Marked for Dearth

Warren Buffett pledged the lion’s share of his recent philanthropy to the Gates Foundation, which mainly caters to immunization, AIDS prevention, and minority scholarship. These are noble causes, to be sure, but they are only a few of the many that are targeted by millions of conscientious people around the world: poverty, disease prevention, education, climate change, social justice. And let’s not forget your alma mater’s fat endowment. How are you supposed to choose where to spend your charitable dollars? And how do you do it rationally when many of the problems seem inescapably emotional?

A few days ago, I started thinking more carefully - which is to say, at all - about how to prioritize world needs. Luckily, I didn’t wallow in this idealism for too long before discovering that someone smarter and better educated had done it for me:

Eight of the world’s top economists…were asked to evaluate the world’s problems, think of the costs and efficiencies attached to solving each, and then produce a prioritized list of those most deserving of money…While the economists were from varying political stripes, they largely agreed. The numbers were just so compelling: $1 spent preventing HIV/AIDS would result in about $40 of social benefits, so the economists put it at the top of the list (followed by malnutrition, free trade and malaria). In contrast, $1 spent to abate global warming would result in only about two cents to 25 cents worth of good.

The findings of the Copenhagen Consensus project mentioned in the article are described in Global Crises, Global Solutions and the abridged, less pedantic-sounding, How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place.

Or, just skip to the good part.