Anonymous asked: dear unitofcaring. What is the unit of caring? QALY*person?

It’s from a post of Eliezer’s called Money: The Unit of Caring. The post talks about how many people donate old food or old clothes to charities, when most charities, reluctant though they are to say it, would much rather have donations they can then use to buy the specific food and clothes that are needed.

That post had a pretty significant impact on me. I’ve said before that I think class is by far the most neglected aspect of social justice advocacy. Having money insulates you from a lot of the shit society can throw at you (housing and job discrimination, violence, street harassment, medical bills) and gets you a lot of things that our society doesn’t make widely available to marginalized people (assistive technology, a safe home, legal assistance, hormones, birth control, access to abortion, etc).

Money is good; money is useful. Money is the way to get the things you want, and giving other people money is a good way to empower them to get the things that make them happy. Some day, of course, I would like to change that, and make everything available to everyone regardless of their means (we might still use money, but in a very different manner). But in the world we live in, money has power. Money saves and changes and protects lives.

It’s of course precisely because of class inequalities that money has this kind of power, so it’s sort of weird that it was by reading about class and classism that I’d developed this vague cloud of distaste around money. I felt like I was selfish for having and for spending it, and like it was morally wrong somehow for an organization to admit out loud “what will enable us to do good is more money”. I thought that fighting injustice meant not using tainted instruments. And so Money: The Unit Of Caring was tremendously influential.

It is a horrible distribution of human resources that I earn far more than I need while lots of people go hungry. Luckily, it’s a horrible distribution of resources which I can fix by giving them money. It is deeply infuriating that my university sits on its $22billion endowment while 22,000 kids a day die of preventable diseases and malnutrition. Luckily we can fix that, by spending money. I can’t speak for anyone else but for me personally, it was so so helpful to realize that money was an instrument, not a taint - that it wasn’t an impure way of doing good but a remarkably flexible one that gave more choices to the recipients.