Money Talks: Altruism After USAID

0:06Felix Salmon: Hello and welcome to Money Talks with Felix Salmon. Is that it?

0:11Mary Childs: That's amazing. Thank you. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm talking to the one and only Mary Childs, friend of the pod and general queen of all media. Mary, I think at this point, with any luck, the audience knows who you are, but who are you?

0:26Felix Salmon: Hi, Slate Money audience, my friends. I am a host of Planet Money, the podcast about economics at NPR. And I'm also the author of the book, The Bond King, How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All. And I'm a Sunday painter.

0:40Mary Childs: You're a very good artist.

0:41Felix Salmon: Oh, thank you.

0:42Mary Childs: And we are going to talk about...

0:44Felix Salmon: GiveWell and Aleema.

0:46Mary Childs: Philanthropy and charity and effective altruism and all that kind of goodness today because... And this is where you plug your episode.

0:54Felix Salmon: I just did an episode for Planet Money, the podcast from NPR, about how when USAID got cut so suddenly earlier in the year, it left all of these programs around the world without any funding. And private philanthropy cannot fill that gap. It's too large. But a lot of them were sort of scrambling, panicking, trying to figure out how they could help in such a basically humanitarian crisis. And so we got to ride along with one such philanthropy.

1:19Mary Childs: So this is what we're going to talk about. It is nerdy, philanthropic conversation, but it is also, with any luck, something that will encourage all of you lovely listeners to give a whole bunch of money to either GiveWell or Aleema, both of which are worthy causes and both of which I have personally given money to. So, yeah, that's all coming up on Money Talks.

1:45Mary Childs: Okay, so let's set the scene here. Yeah. Elon Musk comes into the government with a chainsaw and does way more damage to one part of the government than to basically any other part of the government. I'm not entirely sure how this happened, but it turns out that the part of government that he just obliterated was USAID, the part of the government that spends or used to spend, what,$40 billion a year, making the world a better place, and the foreign aid and the soft power and all of that kind of arm of the State Department. And before Marco Rubio could even find his desk, basically, Elon had killed the entire program.

2:24Felix Salmon: Put it in a wood chipper.

2:26Mary Childs: And this has caused, by various calculations, hundreds of thousands of deaths already. It's a humanitarian disaster. And of course, a lot of that money was going to various NGOs who were spending it in ways that would save lives. So the NGOs lost money. And one of those NGOs is this charity called Aleema, which works in war-torn areas and various other areas to provide healthcare. But then also a part of it is that money just went for sort of basic infrastructure so that NGOs could do what they do. So...

3:04Felix Salmon: System strengthening stuff.

3:05Mary Childs: So like GiveWell, which is one of these kind of meta-philanthropies, wrote a whole blog post about this. And they were like, you know, let's say that I want to buy malaria drugs and give them to Africans. That's all well and good. I can write a check and buy the malaria drugs and then I get them to Africa. But at that point, I am relying on a whole sort of cold storage chain and trucks and, you know, that kind of stuff to exist a certain amount of infrastructure, which will get the malaria drugs to the clinics. And if that chain goes away, then buying the drugs doesn't help. Even supporting the clinics doesn't help because you can't get anything from A to B.

3:41Felix Salmon: Giving money directly to the people doesn't help because there's nothing, like if they have malaria and there's no medicine to buy, it's not great. Yeah, there are like a thousand ways that the chain can fail.

3:49Mary Childs: So even the, to use the technical term, UCTs, the unconditional cash transfers, can be really hurt by departure of the USAID. That sort of sets the stage for this situation where Alima, which is one of these charities that was receiving money from USAID was like, shit, what the fuck do we do?

4:10Felix Salmon: I think that's a quote, yeah.

4:12Mary Childs: And they started scrambling for like any kind of donations they could find to make up the gap, even before they could really demonstrate that they were just as capable or even more capable of spending money than they were before USAID had imploded. And this is where GiveWell comes in.

