GWWC Team

Where are the GWWC team donating this year?

As part of Giving Season, we’re sharing where our team is giving this year, and a little bit about how they currently think about their donations.

Currently, all staff at Giving What We Can have taken the 

 to give at least 10% of their income to effective charities until they retire.

In December, I’ll be doing donations as gifts for my close friends and family via Effective Altruism Australia who are producing digital cards. Those donations will go to a mix of 

I’m also planning to make a donation to 

. I think the approach of looking for excellent opportunities outside of the Top Charities really makes sense - and I’m impressed with the grants given so far!

I’ll also be donating over and above my 10% Pledge to 

Effective Altruism Australia Environment’s Fund

 of effective climate change charities to offset my CO2 from travel.

This year, I’m giving 20% of my income—double my 

I believe that growing the total amount of money directed toward high-impact charities is a crucial bottleneck. As part of this, I’m giving 

our multiplier at GWWC is exceptionally high

, and I’ve written more about why I think effective giving organizations could do with more support 

. While I’d love to give to other effective giving organizations, my role as 

Effective Giving Global Coordinator and Incubator

 means that I see value in avoiding any appearance of bias that could complicate my work.

Another clear decision for me this year is giving 

. I’ve had the privilege of working closely with AIM, and I’ve been consistently impressed by the rigor and ambition of their work. Their track record is very strong and I think that they are likely to continue incubating exceptionally high impact charities.

For the rest of my giving, I’ve leaned on recommendations from Giving What We Can’s 

, filtered through my own values and priorities:

Longview Philanthropy’s Emerging Challenges Fund

Outside of my 10% pledge, I’ll give to 

 to offset my annual carbon footprint and to a variety of animal welfare charities, inspired by 

, to offset the harm caused by my (minimal) animal product consumption as a vegetarian.

I’ve been on a real journey with my giving this year. I previously donated exclusively to the 

It reflected my passion for global health, social equality and justice as fairness.

It was simple. I’m a big believer in ‘outsourcing’ my giving choices to the experts and I think GiveWell are excellent.

I wasn’t as aware of the other cause areas GWWC promotes or their claims to be super effective.

I have a relatively high risk appetite in my giving and I thought that the All Grants Fund’s broader spectrum of giving suited me better than the GiveWell Top Charities fund.

This year I’ve changed my donations a couple of times, but now the split looks like this.

 Having been exposed to the ideas behind animal welfare as an important cause area which is big, tractable and unpopular, I felt duty bound to support this cause.

Whilst I think the likelihood of things like rogue AI, Nuclear Weapons and species threatening pandemics are probably quite low, I am convinced by the argument that the impact should they happen would be unimaginably bad. So I have apportioned some of my donation here.

 I had the pleasure of meeting many of the AIM Incubated Charity teams this year, including 

. I was so impressed and whilst I think they’re much higher risk than the likes of GiveWell Top Charities, their potential for impact exceeds those recommendations. I view this as diversifying my risk profile in my giving.

 I have long admired GiveDirectly, ever since I was involved in setting up cash transfer programming and coordination back in 2018 whilst working at Save the Children. I think they do brilliant work. I stopped donating to them because they were judged not to be as impactful as GiveWell’s top charities, but I have started again because 1) they have recently been 

 and 2) I am convinced that saving lives is important, but that the quality of those lives matters too. I am sold on the importance of 

. For every $ donated to us, we’re able to generate over $10 more for effective charities. This is pretty amazing and made me want to sacrifice my salary back to the organisation which I’m so proud to work for.

, I’ve capped my salary at GWWC to €25k/y, so my largest donation is ~€50k to GWWC. I believe we currently have a good multiplier on marginal funding, and it’s very tax-efficient to reduce my salary instead of donating.

Other than that, this year I gave €6.5k to 

, with the hope that one day their multiplier effect could be even greater than ours.

First of all, how is it December already? The holidays are almost here, and while I'm dreaming of cozy evenings with loved ones and non-alcoholic mulled cider, there's one December task I refuse to procrastinate on

I have a selfish reason to write this section of the post: 

 and public accountability help ensure I don’t rack up donation debt.

Working at GWWC has also shifted how I think about personal giving. My biggest impact comes from my work at GWWC, which gives me the privilege to let both effectiveness and personal meaning guide my personal donation choices. Here’s where my donations are headed in 2024:

Not to toot our own horns - I genuinely believe in GWWC's recommendations (check out our

if you haven’t already!). This is actually lower than my previous years as I feel more freedom to be more experimental with my personal giving as I work at GWWC.

