Being Rich Can Make You a Better Person

You can hardly help anyone if you’re poor. That's the reality. Saving lives takes money, and rich people have it. If you want to have a greater global impact, and if you want to positively impact the lives of more people, then you have a duty to become rich. That's the thesis I'm presenting for your consideration today.

The syllogism is simple:

1) Even the most effective charities rely on donations to fulfill their humanitarian missions.

2) Rich people have more money that they could potentially donate to these charities.

3) Therefore, rich people can save more lives than poor people.

However often people may rail against rich folks (and, clearly, some rich folks are assholes), it's people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett who can afford to give billions of dollars away to cure malaria and other such horrific diseases.

These are diseases that have been killing hundreds of millions of people throughout humanity's evolutionary history, and it's rich people that are leading the charge against them.

"They" say that money is the root of all evil, but "they" are wrong. It's lack of money that is the root of all evil.

Not every problem is a money problem (duh), but some of the most awful and horrendous human misery and suffering can most definitely be solved by throwing money at the underlying causes. Throwing money in a planned, effective way, of course.

I can hear objections already.

"Sure, a couple of billionaires can snag the flashy headlines with their over-the-top techno-philanthropy, but every little bit helps! What about the people that give away 50% of their income to charity, even though they only make $40,000 a year? Have you no heart?!"

We're both right.

We need everybody firing at full capacity, and in every aspect of their lives, in order to heal our world.

But I'm going to lay out the case that it's morally incumbent upon you to make as much money as you possibly can, so that you can help the maximum number of people, if that's something you're interested in doing.

Of course, there is nuance in everything, and snap judgements and emotional outbursts rarely contain any sort of prophetic truth. Nuance means different ways of looking at the same objective reality.

It's just that there seems to be this prevailing belief in many people's minds (I don't want to say "most people", because I don't know "most people" personally) that being poor is somehow more "virtuous" than being rich.

In reality, however, if you have a lot of money, you can give a lot of it away, and make some real and lasting change in the parts of the world that are suffering.

Ok, hang tight for some more nuance...

I should have said right off the top that being poor by no means makes you a worse person, or even somehow less worthy of human dignity. It's fucked up that that even needs to be said, but here we are.

People have some downright strange attitudes when it comes to money, but human dignity and the digits in your bank balance have very little to do with one another.

I'm also going to take aim at some bullshit "self-improvement" advice, or supposed "motivation" that says that: "Although it might not be your fault if you're born poor, it's your fault if you die poor."

Huh?

What sense does that make?

Some people simply won't live long enough to get rich, and even if you live to 1,000 without getting rich, it doesn't mean that you've somehow failed. Far from it. It all depends on what you do with those 1,000 years.

So here we are:

Being rich doesn't automatically make you a good person, and being poor by no means makes you a worse person. Any critically-thinking human being can see this to be the case.

But, my point all along has been that you expand the possibilities for your own life and the life of everyone around you if you can find a way to make gobs of cash and then spread it around.

So, how do you expand the possibilities for your own life?

How do you figure out what you can do, as an individual, to do the most good, and become as rich as possible, while still keeping your unspoken promises to the suffering and the afflicted whom you've pledged to help?

You have potential allies out there, just waiting to find you, or you to find them. People who are asking the same questions that you are asking.

I'd like to introduce you to once such potential ally, an organization called 80,000 Hours, that may be of some use to you. The name refers to the fact that most people, in a forty-year career, will spend approximately 80,000 hours at some sort of occupation. 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for about 40 years. 

80,000 hours is a long time, but it's not so long that you don't have to give it any thought at all as to how you spend it. It demands introspection. Because you're not the only person in danger of wasting 80,000 hours. We all are. Every moment, we're presented with the choice of paying attention to where we are directing our energy and focus, and the other choice, of letting our time slip away from us, never to return.

What the organization does is to help people figure out how they can do the most good, working within their chosen field.

Maybe you don't want to become a total renunciate, and spend 7 days a week feeding and clothing the poor all by yourself. You know that you want to help people, but you also don't want to be poor yourself. No shame in that, and 80,000 Hours recognizes that. They will work with you to make career choices that will allow you to maximize your positive impact globally, or within your immediate community, and at the same time, balance the personal goals you've set for your one and only life. Seriously, check them out if you're still trying to decide how you can achieve the most good through your efforts. 

