Better Spent

Better Spent is a lighthearted satire I built to raise awareness of what your money could do. The idea came to me when I was heading up an elevator at work, I noticed the guy standing next to me was wearing a Rolex and I wondered how much good the money he spent on that watch could have done for people in need.

Looking into it, I found that The Life You Can Save already had an Impact Calculator that converts a dollar amount into real outcomes like surgeries, and lives saved. I expanded on their work and put my own twist on it: instead of typing in a number, you start with a familiar luxury item and see, right next to its price, what a donation of that same amount could actually do. For instance, instead of spending $100 USD on a pack of 4 Apple AirTags you could cover the cost of de-worming nearly 200 children. Or, going back to the Rolex example, if you were to forgo the purchase of a $10k Rolex Submariner and instead donated that money to the Malaria Consortium then you could save the life of 2 children.

The impact data comes from The Life You Can Save’s Impact Calculator, which draws on GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analyses and independent randomized controlled trials from evaluators like IDinsight, IPA, and J-PAL, along with peer-reviewed studies in journals such as The Lancet Global Health, PNAS, and BMJ Global Health. The item prices are real listed retail prices. Every figure on the site links back to its source.

I also made a point to provide much more detail than The Life You Can Save on exactly where the donated money goes for each comparison. Instead of a vague total, you see the specifics: how $50 can deliver roughly 170 hot meals to children in Kenyan schools, for example. That added explanation helps people buy into the idea that their money is doing something real.