This one’s also close to my heart. The 

 Fund currently features six programs across health, education, and gender in China. I've been following their newsletter and am consistently impressed by their work. Being Chinese, supporting impactful work in my home country feels personally meaningful and motivating.

I set aside this portion for responding to immediate needs throughout the year - like disaster relief or helping someone in crisis. While these donations may not be the 

 cost-effective, these responsive donations are important for my giving.

5% 云山保护 Cloud Mountain Conservation

A conservation charity in Southwest China doing cool work. I particularly appreciate their approach of combining rigorous research with public engagement and sustainable development through community-based initiatives.

I haven’t yet made my full donation allocation decisions for this year, and expect to do this during an in-person “pledge party” event we’ll be having with a group of friends and acquaintances who’ve also pledged in the Netherlands next week. During this event we’ll collectively discuss, decide/act on and celebrate our donation allocations and whether we’ll renew/increase our pledges.

Upping my 10% Pledge to 20% per January 2025

I was inspired by a friend who recently decided to take a Founders Pledge of 100% of the equity in a company she co-founded above a certain amount. I’ve been confident for quite a while that I want to give a lot more than 20% of my income over my lifetime, and feel the time is right to solidify this commitment.

For reasons similar to Lucas and Lorenzo above, I’m deciding to dedicate part of my giving to GWWC itself. In addition to buying the general case for multiplier giving and believing we have a strong marginal multiplier at GWWC, I put some value on the associated “practice what I preach” and extra emotional incentive/accountability to very carefully evaluate that we spend and keep spending our money cost-effectively. I will however also dedicate a significant amount of my giving to other organisations, as I want to avoid taking this too far and e.g. being incentivized to rationalise GWWC’s cost-effectiveness.

After seeing how well Giving What We Can performed in recent evaluations (both 

), I've changed my approach to donations this year. The impressive giving multiplier effect convinced me to commit 5% of my income to the organisation as salary sacrifice. But I still want to stay actively involved in choosing where some of my donations go, so I'm keeping another 5% to donate directly to causes I care about. Like last year, part of this is going to 

 - animal welfare remains super important to me.

For the rest I wanted to try something different and get my family involved in choosing where to give. Convinced by conversations at an 

 during the event. My plan is to hand these out during the holidays and have my family and friends help choose where the money should go by redeeming them through 

's platform. I'm hoping this will spark some interesting conversations about giving or pledging and maybe even get them thinking about their donations - topics that don't usually come up naturally around the dinner table.

Once I wrap up my taxes early next year and have my final income figures, I'll check if I've hit my pledged amount. If I'm still a bit short, I'll probably donate the remainder to support Effektiv Spenden's operations. They're doing fantastic work, and their 

 backs that up. I also think there is much potential to grow effective giving in the German speaking region.

Can money buy happiness? A study by two Nobel Laureates suggests it can – but only up to a point. 

Everyone knows the adage "money can't buy happiness" – does it hold up under scrutiny?

Can money buy happiness? A review of the data

This article is based on a 2021 blog post by 

. It was updated in November, 2024 to reflect new research and some takeaways for charitable giving.

e knows the adage "money can't buy happiness", although few of us seem to believe it. While we might chase fortune in the hopes of increasing wellbeing, it is clear that being wealthy does not guarantee happiness; at least anecdotally, there are many who are tremendously wealthy, yet entirely unhappy. But what does the data say on the relationship of money and happiness? Can we link increases in income to wellbeing, and if so, in what contexts? 

Here’s a summary of some often-cited data on the 

 in high-income countries. (Note that respondents surveyed in these studies were primarily from the U.S.)

Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton find that money can buy happiness, but only up to a point. This well-known study found that emotional wellbeing rises 

 with income. In layman’s terms, this means that as income increases, wellbeing increases too – but at a slower and slower rate. Khaneman and Deaton’s data also suggested that once income surpasses about $75,000 per year, wellbeing stops increasing altogether. However, more recent research has shown that the log-linear relationship persists well beyond 75K for most people — though there is likely a flattening effect around 100K for the least happy people (see study 3).

Matthew Killingsworth challenges Kahneman and Deaton’s finding in a paper entitled "Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year” Note that Killingworth also found a log-linear relationship, meaning that it takes a 

 increase in income to observe a relatively small happiness boost, especially at higher income levels. For this reason, in our 

2021 video on Money and Happiness (below) 

we jokingly renamed Killingsworth’s paper to: “Money barely increases happiness above 75,000 per year – unless you really value money, and even then not by much.” However, we wish to clarify that:

 The 75K threshold identified in the 2010 Kahneman study does 

 hold up under new research (see Killingsworth & Kahneman, 2023)

The remapping of the Killingsworth data (at 3:13 in the video) that we suggested could show a plateauing in the happiness-income relationship at $200K USD per year was not meant to imply that this is good evidence against a continuing log-linear relationship, particularly considering the small sample sizes in the high income groups. 

