Kelsey Piper

Kelsey Piper is an American journalist and effective altruist. She is a staff writer at "Vox" and the former president of Stanford Effective Altruism. Piper blogs at "The Unit of Caring".
Early life.
Piper attended Stanford University, where she majored in symbolic systems. At Stanford she discovered effective altruism, becoming a member of Giving What We Can and pledging to donate 30% of her lifetime income to charity, as well as founding a campus advocacy organization.
"Future Perfect".
Since 2018, Piper has written the "Vox" column "Future Perfect", which covers "the most critical issues of the day through the lens of effective altruism". Piper is concerned about global catastrophic risks, and treats journalism as a way to popularize these risks and advance the cause of addressing them, which is part of effective altruism's broader concern regarding the relevance of immediate action. Specifically, Piper has discussed the possibility that society is living on a historical precipice, where immediate action needs to be taken to avoid global catastrophic risks, and what implications that has for effective altruism and her own journalism.
Piper is also an outspoken defender of billionaire philanthropy, including writing on how to assess where the wealthiest philanthropists should donate. Others have questioned whether this is ethically dubious, both as a symptom of systematic issues with income inequality, and as potentially permitting the wealthy disproportionate influence over those issues they philanthropize.
Piper was also an early responder to the COVID-19 pandemic, discussing the risk of a serious global pandemic in February and recommending measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing in March. Since then, she has discussed the societal risk posed by inaccurate study preprints and analyzed the impact of the pandemic on the historical scale, deeming it one of the ten deadliest in human history.