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Get Happier, Help Others: Some Good Ideas About Giving
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- [00:12]
Jacob Goldstein
I'm Jacob Goldstein. I host a Pushkin podcast called what's yous Problem? And I am here randomly talking to you right now because today is the day before Giving Tuesday. Giving Tuesday, as you may already know, is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. And it's supposed to be the day we give money to charity. And I'm gonna be honest with you, in my middle aged, somewhat calcified heart, I cringe a little bit every time I hear the phrase Giving Tuesday. I think Giving Tuesday is not a real thing. It's not a real day. It's just something somebody made up a few years ago. But that cynicism is not helping anybody. In fact, as it turns out, it isn't even helping me. I know this to be true because over the past decade or so, research has made two things really clear. One, giving money away makes us feel better than we think it will make us feel. In other words, we underestimate the benefit to ourselves of giving money to others. That's thing one. Thing two is this. There are charities that are proven proven by really robust evidence to do a tremendous amount of good with the money we give them. So today, I and my colleagues at Pushkin are leaning into Giving Tuesday. We are putting out this special Giving Tuesday show to get into this evidence, to really understand why giving money makes us happy, why we don't do it more, and who we should give money to. To start out on the show, I'm going to talk with Lori Santos. Lori is a Yale psychologist who hosts a Pushkin show called the Happiness Lab. And Lori and I are going to talk about the evidence that shows that giving makes us happy and then the OB puzzle that follows from that evidence. If giving makes us so happy, why don't we give more? Later on the show, I'll talk with Ellie Hassenfeld. Ellie is the co founder and CEO of GiveWell, and he has spent nearly two decades scouring the world, studying the research to try to figure out which charities do the most good with every dollar. And then finally, I'll talk with Maria Konnikova and Nate Silver. Maria and Nate are a pair of writers who host a Pushkin podcast called Risky Business. But they're also both professional poker players. They are people whose livelihoods depend on making optimal bets. So I'll be talking to them about how they bring that thinking to their charitable giving. Laurie Santos, tell me why I am not giving enough money to charity.
- [02:52]
Lori Santos
Well, it's probably because your mind is leading you astray, right? I mean, you're like a smart person, right? You probably think through, like, what would be the pros and cons of giving to charity? You probably do some simulations in your head about how it would feel for you and, you know, how the recipients of that money would feel. And there's just tons of psychological evidence showing that when we do those simulations, we get them really, really wrong.
- [03:15]
Jacob Goldstein
Huh. We don't know what makes us happy with giving money. As with everything.
- [03:20]
Lori Santos
As with everything. Yeah. I mean, in some ways, the giving money part shouldn't be surprising. You know, I have a whole podcast about how we get happiness wrong all the time. But this one's really insidious because it means that we're, like, leaving opportunities not just to make ourselves happier kind of on the table, but we're also leaving opportunities to just do good in the world and do good in society on the table, too. So in some ways, it's, like, even sadder.
- [03:41]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Yeah.
- [03:41]
Jacob Goldstein
Like, people talk about, win, win. This is like, lose, lose, Right. I feel worse, and everybody feels worse.
- [03:46]
Lori Santos
And it's another case where we could be building the pie, right? You know, say. Say I have 10 bucks sitting around in my pocket. I could spend it in a way that makes me happy, or I could donate it to a good cause. I probably feel better. The research would show spending that $10 on a good charity than I would feel kind of blowing it on myself. But now the money is going to increase happiness in other people. Right. Presumably somebody who really needed that money. And so we're losing these opportunities to grow the pie, and we really just need to understand this bias better so that we can be happier.
- [04:19]
Jacob Goldstein
So you alluded to the research that shows that giving money away makes us happier. Tell me more about that. Like, what is the academic work that's been done on this subject?
- [04:27]
Lori Santos
Yeah, well, there's tons of studies now. You know, one of my favorite is a really straightforward one. It comes out of the lab of Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia. And their method is really straightforward. They walk up to some person on the street and they say, hey, do you wanna be in a psych study? I think the person kind of begrudgingly is like, okay, fine. But then it turns out it's an awesome psych study because Liz and her colleagues just hand you 20 bucks and you're like, cool. The key, though, is that she tells you how to spend that money. She either says, hey, by the end of the day, do something nice for yourself with this money. Treat yourself, you know, to something you wouldn't have expected, or by the End of the day, do something nice with this money for somebody else, right? You could donate it to charity. You could buy your friend a latte, right? It doesn't matter, but it has to be for somebody else. And then the key is that she calls participants later that day and even in some cases, later in the week. And what she finds is that people tend to feel happier when they donate the money to somebody else or do something nice for somebody else with the money, more so than they feel when they felt spent the equivalent amount of money on themselves. And this study I love because it's just so straightforward. It just suggests that, you know, what we predict will happen, right? And Liz has actually done these studies where she asks a different group of participants, hey, imagine you're in the study where I walked up to you on the street and gave you 20 bucks. Would you be happier spending that on yourself or somebody else? And like, robustly, people say, oh, I'd be happier spending on myself, right? Because I get something out of the deal. But what she finds is that we're just. Our prediction is just totally wrong. When we spend on others, we're happier.
