I've given $27,910.79 to effective charities this financial year. I'm deeply grateful for being born in a great place to great people, which has given me opportunities most in the world don't have. As a birth lottery jackpot winner I think I have an obligation to give back to those who weren't as fortunate when they emerged into the world from behind Rawls' Veil.

This is 16% of my income donated (that's 16% of pre-tax income including superannuation (an Australian thing)). I gave the same percentage last year. I've promised to give at least 10% of my income to charity for the rest of my life. Most of these donations are tax-deductable meaning that the government effectively has covered 30-40% of my donations expenses (that's a good deal!).

What I could have given to:

1. These artists to make a fun mobile shack to take to Burning Man

Whimsy and creativity are essential to a joyful world. This project adds a small amount of whimsy/creativity to an event attended mostly by rich people.

The rosiest interpretation of this GoFundMe is:

• Burning Man is an important project at the cultural coal face, and potentially impactiful ripples may emanate from it in the form of new ways of organising and working together as humans, and this relatively cheap mobile party shack project is one essential brick of many that collectively form the great Burning Man project.
• If we insisted on waiting until the world's more pressing problems were solved before allowing ourselves to make art, there would never be any art.

And ungenerous interpretation is:

• Vapid, priveleged out-of-touch navel-gazing. This is what Marie Antoinette would have spent her money on if she had been a 20 year-old daughter of a bank executive; it's insulting to the approximately 2 billion people in the world who are subsistence farmers [1] to spend money on an art project that doesn't seem to have a deeper purpose or meaning beyond getting you clout at a music festival

I think the truth is closer to the ungenerous interpretation than the generous one

I did not give to the Burning Man mobile party shack.

2. a fund to pay off the medical debt of Californians.

Many people in medical debt in the US are in a terrible situation, maybe even after losing a loved one to a disease they got into debt to fight.

Should they have bought health insurance to prevent this from happening? Probably, but maybe they genuinely couldn't afford it and had no risk but to gamble on continued good health.

It's a good thing to buy this passed-around medical debt at steep discount to get debt-collectors off the backs of these unfortunate people who were trying their best. There will be some irresponsible chaotic people among the debtors who could have and should have bought insurance but didn't and forgiving their debts might dampen the wake-up call those people need to get their shit together, and a true hardened personalresponsibilitymaxxer/libertarian might scoff at the idea of distrupting the incentives to make good decisions.

At the end of the day, Californians are nowhere near the bottom of the pile globally when it comes to opportunity and the basic amenities of life. Access to health, education and security in most of the world is so dire that I suspect that given the opportunity, most people in the world would swap places immediately with someone in crushing medical debt in California because even that would be an improvement over their own situation.

I think the top commenter in this screenshot above and its 2.4k likers believe they live in a world where medical debt of Californians is in the top 10 most pressing problems. I wish I lived in that world because it would mean there were far fewer problems.

This is a nice gesture by Kerr and Spiegel that should be applauded and I wish more ultra-rich people tried to do good with their money. As long as it's not unintentionally harming anyone it is immeasurably better than flushing it into an ultra-lavish wedding.

I did not give to Californians in medical debt

3. the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

A stage of prodigies, each with thousands of hours of single-minded dedication to their practice, playing an intricate symphony, baring their souls in a medium that transcends language, truly here at the pinnacle of high artistic human achievement we are defined as a civilised etc. etc... this not a priority.

The people that attend the MSO need my help less that the Burning Man mobile shack GoFundMe. Maybe the members of the orchestra - the violinists and bassoonist - deserve some support. Unfortunately there are several billion people triaged ahead of them in my priority queue.

I did not give to the MSO.

4. Drs4Drs to support the well-being of my fellow doctors and medical students.

We are all born with a strong instinctive bias to help our own: people who live near us, people that share our beliefs, people who do the same job, people who speak the same language. In some ways this is fair, in some ways it's not.

The most generous justification for this bias is:

• We know best how to help those in situations that we understand or have been in or have intimate knowledge of ourselves.
• A world where everyone was good to their neighbours but never thought about the global good would probably be better than a world where everyone thought about the global good but were horrible to their neighbours.

A less flattering explanation of this bias is:

• Most of us have blinders on for things that happen outside our view or that we haven't directly experienced, and we only look to fix these problems we're aware of. We'd behave differently if we didn't have this tunnel vision.

I was a depressed medical student once. An awful feeling. Probably not as awful as being a depressed farmer though, or a depressed insurance salesman or a depressed teacher. At least medical students have the prospect of earning lots of money and respect when they graduate.

I support mental health programs, especially for the people who are worst-off in the world, who have the least to look forward to and the most trauma to process.

On average, Australian doctors are one of the least in-need groups in the world. I think it would be poor form of me to selectively help this well-off group in preference to others in the same way that it would be poor form for me to target my help to inner-city Melbournians over regional Australians, or men over women.

Where I am giving my money:

1. GiveWell All Grants Fund

donated: $10,000 (Jun 2025)

GiveWell is the result of investment managers turning their cold analytical reasoning to assessing how to save the most lives. They look at evidence, ideally from randomised controlled trials, and assess what helps people and what doesn't in the same way that we rigorously test medicines and vaccines to make sure we're not ingesting snake oil.

GiveWell's answer to how to save the most lives per dollar is not to give locally to your neighbour to pay his vet bill for his sick cat, nor to give to the last charity you saw advertised on Instagram. Rather it's to help the poorest people in the world through evidence-based cost-effective charities, usually focused on preventative health.