4:32Felix Salmon: Yeah, there was an interesting thing that happened. And there were some USAID workers who were inspired and bored and mad and a few things. I probably shouldn't speak for them, but these USAID workers suddenly had some free time and took the list of projects that they knew had just been unfunded, that had already been vetted, that had been approved. Money was like being spent actively to, you know, causes that had been deemed worthy. And they make this list. It's called Project Resource Optimization. And they send it to various parties around the philanthropy world being like, hey, these things just lost funding.

5:04Felix Salmon: For example, GiveWell, here are some that we know that you might have an affinity for. You love malaria treatments. You love nets that prevent malaria because they block the mosquitoes. Those are super cheap, super effective. That's like the canonical example. Here are some things. You can just pick these off the list. It's like low-hanging fruit. And so at that moment, GiveWell had sort of been internally like obviously aware of what was going on, you know, not only from reading the news, but also talking to their contacts who were hearing like, we just lost our grant. We maybe don't have the grant.

5:30Felix Salmon: We have part of the grant. We can't tell. So like word was kind of chaotically spreading among all of these different NGOs as to what was happening. So they had created multiple teams within GiveWell to kind of triage to try to tackle the situation. Because, I mean, the reason I called them in the first place is even just where I was sitting, as a person in the world, you know that this is about to affect people in like the most fundamental way. The stakes absolutely could not be higher. And for someone who works at GiveWell, this was actually a sort of misunderstanding that I had. I thought that they approached their work like an ER doctor, you know, like emotionless, cold triage.

6:06Felix Salmon: I thought they did their calculations and they were like, let us save these people, not those people. It is not like that there. I made people cry in multiple interviews because I asked basically that question, like, how do you choose who to save? Someone's going to die. And I just made people cry left and right. It felt kind of bad. But I was just envisioning, like, I know that they make these horrifying calculations on a good day. And this is a horrible day. So I connected with PR person in March, and they agreed to start recording all of their deliberations as they tried to figure out to what degree or how or where they could jump into the void and fund things that had just gotten unfunded.

6:42Mary Childs: And you wound up focusing on this one project in Cameroon, which was run by Alima. What project is that?

6:49Felix Salmon: So it's a few health clinics, mobile health clinics and hospitals in different parts of Cameroon, far north region, where they provide basic health care and do a lot of like maternal and fetal medicine. And like newborn, it's the only, substantially the only like newborn medicine in the area. And just hearing about that was incredibly gutting, just the basic work that they do, the number of C-sections that they do that will not get done without them there. They have these facilities and they do a lot, a lot of work within the community to convince people to come in. So there's not only is there a complicated logistics chain, There's also the complication of like, this is a very unstable area.

7:26Felix Salmon: The people are refugees. They're displaced people. They're not home. They don't drive in. There's no road. You might get attacked on the way. It's expensive to go to the hospital. So if they go to a health center or hospital and it's closed, they will give up and they don't come back. They don't try again and they just don't get the care that they need. Or they just don't try at all. And so a substantial amount of the work that Alima does is what's called community sensitization. This is an NGO term that I learned. I was like, surely that doesn't mean anything, but it does. Basically, it's just like working within the community, not taking sides in this like horrible armed conflict, staying neutral and being able to convince whatever community leaders are necessary to please come in.

8:02Felix Salmon: Like this is free. You can have this health care, this support. And just that's kind of my understanding of the scope of it.

8:08Mary Childs: And so the big sort of dramatic tension in your piece is that GiveWell is examining a Lima. And I think Slate Money listeners are familiar with this, but in case you're not, GiveWell is basically this very quantitative place that judges interventions and tries to work out how cost effective they are. And if they're so many times more cost effective than cash transfer, then that's like the bar they're setting and then they'll make a grant. They have lots of spreadsheets.

8:36Felix Salmon: So many spreadsheets.

8:37Mary Childs: So many spreadsheets. And so the way you've set up your podcast episode is, can a lemur find the kind of data that GiveWell is going to need in order to be able to write a check, even though they're in the middle of nowhere in Cameroon and there's not a lot of data lying around?

