It’s a rare day I do not pass by one of Wellington’s many bucket collectors. On my morning walk from the train station through to Lambton Quay, it’s more common to see at least three or four of them than to see none.

Every day, it’s a different cause. The charities all sound worthy and the bucket holders’ earnest faces signal that they care about the charities for which they’re collecting. If you dropped a two-dollar coin in each cause’s bucket, every working day, while walking by, it would be pretty easy to wind up donating $500 to charity over the course of the year.

If it’s the loose change jingling in your pocket, you might not even notice the loss – if your income is high enough. The charities would value the money and it would likely do some good. But is it the most good you could do with that $500?

I helped in hosting Peter Singer last week at the Christchurch Arts Festival and WORD Christchurch session on his new book, The Most Good You Can Do.

Professor Singer is the Ira W DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton and the world’s foremost moral philosopher. His commitment to a consistent utilitarianism – the notion that what matters most is people’s enjoyment of life and that each person’s enjoyment counts equally – takes him in interesting directions.

His work has ranged from the moral status of animals that can feel but are not self-aware and whether that should differ from infants, to whether we can trust our moral intuitions, and most recently to how we can do the most good in the world.

Singer’s book opens with an analogy. If you saw a drowning child in a pond, and you would ruin your cell phone by diving into save the child’s life, should you not be willing to do similarly costly things to save the lives you cannot see? And, if you are a rational altruist, should you not want to do the very best you can with every dollar and every minute you can devote to helping others?

If we accept the book’s premise – that it is good to help others, and that we should seek to be effective in the help we give – then some interesting conclusions follow.

Professor Singer argues that, for many people, the best we can do is to take the highest-paying job we can, live simply but not in a hermit’s cave, and donate as much as possible to the charities that can do the most good.

The hedge fund trader living in a small downtown apartment and donating large amounts to effective charities saving and improving lives abroad does far more good for the world than he could have by taking a job that’s more commonly associated with helping people – or by standing on street corners holding a bucket.

Professor Singer contrasts effective altruists with “warm glow” altruists. Effective altruists think hard about where they might do the most good and put most of their charity budget into the one or two causes that are most important to them and that demonstrate their cost-effectiveness.

Give Well is one American charity that provides unbiased, well-researched insights into which charities provide excellent value per donated dollar. So too does The Life You Can Save. And this is rather more than simply looking at administrative overhead ratios.

A charity that does a lot to evaluate its effectiveness will not have a low overhead ratio but it also will not be wasting the money that it spends.

Little difference

Warm glow altruists instead give a little money to each of many causes, putting their coins into many buckets. It feels good to put a coin into each of those buckets. But, at the end of the year, the $500 in coins split across a couple hundred charities will have made little difference to each of the bucket-charities.

The same total amount of money, better targeted, could have funded the surgical repair of an obstetric fistula in the developing world and radically improved one person’s life. Or it could have funded 10 sight-restoring cataract surgeries.

I pressed Professor Singer a little in our conversation. Charitable donations in New Zealand earn a small tax credit – about enough to rebate the income taxes you paid on the money you gave, depending on your tax rate.

But we could imagine a more generous regime where donations to effective charities – the kinds of charities on Give Well’s list – earned a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. Less money would go to the New Zealand government and more would go to improving the lives of poor people in developing countries.

The $12.3 billion the government spends on transfers to relatively wealthy superannuitants in New Zealand could do far more to save and improve countless lives elsewhere – lives no less morally worthy than those of any New Zealand resident.

Hard to resist

Professor Singer’s recommendations are targeted at those altruists who care most about doing the most good, and who do not think less of others by virtue of their being on the wrong side of some border. Not many people fit that description.

But if all altruistic efforts devoted to making New Zealand a better place ceased because those efforts could do more good elsewhere, New Zealand would become an objectively worse place. That donors could apportion some of their giving to effective domestic charities and the rest to charities helping those abroad is one pragmatic solution. But it is not one that sits well with an overarching goal of doing the most good, full stop.

It is hard to resist Professor Singer’s call for more effective altruism. Whatever your charitable preferences and wherever you most want to help, doing the most good you can toward your chosen ends requires being careful about where you give. It also poses a challenge for the charitable sectors. The government has been increasingly insistent on outcome-based performance measures in its contracting for services and some charities seem uncomfortable with the rigorous evaluation that such measures require.

It is not easy to measure the good that you can do. But organisations chafing at performance-based contracting with the public sector should not sit back and hope the fad passes by.

As more private donors start watching the kinds of evaluation being provided by places such as Give Well and demand better measures of the good their dollars do, charities wanting to keep those donors will have to keep up. It might get harder to rely on the bucket brigades.