Another way to decide how much to give

Here's an interesting idea from Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer working with Google.org. He writes:

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I am trying an experiment I call "personal consumption offsets" (http://wolog.net/254527.html):

In 2010, I'll match everything I spend on a non-essential purchase
with an equal donation to an effective charity.

I think there is a good chance that this method may have both practical
and psychological benefits:

1. Anybody can apply this plan, regardless of income.

2. The statement of the pledge is simple and does not involve
choosing arbitrary numbers.

3. I will make more total donations than by pledging 5% of my income.

4. It will motivate me to donate more to charity (because it means
more enjoyment for myself).

5. It will enhance my enjoyment of the things I buy for myself
(because I will know that it also benefits others).

If you like this idea, please consider passing it on

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I like it, so I'm passing it on. It resembles, to some extent, the idea behind www.whatIdidnotbuy.org, which is also worth a look.

I have only one tiny cavil. In his blog, Ka-Ping Yee describes this as an alternative to take the pledge that I have invited people to take, at www.thelifeyoucansave.com. But why not do both? If you give in this way, then unless you have an extremely high income, or spend almost nothing on non-essential items [or both - but that is unlikely} you will exceed the pledge level. And taking the pledge spreads the message to others - it helps them to see that many people are giving significantly to those in extreme poverty.

Special Guest Blog: How Students Can Support a Millennium Village?

Reading The Life You Can Save I got pretty excited and with good reason I think too. Last year at Carleton University our group, Students To End Extreme Poverty, worked to get a question to referendum where students voted on whether or not they would all have to automatically pay an additional $6 in tuition fees ($5352 instead of $5346) to help support a Millennium Village. It worked. Carleton students now contribute over $110,000 annually.

Here is our hope: By getting enough universities and organizations to support Millennium Villages (aside from helping a couple communities help themselves out of extreme poverty) it would raise enough awareness, get enough media attention, engage enough people, foster enough cooperation, and generate enough civil society will to see policy changes: more and better aid, fairer trade, and debt cancellation.

Worst case scenario: thousands of people, many of whom would otherwise be dead, will have the basic tools they need to lift themselves out of extreme poverty.

Just like professor Singer pointed out, if we remove the barriers to involvement and giving – people can always opt out if they don’t like it – the great majority of people will stay involved in alleviating global poverty and be happy they did with ”the right kind of nudge”. Facilitating institutionalized giving of 1% of people’s incomes could easily generate enough money to make a massive impact on some of the worst effects of extreme poverty and send a clear message to our governments: act now to end world poverty. Norway even gives 1% as a country.

Institutions and their employees don’t usually do this for global poverty. They can; it’s just that oodles of people haven’t leapt at the opportunity to make it happen. Efforts like these can be going on in a variety of fashions across the world. In Canada alone there are 18 million people in the labor force with nearly 4.5 million people in unions. Over two million of those unionized workers are in nine unions. That’s not a logistical nightmare to try and make happen. Want to make a difference? Opportunities like this abound.

What have we got to lose in going for it? Especially if it’s benefiting a stellar organization like Millennium Promise or Oxfam where the money is spent transparently, where there are monitorable objectives and where it is making a demonstrable difference in people’s lives one person or one community at a time.

This is something that we as a global community can run with. There are numerous ideas like these that with little time produce results thousands of times the size of the effort they take. There are a number of us working on similar initiatives so please get in touch if you want to help. James Grant said “the problem is not that we have tried to eradicate global poverty and failed; the problem is that no serious and concerted attempt has ever been made”. Sadly it’s true; however on the plus side, there really has never been a better time to make poverty history.

Bryan Turner
Youth Engagement Coordinator
Make Poverty History Canada
www.makepovertyhistory.ca

Going Multinational

The Life You Can Save is becoming a truly multinational website. It is now available in 12 languages, including Chinese, with more translations on the way. And the 3346 people who have pledged to give a percentage of their income to help the world's poor come from 59 countries! We have a new map, courtesy of Google, that shows which countries have the most people pledging (although you need to move down to the more detailed level to get this accurately, as at the global level the map groups several countries together). Here's the list of countries from which people have pledged:

Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Australia
Bahamas
Bahrain
Belgium
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Brazil
Bulgaria
Canada
Chile
China
Colombia
Costa Rica
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
India
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Korea, Republic of
Luxembourg
Malaysia
Malta
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Pakistan
Panama
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Senegal
Singapore
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States
Venezuela
Vietnam

Of course, we'd like to get pledges from even more countries. Russians, where are you? As for the number of pledges, they are still moving up steadily, but please spread the word, and remember that everyone who pledges is setting an example for others to follow and helping to change the culture about giving.

Translating the website

We are looking for native speakers of a variety of languages who are willing to volunteer to translate the text of the website (www.thelifeyoucansave.com) into as many languages as possible. We started with Swedish and have Russian, Polish, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Hebrew, French, Italian, German, Chinese both simplified and traditional, Dutch, Romanian, Tagalog Filipino, Danish, Korean and Japanese now. We also have volunteers for Catalan, Lithuanian, Slovenian and probably Arabic. If you are a native speaker of a language not included in this list, and can spare the time to translate a few pages of text, please email us at thelifeyoucansave@gmail.com. Thanks!

Giving More - gradually

After a talk I gave at the London School of Economics yesterday, one person told me that he'd begun giving a few years ago, starting at 1/% of his income, as the website (www.thelifeyoucansave.com) recommends for 90% of taxpayers, but increasing this by an additional 1% each year. That's an easy way to build up slowly - and especially if you are young, as this person was, it's going to mean that in a few years you will be giving a significant amount, but not in a way that ever causes a shock to your budget. Worth thinking about.

Peter Singer

And The Number Keeps Growing And Growing!!!!!

Thanks so much to everyone who has pledged on the website. The number of clicks are rising fast now, because of the excellent publicity the book is getting.
If you haven't visited the website, www.thelifeyoucansave.com recently, it's worth going back there to catch up with all the reviews, blogs and discussions about the book. There was a great piece in The New York Times and there are many other good reviews as well. And even those reviews and blogs that have critical points to make are contributing to a valuable discussion about aid.

posted on behalf of Peter Singer - he is so busy at the moment...

Over 1000 Pledges!!!