This essay was written for high school and college students who are considering volunteering. I'm interested in finding high social value activities for high school and college students to engage in, and would be grateful for any suggestions.
High school and college students are often just starting to think about how to make a difference and improve the world. One salient option available to them is volunteering. How valuable is volunteering?
One way in which volunteering can be valuable is that it can be enjoyable. This is the primary motivation of some volunteers. Another way in which volunteering can be valuable is that it can build skills. Building skills is valuable to the extent that you need them later on. As an example, working on an open source software project is often cited as a good way of developing programming skills.
What of the direct social value of volunteering to others? There are many factors that cut against volunteering having social value to others in general:
Factors that cut against volunteering having social value
Volunteering to help people who can afford to pay generally doesn't help them much, or simply saves them money
In general, people are willing to pay for work that they find useful. If you're doing volunteer work to help people who have the capacity to pay, you're often either:
- Doing work that doesn't help them enough for them to be willing to pay for it.
- Saving them some money.
Saving people money when they can afford to pay is not an effective way of helping people.
Volunteering to help people who would be willing to pay can reduce the job prospects of those who would be paid
The article before you pay to volunteer abroad, think of the harm you might do reports on Americans doing volunteer projects in Cambodia. The projects are ones that locals would have otherwise been willing to pay poor Cambodians to do. Because the Americans were willing to do them for free, the poor Cambodians weren't hired.
Volunteer activities targeted at those in need are often less helpful than giving cash
People generally know what they need best better than outsiders do, and this points in the direction of giving them money to purchase the services and goods that they need most rather than providing services that they may or may not benefit from.
There are exceptions to this – for example, it may be more efficient to have a soup kitchen for homeless people than to give them money to buy food, because one can serve many homeless people simultaneously, cutting down on the costs of facilities and preparation. But unless you have reason to believe that
- The services would be the best for the beneficiaries, but they would be irrational and not purchase it
- Providing the services to many people has substantial efficiency benefits
you should adopt the presumption that giving cash is better than engaging in volunteer activities to help the beneficiaries.
Relatedly, GiveWell ranks GiveDirectly (which transfers cash to poor Kenyan families) as one of its three top charities, above a multitude of organizations that implement other activities in the developing world.
Even when volunteer activities help the beneficiaries, they can hurt others
Consider the case of fundraising for a nonprofit. The activity helps the nonprofit. But what effect does the activity have on other nonprofits? Fundraising might make donors give more in general. But after a certain point, people aren't willing to give more money to charity. By getting people to give to one nonprofit, you can make them reluctant to give to other nonprofits, reducing their funding.
Consider the case of volunteer tutoring. A lot of what people learn in school is material that they don't need to know later on in life, so that the primary way in which learning helps is to get them better grades, which helps them get into more prestigious colleges. But there are only a limited number of slots at a prestigious college. So tutoring can have the effect of knocking people out of the running when they don't have access to quality educational resources.
Volunteering can be costly to nonprofits
According to the report the cost of a volunteer, training and supervising volunteers often costs a nonprofit a lot of money, reducing the resources that it has to use for its activities.
Volunteering is often worse than donating
In Donate Money, Not Time or Stuff Jeff Kaufman points out that to the extent that nonprofits need people to do the work that volunteers do, in cases where the nonprofit could hire someone just as good (or better) than you are for the work for a wage below your earning power, it's generally better to donate $X than it is to volunteer $X worth of your time.
What to do?
Learn about economics and effective philanthropy
In view of the above considerations, finding volunteer activities with high social value can be very tricky. To figure out which ones they are, it helps to
- Develop an understanding of basic economics (Economics reading recommendations)
- Learn the ideas of effective altruism (Effective altruism learning resources) and speak with members of the effective altruism community.
If you do these things sooner rather than later, you'll be much better positioned to make the most out of your volunteer time. I'd be happy to correspond with high school or college students who are interested in the subjects above.
Consider creating online content that many people can benefit from
One promising area for contributing social value through volunteer work is creating online content. This is because (i) the number of people who can benefit is large (ii) people are seldom willing to pay for online content even when they benefit from it.
By engaging in activities like writing Wikipedia articles on important subjects, you can hope to have a large social impact relative to the impact that a high school student would usually have.
This is only one promising activity, and it won't be right for everyone: we're in the process of searching for other promising candidates, and welcome any suggestions.
Build skills to help people later
Learning skills like programming, and writing can situate you better to help people in the future. This is true of high school students in particular, who have the potential to become much more knowledgeable and skilled. The resulting humanitarian benefits can be much larger than the benefits of volunteering now.
Cross-posted from the Cognito Mentoring blog.
Jobs should not be a terminal value. That's right. If an activity could be done for free and the activity eliminated the need for a job, that would (most likely) be a net benefit for society.
But, the fact that some people don't get jobs because of the activity does weigh into the overall cost-benefit calculation, particularly when you're trying to do something with explicit altruistic motivation.
Suppose Alice can do a job for Bob at the market rate of $20. The opportunity cost of Alice's time is $15, and the value of the job to Bob is $25 (so they split the social surplus of $10 equally).
Let's say that the opportunity cost of Carl's time is $18, but he thinks something like "hey, if I do this job for Bob for free, I can generate a social surplus of $7, whereas if he hired Alice, he'd only get $5 in value." What Carl is doing is essentially donating $18 of his time to Bob and adding $7 in social surplus, and all of that $25 is captured by Bob. But Carl's choice reduces social surplus from $10 to $7.
Now, if Carl were not being altruistic, he would charge for at least the $18 that's his opportunity cost, which is more than Alice's opportunity cost. Since Alice has lower opportunity cost, she'd bid down her price to below the $18, and Bob would still hire Alice. So, in the absence of altruism, the market mechanism works to maximize social surplus.
But, since Carl is being altruistic, Alice has no way of undercutting him on wages, and Bob, even though he knows that Alice's time is valued less, is gaining so much more ($25 instead of a measly $5, or even the maximum possible $10 he could get if he bid Alice's wages down) that he has no incentive to hire Alice.
Anyway, the above illustrative example is just to illustrate why job losses can matter when we introduce altruistic calculation into the market mechanism.
That works for digging a ditch, not for writing a computer program or really anything covered by copyright or patents .
Lets say, for example, that there is some piece of software wanted by 1000 companies who would be willing to pay 50 cents each.
It's also wanted by 10000 other entities without the resources to pay a notable amount.
It would cost our programmer $400 worth of time to make it so he could make it and sell it or make it and give it away.
The companies willing to pay would get angry if he took their money then also gave it away for free to ever... (read more)