- [05:55]
Jacob Goldstein
So I feel like there's a subtlety there in the spending on others group, right? Like, it is in some ways more intuitive to me that, like, whatever, buying lunch for my friend would make me happy because my friend would be so happy and we'd be happy together, and the thing would be happening in this very, you know, social, real, physical way. Like, I get that one. It seems less obvious to me that, like, giving 20 bucks to a charity helping people in sub Saharan Africa would make me happy. Even though clearly, intellectually, analytically, I know that the 20 bucks going to sub Saharan Africa is going to do more to increase abstract human happiness than buying lunch for my friend who could have bought lunch for herself. So, like, how does that piece of it work? How do we think about that piece of it?
- [06:45]
Lori Santos
You are onto an important point, which is that there are better and worse ways to give to charity, right? In terms of, like, boosting our own happiness and sort of feeling the impact from that. We are a lot happier if we can see the impact of our work, right? But even when we don't see the impact of our work, the act of donating winds up making us feel better than we think. Again, I share the intuition that you have, Jacob, right? Like, I know these studies, I can kind of quote the stats, and I still don't have the intuition that it works. But the results really just suggest that we feel better than we assume we will.
- [07:17]
Jacob Goldstein
Why do you think we get it wrong? I mean, I know we get everything wrong, but why do you think we get this wrong?
- [07:21]
Lori Santos
Yeah, I mean, we get everything wrong. Right. Our minds. I wish we could just, like, Update, like, mind 2.0. It'd be so much better. I think there's some reasons that we get this one wrong. One is sort of when we're doing an act of kindness, what we focus on as opposed to what the recipient will focus on. Right. I'm sort of focused on whether or not my gift is kind of, in some sense, competent. Like, am I doing the right thing? Am I picking the right charity? Maybe in more local acts of kindness, am I doing it the right way? Right. Yeah.
- [07:50]
Jacob Goldstein
I don't want to be awkward. I don't want to be rude or make this person feel some sense of obligation or reciprocity that might not work for them. You over overthinking it. You're saying we're overthinking it, but in.
- [08:01]
Lori Santos
Terms of the overthinking, that's not what's happening on the other side. You know, think of the recipient of a compliment, right? If, you know, if someone walks up to you on the street, he's like, hey, you know, love those glasses. They really suit you, Jacob. Like, nicely done. You're not thinking.
- [08:13]
Ellie Hassenfeld
You're just, I didn't even mean it.
- [08:14]
Jacob Goldstein
And I like it.
- [08:15]
Lori Santos
But you're not thinking of, like, did they say it right? Did they use the right adjective? Was it cool glasses or stylish? You're just like, oh, my gosh, I'm surprised. And I have this incredible warm feeling. And so this is part of the disconnect is that when we're making the decision to do something nice, we're overthinking. We're caught up in if we're doing it right and so on. But the recipients, they don't feel any of that. They're just like, oh, my gosh, I feel amazing. And so we kind of mispredict what they're paying attention to when they react. And that means their reactions are often a lot more positive than we expect. And then we're like, oh, I guess. I guess it was nice to do that kind thing for somebody.
- [08:51]
Jacob Goldstein
It's the broader lesson of, like, everybody's just thinking about themselves all the time. We're thinking about ourselves as givers. And am I the optimal giver? Am I giving in the optimal way? But the recipients aren't thinking about you, they're just thinking about them.
- [09:03]
Lori Santos
Yeah. And we get so caught up in the awkwardness of it. Right. You know, how many compliments have you not given just because you're like, oh, I don't want to do it wrong or seem weird? And some of Nick Epley, who's a professor at the University of Chicago's data, he finds that about a third of the compliments we think in our heads, we don't actually tell the people around us. Right. Which, when you think compliments usually are received really well, make people's day. It's like a lot of positivity that's just like stuck inside people's heads that we're not giving out.
- [09:31]
Jacob Goldstein
Friction seems like another interesting piece, right? There's like, you're in your own head too much. And the other core piece is like, eh, I don't know, I'm just some guy in the world. How do I figure out who to give to? And like, I feel like that one is underrated in the world in general. Right. Like, we just. We're like water. We just flow to the easiest route. I mean, how do you see that playing out in charity more generally? In giving more generally?
- [09:55]
Lori Santos
Yeah, I mean, I think that friction is a huge thing, right? I mean, a good friend of mine just had a baby with his wife, and my instant reaction was like, oh my gosh, I should. I should do something nice for them. Maybe I'll get them some food or some onesies or something. But I was like, do I just show up at their house? Like, do they have any dietary restrictions that I'm forgetting about? Is this weird? Like, all. Again, all this overthinking in my head? But another good friend of ours was like, I'm setting up a meal train. Here's the date. You click on this link, it's super easy. Write what you're going to give him. If it's a lasagna, whatever, here's how you drop it off. She just made it really easy for me to do the nice thing that I was thinking about doing anyway. I needed somebody to make that friction go away for me to help. And so I think there's so many cases of this in terms of what we could do to do nice things for others, whether that's with a charitable donation or even just like asking a friend if they need some support or checking in on the people we care about, sharing compliments and so on, the friction kind of gets in the way. And I think this is the idea, is that we can overcome the friction by kind of reducing how much work it is for us. To do the nice thing, right? Sometimes the next thing is just texting a friend or you're already there, you know, like, you know, in the subway and you compliment somebody who's walking by, right? These are the kinds of things that we can do quickly. And if we do them enough, then there's a second way that we can reduce friction, which is that it just kind of becomes a habit, right? If we just get in the habit of doing this over and over again, doing more and more nice things, then all of a sudden it just becomes easier. Because so much that we know about human psych, even though we're kind of in the crappy beta version, shows that when we do something over and over again, it just becomes easier to do that same thing. And so one of the Giving Tuesday practices that I talk about on my show, the Happiness Lab, is just, hey, practice doing nice things, and it will make it easier. You'll kind of experience less friction over time just because, like, it's just the thing you do when you see somebody at work who is wearing something nice or they do something great in a team meeting, you'll just get good at expressing compliments, expressing gratitude. It'll just become second nature to you.