One of the things I like about their organization is that they don't tend to engage in erroneous, moral generalizations. Their focus is on you, and your immediate personal impact, regardless of what anyone else is doing. This dovetails perfectly with my complete and total disregard for generalizing questions like "Who is more generous? Rich people or poor people?"

Answer: I don't give a flying fuck. There are poor people who are stingy thieves, and there are rich people who are stingy thieves. Who are you? What are you doing to help others? 

You can’t affect whether some multi-millionaire you’ll never meet only gives 0.005% of his annual income to charity or not. That is literally none of your concern. What percentage of your income do you give away? Do you know? How do you know?

The larger point here is that once your own needs are met, you’re going to find yourself with much more mental bandwidth to spend on others.

Being rich expands your life to include the needs and desires of others besides yourself. No doubt there are lots of poor people who would give billions of dollars away if they could. But they can't, so they won't. They're poor. They have no fucking money!

Again, this is not to disparage the efforts of those "noble poor" who have given so much, and who have alleviated so much suffering simply by offering their time, attention, care, and genuine sympathy. They are heroes to me as well. My point is that their reach is limited.

One might say that if you care about helping others, you have a duty to become rich. Becoming rich expands the net of your compassion, and allows you to have a greater positive impact on the world at large than if you remain poor. 

You’re no good to anyone else if you’re poor. You don’t have any extra money to give away, you don’t have the time to devote to anyone’s concerns but your own, and you’re going to go through life as a relatively selfish, narcissistic person. Paycheck to paycheck doesn't give you any breathing room to take on the suffering of others.

If you want to help more people, you need to get rich. That's the deal. That's what I'm presenting for your consideration here today. Just think about it, you don't have to come to a conclusion now. Test my ideas, see where I'm wrong, see where I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, see where I might have a point. Think for yourself. 

Going a bit deeper now...

How much money do you think it takes to save one human life?

Here's an interesting article that reveals what many people think are the costs involved of saving one life in a developing country. Turns out that people think it's way cheaper than it actually is.

This is all interesting for sure, but I'll save you some time and pull from the article the fact that one of the most effective charities, Against Malaria, can save a life for about $7,500. Most people won't donate that amount of money in a single year. But if you're rich, what's $7,500?

If you get rich enough to give away $100,000 each and every year, you can literally save 13 irreplaceable human lives every single year. 13! That's 13 people who will be alive, breathing, happy, productive, joyous even...and all because of you. Because you decided that you it was your duty to become rich, and to give away a lot of money to people in need.

So why are you so afraid of money? Why do you think it's so evil? Maybe you just haven't learned enough about it. Maybe if you educated yourself on money, you'd find out that it has a great potential for good, and you would pledge that you were going to make more of it. Maybe that would be a good thing for you to do, a worthy, honorable, benevolent thing to do. Maybe you'd even be good at it.

Here's a perspective shift that might help you: Socrates, that great philosopher and sage, said that before you are impressed with someone else's bank account, you should first ask yourself how it was acquired, and what that person spends their money on. If you get rich legitimately, through your own efforts, and via legal means, and then you donate it to people who really need it, what's so evil about that?

What if you got so rich that you could afford to donate $1,000,000 every year? Is that so unrealistic? Find a way to do it and you're responsible for bringing 133 people back from the edge of nonexistence...every single year.

Look, prayers and Facebook likes don't save lives. Money saves lives. Money, donated intelligently, can change the world. It is changing the world. The question you have to ask yourself is whether you want to become part of the solution, or if you just want to sit back and remain poor.

Keep your money, donate it, store it under your mattress, that's up to you. No one can tell you what to do with the money you've made yourself, through your own efforts and initiative, and no one can make you feel bad for hoarding it all to yourself. I think it's better to give some (a lot) away, but that's just me.

However.

I have to add this little "flip".

If you do want to make a greater impact on the world at large, if you do want to make sure that no child ever has to die alone in the dark, and if you do want to be a better person, then the issue has been made clear: You have a duty to become rich. You must change your life.

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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