusion by the following premises
1. Suffering and death for preventable reasons like lack of food, shelter, and medical care is bad
2. If it is in your power to prevent something bad by sacrificing something less important, it is wrong not to do this
3. By donating to effective charities, we can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care by sacrificing something less important (excess income on luxuries) than what is gained (life, prevention of suffering, etc).
Conclusion: If you do not donate to effective foreign aid charities, you are doing something wrong.
Singer also explains this through a hypothetical example in which you imagine that you see a drowning child in a pond with nobody else around. Here you have two options: you can jump in and save the child, which would ruin the expensive suit your are wearing, or do nothing. Obviously everyone would agree that we should save the child, since what we lose is obviously much less valuable than what is gained. But as seen in the argument above, similar reasoning can be used to justify donation to foreign aid.
Most of the book is spent giving evidence for this argument, but Singer also does a good job of discussing many possible counterarguments to these premises. When looking online at reviews of the book I saw many critiques of this argument which initially sound strong. However, all of them and more were addressed in the book, which makes me feel like we were reading different books entirely. This might actually be true since I'm reading the 10th anniversary edition, which I believe is the latest edition.
Giving
Singer argues that individuals in affluent countries shouldn't utilize their income to provide themselves with luxuries that give them small amounts of pleasure, but donate it to those in poverty. These "luxuries" range from just buying bottled water over tap, spending hundreds or thousands on vacations, new/fancy clothes, or concerts, to the superrich spending millions on yachts and expensive properties. Instead, we can use this money to help those in poverty for surprisingly low cost. If we don't do this, we are implicitly valuing affluence in our own lives over basic needs of others.
Understanding this, we should donate to charities are the most effective at using donations to provide impact. We can find trusted, high impact charities by using charity evaluators like https://www.givewell.org/ and https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/, the latter being created after this book's publication. We should then do research in what the most cost effective ways we can help people are. There are plenty examples given in the book, but some include
- preventing malaria in African children through donations of cheap bed netting, which costs about $3.40 per child
- Educating through radio broadcast about symptoms of malaria, pneumonia, and other diseases, which is projected to cost $196 per life saved
- 3/4ths of the world's blind or visually impaired people can be cured with a $50 cataract surgery. This issue is something that only occurs in low-income countries rather than rich ones due to poor quality, sanitation, and malnutrition
Singer makes an emphasis on donating to the most cost effective solutions. For instance, while donating to help Americans in poverty is also a good thing, it's likely that donating to foreign aid will allow us to help more people for the same cost. We have all heard that those in poverty survive on $2 a day, but what I didn't realize before reading this book is that this figure doesn't mean that people live on 2 USD in a poor country where the money would be worth more, but literally the equivalent on $2 a day in the U.S. with all the U.S prices. Understanding this, we can see how donating to those in poverty in poorer countries can cause our money to have more impact.
An interesting calculation that was brought up is donating your kidney. Donating a kidney is a very safe operation, with only about 1/7500 chance in death during surgery or complications after it. Because of this, if you do not want to donate your kidney, you value your own life 7500 more than another person who needs it. While it may seem crazy, it apparently has convinced some of Singer's students to donate their kidneys to those who need them.
Objections to Giving
Singer goes over many common objections to giving.
There is no universal moral code for everyone, we should accept everyone might see the issue of if we should donate differently
This is moral relativism, can be easily countered with an example where if you object to someone who is abusing a cat, they could reply with, "well everyone is entitled to their own beliefs". We should reject moral relativism and try to find universal moral principles, like that abusing cats for no reason is bad.
Someone who works hard for what they have has the right to spend it on their own happiness
The idea of reward for effort seems fair, but you should consider how this argument would imply that those who are in poverty must not be working nearly as hard as you for a reward. We should understand that we are privileged to be born in a developed country, which in itself is a reward that many people in poverty would trade everything for. In fact, being a middle class person in America already puts you at the richest 2% of the global population.
An interesting point brought up is that 90% of our wealth in affluent countries comes from "social capital", which includes institutional wealth like good banking, police, power supply, road infrastructure, etc., which is a concept I thought was really interesting. Thus, just by being born into the social capital that comes with an affluent country, we are already "rewarded" with wealth unattainable to most people who work as hard as us.
Additionally, Singer agrees you have the "right" to spend your own money how you want. But he is arguing what he thinks you "should" do, not what you have the right to do. In the drowning child example, you have the right as a free individual to make the choice not to save the child, but Singer is trying to convince you that you ought to choose otherwise.