- [11:57]
Jacob Goldstein
So you have this project through your show, the Happiness Lab, of giving money away, like, built on this premise that we're talking about, that not only would recipients be better if people gave more, but that givers themselves would be better if people gave more. You have this project that you do every year for Giving Tuesday, which is coming up. Tell me about that project.
- [12:20]
Lori Santos
Yeah. So the site that we've worked with is this group called givingmultiplier.org and their goal is to fight a different kind of thing that can go wrong when we think about donating to charities, which is that many of us really do want to be kind of competent about it. We want our money to go to really good causes in the world, but we also kind of fall prey to the causes that feel really close to my heart. Right. You know, like, I might want to give to my local food bank, which is great. You know, it's good to do that. But that 10 bucks I give to my local food bank, it might not have as much impact as giving to somebody, maybe in extreme poverty in sub Saharan Africa. I haven't really analyzed is my local food bank doing the best with the money and so on. And so givingmultiplier.org has this really nice combination of, they say, okay, you really feel compelled to give to your food bank, but what if you gave just part of that ten bucks to one of these so called super effective charities, they've done the research. They're like the dollar that you give from that 10 bucks to the super effective charity is gonna go even further. And so they kind of allow you to make this distinction between your heart and what you kind of really feel locally. The kind of things that make you feel good. Cause you can see the impact in your community versus what's doing the best work out there. And givingmultiplier.org this year has picked a really great super effective charity, which is called Give Directly. This is this group that just gives these unconditional cash transfers, like no strings attached, like CAS bonus to people living in extreme poverty.
- [13:49]
Jacob Goldstein
And there's a happiness lab URL, right? Shout it out, shout it from the rooftops. What is it?
- [13:55]
Lori Santos
It's givingmultiplier.org HappinessLab Super Easy Go right now.
- [14:00]
Jacob Goldstein
Phones are open, operators are standing by.
- [14:03]
Lori Santos
You know, and one of the things we've seen is that a lot of our listeners will donate five bucks, three bucks in some cases. But those kinds of donations really add up. And especially if part of your donation is going to one of these super effective charities, like that dollar is going a really long way.
- [14:20]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah, I'll say. And I know like analyzing super effective charities ends up being about like randomized controlled trials, which is great, like real evidence. But I will say that I actually, for a story I did 10 years ago or so, I went to Kenya to a village where givedirectly was giving money. And I saw how profound the impact is. I mean, as people get $1,000 at least at that time, no strings attached. And like I talked to a guy who bought a motorcycle so that he could start a motorcycle taxi business, right? So it's not just like they buy food and then the money runs out. It's people have no capital, they have no money. And so getting $1,000 allows them to make these investments that can change their lives forever.
- [15:05]
Lori Santos
Yeah, we saw that last year where we really focused on give directly in particular and one community specifically. So we worked with this community, Kabobo in Rwanda, which is a tiny village just on the outside of Kigali, the capital. But they just, like most of the people in the community, live off less than a dollar a day. And just like you're saying, they just lack so many of the basic conveniences that we take for granted, right? They have to hike two hours to get access to water, and then the water comes back and it's like, are you going to drink some water? Are you going to give your kid a shower? Right. There's no access to schools and these kinds of things. And last year, happiness lab listeners were able to generate over $100,000 for this community in particular. And so, just like you were saying, givedirectly was able to give each person in the community $1,000 unconditional cash transfer. And the money went to things like motorbikes. Like you mentioned, fixing roofs, buying mattresses. Right. Most of the people in kabobo were sleeping on the floor. They just didn't have access to a mattress. But some people did these really creative things that. One of the things I didn't expect is that one of the couples that got the cash transfer bought a pub, which you might think like, huh, they got a pub.
- [16:10]
Jacob Goldstein
A pub. Like a bar?
- [16:12]
Lori Santos
Like a bar. They bought a bar, basically.
- [16:13]
Jacob Goldstein
I love that. Yeah.
- [16:13]
Lori Santos
But the bar, like, wound up employing people in the community. It became this community hub where people could get together with each other at night, and it's generated more income for them. So now they're turning kind of the side of their pub that they put together into a little mini grocery store, which is one of the first spots that people can buy food in town so that they don't have to leave town. And so it's like, if you leave it up to people's ingenuity, they kind of come up with these interesting things.
- [16:38]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah. I mean, there's a really simple idea. Like, the reason I wanted to do that story all those years ago is, like, people know what they need, right? Like, they know if they need food or a motorcycle or a roof, they just don't have the money. So, like, if you give them the money, they can buy what they need. That's the great thing about money.