8:55Felix Salmon: It was such an interesting to watch these two groups who just are different shapes. They're just different shapes. It's like square peg round hole. They just can't quite come to the same place because of the way that they work and the things that they do, which are both like very valid and good things to do. But like the Cameroon project is like we can't systematically count the population that we treat, which is like super confusing. If you like work in a hospital in the US, you're like, what's your just like count the person. But like in Cameroon, they don't come back for follow ups. Like, do you know what the outcome was?

9:24Felix Salmon: You can't actually measure in the normal way that you're used to if you're working in, you know, a hospital in the Upper West Side.

9:30Mary Childs: Or even in Nairobi.

9:32Felix Salmon: Exactly. You're just not going to get good data in a conflict area. And everybody in the NGO space knows that. GiveWell knows that. They don't do work as much in humanitarian context for kind of for this reason, because it's so hard for them to get the look through that they need, to get the data and the information that they need. They have functionally promised. I mean, it's their whole value proposition to their donors. They're like, we will make sure that this cause, this grant, whatever program we're evaluating, is going to save the most lives possible per dollar or improve. And that is their promise.

10:03Felix Salmon: And if they stray from that, then like, what are they doing? Like, they cannot stray. So there's this incompatibility at the root of it.

10:08Mary Childs: It's a tension that they're very conscious about, that they have written about in many blog posts over like over a decade. there is this feeling that if you do a very narrow targeted intervention something like bed nets then that makes it easier for give well to fund you than if you're in especially in the health care or like cash transfers where the range of positive outcomes is much broader so it's much harder to count them all up and add them all up and this kind of thing and this is a known issue within give well and this is something that give well has been trying to account for yeah some time And it turns out, I did not know this, but it turns out that GiveWell had actually funded Alima, various Alima projects in the past before this whole catastrophe happened.

10:50Mary Childs: So they were, they had a little bit of prior understanding of what Alima does and that it can work out well. Yes.

10:58Felix Salmon: And those were, I think, somewhat narrower in scope and somewhat more like digestible for GiveWell purposes. And I mean, some of them were like a reach for GiveWell. And one of the things that they had discussed a lot within the scope of this project, this program that they were evaluating and all of the ones that they were evaluating that had fallen off of USAID's list, I guess, they were thinking a lot about like, if this is a space that we don't do a whole lot and we don't have the expertise here, we're going to learn a lot. We're definitely no matter what going to learn a lot. And that's sort of an extra overlay.

11:25Felix Salmon: We're like, OK, maybe it doesn't clear our normal hurdle of whatever times better than cash transfers. But if you add the benefit of us learning and the yield of all that future good work that we can do that will save lives because of that learning, it's sort of a cheat code. That's what they told me, that it was like, okay, we can stretch a little bit outside of our comfort zone here. If we understand that we're going to make mistakes, then this might fall a little bit short of our normal rigorous process in some way. And like we are intentionally saying right now that we're okay with that because we want to learn.

11:56Mary Childs: It's interesting to me that they feel that the way of learning is by like writing a check. And if they don't write the check, they won't learn. It's all, you know. But that is it, right? It is natural.

12:08Felix Salmon: Try it and like see what you come back with. For example, in the Cameroon project, a point of anxiety was like, what if we reached the end of the year, we funded this project, we felt okay about it. We're like, let's just see, let's learn. And then we reached another project and there's no better data. Like what happens then? Did we just waste our time? Did that cheat code fail? So I think that that was one of the things that they were really trying to get comfortable with and like just understand that maybe it'll be better and we'll get that data that we want or something close to it. And maybe we won't.

12:35Mary Childs: And the thing that you don't really go into a lot of detail about, I think because it's just incredibly heart-rending and there's a limit to how much you can think about it, is this impossible question of what's the opportunity cost of giving a Lima$2 million? Right. That's$2 million that would otherwise have gone to some other project.

