What is it like to be extremely poor?

We know that the extremely poor are living on less than what $1.25 a day could buy in the United States. But this seems implausible. Wouldn’t someone with that little money just end up dying of starvation very quickly? Simulations like Living Below the Line can only go so far. It’s difficult to understand what it’s like to be that poor.

However, it’s now becoming a bit easier to understand. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, authors of the popular book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty and co-founders of The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, have written a paper called “The Economic Lives of the Poor”. Using survey data from thirteen different countries, Banerjee and Duflo are able to tell the tale of life as a poor person.

Here’s an informative summary of their research.

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There is a lot of effort in the effective altruist movement right now. Community building would include anything broadly related to recruitment and retention for the EA movement, aiming to get existing EAs to become more EA (and less likely to quit EA) as well as getting new people to become EA. This seems prima facie to be very high impact for many classical reasons like the haste consideration that recruiting one person now seems to double your impact.

However, not too much EA effort seems channeled into community building at the moment. GiveWell, 80K Hours, Animal Charity Evaluators, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute are all primarially research organizations. Organizations like 80K Hours and ACE once were outreach / community building organizations, but then intentionally rebranded and refocused specifically on research, eschewing community building. GiveWell has considered many times to improve effort put into marketing, and chosen not to.

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Periodically, in times of blog inactivity, I like to come back and report all the things I’ve been doing while not blogging. Here’s a complete run down of the more recent:

I finished up Recruitment for my fraternity. It was basically working a part-time 20hrs/wk job for two weeks doing lots of event planning, but we ended up getting twelve fine men to join our fraternity. Well worth it!

I’ve been working with Ozzie Gooen on .impact, a distributed volunteer force working to produce really useful projects. Here’s a list of projects our group is working on and you can check our meetings log for their status. Besides helping coordinate the group as a whole, I’m also working on building a Job Board (more details here) and studying vegetarian advocacy.

I’ve been working on learning more computer programming. In addition to working on the Job Board, I’ve begun to work for a friend’s startup called Jorge’s Trading Post, doing some PHP development for them. I’ve also been learning more Ruby on Rails, Python, and JavaScript. It helps that I’m now in a Computer Science class and have to program for actual homework.

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.impact recently gave a presentation about what the group is up to. Feel free to watch it on YouTube here:

It’s a little rough right now, but we’ll get better. Also, check out our website: http://www.dotimpact.im.

So I haven’t been writing as much as I used to, but one thing I have started getting interested in is writing about “not utilitarianism”. Thus, I’ve thought it easiest to start a new blog elsewhere: peterhurford.tumblr.com.

I’m on Tumblr as a matter of economy — it seemed like a quick and easy way to make a blog happen without mucking around in Wordpress or Jeckyll or what not. It will be for all my musings that aren’t philosophical-y or utilitarian-y enough to go on his real blog. But I promise this all maximizes utility somehow…

Rest assured, I’ll still be keeping this blog going. But sometimes, I’ll have things that are best said elsewhere. And now I have an elsewhere to say those things.

A profile of Zell Kravinsky. Any biography that opens casually with “Last summer, not long after [he] had given almost his entire forty-five-million-dollar real-estate fortune to charity” has to be good.

And speaking of effective altruism, ever wonder what characteristics effective altruists share? Joey Savoie and Xio Kikauka interviewed 42 EAs and found an average age of 25 (17-46), 75% male, left-wing politics, an average of 20 hours a week on EA volunteering, donating a median of 10% of their income, and generally transitioned from altruism to EA (as opposed to from effectiveness to EA). Though, admittedly, this survey used a non-random convenience sample.

Also, we should put a value on a human life: “That dollar value is $5.8 million. Denying this leads to terrible consequences. Let me explain.”

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Follow up to “Interview with Jon Behar”.

Jon Behar left a lucrative job at the investment management firm to pursue dreams of running philanthropic projects. Behar runs a startup called “A Path That’s Clear” which uses a model called “Giving Games”. These games are run at colleges and other areas around the world and engage people in discussions about effective giving.

Rob Wiblin and I sat down to interview Jon Behar and learn more about Giving Games. Here’s what we learned:

• “Giving Games” are a way to get people engaged in discussing effective philanthropy by asking them to chose where to give a pot of money from two pre-selected choices

• These games can be used to experimentally test why people don’t give more effectively and find ways to encourage them to give more and give better

• Donating to Giving Games could be an option to leverage an existing donation to a GiveWell top charity.

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Follow up to “Comparing Across My Five Career Categories”, “My Careers Conversation with Holden Karnofksy”, and “My Conversation with Satvik Beri”.

Back in May 2013, I realized I would be graduating in a year and wondered a lot about what I should pick for my first career. The questions I had at the time were:

1. Should I aim to work in an Effective Altruist organization, go to graduate school, or should I earn to give?

2. Where should I look for employment if I want to earn to give - law, market research, or programming?

3. I spent a little time considering other options (finance and consulting careers), but the bulk of my time was spent comparing EA org employment, grad school, and the three earning to give careers.

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Someone asked me what the top ten posts are on Everyday Utilitarian. I use Google Analytics, so this was a pretty easy thing to find out. I looked at page visits for each essay over all of 2013. Of course, this isn’t a perfect metric, as essays written later in the year have less of a chance of getting viewed, and the “hits” metric is skewed a lot toward what I choose to publicize via Facebook and LessWrong and what I don’t.

So this isn’t much of a “top ten” by quality, I suppose. But here it goes, anyway:

1. How I Am Productive (1618 pageviews)

2. How Much Does it Cost to Buy a Vegetarian (606)

3. Who is This Peter Guy? (543)

4. A Meta-Ethics FAQ (539)

5. What is Utilitarianism? (501)

6. Interview with Ruairí Donnelly (439)

7. For Happiness, Keep a Gratitude Journal (422)

8. My Strategic Plan (375)

9. My Careers Plan (375)

10. Why Eat Less Meat (286)

I promised to make the link roundups relate a little better, so here you go:

The Millenium Development Goals set priorities for governments and NGOs working to help the developing world. However, the current set only covers 2000-2015, so a new set is being developed for 2015-2030. What should be included? Toby Ord suggests including a metric of “healthy life expectancy”, or life expectancy weighted by quality of life, and “log income”, which correlates pretty highly with life satisfaction.

The implications of “log income” is that giving money to the poorest should more easily boost total world satisfaction than giving the money most other places. Luckily, there’s an organization, Give Directly, that does just that, who I’ve profiled earlier. They’re also profiled in Tina Rosenberg’s Fixes Column entry “The Benefits of Cash Without Conditions”.

Peter Singer argues that if you’d save the life of a small child near you, you should also be willing to donate to one of these charities. After all, the idea of distance mattering in ethics is quite weird indeed.

Also, in a related note, Carl Shulman works to try and turn log-income and log-consumption into better metrics of human welfare.

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