- [16:58]
Lori Santos
Yeah. And this is something we forget with gifts in general. I think this comes up in charity, but there's also work. You know, giving Tuesday is sort of the prelude to other holidays and gift giving moments coming up. And it's just something we get wrong all the time. Like, we want to be able to come up with the creative gift for somebody. But one of the best ways to figure out the best gift is to just ask people, what do you want? And if you buy someone that thing, they're gonna be happy because that was what they wanted.
- [17:23]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah. It goes back to the, like, we're thinking about ourselves. Right. Even when we're giving gifts, this notionally, you know, other focused thing, we're actually like, oh, am I a good gift giver. Am I a good. It's just ego. It's just, we're just screwing ourselves with our ego, as always.
- [17:39]
Lori Santos
Yeah.
- [17:41]
Jacob Goldstein
It was great to talk with you, Laurie. It was truly a delightful conversation. Thank you.
- [17:46]
Lori Santos
This is super. Thanks for sharing the love on Giving Tuesday.
- [17:51]
Jacob Goldstein
Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale and the host of the Happiness Lab. They have a whole episode on the psychology of generosity coming out this week. We'll be back in a minute with my conversation with Ellie Hassenfeld, who spent nearly two decades scouring the planet to find the most effective ways to spend money on other people. Okay, so Laurie Santos explained convincingly that giving away money makes us feel good. So now the question is, who do we give the money to? That is basically the question that Elie Hassenfeld asked himself almost 20 years ago. It's a question that led him to co found GiveWell where he's now the CEO. And it's a question that in some really interesting ways, as you will hear, has started to change the way charities themselves think about what they do. To start, I asked Ellie how he came to found GiveWell in the first place.
- [19:05]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Back in 2006, I was a couple years out of college working at a hedge fund and a friend, Holden Karnofsky, and I wanted to give to charity. And at the time we were trying to give a few thousand bucks away and we wanted to find charitable organizations that were getting a lot of bang for their buck. And when we went looking online for information, we just couldn't find great information about what charities do and how well it works. We heard a lot about the overhead ratio, how much do they spend on administration versus programs, but nothing that said this is what they're doing and this is how many people they'll help with their programs. We spent months trying to answer this question. The two of us got a little bit obsessed with it and eventually after about a year of working on this project, left our jobs to start GiveWell as a full time project. And the idea was to create the resource that we had been looking for as donors.
- [19:58]
Jacob Goldstein
Well, and there is this interesting sort of broader idea in the charity world, right. In the philanthropic world, which is what are they measuring? You know, you can have a charity that builds schools and they might tell you how many schools they build, but presumably you're not actually giving money to build the school. Right. You're giving money so that children get a better education. And so I'm curious, I mean, as you started to look deeper at the time, as you founded GiveWell, like, what was just the basic landscape of measurement within the charity world.
- [20:35]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Like, it's just really hard to get information about the outcomes that we cared about that I think donors ultimately do care about. And those outcomes would be things like, do you save children's lives if you are providing funds for health programs, if you're trying to reduce poverty, do you increase people's income so that they can buy more of the kinds of things that they want? I would say that, by and large, this information was not available. When we were calling up organizations and asking them for information, they were often shocked that anyone would be even asking a question like this, because it was just in 2006, 2007, it was completely unusual that someone would be wondering about, like, what. What is the program actually accomplishing? What is the impact that it's having on the world?
- [21:26]
Jacob Goldstein
I mean, is it almost a rude question? Was it almost like, look, we're spending our lives helping these people. We're. We're giving them cows. We're building clinics. Like, who are you? What. What are you asking about? Why? Where do you come off asking these questions?
- [21:41]
Ellie Hassenfeld
I think it's definitely a. An odd question to ask. Something that I say a lot internally at GiveWell now is that, you know, we're the people who react skeptically to organizations saying, we're just trying to help people around the world. And we say, well, how do you know? And can you prove it? And, you know, that's not a socially normal thing to do, but I think it's necessary because, gosh, it's so hard to have an impact on people around the world. And asking those questions helps get better information so we can ensure that funding goes to the best place.
- [22:11]
Jacob Goldstein
So you do have this short list of top charities that seems kind of like the center of what you do in some way. Right? You've looked at all of these charities in the world, and you've landed on this very small number. Briefly, what are they?
- [22:27]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Yeah, so these top charities account for about two thirds of the funds we direct. There are four of them. One is the Against Malaria foundation, which delivers malaria nets in Africa. The second one is called Malaria Consortium, and we support their seasonal malaria chemo prevention program. That's a preventative malaria program, giving medicine to young children. The third one, and these are in no particular order, but the third one is Helen Keller International's vitamin A supplementation program. This is a program that gives a small amount of vitamin A to children under the age of five. And it is shown in numerous studies to reduce child mortality. And then finally New incentives, which is the organization that provides conditional cash transfer, small cash transfers to encourage immunization. You know, the top charities reflect, you know, roughly two thirds of the funds that we direct. And we see them as the, you know, really the tried and true. Like if you're a donor and you want to have a lot of impact and you want to have confidence in that impact, these are organizations that we have followed for many years and we have a lot of confidence in because they are, there's a lot of evidence that supports their impact.
- [23:37]
Jacob Goldstein
So how do you get from sort of generally being interested in charity and in, you know, research driven outcomes to specifically focusing on saving the lives of children in the developing world?