That said, consistent with a log-linear relationship, the effect of extra income is certainly much smaller at high incomes. Additionally, the observed increases in happiness correlated with even significant extra income are quite small. 

Therefore, the key takeaways in the video below — that there are diminishing returns to income gains and that that spending on others with less income is generally a much better bargain —  do hold true, even given the new 2023 research, which for the most part, overturned the finding of any sort of "plateau" or "threshold" except for in a small (very unhappy) subset of the population.  

Can money buy happiness? A review of new data. (2021 Video)

Killingsworth and Kahneman team up in what’s known as an “adversarial collaboration” to try to get at the root of why their data showed different things. They found that one’s starting level of happiness affects what will happen to that happiness as income increases. For the least happy people, income does increase happiness up to a point (around 100K) but then ceases to have any effect. Conversely, for the most happy people, once income surpasses 100K, the happiness boosts also increase! For the majority of people, however, the log-linear relationship between income increases and happiness persists, meaning that the overall takeaway (more money does make you happier but not by very much) seems to persist across all three studies. To make this more concrete, a doubling of income (whether below or above 100K and no matter the starting level of happiness) was associated with a happiness increase of 

Okay, so what does this mean in terms of giving to charity? Should we be worried that giving to others might markedly decrease our wellbeing?

Based on the data above, the answer seems to be no – you’re unlikely to experience a decrease in wellbeing from giving to others, even if you give more than average. The effects are so small that – even if they happened to be causal – you’d have to give more than half your income away to feel even a 2 point decrease in happiness (and that’s on a 100 point scale!) Of course, if you give so much so as to not be able to meet your basic needs, that could very well affect your wellbeing, but as long as you can safely donate, it’s unlikely that sacrificing some income would lead to any noticeable decrease in happiness.On the contrary, it will probably make you happier.

 that prosocial spending (i.e., spending money to benefit others) improves the spender's happiness. In one experiment, participants were given money and then randomly told to spend it on themselves or others. As it turns out, those who spent it on others reported higher levels of happiness at the end of the study. And anecdotally, we hear often from Giving What We Can members who have taken the 

 that it’s actually made them happier to know that they are living up to their values and having a concrete impact in the lives of others.

So one reason to give is that it will probably make you happier than the other ways you could spend your money (cough, cough…hedonic treadmill).

Personal happiness aside, let’s talk about what these findings mean for the 

 of your charitable giving. All of the studies above supported a log linear relationship between income gains and happiness boosts (with the exception of a plateau for the least happy and a sharp increase for the most happy). This means that generally, doubling someone’s income is associated with around the same increase in happiness, 

In other words, according to these observed trends, doubling Jane's income from $500 to $1,000 increases Jane's happiness by the same amount as doubling John's income from $100,000 to $200,000 increases John's happiness. So that $100,000 increase for John could instead be used to increase the happiness of 200 others like Jane by the same amount.

With a few caveats (the data is correlational, the studies looked specifically at high-income countries), this means that our money goes a 

 further when we send it to high-impact interventions overseas…or even just to organisations like GiveDirectly who use it to increase the income of the world’s poorest! (And it seems plausible that increases in wellbeing may also be much larger if that increase in income makes up the difference between being able to afford basic needs and 

How can you use your money to increase happiness?

Given the very small increases in happiness we can expect to experience even with substantial increases in our income in richer countries, it seems that chasing ever-increasing amounts of money is an ineffective way to find happiness for ourselves. On the other hand, giving to highly effective charities could be a great way to increase happiness all around, especially if this money provides basic needs and security that would otherwise be lacking. And if the experiences of 10% Pledgers are any indication, making a commitment to increase the wellbeing of others will probably make you happier too. 

Note: Some of the research/analysis in these readings may now be out of date, given the new adversarial collaboration described above. 

Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson, "

If money doesn't make you happy then you probably aren't spending it right

Everything you need to know about whether money makes you happy

Everyone knows the adage “money can’t buy happiness,” — but does it hold up under scrutiny? Here's what the data says. 

Can money buy happiness? A review of new data

Giving What We Can is a community of effective givers. We support each other by learning and sharing information about effective giving. We aim to create a culture in which people are inspired to give more, and give more effectively.

GWWC Team

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Where are the GWWC team donating this year?

Can money buy happiness? A review of new data