Donate money, not time
When most people think about giving, they gravitate toward volunteering their time. I’ve seen friends of mine put together long lists of organizations to work for, ask friends for volunteering opportunities, and brainstorm ways to make use of their professional skills.
But in most cases, the best thing they can do is to just donate their money.
We live in a world where $2500 — about 50 hours of wages for a typical professional in tech — will save someone's life. For comparison, how much impact will you have had by volunteering those 50 hours instead?
Using this framework (let’s call it “50 volunteer hours vs 1 life saved” — you can plug in a different number if your wage differs), it’s difficult to think of ways in which 50 hours of your time does more than saving someone’s life. I can think of just a few — certain forms of scientific or policy research, or work around managing the charitable donations of others — but these are exceptions, not the rule. In most cases, you can make a bigger impact by donating money.
To simplify the decision even further, donating money is now really easy and really reliable. There’s never been a time in human history in which we’ve had a more robust giving infrastructure than we do now: today, you can have confidence that the $2500 you donate will (i) actually go to an underfunded charity, (ii) actually purchase deworming pills, malaria nets, or vitamin supplements, and (iii) actually be delivered to the hands of recipients in need. In the end, you can have more certainty than ever that your donation will have saved someone’s life.
(I want to call out Givewell for producing some of the most rigorous and high quality research around charities I’ve ever seen. Their research covers not just the effectiveness of each charity, but also financial factors like cost structure and ability to absorb additional funding. I’m not affiliated with Givewell.)
The “donate money instead of time” approach results in certain unintuitive conclusions. For example, rather than volunteering to tutor a student free of charge, you should tutor for money and donate that money:
50 hours of free tutoring -> student gets an “A” instead of “B” in geometry class
50 hours of paid tutoring at $50 per hour -> $2500 -> save someone’s life
But ultimately, the tradeoff is clear: donating money will usually lead to a bigger positive impact.
Other thoughts
A common objection I hear is that the $2500 does not save the life of someone your city, but rather in another country. Implicit to this objection is the idea that people who are geographically closer to you are more valuable than people farther away.
This ultimately comes down to what I call your “local preference ratio” — the ratio at which you prefer helping people around you over people farther away.
If your local preference ratio is less than 1000, this article mostly holds true. If it’s much higher than that, it could make more sense to support people locally instead of overseas.
This article was written for other white-collar professionals working in developed countries. From a global perspective, we are incredibly privileged (and lucky to have even the luxury of writing an article like this). One of the few things we ought to do is to give back, and to do so in a thoughtful way.
I am by no means discouraging of volunteering time. This article was written with a focus on impact maximization, as opposed to personal fulfillment or learning.
Further, I believe that time is fundamentally the only thing people have, and I respect people who give it to helping others. Any form of giving — whether time or money — is one of the most wonderful things you can do in this world.