Review
The Life You Can Save is about the billions of people starving, suffering,
and dying because of poverty and how we can and should help them without
suffering ourselves.
Singer's focus is the people who live in extreme poverty as the World Bank
defines it:
Those ... "not having enough income to meet the most basic human needs for
adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care or education
... The number of people whose income puts them under this poverty line [of
living under $1.25 a day] is ...1.4 billion ..."
If people could be counted on to react to his alarming
statistics and descriptions of unnecessary suffering and death with a sense of
urgency and generosity, Singer could have written a pamphlet or relied on his
website to
present statistics on world poverty, outline his...
Beyond the Book
Charities That Save Lives
The United Nations
International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 27,000
children die every day from preventable, poverty-related causes.
The Life You Can Save website has links to relief
organizations that Singer has examined for effectiveness and transparency:
- GiveWell leads the campaign for evaluating the effectiveness of aid organizations – and
your donation can go, via GiveWell, to the organization they judge to be most
effective.
- The Fistula Foundation
treats the obstetric injury that ruins the lives of young Ethiopian women but can easily
be repaired by modern surgical techniques.
- The Worldwide Fistula Fund...