- [23:52]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Yeah, I mean, so at its core givewell is about finding outstanding programs that we can support with the aim of getting having the most impact with the funds that we direct. And when we started, we didn't know where we were going to find those programs. So we were looking at health programs focused on low income countries, but also social programs focused on New York City, where we lived at the time. So job training programs, education programs, et cetera. And after our first year of work where we were focused on both U.S. social programs and also global programs, we looked at the data and just saw how big the difference was in what a dollar could accomplish overseas versus at home. And just to make it concrete, you know, we, we estimate roughly, but I think it's the right ballpark, that five, five thousand or so dollars will avert the death of a young child in a low income country. That's about what it costs to put a child through school for a couple of years in a New York City charter school. And so that differential really showed us that the opportunities to use money to have a big impact on the world, we're stronger overseas and it drove us to focus our efforts there. We're finding the groups that are, I think importantly not sure that their own programs are working and so want to ensure that they're gathering the data so that they know where the programs are effective, where they're struggling, so that they can make changes to run those programs more effectively.
- [25:37]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah, I mean, so that's an interesting idea, right? Like that idea of the groups themselves being unsure. It requires a sense of what is the real end point. Right. I think quite often and reasonably, like things are clearly helpful. If you, whatever, give someone a cow and you know, training on how to take care of that cow, like pretty clearly that person is going to be better off than if you hadn't done it. And so it might not be obvious to say, oh, we need to measure, well, how much does it cost to give them the cow? How much better off are they? Are there things we could change that would be even more helpful? Like, most people clearly don't do that. Right? Most people in their jobs, in many domains are not constantly measuring and trying to optimize.
- [26:25]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Yeah, I mean, I just think the stakes are so high that it's just absolutely critical that there is a recognition that failure can happen and we have to do the best we can. Billions of dollars go to health aid every year, and the stakes are quite literally life and death. And so therefore, the difference between some of the best programs that can very roughly say, avert the death of a young child for approximately five to $10,000, and then other programs which could have very limited impact, I think in the worst case even cause harm. The measurement in that feedback loop to say this, we want to see whether it's working, we want to see the extent to which it's working, and we want to learn from what we've done so that we can do better. That's true for the organizations we work with. That's true for us as an organization. You know, we're trying to follow the same project of learning from our own track record and history to make better decisions in the future and hopefully help people even more. The groups that we work with most, and I think the kinds of people who are most drawn to what we're doing, whether it's donors or practitioners, are people whose, I think their interest, you know, the idea that they have, that we have, is to try to find the way to use charitable dollars to accomplish as much good as possible. And if that idea is preventing HIV in young children, then great. And if we can do better, if we can distribute oral rehydration solution to prevent deaths from diarrhea, or if we can encourage additional testing and treatment to prevent cases of tuberculosis in children. What I ultimately care about, the thing that's important to me is just helping children. And I'm not drawn to the specific cause or disease as much as the outcome, which is trying to enable more people to live long, healthy lives.
- [28:18]
Jacob Goldstein
I feel like traditionally philanthropy was largely about making donors feel good. And maybe it still is to some degree, the nature of human nature being what it is. But it seems like the growth of GiveWell and of sort of research driven philanthropy more generally has coincided with the long boom of Silicon Valley. Right. And it strikes me that the kind of people who get rich in tech, are more numerically driven, are more metrics oriented perhaps than earlier generations of rich people. And that that might be sort of part of what is going on, part of the wind at your back, part of the rise of research driven philanthropy. Do you buy that?
- [29:10]
Ellie Hassenfeld
I think there's a kind of person in tech and also in parts of finance. Those are the two sectors from which we draw most of our donors who have, I think their perspective that they take on the world is one. We know that there's a lot we can be wrong about. We know there can be big differences in the investments we make or the decisions we make as a company leader. We also know that we can be wrong and we want to learn about how to do it better. And I do think we see that coming out of those industries and it's a big part of what, you know, has helped us grow to the size that we are today.
- [29:49]
Jacob Goldstein
So you were mentioning that when you first started out and you were calling up charities and saying, what evidence do you have that you're actually helping people, basically? And they would say, how dare you? Who are you? Why are you asking me this? I'm spending my life helping people. What do they say now when you call them up? Has that changed?
- [30:10]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Very practically, it's changed for us because when I was calling people up almost 20 years ago, I was offering them a thousand bucks. And, you know, now we have a lot of funding to give and so that does make them more responsive.
- [30:22]
Jacob Goldstein
Oh, that's interesting. So there's a sort of pull. So basically, because you're directing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, organizations have an incentive to be more research based.
- [30:31]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Yeah, I mean, very fundamentally, you know, there's a, there's a problem, so to speak, in the charitable market where the person deciding to open their wallet is not the person who's ultimately receiving the service. So there's a disconnect between the recipient and the giver. Where in the consumer market that we're used to, you know, I purchase my laptop and then I also use it and see how good it is.
- [30:56]
Lori Santos
Yeah.
- [30:56]
Ellie Hassenfeld
And so I think, and if it.
- [30:57]
Jacob Goldstein
Sucks you, you, that company goes out.