We don't have a duty to help others
Singer argues most people would agree that if you can help the drowning child for very little cost, you should. However, if you somehow disagree with even this, then you should at least agree that you should not actively harm others, even if you don't want to help them. For this, Singer gives various examples of how affluent nations have indirectly harmed low income countries, including industrial overfishing harming local fishers and global warming (which is mostly caused by industrialized nations) harming poorer countries disproportionately more than richer ones. After understanding that affluent nations have harmed poorer ones, we should agree that we should at least compensate them for what we have done.
We already give a lot to foreign aid through taxes
Only ~1% of the U.S. federal budget goes to foreign aid.
Philanthropy and poverty relief only address the symptoms, but not the underlying causes, of global poverty
If you think this is true, then you should actively work to fix whatever these "underlying causes" of global poverty are. For instance, if you think that countries need to bring themselves out of poverty through industrialization and infrastructure, then donate to charities that promote these. But if you believe that the underlying causes do not have a real chance of being achieved, then you should still donate to charity, since pointing out there are underlying causes for global poverty isn't an excuse to not save someone's life through your donation. We can all agree that systemically ending poverty is the best course of action, but relieving it and making individual's lives better is obviously better than doing nothing.
Self interest
Many psychological reasons for not donating to foreign aid are explained.
The first example is that in the drowning child example we have an identifiable victim, which is the child we see in front of us. However, when we donate to foreign aid we don't know to which individual it is going to, and this lack of connection makes us feel less interested in donating. This can be explained by the fact we have likely evolved to feel connections to individuals, not masses of people, causing us to feel an emotional connection to a singular individual over a statistic.
Another reason is called parochialism, where one cares about things closer to them rather than far off things, which causes people do donate to events that happen closer to them rather than far away ones. For instance, $6.5 billion was given by Americans to help those affected by Hurricane Katrina which killed 1,600 people, but $1.54 billion to a Tsunami in 2004 in Southeast Asia that killed around 220,000 people. Singer doesn't argue that helping those directly around us is inherently bad, but if are going to donate, we should probably donate to where our donation will have the most impact, which often is lower income countries. This parochialism is also an evolved characteristic, since we likely have evolved to form cooperative relationships with those close to us in our tribe, and not those far away.
People also don't donate since they see the obstacle of ending poverty as an impossible, futile task. Singer would argue there is clear evidence that it is not, since global poverty has been decreasing over the last decades. Additionally, if you are able to save a drowning child without stopping all drownings everywhere, you should still save this child.
Another reason discussed is that people realize that unlike our drowning child example, the responsibility isn't solely on them. In real life there are many people who could potentially donate, and it doesn't feel fair if they donate a significant portion of their income while others don't. This would have grounds in evolution since we have likely evolved to desire fair, cooperative relationships, and dislike it when we feel we are giving more than others. Singer argues that acting this way is like acting "like children who stamp their feet and say 'It's not fair!'" and will hear nothing further. Sometimes we should accept doing something that we think is unfair if it is the right thing to do.
Singer shows us that we have evolved to behave in a way the benefits our own self interest, but while this explains why we act a certain way, it doesn't mean we should. "Evolution has no moral direction", and we shouldn't use our evolved self interest to guide what we do. We should instead recognize that our self interest might lead us to act a certain way, but then use reason and logic to guide our morals, choosing whether to act in this self interested way or a possibly more ethical alternative.
How much to give
To follow this argument, we would have to keep giving until we are sacrificing something that is nearly as important as what or donation prevents. However, Singer very transparently acknowledges that this moral standard is very strict, and in order to create an argument that convinces people to act, he should accept less from his readers, so he sets the bar at around 5% of one's income for middle class individuals in affluent countries. He actually lays out specific donation amounts for each income bracket, and believes that donating his recommended amount of income at each income bracket shouldn't have any affect at all on your well being. I did somewhat disagree with this part since I felt the numbers provided were arbitrary, but I did like his attempt to give readers a more attainable goal than his high standards.
Conclusion
I found this book very convincing definitely opened my eyes to an issue I hadn't put much thought into before. From reading this and Animal Liberation, I think Singer is a great author who asks us to question our choices we make day to day, which is what philosophy is all about.
He lays out his argument in this book very simply in numbered order, which I appreciated, as he clearly values being extremely clear and transparent since he knows the more understandable his work is the more people will be convinced. One issue that I had with the book is that it did feel slightly mean spirited at times, like the frequent comparisons of those who choose to go to $700 concerts instead of donating. But I think this also might just be a defensive feeling that's caused by my way of life being put into question.