12:58Felix Salmon: You think I didn't do this in the show? I put someone crying in the show talking about exactly this. Well, so the way you do it in the show is interesting, right?

13:09Mary Childs: Because the way you do it in the show, or correct me if I'm wrong here, is that you flip it, right? And you're like, if a lemur doesn't get the money, then that means these people will suffer and possibly die and all these terrible outcomes. Whereas you don't concentrate so much on the flip side of that. If a lemur does get the money, then there's some other unfunded project somewhere.

13:32Felix Salmon: Well, the example in the show was that when I was talking to Tara and the director of research, she was talking about an example when she joined at first at GiveWell in 2019, where she was evaluating these two projects that seemed really similar, but one turned out to be way more effective and like life saving and improving. And so the one that they didn't end up funding was maternal mortality stuff. And I was just like, well, what about the moms who die? And then no seconds later, she's crying. And I was like, oh, my, this is a choice she has to make every day. I did not know it would be so close to the surface.

14:03Felix Salmon: I was like very surprised. How do you live? That's so stressful. That's so hard.

14:08Mary Childs: This is why, you know, Americans just fund like the opera or something.

14:15Felix Salmon: I'm like, I like it. It makes me feel good. Yeah.

14:18Mary Childs: But it is hard to do reporting around this kind of area and then do that thing that most like statistically speaking, 99 % of charitable donations by Americans just stay within America in one way or another, where objectively speaking, the need is not the greatest. We're at the end of the year and Mackenzie Scott has just released her list of$7.1 billion that she's given away over the past year, which is nice to be able to give away$7.1 billion in a single year and there's definitely some development stuff in there but there's a huge amount of gifts that aren't yeah and it you know it feels quite american there's a lot of that money stays in america and you do have to at some point you do start wondering like does she ever have those conversations about every million dollars you're giving to some arts organization in alabama is money that could be like saving mothers lives in cameroon i mean a lot of the philosophy of

15:18Felix Salmon: effective altruism goes back to Peter Singer and the very famous child in a lake scenario where, okay, you're walking, you're minding your own business and you look over and there's a child drowning in a lake. Do you save them? Okay. You would say yes. Like any rational person with any humanity would say yes. So what if the lake's a little bit further away? And that's the whole thought experiment. It's like, okay, at every moment there's a child drowning in a lake and you can save them. It takes$4 and not really, it's not like a bed net is literally like$3 depending, and then the logistics of arrival, whatever.

15:49Felix Salmon: But it's incredibly inexpensive to save lives around the world.

15:52Mary Childs: Well, I mean, this is also something which I feel is worth, mentioned this on the pod before, GiveWell has done incredibly valuable work over the years about really calculating how much it costs to save a life. And it turns out to be somewhere in the region of$5 ,000, which is incredibly cheap in one way, but is also not$5, you know. And I think a lot of the marketing that we have seen from UNICEF and a lot of the big charities. Oh, yeah, it's like$1.90. For like$1 a month, you can save a kid's life. Wow. Actually, you can't. It does actually cost like$5 ,000. The reason bed nets are effective, yes, the bed nets are cheap.

16:35Mary Childs: But you need to buy like$5 ,000 worth of bed nets to save one life, which is totally worth it. And we should all do that. And that's a really good intervention. But yeah, the Peter Singer thought experiment is basically, what if you're wearing an expensive suit? Would you jump into the lake anyway to save the child in the knowledge that you would ruin your expensive suit? And everyone's like, well, yes, of course I would. Well, in that case, he says, wouldn't you...

16:59Felix Salmon: So that's$10 ,000.