I find their reports analysing charity effectiveness very thorough and I trust their judgement even on topics I haven't read the reports for.

The limitation in their process is that certain interventions might be very effective but if that effectiveness is hard to prove (e.g. the effects are very delayed, or hard to measure in a way that removes confounding variables) they won't make the cut.

GiveWell is based in the US and donations are usually not tax-deductable in Australia. Effective Altruism Australia allows you to donate to GiveWell tax deductably through them.

The All Grants Fund is their speculative donations arm. It takes a high-risk high-reward approach to helping the world's poorest people, offering grants from its All Grants Fund to promising programs that don't have as strong an evidence base as their well-researched staple recommendations but which they believe have a chance of being extremely effective.

A criticism I've heard leveraged against GiveWell is that they pay their execs lots of money (the CEO earned USD$450k/year in 2023 (see page 7)). A 20-year old Che Guevara-sympathising Henry would have been disgusted by anyone working for a charity that didn't live in a van and eat instant noodles for each meal. A 33 year-old Henry with a job understands that execs are usually highly skilled and necessary and if you don't give them money then they get poached by McKinsey or Jane Street or some other exclusive firm that will proceed to make huge amounts of money from them, thus demonstrating the value in them you refused to acknowledge.

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2. Five Percent Foundation

donated: $8600 (June 2025)

The Five Percent Foundation is a group of Australian young professionals - lawyers, healthcare workers, public servants. We all give 5% of our incomes into a public ancilliary fund, the money is invested in low risk index funds and each of us chooses each year where the returns from our portion of the pool are donated. The donations go to various effective charities based on The Life You Can Save and GiveWell recommendations.

Donations to the fund are tax-deductable. The members of the group I've met are lovely and seem pure of heart. The Foundation's fund grows a little every year and the plan is that it will outlive us.

The benefit of the "invest and give the returns" strategy is that the money we give will continue to generate donations forever.

The disadvantage of this strategy vs just giving it all now is that if someone needs help, it's better to help them now rather than wait 10 years. That's 10 years over which, if you solved their problem now, they can be a more productive member of their community and help uplift those around them. If my child was dying of malaria now, I would prefer that a person in a rich country had donated a mosquito net or malaria chemoprophylaxis last month rather than investing their money and letting it dribble out over the next decades and centuries.

I hedge my bets by following both these strategies in my giving. 5% to the "invest and give" strategy through Five Percent, the rest through the "give now" strategy.

Consider joining The Five Percent Foundation.

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3. The Life You Can Save Health Fund

donated: $6,000 (June 2025)

The Life You Can Save was set up by the philosopher Peter Singer, who argues that in a world where there are very cost-effective ways for people with spare money to help people without money, the people with money should donate to effective charities helping the people without money.

The Life You Can Save recommends effective charities that reduce suffering and save lives in evidence-based cost-effective ways. It leans on GiveWell's recommendations for some of these and it also has its own framework for establishing effectiveness which is slightly different to GiveWell's. Whereas GiveWell's framework is very much Dollars per Life Saved/Improved, The Life You Can Save acknowledges that Dollars Per Life Saved/Improved has limitations: certain good in the world isn't easy to measure (e.g. how would GiveWell have possibly assessed the dollars per lives saved for supporting the aboliton movement, or women's suffrage, or civil rights. How would GiveWell assess the benfits of supporting education programs for kids, whose benefits might not be seen for decades and might manifest in all sorts of subtle, difficult-to-measure ways that would be hard to disentangle from confounding factors? And yet we almost universally agree that education of kids is good).

The generous interpretation of the Life You Can Save's slightly more vague, open-to-interpretation, holistic framework is:

• It opens the door to charities that might be very effective but the effectiveness is difficult to measure, rather than being married to interventions that produce straight-forwardly measurable outcomes like infectious disease prevention

An ungenerous interpretation of the framework is:

• Its looseness and openness to interpretation leaves it vulnerable to vibes-based thinking/political fashions. If enough people feel that The Life You Can Save should support wiping medical debt for Californians, or mental health for doctors, is this framework concrete enough to let us reject this as an effective approach?

I'm such a fan of the Life You Can Save that I voluntarily run the Melbourne The Life You Can Save meetup group. Come and hang out with us at our meetups

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4. OneDay Health

donated: $3310.79 (June 2024)

OneDay Health sets up nurse-led health clinics in parts of Uganda where people would have to travel more than 5 km to get to a government healthcare centre. Do these clinics offer much value over the existing healthcare offerings in Uganda? Do they improve outcomes for people or do they just save a half hour bus trip? There's rigorous discussion on the Effective Altruism forum about that here

They estimate that USD$4000 is enough to set up one of these clinics and run it for a year, which sound like much more than you could ever do with that money in a developed country.

This is a small charity, and not backed by a randomised controlled trial, as many of the best interventions won't be because it's too expensive to do the trial or the outcome is too difficult to measure.

Dr Nick Laing, who co-founded the charity, is a person I deeply admire. I find his actions as a human - living and working as a doctor in Uganda for >10 years - to be demonstrative of his genuine desire to do good in the world. His writings on substack and on the EA forum convince me that he is sincere, thoughtful and well-informed. I believe that if he didn't think One Day Health was doing real good for Ugandans, he would shut it down.

Other than the potential direct improvements in health outcomes, I like that it uses local members of the community to staff the clinics, which I think, like most work, provides purpose, income, stability to those people while also having flow-on economic growth effects for the community around them.

It's not tax-deductable in Australia.

The weird donation amount is because of the AUD to NZ exchange rate.

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