The Simplest Way to Save Lives With Your Money

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“This lightbulb went off that almost no one was asking these questions.” In 2006, Elie Hassenfeld and a few of his friends pooled some money they wanted to donate to charity. And they wanted to find charities where their money would go the farthest in improving lives. That information, it turned out, was incredibly hard to find. That was the seed of GiveWell. For almost a decade, GiveWell has dedicated itself to rigorously researching the impact of charities around the world and channeling donations to the ones that are the most effective at saving lives. It might sound simple, but this was a radically new approach in the world of charitable giving, and the work itself isn’t simple at all. I’ve supported GiveWell through the years. So as the year winds down and other people might be thinking about giving to a charity, I wanted to invite Hassenfeld, GiveWell’s chief executive, on the show to talk through this work. How does it measure impact? Are there limits to what you can measure? As an organization, has it made mistakes? What does it really mean to give well? If you like what you hear, I hope you’ll also consider donating to GiveWell. Learn more at givewell.org. Mentioned: GiveWell “Trust in Radical Truth and Radical Transparency” by Ray Dalio Harlem Children’s Zone Against Malaria Foundation Helen Keller Intl New Incentives No Lean Season Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) PATH GiveDirectly ALIMA Book Recommendations: Factfulness by Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund Poor Economics by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The It's a holiday season, and at New York Times opinion, Nick Christoff many years ago, kicked off a tradition, which I love.
0:36.4	It's one of my favorite parts about
0:37.6	being here, where different columnists and parts of the organization offer up their
0:43.0	recommendations for giving, try to make people aware of charities, philanthropies. They might want to
0:48.7	support where money that they can spare might do a tremendous amount of good. In my personal giving every year,
0:57.7	I give some of the money I'm giving to a local charity, but then I give a lot of it to give well.
1:03.8	And the reason I give it to give well is that of every organization I know of, I have the most
1:10.0	trust in them to vet, to run the experiments, to read the
1:15.0	research, to really figure out where my money will go the furthest in helping other people.
1:23.0	Give-all has not been around that long, but in the time they've been around, they've become a pretty big
1:28.7	channeler of giver's funds for this exact reason, because a lot of people trust the work they do,
1:33.5	because it is so transparent, because it is so rigorous. Billions of dollars have ended up being
1:38.0	given through them. And so I am recommending that if you have money to spare, you consider
1:43.3	giving some of it through
1:44.3	Givewell, which you can do at givewell.org. But I thought as a way to talk about this, rather than writing
1:48.8	a column, I would have Givewell's CEO and one of its founders, Ellie Hassanfeld, on the show, to talk
1:54.7	about how Givewell started, how it does its work, how it makes some of its very arguable and very difficult decisions in terms
2:02.4	of what to recommend and what not to recommend, and how givers themselves should think about
2:08.9	donating money to whom, to where, and under what conditions, as we all sort of wrestle with
2:15.9	how we can do a little bit more good in a world that needs a lot more good done.
2:21.0	As always, my email as Recline Show at NYTimes.com.
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