- [30:59]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Of business, that company goes out of business. But that's not how it works in charity. If you're great at fundraising from donors, but terrible at delivering a program, no one might ever know. And so very, I think just concretely, GiveWell has helped support the literal, in a very small way, the creation of an incentive to operate in a way that is focused on demonstrating impact because the dollars that we have to give, the dollars that we have to influence, are going after that evidence of strong impact. And I should say, of course, we are just part of a larger and I think, ever growing ecosystem. You see this in the academics who launched the randomized control trial movement in economics, organizations like Evidence Action, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Give directly. I mean this. It's a large and growing group of institutions, even beyond the scope of Just GiveWell, that are operating in a way that is explicitly aiming to deliver great results and demonstrate that those results are coming to fruition. And I think that is just a massive change from where we were 20 years ago.
- [32:08]
Jacob Goldstein
So you mentioned GiveDirectly, and as it happens, there's a sort of charitable giving project out of one of the shows at Pushkin that gives money to GiveDirectly, basically. And I'm curious about GiveWell's sort of ongoing evaluation of GiveDirectly. Like, what do you think? What do you think of GiveDirectly's work in a quantitative, professional way?
- [32:28]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Yeah, I think, like, extremely, extremely highly of them. I've personally been a Give Directly donor for many years. You know, continue to give to them last year and will this year because I really love what they do. I think it's just so critical to say, you know, with some of our giving, let's make sure that we're just supporting people to purchase what they most want.
- [32:54]
Jacob Goldstein
Still to come on the show, LA talks about some of the most surprising things he's seen in his nearly two decades in the charity world. What do you make of the fact that $5,000 can save a child's life?
- [33:18]
Ellie Hassenfeld
I think it is just an illustration of on some level how unjust our world is potentially. How I think all of us, myself included, perhaps, don't really take as seriously as we should the kind of impact that we can have overseas. But fundamentally, I think it shows that something is very broken in our system for allocating resources globally. Because it's very hard to accept that it's possible to save someone's life for $5,000.
- [33:52]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah. I mean, with all the money, even with all the money that people give away, like, why don't people give enough money to buy bed nets for kids so they don't get malaria? Right. Like there's some amount of money. The more money people give, the less valuable each marginal net would be. Right. Like, why haven't people given enough money to these programs to sort of give away all the bed nets that you need to give away and give away all the malaria medicine that you'd need to give away to stop kids from dying of malaria. At least in these high intensity malaria areas where it's obvious that kids are going to die of malaria every year.
- [34:33]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Yeah. So I think, I think first of all, it's just worth noting how much progress we have made globally in the last 25 years. The U.S. government has given huge amounts to a program called PEPFAR focused on HIV. The president's malaria Initiative focused on malaria and has been instrumental in the creation of the Global Fund, which focuses on HTB and malaria, and GAVI, which focuses on immunizations. So since the year 2000, the amount of funding going to global health problems has gone up a huge amount. It has plateaued more recently, but it's gone up a huge amount and we see a massive reduction in child mortality. So we're doing a lot better today than we were in the recent past. And then I guess like fundamentally I don't know why people don't give more.
- [35:22]
Jacob Goldstein
Or even give more to these charities. Right. It's more a question of direction. It's not even why don't people give more money. It's like if it's really that easy to save a kid's life, like we want that number to go up, right? Like the cheaper it is to save a kid's life. I mean it's kind of you cut both ways, right? On the one hand it's like, well, great, we know a thing that is helpful. But on the other hand, like, well, let's buy all the bed nets. So it's not so easy. Do you know what I'm saying?
- [35:52]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Completely. And yeah, I think that GiveWell raises about $300 million a year. A GiveWell that was raising a billion dollars a year would, the marginal dollars would be much less cost effective because we would have gone much further.
- [36:07]
Jacob Goldstein
Weirdly, you want to get to a place where it's more expensive to save a child's life. Like the more expensive it is, the less inequality there is in the world, the more kids lives we're saving.
- [36:17]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Exactly, exactly. And Then I think GiveWell itself is an institution that has raised much more money over the last 15 years than was raised previously and is going. And I think it reflects more people giving. Why, why aren't people giving more to these programs? I think because the, honestly, the suffering and the poverty of say the poorest parts of sub Saharan Africa is something that we are largely blind to in our day to day lives. It's not, you know, we cover natural disasters when they occur, but no one is covering, literally, the daily catastrophe of child deaths due to infectious disease. In sub Saharan Africa, very roughly a thousand children die every day of malaria. We know how to prevent it. And that's not covered because it's. Well, I guess I don't know exactly why that's a question for you, not for me, but it's not covered. And I think because of that, on some level, we're able to live as if it's not really there, and that motivating force to get people to see it and then act isn't happening.
- [37:29]
Jacob Goldstein
You've been doing this now for 15 years. Ish. If you go back to when you started, what's been surprising to you, what has happened in a way you would not have expected?
- [37:45]
Ellie Hassenfeld
I was really surprised when we started at how strange our questions seem to the organizations that we were going to. The question of how effective are your programs? How much are you accomplishing, and how do you know? Seems like a really an obvious question. It's also really surprising to me how much we've grown. When we started this, I think we thought that we were just. We were a couple of guys who had this idiosyncratic interest in an approach to charitable giving. And when we talked to people who worked in philanthropy, they reacted like we were nuts, that no one would ever be into this. This is not what. Donors go to galas, and donors like stories and their names on buildings and, wow, it's shocking. You know, people are. People are normal. People are just giving $300 million a year to help people around the world, and they're by and large, anonymous. They're not getting their names on buildings, and they're just, you know, following along, trying to make as big a difference as they can in people's lives so they'll never meet. And, you know, on some level that maybe that makes sense, but that. That's also really surprising.
