You can improve (or even save) lives without being rich. Here are 3 things to know about effective giving.

• Human lives can be impacted on the cheap.
• Deworming a child costs around a dollar. Nobel Prize winners have shown that simple act can open up opportunities for education as well as earnings those children would otherwise not see.
• That's the logic of "effective altruism": Take a rigorous, data-based approach to making the world better.
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It's Giving Tuesday.

That means, hopefully, people around the world are thinking about how to give money.

You don't have to be rich to do so.

In fact, as boatloads of new research have shown over the past couple years, improving — and even saving lives — is relatively cheap.

As my colleague Chris Weller has reported, the most effective charities can save a life for around $3,000. It's really remarkable.

So if you want to give money today (or any other day), you might want to think about how your giving can go the furthest. Or, as the term of art goes, that your altruism can be maximally effective.

Here are a couple things to consider.

For one, you should probably look abroad.

For a million psychological reasons, people tend to favor people that they closely identify with — who belong to various social groups, who live near them, who share the same faith or same country. 

And yet! If you want to get the most helpful bang for your altruistic buck, you should go overseas. If you're an American, consider this: The United States is expensive, and while health care in states is incredibly uneven compared to other developed countries, access is still better for low-income Americans than it is in much of the developing world.

Plus, there's the exchange rate. The dollar is strong right now.

The most effective nonprofits tend to make low-cost interventions with extremely high value, like giving away insecticide-treated mosquito nets. In wealthier perts of the world, mosquitos are just annoying, but in less-developed countries they can carry diseases like malaria, which killed 400,000 people in 2019, two-thirds of them children under five.

Secondly, follow the research.

As Dylan Matthews notes in an excellent explainer on Vox, you want to give to organizations whose work is guided by the research literature rather than convention or ideology. He praises the work of GiveWell, an organization that maps both evaluations of charitable work and the demonstrated success of the methods they're employing.

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, for example, went to the trio of Michael Kremer, Esther Duflo, and Abhijit Banerjee, who have used rigorous research to figure out low-cost ways to better the lives of poor people. Their work in Kenya showed that deworming children — treating parasitic worms that lead to disease — reduces school absenteeism in childhood and increases earning potential in adulthood.

So an organization committed to deworming can have major impact on many lives on the cheap: GiveWell reports that donating $100 will deworm around 100 children, which the research suggests could change the course of their lives.

And third, give what you can. (No, really.)

One is infinitely more than zero. Without lapsing into sad TV commercial tropes, it's demonstrably true that a US college graduate could donate a little bit — even $10! — and still make a huge difference.

For Christmas one year, my very thoughtful brother gave me the book "The Most Good You Can Do" by the philosopher Peter Singer, which is all about effective altruism. (Maybe he was trying to tell me something). In it, Singer — probably the most influential moral philosopher alive — makes the simple observation that if you were to save a person's life, or rescue several from a burning building, it would likely be the best day of your life.

But here's the thing: The resources are available to us to save lives by giving to effective charities. For the price of one excellent burrito, you could help deworm a dozen children, opening up possibilities of achievement that would be otherwise be closed.

And with that, I'm going to (finally!) set up a recurring donation right now to GiveWell and its Maximum Impact Fund, which funnels money to its highest-rated charities.