I’ve mentioned how years ago I had an argument with my then girlfriend about how to best aid charities. My argument was that the best thing you could do is take a high paying job and give a substantial portion of your income away (as opposed to taking a low paying job with a charitable org or NGO.) This idea seems to be gaining steam as seen in this page for the “Earning to Give” movement.

For all of the reasons that donating can be extremely effective, earning to give is too. The opportunities to make the world better through donations are enormous. If we take the salary earned by a fairly typical UK banker over their life-times, and assume they choose to give half of it away (leaving them still very well off) they end up able to distribute more than 600,000 malaria nets. That saves more than 100,000 lives.

The main point here isn’t that this is an ideal way to solve the world’s problems but rather that, in any argument I have with a girlfriend, I am alway right.