17:00Mary Childs: Wouldn't you pay the cost of a suit to save a life of a child somewhere else? And at some point, the moral intuition just kind of attenuates. and if it's not me personally with my physical hands saving the child then it becomes a very

17:14Felix Salmon: different thing i did an article a few years ago for town and country about effective altruism and i happen to have a philosopher friend who's super into it like very intellectually into it and so we talk a lot about it and i mean you can get really tangled up there's a famous story of one woman who's in the you know broader movement at some organization and she like was trying to buy like an apple at the grocery and started crying because what would it mean for her to buy this apple verses. Like you can really paralyze yourself with these thoughts and get kind of tangled up in the moral intuition and the logic chains and all of that.

17:45Felix Salmon: The thing that Taryn said to me, it's a calming instrument. It's a way to discipline compassion is how she put it, to put it in this kind of brutal framework that makes numbers out of human lives and can feel very uncomfortable and sociopathic. But if you have wrapped yourself up in those logic chains and you're upset and like thinking about this, which is like an appropriate human response to suffering around the world, this can provide a way to not get stuck and not get paralyzed by that.

18:11Mary Childs: I'm super interested in how the Aleema folks reacted to all of this, because one of the things, I mean, one of the things we definitely see and feel in your episode is the Aleema folks just constantly getting on fucking Zoom calls with these fucking people and being answering, trying to scrape up a bunch of fucking data. And they're like, look, we're in fucking Cameroon. People are going to die. Can we have some money here? And they're like, well, actually, can you send me a spreadsheet? And that takes a huge amount of time and effort that they need to divert from doing life-saving work to talk to a bunch of management consultant types with spreadsheets.

18:52Mary Childs: And again, this is something that GiveWell is very conscious of. They don't want to make too many demands on the time of the people who should be out saving lives. but they kind of have to.

19:04Felix Salmon: They kind of have to because again, they've made those promises. Like this is who they are and how they think about the world. They have this framework that disciplines their compassion and like they cannot deviate from that both like morally because they made a promise but also I think this is very intentional. So yeah, it is that incompatibility and it's one of the moments that really I found so staggering was when Madeleine in Cameroon, she's one of the people who like manages the grant programs, tries to raise money for the organization for Lima and she's kind of like, hey, it's been a couple weeks, months.

19:34Felix Salmon: What's the likelihood that we're going to get this money? Give us kind of a deadline or any kind of sense from your side. It would be really helpful for us. And the give well side is like, oh, well, do you have any pressing deadlines? There are laws in Cameroon. If you fire people, you have to do such and such severance type things. There are logistics that Madeleine will have to manage to shut the whole thing down. And she's always keeping that in mind no matter what because it's grant funded. She's always got an exit plan. Eventually, she's like, tell me the probability of us getting this money, which is like such GiveWell language, which I like love that they're like, let me just translate for you.

20:05Felix Salmon: And the GiveWell side, they're like 55%.

20:08Mary Childs: So unhelpful.

20:09Felix Salmon: Oh my God, it's devastating. And I talked to the GiveWell person later, her name's Rosie, and she's super thoughtful and careful. And she was like, yeah, that was kind of uncomfortable to have to say. First of all, I'm saying that kind of thing all the time. But like, what if I wasn't brutal with them? What if I just didn't tell her honestly where we were. Like, I'm wasting our time. People are dying. No one can afford for me to do that. The brutality is like a kindness in this context.

20:34Mary Childs: I'm sure I didn't.

20:35Felix Salmon: You didn't feel that way. Well, Madeleine also like, it's so funny how all of my assumptions about the emotions of this are just wrong. Madeleine was like, that was really helpful. I did not mind all the requests for data because that shows that they're interested. And so I remain hopeful. We wanted them to want to help us. And they did. We got there. It's great. We are so appreciative. And my natural like, oh i'd be so frustrated it was like we'll grow up i spent a little bit of time working with aid

21:00Mary Childs: workers or watching aid workers i wouldn't say working with them and it's amazing how very quickly if you're in that line of work you get into the mode of just doing as much as you can and knowing that you're doing as much as you can because if you start looking at outcomes especially in conflict areas and like you know things can get a lot worse and you're like well why the fuck did i come here if things are just going to get a lot worse but you're like I still saved lives compared to if I hadn't come here. When you're in that world, I think you do become a little bit more sort of...