Peter Singer takes an extreme position that if most individuals in affluent countries must donate a significant portion of their income to foreign aid or they are doing something wrong. He reaches this conclusion by the following premises
1. Suffering and death for preventable reasons like lack of food, shelter, and medical care is bad
2. If it is in your power to prevent something bad by sacrificing something less important, it is wrong not to do this
3. By donating to effective charities, we can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care by sacrificing something less important (excess income on luxuries) than what is gained (life, prevention of suffering, etc).
Conclusion: If you do not donate to effective foreign aid charities, you are doing something wrong.
Singer also explains this through a hypothetical example in which you imagine that you see a drowning child in a pond with nobody else around. Here you have two options: you can jump in and save the child, which would ruin the expensive suit your are wearing, or do nothing. Obviously everyone would agree that we should save the child, since what we lose is obviously much less valuable than what is gained. But as seen in the argument above, similar reasoning can be used to justify donation to foreign aid.
Most of the book is spent giving evidence for this argument, but Singer also does a good job of discussing many possible counterarguments to these premises. When looking online at reviews of the book I saw many critiques of this argument which initially sound strong. However, all of them and more were addressed in the book, which makes me feel like we were reading different books entirely. This might actually be true since I'm reading the 10th anniversary edition, which I believe is the latest edition.
Giving
Singer argues that individuals in affluent countries shouldn't utilize their income to provide themselves with luxuries that give them small amounts of pleasure, but donate it to those in poverty. These "luxuries" range from just buying bottled water over tap, spending hundreds or thousands on vacations, new/fancy clothes, or concerts, to the superrich spending millions on yachts and expensive properties. Instead, we can use this money to help those in poverty for surprisingly low cost. If we don't do this, we are implicitly valuing affluence in our own lives over basic needs of others.
Understanding this, we should donate to charities are the most effective at using donations to provide impact. We can find trusted, high impact charities by using charity evaluators like https://www.givewell.org/ and https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/, the latter being created after this book's publication. We should then do research in what the most cost effective ways we can help people are. There are plenty examples given in the book, but some include
- preventing malaria in African children through donations of cheap bed netting, which costs about $3.40 per child
- Educating through radio broadcast about symptoms of malaria, pneumonia, and other diseases, which is projected to cost $196 per life saved
- 3/4ths of the world's blind or visually impaired people can be cured with a $50 cataract surgery. This issue is something that only occurs in low-income countries rather than rich ones due to poor quality, sanitation, and malnutrition
Singer makes an emphasis on donating to the most cost effective solutions. For instance, while donating to help Americans in poverty is also a good thing, it's likely that donating to foreign aid will allow us to help more people for the same cost. We have all heard that those in poverty survive on $2 a day, but what I didn't realize before reading this book is that this figure doesn't mean that people live on 2 USD in a poor country where the money would be worth more, but literally the equivalent on $2 a day in the U.S. with all the U.S prices. Understanding this, we can see how donating to those in poverty in poorer countries can cause our money to have more impact.
An interesting calculation that was brought up is donating your kidney. Donating a kidney is a very safe operation, with only about 1/7500 chance in death during surgery or complications after it. Because of this, if you do not want to donate your kidney, you value your own life 7500 more than another person who needs it. While it may seem crazy, it apparently has convinced some of Singer's students to donate their kidneys to those who need them.
Objections to Giving
Singer goes over many common objections to giving.
There is no universal moral code for everyone, we should accept everyone might see the issue of if we should donate differently
This is moral relativism, can be easily countered with an example where if you object to someone who is abusing a cat, they could reply with, "well everyone is entitled to their own beliefs". We should reject moral relativism and try to find universal moral principles, like that abusing cats for no reason is bad.
Someone who works hard for what they have has the right to spend it on their own happiness
The idea of reward for effort seems fair, but you should consider how this argument would imply that those who are in poverty must not be working nearly as hard as you for a reward. We should understand that we are privileged to be born in a developed country, which in itself is a reward that many people in poverty would trade everything for. In fact, being a middle class person in America already puts you at the richest 2% of the global population.
An interesting point brought up is that 90% of our wealth in affluent countries comes from "social capital", which includes institutional wealth like good banking, police, power supply, road infrastructure, etc., which is a concept I thought was really interesting. Thus, just by being born into the social capital that comes with an affluent country, we are already "rewarded" with wealth unattainable to most people who work as hard as us.
Additionally, Singer agrees you have the "right" to spend your own money how you want. But he is arguing what he thinks you "should" do, not what you have the right to do. In the drowning child example, you have the right as a free individual to make the choice not to save the child, but Singer is trying to convince you that you ought to choose otherwise.