- [38:59]
Jacob Goldstein
It seems like the happy surprise.
- [39:00]
Ellie Hassenfeld
The happy surprise.
- [39:02]
Jacob Goldstein
I appreciate your time very much. It was great to talk with you.
- [39:05]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Yeah, that was great to be here. Thanks so much, Jacob.
- [39:09]
Jacob Goldstein
Ellie Hassenfeld is the co founder and CEO of GiveWell. Last conversation on the show is with Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova. Nate is a statistician. Maria is a psychologist. They are both writers, and together they host a podcast called Risky Business. They are also both professional poker players. And that's really why I wanted to talk to them about charitable giving. One of the things they do on their show is they talk about bringing a poker mindset to the decision making of everyday life. And so I wanted to hear from them how professional gamblers think about giving money away. So, like, the core idea of the show is making better decisions using this expected value framework. Right. In like one sentence, what's expected value?
- [40:00]
Nate Silver
Expected value is the net benefit you expect to get averaged over all the uncertain outcomes. Now, I guess with charitable giving, maybe it's more deterministic, where we know, for example, that mosquito nets in Africa have a high return on investment, they save lives and prevent malaria at a relatively low cost. It's not like a random element there. Exactly. Although there are always some implementation issues. But really it's a framework about utility.
- [40:31]
Maria Konnikova
And I would just jump in a little bit to say that we have the economic definition of expected value. And then when you look at behavioral economics and the way that people actually make decisions, you realize that there's a lot of psychology involved as well. And so calculating expected value is not as straightforward as just kind of doing these dollar calculations. Because, you know, how do you put a dollar amount on how good you feel after a decision, or how bad you feel, or the regret that you might feel when you don't take a decision? And when we're looking at kind of the broader picture of expected value, you do have to try to quantify that a little bit and try to account for all of those different psychological factors that come into play as well.
- [41:17]
Jacob Goldstein
One of my favorite things about your show is when you talk about the culture of professional poker players. Basically, you're both professional poke and you live in this universe where people treat money really differently. Right. And there are these two terms that come up a lot on the show. Two kinds of people. Knits and degens. What's a nit?
- [41:40]
Maria Konnikova
I'll leave this one to you, Nate.
- [41:43]
Nate Silver
A nit is basically George Costanza.
- [41:46]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Right.
- [41:46]
Nate Silver
It's like a neurotic risk averse, cheap, but more. More someone who is so neurotic that they aren't taking plus ev bets. Right. They're too conservative for their own good when it comes to playing poker hands, for example, and have a low openness to experience, perhaps, and can be annoying. They're the ones who want to itemize the bill when the check comes.
- [42:15]
Jacob Goldstein
I didn't need the app. I shouldn't have to pay for one third of the app. That's the nitty.
- [42:19]
Nate Silver
Yeah. Whereas a degen is someone who likes to gamble, is risk tolerant, maybe to their own detriment, is freewheeling with money and splashes around.
- [42:31]
Ellie Hassenfeld
Yes.
- [42:31]
Jacob Goldstein
And degen is Short for degenerate gambler, but in a loving way. Right. That's my favorite. So in your experience, who is more generous? A degenerate knit.
- [42:43]
Maria Konnikova
Degen. Absolutely.
- [42:44]
Jacob Goldstein
Oh, yeah, for sure.
- [42:45]
Maria Konnikova
I don't think it's even close.
- [42:47]
Jacob Goldstein
You guys give to charity.
- [42:51]
Maria Konnikova
I give to charitable causes that I believe in. So for instance, I gave a lot of money to Ukraine when Russia invaded. And that is how kind of I calculate my charitable giving. I understand that mosquito nets in Africa are incredibly important. I have not given to malaria because that is not something that I feel strongly about. There are other people feel strongly about that. So for me, part of it, you know, I have given to educational causes. You know, I give to things that I have a connection with and that I feel also are underfunded.
- [43:26]
Jacob Goldstein
Maria, you mentioned giving to Ukraine and I mean, I know you a little bit. I know your life story seems connected to that. Right. Tell me about your connection to helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia.
- [43:37]
Maria Konnikova
Yeah, so my dad is Ukrainian and my mom is from Moscow and I was born in Moscow and then came to the United States when I was 4 years old and have always been very anti the autocratic tendencies of Russia, very anti Putin. And I think when Putin invaded Ukraine, to me that was a no brainer. I think at this point, Ukraine is one of the only things standing between us and the third World War, basically the fact that they're able to resist him. So for me, it was incredibly personal. And so I'm all in on the Zelensky camp.
- [44:19]
Jacob Goldstein
Nate Silver, do you give money away?
- [44:21]
Nate Silver
I'm having to reevaluate. I mean, the short answer is I haven't.
- [44:26]
Jacob Goldstein
Does either saying on a show that you haven't given money away or hearing Maria talk about giving money away, honestly, does it. You think it makes it any more likely that you'll give money away? Do you think it's going to have any effect on you?
- [44:39]
Nate Silver
I'm generally not a person who is governed by guilt.
- [44:42]
Jacob Goldstein
Ah, that's.