21:31Felix Salmon: Inured to it?

21:32Mary Childs: Inured, yeah.

21:34Felix Salmon: Whereas the GiveWell side isn't. That's so interesting. Like theirs is right on the surface and Aleema's like, nah, this is just part of it. It's not what I expected.

21:43Mary Childs: We need to have a quick ad break, but when we're back, we're going to talk a bit more about the global context of what happens when$40 billion just disappears from the world.

22:02Mary Childs: The thing that really struck me more than anything else was when GiveWell put this blog post up saying this is what's happened in the wake of the USAID cuts. There are two possible things that could have happened. One is that the USAID cuts basically degrade the philanthropic infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa so much and various bits of the Caribbean and other places that it actually has become much, much harder to get aid to the people who need it and more expensive to get aid to the people who need it. And therefore, your dollar is not as effective as it was. Conversely, the other possibility is the USAID cuts like USAID was actually funding a bunch of incredibly cost effective self-contained interventions and all you need to do is pick one off a list and give money to that and that is amazing and USAID they had some smart people there and you can replace that money and in fact when the amount of total money goes down then every extra dollar that goes in is that much more effective that's a silver lining and they and they were like which one is it I think it's both isn't it and they're like you know if you're the metaphor i used when i was talking to someone in limo was like if you're the tip of the spear then what happens if the entire like shaft of the spear falls away yeah yeah but the answer that give well came to after a lot of empirical you know thread sheeting was actually our effectiveness bar is being raised if you give one dollar to give well now it will have more positive effect than if you gave a dollar to give well a year ago before USAID had imploded.

23:42Mary Childs: And that was, for me, it was just like a very validating thing. It was like, don't worry too much about the bigger effects of like everything has fallen apart because in a weird way, if everything has fallen apart, that is where philanthropy can do the most good.

23:57Felix Salmon: That's so sad because that means that things are so dire that the better that it can be is more. That's awful. But I also think the other way is true too, like the other bad outcome of degradation of these systems is absolutely true. Like GiveWell stepped in with what, $39 million so far this year as of the publishing of this Planet Money episode. And I mean, the hole that USAID left is tens of billions of dollars. Private philanthropy cannot cover all of that. We can accept that maybe USAID was doing too much. Maybe they were doing too much according to people or too much random, not accretive stuff, things that don't save lives, things that I don't know, whatever.

24:36Felix Salmon: You can have valid conversations about the efficacy or utility of USAID's contributions and what they were doing. To me, it's sort of less disputable how the ending of all those programs were handled, like you could have tapered it. But I think Taryn said this in one of the GiveWell podcasts, actually, that GiveWell and a lot of these sort of effective altruism types of organizations operate on the margins on purpose. As you put it, it's a meta-philanthropy. there's this assumption that the larger systems are there doing the basic stuff and they're not I mean they are they're providing basic health care in a lot of these cases but that's because the governments aren't able to at that time and like we're hoping that the armed conflict will ever stop and things will get better and like but in the intervening you know years there's just this assumption their delivery mechanisms work and their ability to save lives is to some degree predicated on some of these systems functioning and if you do not have those systems function And like, it's not just the U.S.

25:30Felix Salmon: cutting back. It's France, Germany. Like, it's all around the world.

25:34Mary Childs: That was definitely a very depressing part of the conversations I was having with Lima. It was just like, we have grants from Norway and France and the U.K. But like, when the USAID cuts back, what do they do? They also cut back. It gives cover to everyone else. Because the U.S. is telling Europe that it's basically pulling out of NATO. And so Europe needs to spend all the money on defense and they take it out of front. Anyway, I do think that to use a sort of investing metaphor.

26:00Felix Salmon: Really high ROI. I know.

26:02Mary Childs: You know, it's a good idea to sort of buy low when things are cheap.

26:07Felix Salmon: You're saying human life is on fire sale right now.

