How much does it cost to save a life?

In 2006, two hedge fund analysts in their mid-twenties—Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld—started asking a question that turned out to be surprisingly hard to answer: which charities actually do the most good per dollar? They expected the nonprofit world to have clear answers. It didn’t. Most charities couldn’t say what their programmes achieved, let alone how cost-effectively. So Karnofsky and Hassenfeld quit their jobs and founded GiveWell, an organisation dedicated to finding out.

What they discovered was striking. Some health interventions in low-income countries cost roughly $3,000–5,000 per life saved. Others, targeting similar problems, cost hundreds of times more for the same outcome. The variation wasn’t a rounding error—it was orders of magnitude. And most donors had no way of knowing which was which.

This chapter tells the story of how rigorous cost-effectiveness analysis came to charitable giving—how GiveWell was founded, what they discovered, and why it changed the landscape of philanthropy.

Read: Peter Singer, “How much does it cost to save a life, and how can you find which charities do it best?” — Chapter 6 of The Life You Can Save (20 mins)

The book is available as a free download: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/the-book/