March 26, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
The Life You Can Save
by Peter Singer
In December 2006, Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine titled “What Should a Billionaire Give — and What Should You?”
This book is an expanded treatment of that article and explores the reasons why people should give and yet do not, why current levels of aid are not enough, and how much people can and should contribute.
Mr. Singer’s central argument rests on three premises: pain and death stemming from lack of food, health care, and housing are bad; if one is able to prevent an unfortunate event without great sacrifice, it is wrong to do nothing; and in donating to charities, one can prevent the ill effects of poverty without incurring a steep personal cost.
In one chapter, for example, Mr. Singer discusses the efforts of GiveWell, a group founded by two former hedge-fund employees that evaluates how charities accomplish their missions. Two charities highly rated by GiveWell, Population Services International and Opportunity International, as well as others highlighted by Mr. Singer, manage to save lives while spending modest sums (between $200 and $2,000 for each person). “Even at the upper end of this range,” he writes, “the contrast between what it costs to save a life in a poor nation and how much we spend to save lives in rich nations should make us uncomfortable.”
In his final chapter, he offers a way to calculate what people in specific income brackets should donate to charity. Mr. Singer suggests that donations should be “roughly 5 percent of annual income for those who are financially comfortable, and rather more for the very rich.”
Publisher: Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10019; http://www.randomhouse.com; 206 pages; $22.00; ISBN 978-1-4000-6710-7.