26:09Mary Childs: Yes.

26:09Felix Salmon: That's right.

26:10Mary Childs: And you can save lives for like less money. If the going rate a year ago is$5 ,000, maybe it's like$4 ,000. It's like cheaper to save lives.

26:17Felix Salmon: But I do, I will just say, I do worry about the long term because as these things degrade more and more, like there's more instability in countries that were already unstable. There's more like, that makes it harder and harder.

26:27Mary Childs: And maybe it will come down to like$3 ,000 or$2 ,000. But like the point is that in a weird way, you're right about the institutions. But the message I took from the blog post is that there always is an intervention that you can do. And the effective of your dollar, it just becomes more effective even if the institution is falling apart. I think you're right. There's a limit to that. And one of the things we're seeing in places like Cameroon is that it is harder. It is more difficult. It is more expensive to save lives in conflict zones than it is if you're in a peaceful neighborhood. But the opportunities are presenting themselves.

27:01Mary Childs: And one of the things I think about a lot, probably more than most people, because I'm weird, in philanthropy, is that the most effective time to spend money and save lives was probably some point in the 19th century. like the world is so much richer and healthier now that's funny and the need is so much lower now is there need yes but if you just look at what happened with the millennium development goals and the number of people who are living in extreme poverty on planet earth has gone from like 2 billion to 400 million over the past 20 years or something like that there was so much opportunity 20 years ago and people weren't really addressing it.

27:46Mary Childs: And eventually it got addressed and that's great. But if you have a pool of philanthropic money and a bunch of great tools to intervene, what you want to do is you want to front load that as much as possible. Is to have already intervened.

27:59Felix Salmon: Yeah.

27:59Mary Childs: Well, ideally you would have intervened years ago.

28:01Felix Salmon: Yeah. Time value of money.

28:03Mary Childs: The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the second best time is today.

28:07Felix Salmon: Yeah.

28:07Mary Childs: And so this is why I hate it when foundations only give away 5 % of their capital every year. Because they don't understand the discount rate. They don't understand that their money is going to be less effective in the future. The cost of saving a life is going to go up in the future.

28:23Felix Salmon: Except for this fire sale that you just pointed out.

28:25Mary Childs: But now, everything is on sale. Everyone should just be spending all of their money right now, all of their philanthropic capital right now, throwing it into sub-saharan africa wherever right now because now is it's on sale now there's an urgency now it's like cheaper to save a life than ever and then ultimately just trust either that like sanity will prevail at some point the arc of human history is going to bend towards justice or for sure or just trust that that right now you're doing there will be future philanthropists in the future who are also going to have money and who will be able to fund future needs.

29:05Mary Childs: That you don't need to save up your money, your philanthropic money for the future, because either it will be less effective or someone else will have money.

29:13Felix Salmon: I like that. There's like a comfort in that. It's almost like burning a hole in your pocket. I think that's a nice framing and a comforting framing and a sort of another way to discipline your compassion, I guess. It's soothing to think that, and it's true. and I mean making this episode for Planet Money was like I normally do like what's the structure of the treasury market and like I love that stuff don't don't get me wrong but the texture of this is obviously so different and I was like what am I doing with my life do I need to go quit and like go work for an NGO like that's not my expertise I don't spend a lot of time there and um yeah it's

29:46Mary Childs: pretty urgent and the needs are increasing it's funny I texted you I sent a bunch of cash to or Lima, before your episode came out.

29:54Felix Salmon: You saved a life with that cash, I think.

29:55Mary Childs: I saved a life with that cash. And then I heard your episode. I'm like, yeah, that was like Mary just tapping me on the shoulder and saying, good job, Felix.

30:03Felix Salmon: Oh, I love that. Yeah, the context of me being here today is that I got a random screen grab from you out of nowhere of your donation. How did you come to them? Why do you know them?

30:13Mary Childs: I've been supporting them for, I don't know, six or seven years, something like that.

