Copyright © 2007–2018 Tim Ferriss. All Rights Reserved.
of if you’re thinking about the environment, there I’m just less
sure, actually. GiveWell is starting to broaden the research that
they do, so they’re working with a foundation called Good
Ventures, which is set up by Kevin Turner and Dustin Moskovich,
who’s one of the Facebook cofounders.
And there, they’re looking into a much wider variety of causes
beyond just global health and global development, including things
like climate change, fundamental research, policy reform,
especially immigration research and criminal justice reform, and
trying to look for – comparing across all different causes you could
be interested in, what are those that are particularly great in scale,
so it’s just a very big problem, particularly neglected. So there
aren’t very many other philanthropists or actors trying to solve this
problem, so it’s not very crowded, or particularly [inaudible], so
where there’s just really great programs that haven’t yet been
funded. But we know they’re going to make a really big difference.
And some of the ones they’re championing are improving
conditions of animals on factory farms, improving immigration
policy, improving criminal justice policy to reduce the number of
people who are incarcerated, while at the same time maintaining
the same level or better level of public safety.
And then also, the risks of kind of global catastrophe. New
technology is often climate change, or from developments in
biology and so on.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. Thank you. Related question or quandary, maybe, for, I
think, all the people listening. So if you look at a given high need
population. Let’s just say we’re looking at – you gave Kenya as an
example – we’re looking at Kenya. The reflex seems to be to help
the poorest of the poor. Are there philosophers or philanthropists
out there that you respect who disagree with that?
In other words, people who say, you could give $10 to the 10,000
poorest people in Kenya, but I’d prefer to try to identify the, say,
200 most promising young students who could become the leaders
of tomorrow, and break the cycle of poverty in this country
through policy reform, and this, that, and the other thing,
engineers, blablabla. But it’s a much more expensive per person
proposition probably, right? Maybe they have to be sent to the US
or Cambridge or Oxford for education, for instance. How are
people thinking about that, and is there anyone who – it’s
politically safe to say, we want the focus on the poorest of the
poor. No one’s going to rake you over the coals publicly for that,
right? But are there people who take the opposite approach, whose