Let’s not waste any time.
We need to get right to a recent scoop by Vox.
Here it is: According to the headline, a man has given at least 10 percent of his income to charity for 10 years running.
Yes, I know how amazing that must sound to everyone just hearing about it for the first time.
“What a revolutionary idea,” said one person (actually, lots of people) on Twitter.
“Huh,” suggested another. “If only we had a word for this. One syllable? Rhymes with Blythe maybe. I don’t know. Maybe this guy can invent the word.”
Great idea! I suggest we all think real hard and try to come up with such a word.
In the meantime, here is Vox’s lede:
Ten years ago, in November 2009, a philosopher at Oxford named Toby Ord set up an organization called Giving What We Can. His idea was to ask people to commit, with him, to donate at least 10 percent of their income every year to highly effective charities. Ord chose to donate to organizations working to fight global poverty.
This commitment, from a not particularly well-paid research fellow, earned Ord profiles at the time from the likes of the BBC, the Telegraph, and the Wall Street Journal.
Ten years later, over 4,000 people from a wide range of backgrounds — including hedge funders, prominent philosophers like the late Derek Parfit, 2019 Nobel laureate in economics Michael Kremer, and, uh, me — are on the list of signatories.
Ord is now a senior research fellow in philosophy at Oxford and has since cofounded the effective altruist movement with fellow philosophers Will MacAskill and Peter Singer. Giving What We Can is now part of a broader suite of organizations under the Center for Effective Altruism, trying to persuade people they can use their time and money to make the world a substantially better place by giving to good causes.
Alrighty.
Believe it or not, Vox never connects the 10 percent figure to any kind of religion tradition — you know, that word that we’re trying to come up with.
If only Vox had clicked the link to the previous BBC story, which noted:
The figure of a tenth originates from the Christian tithes, a tradition that many people still follow today.
The previous Telegraph piece also noted tithing, although the WSJ op-ed did not.
How goofy is it that Vox didn’t make the connection to tithing?
Let Twitter count the ways:
For something even goofier, click the link and see the actual URL. What the what?