- [44:43]
Nate Silver
I mean, I think I should. But there's like a lot of long term financial planning that gets put off. I mean, these are discussions that, you know, my household, we've had and so we're, we're aware of this question and what we want to do with our money in the long term. And we're thinking about it actively, but kind of things get short circuited during. I mean, look, clearly I think that, you know, in some abstract sense you are being selfish. If you're not, if you have a comfortable life, then you are being Selfish to not give, but it's easy to make excuses.
- [45:17]
Jacob Goldstein
I appreciate your honesty. So, Nate, does that make you a nit? And Maria the degen? I never would have guessed.
- [45:25]
Nate Silver
Well, but I am. I think Maria is also. I am generous in those other ways with things like tips, with things like, you know, picking up checks, even at fairly expensive meals or something for my friends. And so maybe psychologically, that feels more satisfying than the abstract charitable giving.
- [45:42]
Jacob Goldstein
Yes. I mean, that is an interesting tension, right? Like, it feels better to buy lunch for your friend than to send the money off to somebody thousands of miles away, even though obviously the marginal benefit of that, whatever, 100 bucks, 50 bucks. Any bucks is clearly greater if you send it off thousands of miles. You've gone out to dinner.
- [45:59]
Nate Silver
Jacob in New York recently. 50 bucks would be great.
- [46:03]
Jacob Goldstein
I was trying to be a man of the people, Nate. And when are we getting dinner?
- [46:08]
Maria Konnikova
I totally agree. And I also just want to add a little bit to say that I think that in this particular case, role models really do matter when it comes to charitable giving tendencies. So psychologically speaking, and one of the things that has made me actually kind of give more than I have in the past is my parents, who don't have a lot of money and, you know, are single income because my mom no longer works. And they give a recurring donation every single month to causes that they believe strongly and including Ukraine. And when I think about it, I'm like, you can't afford to do this, and yet they do it. And that, you know, it. I won't say guilts me into, but, like, it makes me realize that, like, you know, it is important when you are donating to causes where it actually makes a difference. Nate and I talked a lot on our podcast about kind of donating to political campaigns, and, you know, don't donate to the presidential campaign because they. They don't need the money. But, you know, I think that that's kind of. That's what we're talking about at the end. Where do you donate in a way that your money actually makes an impact right now? And it doesn't have to be millions of dollars, Right. You can leave. I hope I have millions to leave at the end of my life to good causes. But, you know, there are causes where even a few hundred dollars actually can make a huge difference.
- [47:39]
Jacob Goldstein
But I guess that.
- [47:40]
Nate Silver
Because there probably is some pleasure from it, right? And you kind of recognize the ephemeral nature of money, and it's kind of more an emotional reaction. And then when everything about charity, it's kind of the more rational part of your brain.
- [47:53]
Jacob Goldstein
Right.
- [47:53]
Nate Silver
You can make excuses along the lines of, well, maybe I should just give it away at the end of my life. And I pay a lot of taxes. And, you know, figuring out where to give is a discussion to have with your partner. And that can get, you know, we'd have disagreements about that. And so it's different than the kind of, oh, let's get a nice bottle of wine, and I'll pick. I'll pick up dinner tonight because I know you had a rough tournament series.
- [48:13]
Jacob Goldstein
Or something like that. I never thought of you as such an emotional guy. So I'm curious in particular. So this show is about giving away money fundamentally. And, you know, we can talk about, you know, maximizing ev and what charities are good, but there's also just this more general idea of pro social behavior. Spending money on your friends is part of this. And so I'm curious, what's your favorite degen Dropping a bunch of money on their friends, on charity, on anything story?
- [48:44]
Maria Konnikova
Yeah, well, this isn't a. This isn't Degeny, but I think it's something that is quite important. The poker community actually does give a shit ton of money to charity. You know, those aren't the fun Degeny stories, but that's. I think, you know, I think it's important to note that poker players actually are on top of this, and there are a lot of poker players giving millions to charity and matching charitable donations.
- [49:10]
Jacob Goldstein
Thanks, you guys. It was a delight to talk to you.
- [49:12]
Maria Konnikova
Thank you.
- [49:13]
Nate Silver
Thank you.
- [49:16]
Jacob Goldstein
So just before we end the show here, I want to just mention one last thing. There was a moment in that last conversation when Nate was talking about the reasons he hasn't given money. You know, how giving money to charity is tied up with all these other household financial planning decisions, et cetera, et cetera. And I thought back to that thing that Laurie Santos said at the beginning of the show about friction, how friction and not knowing how to give or who to give to winds up being this huge barrier. And I thought about how Elie Hassenfeld has spent all this time trying to find charities that are very clearly doing good that you can just give money to and feel good about. So to close out the show today and to fight against friction in my own life, I'm gonna go right now to that website that Laurie was talking about, giving multiplier, and I'm going to give 50 bucks. Is it the perfect amount of money? I don't know. I'm just going to do it right now. Thanks very much to Nate Silver and Maria Konikova, the hosts of Risky Business, ellie Hassenfeld of GiveWell and to Lori Santos, the of the Happiness Lab who got me thinking about giving Tuesday in the first place. Today's show was produced by Lucy Sullivan and Isabel Carter, edited by Sarah Nix and engineered by Jake Gorski. Special thanks to Ryan Dilley, Farah Daygrunge and Owen Miller. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and I host the Pushkin show, what's yous Problem? Thanks for listening, Ra.