Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz: Young Silicon Valley billionaires pioneer new approach ... - 0 views
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Tuna and Moskovitz were in their mid-20s in 2010 when they became the youngest couple ever to sign on to the Giving Pledge, the campaign started by Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett to encourage the world’s billionaires to commit to giving away most of their wealth.
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They had little experience with philanthropy, but they believed that the bulk of the money Moskovitz had made — estimated to be $8.1 billion by Forbes — should be returned to society in their lifetimes.
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they have narrowed their interests to four major “buckets”: U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks, international aid and science. They plan to announce their first major gifts in early 2015 and eventually hope to scale up to give away hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
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As Tuna and Moskovitz, now 29 and 30, respectively, began to compare one possibility with another and then another, they have become pioneers in an emerging philosophy of philanthropy known as “effective altruism” — which applies evidence and reason over things like emotion and intuition to determine where one can do the most good.
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Today, Tuna and Moskovitz have a reputation for being among Silicon Valley’s most low-key billionaires. Friends and colleagues mention that they prefer to spend their free time doing yoga, meditating and taking walks. They fly coach, share a used car and bike or take public transportation to work.
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Early in her research, Tuna came across Peter Singer’s “The Life You Can Save” — a book she cites as the catalyst for their approach. An Australian philosopher, Singer makes the moral case for giving, arguing that many people in the developed world can do so at little cost to themselves.
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Each topic is assigned to one of four researchers who work full-time — which include Tuna, Karnovsky and two other young whizzes from the country’s top colleges. They conduct “shallow” investigations of the ideas that involve making a few phone calls with experts and reading a few smart papers or journal articles on the subject.
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A former hedge fund analyst, Karnovsky was frustrated that he could not compare the impact of different charities when he tried to give away $5,000 of his own one year. So he and a colleague, Elie Hassenfeld, quit their jobs and founded an independent, nonprofit charity evaluator that they dubbed GiveWell.
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Tuna and Karnovsky approached the challenge like reporter-scientists, partnering to collect data on the universe of possible causes, evaluate them and share their findings online for anyone interested to see. As part of a joint venture between Good Ventures and GiveWell that they called the Open Philanthropy Project, they talked to foundation heads, technical experts, historians, biologists, former government officials, political campaign managers and many others.
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“One thing I learned early on is that a well-placed donation can transform someone’s life, but a poorly placed donation can have no impact or even do harm,” Tuna said. “But it’s not at all obvious from charities’ marketing which are the best buys.”
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The centerpiece of the team’s investigation is a giant spreadsheet, the origins of which can be traced to a Google Doc list Tuna began in 2011. She added causes as she thought of them: Malaria, microfinance, marijuana policy. The arts. Nuclear security, climate change and on and on until there were hundreds of entries.
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“Cari and I are stewards of this capital,” Moskovitz wrote in a Quora chat in 2013 shortly before they married. In response to a question about what it feels like to be a billionaire, he said: “It’s pooled up around us right now, but it belongs to the world. We intend not to have much left when we die.”
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They consider three questions when deciding whether a cause has promise. First, importance — how many people’s lives would be affected and by how much? Second, could it be solved, in the short-term and long-term? And third, how crowded is the space? If a lot of smart people are already thinking about the issue, the marginal impact could be less than in other areas.
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If a topic passes this initial test, an in-depth investigation follows. That can take months and includes discussions with as many as 50 people in the field and an attempt to home in on what kind of specific project could make a difference.
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One of the topics they zeroed in on was criminal justice reform. Tuna and her team were struck by two statistics: The United States incarcerates a larger percentage than almost any other country in the world at great fiscal cost and it has highest rate of criminal homicides in the developed world. Clearly something wasn’t working.
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“The world is a big, complicated system,” Tuna said, “and I feel we need to be as smart as we can be in order to stand a chance of having an impact with the resources we have — which are significant in one sense but really small in comparison to the kinds of the problems we want to work on.”