How Can We Do Good Better?
We all have limited amount of time and money. This means that there will be moments when we have to make tough choices. Sometimes it is between saving someone and leaving someone else to suffer. The reality of our world is that, if we want to make the world a better place, we have to choose hard trade-offs decisions. If we decide to donate our money to disaster victims, then we have to deal with the fact that we’ll have lesser money to fund for other causes such as helping the migrant workers or funding a cure. As a result of our choices, it is inevitable that someone will be made better off and someone else is not. There are many areas that require help and we are interested to lend a helping hand, but we don’t have enough time and money to solve them all.
As with almost everything in life, we need to prioritise.
Please understand that not choosing would itself be a decision and escaping makes the situation no less real. Failure to decide is the worst decision of all. Some questions that we may consider in terms of deciding where or who to help includes, “How much does this activity cost in terms of time or money?”, “How many people does it affect?” and “By how much does it improve people’s lives?” These specific questions act as guiding light for us to do as much good as we can. However, we may want to consider how the law of diminishing returns affect our decision-making process.
The first slice of cake is out-of-the-world delicious, but by the fourth bite, we start to feel a little overwhelmed and sick.
Suppose I receive a pair of socks for Christmas. The instrumental value of the pair of socks (not to be confused with its sentimental value) increases only when I need to replace the socks that I already have. An additional pair of socks would ease my cycle of wearing and washing a pair of socks everyday. However, if I already have many or sufficient pairs of socks, an extra pair of socks could be more of a nuisance on the note that it eats up wardrobe space, albeit little, and only comes into use when one of my current pair of socks gets unmistakenly bitten up by a dog or something along those lines. Its value diminishes as the quantity increases. It is similar to how having a book might provide us with interesting insights, yet having another copy of the same book would just be a makeshift laptop monitor stand.
Often, many of our decisions come to a standstill when it is wobbling between the line of not-that-useful-but-definitely-not-useless.
It is like putting money in the bank for its jaw-dropping interest rate. Low interest, but better than nothing. I digress, let us continue. One of the reasons why we need to consider the law of diminishing returns is that it provides an effective rule of thumb for comparing causes. Given that a specific cause has already received tremendous amount of attention and funding, any additional resources would have less value as compared to helping a different cause that is much more neglected. An example would be emergency health interventions being more costly and less effective than time-tested health activities. We can draw the parallels easily between easily preventable diseases such as AIDS and malaria as to a tsunami.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to us that funding appears to be allocated in proportion with how widely publicized the disaster is in comparison with the basis of its scale and severity.
New events tend to be timely when put in comparison with ongoing problems. This is probably why we respond to new events as though they’re crisis and we immediately react to emergency. Yet, we tend to forget that with the same amount of pain, suffering and deaths happening in the world, emergency is happening all the time. Perhaps, we’ve grown accustomed to everyday emergencies such as disease, diabetes and poverty. As much as we sway towards our heart-felt emotions, it can be a double-edged sword. In order to focus on measurable, concrete ways of helping others, we can do research on various aspects of the causes we’re interested to help. What is the magnitude of the problem? How much does it affect in the short and long run? Think along the lines of poverty versus climate change. How many resources are already being dedicated to tackling this problem? How easy is it to make progress on this problem? How easy is it to tell if we’re making progress? No doubt, it is a tough time right now. However, let’s bear in mind that Covid-19 isn’t the only thing happening right now.
