This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg.

At our core, what we're trying to do is improve human well-being as much as possible.

The holidays are the season for charity, the time when we give away money to the causes we care about and to help people who are suffering.

But how do we make our decisions about where to give?

For many of us, it's just a matter of habit, or responding to solicitations,

or the disaster or crisis that seems the most pressing. But should we be thinking about the

effectiveness of our giving? How much suffering can be alleviated? How many lives saved for the same

donated dollar? We live in a world in which there are really cost-effective, proven ways to save the lives of kids that are dying.

And at least as a benchmark, we should be able to say, you know, you could spend $10 million

distributing anti-malarial bed nets.

And those $10 million are going to protect two to four million households

from getting malaria and are going to save the lives of several thousand people.

It sounds like a lot of the programs that you fund are directly connected to measurable things

like health and consumption. Can you imagine this applying to other areas of charity?

I think it extends to far more areas of charity than one would think.

Buddy Shaw is the managing director of Give Well, an organization that researches the impact of giving across a variety of causes and makes recommendations for where and how to give.

My solvable is helping people identify charities that do the most good per dollar spent.

My co-host Anne Applebaum spoke with Buddy about the importance of giving

and how his organization evaluates the many worthy causes out there.

Here's their conversation.

Thinking back to when you were a child or a young adult, what's your earliest memory of

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