Duration: 3:09

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JAY MAHENDRA RAJ: Thanks, Tony. The US-based organise GiveWell evaluates the effectiveness of charities through measures such as quality adjusted life years. So my question is the next time I bump into someone on the street who is asking for a donation, what sort of question should I be asking them to make sure that my money is going towards an effective charity and not a bureaucratic, money-grabbing machine.

TONY JONES: Peter Singer, we’ll start with you, obviously, and GiveWell takes a pretty hard line on this. I think there’s only three charities that they recommend.

PETER SINGER: I think they boosted them. I think they're up to half a dozen or so now, but it’s a very small slice, yes. GiveWell, which you can find at givewell.org, is a very rigorous evaluator and would, I guess, say you shouldn't be giving to people who just accost you on the street. You should be researching the charities, checking them and unless they're on their list of ones that they say that have demonstrated their effectiveness - not that the others necessarily aren’t effective - but just that they haven't been transparent enough or produced the information to show that they are effective. This charity that I'm wearing a badge for today, thelifeyoucansave.org, that I’ve been involved with, is a little bit broader. So we feel that GiveWell is so tough that it misses out things that are good but can’t be evaluated. So if you go there, that will give you
you another list of organisations that you can support, and it's also you can get involved with it and helps to promote these ideas that we've been talking about and I'm pleased to say we've had a lot of consensus on about trying to live a more ethical life.

TONY JONES: So you make quite strong value judgments on different types of charities, don’t you, and I saw, for example, you make the case that it’s not an effective charity to give to the group which creates or which train guide-dogs for the blind, which surprised me enormously. So, perhaps you should explain how you came to that conclusion?

PETER SINGER: Yeah. It’s a matter of getting the best value for your money and it’s strange that people tend not to think about that in the charitable field as they would, you know, if you were buying a dishwasher. You would check some consumer reports on which one gives you the best value for money but with charities people don't. So, yeah, you can say, sure, it’s good to train guide dogs to help the blind but if you are doing that in Australia or in another affluent country, it’s going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars. In the United States, it costs about over $40,000 to train a dog and to train the blind person so that they can work together and the dog can be helpful to the blind person. Now, as I mentioned before in talking about Toby Ord, you can prevent someone becoming blind in a developing country for maybe something like $100 per case of blindness averted. So, you know, what's better: to prevent someone becoming blind or to give a blind person a guide dog? I think it's clearly better to prevent someone becoming blind, plus it costs only $100 so, you know, you can calculate for $40,000 how many people you can prevent being blind. It just seems to me clear that it gives you better value and, therefore, that’s what we should be doing.