30:18Felix Salmon: How did you find out about them?

30:19Mary Childs: As I say, I have friends in the development. But Aleema, in some ways, it's a bit of an oversimplification, but you can say oversimplifying that it kind of spun out of Doctors Without Borders. And long time Slate Money listeners will remember from like eight, nine years ago, I did like a whole matching donations thing for Doctors Without Borders and wound up raising like$40 ,000 for Doctors Without Borders from Slate Money. And yeah. Do it again. Do it again.

30:53Felix Salmon: Let's do it.

30:54Mary Childs: Let's do it again. We will come up with some.

30:57Felix Salmon: We'll come up with a matching scheme.

30:58Mary Childs: But this time we'll do it for Lima.

31:00Felix Salmon: I think journalistically, I don't know if I can do that. I can do it. I don't know. I'll have to check my ethics.

31:05Mary Childs: Do you have like an NPR ethics? I just covered them. Money to Lima.

31:09Felix Salmon: I don't know. I just covered them in a story. So I would assume I can't give them money. Right. You can't just give money to people that you cover. That's a rule. You're looking at me like.

31:19Mary Childs: You can't receive money from people that you covet. I feel like giving money is fine.

31:23Felix Salmon: Listen, I'm going to ask the ethics people just to make sure. But it seems like life-saving work would be probably a good use of money.

31:30Mary Childs: If you take one lesson from this podcast, go out and save some lives, anyone who can afford it should do it. All right, final question, Mary.

31:37Felix Salmon: Yeah?

31:37Mary Childs: Since this is a money podcast.

31:39Felix Salmon: Okay.

31:40Mary Childs: If someone makes a donation in your name, or if you make a donation in someone else's name as a gifty-type gift.

31:47Felix Salmon: Gifty gift.

31:47Mary Childs: Do you tell them how much you donated?

31:50Felix Salmon: Oh, that's nice. I would have said yes, but let's imagine that it's millions and millions of dollars and you can just like hold on to the fantasy that you just saved like a lot. That's nice. Yeah, don't say.

32:01Mary Childs: Leave it vague.

32:02Felix Salmon: Maybe, yeah. Because if it's$25, you're like, okay, thank you. You know? But it's also like people give what they can. Like we can't all be throwing around three grand.

32:11Mary Childs: That's the other thing. There are two big lies in philanthropy. One is...

32:16Felix Salmon: That it's cheap to save a life.

32:17Mary Childs: that it's cheap to save a life. And the other one is every penny counts. It's like, really, no, if you get a million dollars from Mackenzie Scott, that really does count much more than if you get 25 bucks from some kid.

32:28Felix Salmon: Yeah, yeah. I just think all the time about how like the ice bucket challenge, people made fun of it at the time. And they're like, it's too much money. It's going to break these foundations. And then they like found cures. And it's like, oh, well, they didn't. They've made enormous progress because of all the fundraising promise. There was a really good New Yorker article about it. They have not cured it. You're right. But they are finding cures. And that feels huge.

32:50Mary Childs: We're getting there.

32:51Felix Salmon: Yeah.

32:51Mary Childs: So happy way to end Hope. 2025.

32:55Felix Salmon: Imagine that.

32:56Mary Childs: Imagine that. Mary, thank you so much for coming on Money Talks. Thank you for having me. It's so great.

33:00Felix Salmon: It's a delight as always, Felix.

33:01Mary Childs: And we will have you back soon to talk about something completely different.

33:04Felix Salmon: Absolutely. Let's do it.

33:05Mary Childs: Thank you. Oh, and also many thanks to Jessamyn Molly and Magnus Hendrickson here at Bloomberg who managed to express buttons which I could never otherwise find.

33:13Felix Salmon: Really important buttons.

33:14Mary Childs: Very important buttons.

33:15Felix Salmon: No.

33:15Mary Childs: And to everyone else, Shana Roth and everyone putting it together. And to you guys, thank you for listening. And thank you even more if you gave money to a living.