Re:The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in t...
by willmacaskill on Sunday June 21, 2015 @07:06AM
(#9752944)
Re: bizarro candidate? Yes, certainly. (as long as they're actually going to be much better for the world and your donation will make a difference). Lower probability of larger upside can easily beat guarantee of doing more modest amount of good.
There's a lot of talk about 'impact investing' and I see potential there, but at the moment the 'impact' side of things is generally very poorly understood so it's not fulfilling its potential in my view.
An unrelated question is: why do you think there are so few investment opportunities that are truly concerned with being ethical? The GiveWell founders seems like they could have made an investment fund dedicated to growing local companies in the poorer parts of the world. Direct cash transfers are among the best ways of helping the poor, but stable financing with modest return expectations seems like it could be pretty good too, with the benefit of slightly growing the capital available to help. Or you could imagine getting a significant amount of shares in Shell and turn up at shareholders meetings and make them repair their pipelines properly and such things.