We don't have a duty to help others
Singer argues most people would agree that if you can help the drowning child for very little cost, you should. However, if you somehow disagree with even this, then you should at least agree that you should not actively harm others, even if you don't want to help them. For this, Singer gives various examples of how affluent nations have indirectly harmed low income countries, including industrial overfishing harming local fishers and global warming (which is mostly caused by industrialized nations) harming poorer countries disproportionately more than richer ones. After understanding that affluent nations have harmed poorer ones, we should agree that we should at least compensate them for what we have done.
We already give a lot to foreign aid through taxes
Only ~1% of the U.S. federal budget goes to foreign aid.
Philanthropy and poverty relief only address the symptoms, but not the underlying causes, of global poverty
If you think this is true, then you should actively work to fix whatever these "underlying causes" of global poverty are. For instance, if you think that countries need to bring themselves out of poverty through industrialization and infrastructure, then donate to charities that promote these. But if you believe that the underlying causes do not have a real chance of being achieved, then you should still donate to charity, since pointing out there are underlying causes for global poverty isn't an excuse to not save someone's life through your donation. We can all agree that systemically ending poverty is the best course of action, but relieving it and making individual's lives better is obviously better than doing nothing.
Self interest
Many psychological reasons for not donating to foreign aid are explained.
The first example is that in the drowning child example we have an identifiable victim, which is the child we see in front of us. However, when we donate to foreign aid we don't know to which individual it is going to, and this lack of connection makes us feel less interested in donating. This can be explained by the fact we have likely evolved to feel connections to individuals, not masses of people, causing us to feel an emotional connection to a singular individual over a statistic.
Another reason is called parochialism, where one cares about things closer to them rather than far off things, which causes people do donate to events that happen closer to them rather than far away ones. For instance, $6.5 billion was given by Americans to help those affected by Hurricane Katrina which killed 1,600 people, but $1.54 billion to a Tsunami in 2004 in Southeast Asia that killed around 220,000 people. Singer doesn't argue that helping those directly around us is inherently bad, but if are going to donate, we should probably donate to where our donation will have the most impact, which often is lower income countries. This parochialism is also an evolved characteristic, since we likely have evolved to form cooperative relationships with those close to us in our tribe, and not those far away.
People also don't donate since they see the obstacle of ending poverty as an impossible, futile task. Singer would argue there is clear evidence that it is not, since global poverty has been decreasing over the last decades. Additionally, if you are able to save a drowning child without stopping all drownings everywhere, you should still save this child.
Another reason discussed is that people realize that unlike our drowning child example, the responsibility isn't solely on them. In real life there are many people who could potentially donate, and it doesn't feel fair if they donate a significant portion of their income while others don't. This would have grounds in evolution since we have likely evolved to desire fair, cooperative relationships, and dislike it when we feel we are giving more than others. Singer argues that acting this way is like acting "like children who stamp their feet and say 'It's not fair!'" and will hear nothing further. Sometimes we should accept doing something that we think is unfair if it is the right thing to do.
Singer shows us that we have evolved to behave in a way the benefits our own self interest, but while this explains why we act a certain way, it doesn't mean we should. "Evolution has no moral direction", and we shouldn't use our evolved self interest to guide what we do. We should instead recognize that our self interest might lead us to act a certain way, but then use reason and logic to guide our morals, choosing whether to act in this self interested way or a possibly more ethical alternative.
How much to give
To follow this argument, we would have to keep giving until we are sacrificing something that is nearly as important as what or donation prevents. However, Singer very transparently acknowledges that this moral standard is very strict, and in order to create an argument that convinces people to act, he should accept less from his readers, so he sets the bar at around 5% of one's income for middle class individuals in affluent countries. He actually lays out specific donation amounts for each income bracket, and believes that donating his recommended amount of income at each income bracket shouldn't have any affect at all on your well being. I did somewhat disagree with this part since I felt the numbers provided were arbitrary, but I did like his attempt to give readers a more attainable goal than his high standards.
Conclusion
I found this book very convincing definitely opened my eyes to an issue I hadn't put much thought into before. From reading this and Animal Liberation, I think Singer is a great author who asks us to question our choices we make day to day, which is what philosophy is all about.
He lays out his argument in this book very simply in numbered order, which I appreciated, as he clearly values being extremely clear and transparent since he knows the more understandable his work is the more people will be convinced. One issue that I had with the book is that it did feel slightly mean spirited at times, like the frequent comparisons of those who choose to go to $700 concerts instead of donating. But I think this also might just be a defensive feeling that's caused by my way of life being put into question.
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
Clear, straightforward, and a quick read. But in some ways not easy to read. Peter Singer certainly succeeded at making me think about the considerable privileges and luxuries I enjoy compared with the majority of the world's population, and how I could be doing more to alleviate suffering.