Finding the Perfect Charity

[GoodEnoughForMe]

There was a long Vox article today all about Open Philanthropy and GiveWell and "effective altruism." The idea being that, using empirical data, the best charities can be found and utilized, and less meaningful charities can be eschewed. This, of course, comes with some interesting controversies. Arts charities are worthless in this pursuit of the best charity. Donating to disaster relief is largely a waste. Here's a snippet of the story all about it:

Open Phil (as the staff calls it, eschewing the OPP acronym) doesn't know which of these is the best bet, but it's determined to find out. Its six full-time staffers have taken on the unenviable task of ranking every plausible way to make the world a much better place, and figuring out how much money to commit to the winners. It's the biggest test yet of GiveWell's heavily empirical approach to picking charities. If it works, it could change the face of philanthropy.

The team at Open Phil are effective altruists, members of a growing movement that commits itself to using empirical methods to work out how to do the most good it possibly can.

Effective altruism holds that giving abroad is probably a better idea than giving in the US. It suggests that giving to disaster relief is worse than giving elsewhere. It argues that supporting music and the arts is a waste. "In a world that had overcome extreme poverty and other major problems that face us now, promoting the arts would be a worthy goal," philosopher Peter Singer, a proponent of effective altruism, writes in his new book, The Most Good You Can Do. In the meantime, opera houses will have to wait.

Effective altruism also implies it's quite possible that even the best here-and-now causes — giving cash to the global poor, distributing anti-malarial bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa — are less cost-effective than trying to reduce the risk of the world as we know it ending. Hence, the chatter about AI. If it causes human extinction, then billions, trillions, even quadrillions of future humans who otherwise would have lived happy lives won't. That dwarfs the impact of global poverty or disease at the present moment. As Bostrom writes in a 2013 paper, "If benefiting humanity by increasing existential safety achieves expected good on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than that of alternative contributions, we would do well to focus on this most efficient philanthropy."

Here's the story: http://www.vox.com/2015/4/24/8457895/givewell-open-philanthropy-charity

The story is a good one, and it's a look at a sort of consequentialist extremism being employed by some very wealthy people who really are trying to do the right thing. It's not without its critics, though. The CEO of Charity Navigator, another charity ranking/tracking site, calls it "defective altruism" and bemoans how it seems to pit charitable behavior against one another in a sort of race to the top in which even 2nd place is a loser.

I was curious if anyone here had any thoughts on this idea of "effective altruism" and the search for a "perfect" charity or cause. Right track? Wrong track? Heart in the right place but head not so much? Too elitist?

 

[Akka]

It's just dumb and short-sighted utilitarianism disguising itself as altruism. Morality is not a number game.

 

[warpus]

It's not easy finding the right charity. Most of the big global charities seem to go against my "code of being charitable". For example, if you pay your CEO $500,000+ a year, I'm not donating to your organization. Another example - religious charities often have other moral.. issues that would prevent me from donating.

But that sort of limits me to smaller charities that I know less about, which essentially means that it's a matter of sitting down and doing in-depth research on each one. This isn't possible when someone knocks on your door and asks for money. Those "drop-ins" I evaluate on a "how do I feel?/Do I have any change lying around?/Do these people really need money?" type basis.

I would be more charitable than I am, but charity organizations often seem sketchy.

 

[Gary Childress]

I donate to Doctors Without Borders. After the Ebola epidemic in 2014 I am a believer in what they do. Truer heroes than MSF do not exist, at least for me.

 

[BvBPL]

This is a very confusingly written article.

Who is Al and why does he want to flood the world with paperclips? Why the abrupt deviation into discussing bipartisan agreement on public safety spending?

Anyway, the analytic examination seems to make sense from an institutional giving standpoint if you accept both the utilitarianism viewpoint and the assumptions they've made in terms of value.

That having been said, this valuation may not be the best way to determine value in giving for the private citizen. The private citizen may well wish her donation to bear fruits visible to her which makes the local opera house more compelling to her than to the institutional donator.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

The AI talk is weird. For an organization hell bent on empirical data --> better charity, planning for something that is completely untested and currently fictional seems counter-productive.

 

[Tahuti]

Individuals are the perfect charities. If you want stuff to change, you need to be the agent of that change. If a donation isn't substantial enough to change a charity's balance sheets, donating money becomes merely a way to demonstrate that you appreciate what they do, and since thousands of people each give irrelevant amounts, they will not care.

 

[Borachio]

Tricky one.

It's a job to know what to do. If I ever give anything at all (and I'm not saying I do), it's to a single well-established charity that, though it does disaster relief it also has projects which are destined to alleviate long-term problems in simple ways - like providing clean drinking water.

One-off disaster relief funds, like the Tsunami one, I don't tend to contribute to at all; since they're so obviously overwhelmingly popular that I don't think there's any need. Still, it wouldn't do if everyone thought like me, I realize.

It's not a simple matter to find out which charities are the most cost effective though. Most publish figures about what percentage of a donation is actually used to provide help. If I remember correctly, the Salvation Army came out top at 93% (or something). But even that's not a particularly relevant metric, I think. If a charity spends 50% of its donations on raising even more money - and is very good at doing just that - isn't it more worthwhile than one which spends less than 5% but doesn't raise anything like the amount?

At the end of the day (and how I despise that trite phrase!), donating to charity is probably just a sop to one's conscience. And may not mean anything at all.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, in many ways they're correct. If you've got a goal with your money, then it makes sense to try to maximize that goal.

The most important component is not that the charity is chosen perfectly. It's that your charity dollars get mobilized. The money in your pocket you didn't give isn't going to do anything. Meanwhile there's a charity that's 90% perfect that could have chipped away at the problem (that you'd like handled!), but the didn't get the resources to do it, so they didn't.

Lots of people get charity fatigue. They gave to the bucket challenge last year, so they feel no urge to give again to anyone this year. But the kicker is, if they waited for the perfect charity, they'd never give. We'd rather them give their $10 every two years than zero forever.

Now, if you're the type to bank your charity donations, waiting for something good, then this doesn't apply as much. I specifically use a "%age income" formula for myself so that I don't fall for the cognitive trap in the last paragraph (and so that it scales with my wealth). So, if in summer 2015 I haven't found a good charity, I can check again in winter 2015 and just write a larger cheque.

You want those dollars mobilized. And if you're dealing with something that's got exponential trends, you want them mobilized sooner rather than later.

 

[Narz]

I donate 1% of my Amazon orders (maybe $150 a year or so, so $1.50) to Survival International. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_International) It's the best sounding charity I've come across so far (I haven't delved that deeply into the exact way they spend their money, considering its pennies a day/average I don't worry about it.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It's not easy finding the right charity. Most of the big global charities seem to go against my "code of being charitable". For example, if you pay your CEO $500,000+ a year, I'm not donating to your organization. Another example - religious charities often have other moral.. issues that would prevent me from donating.

Agreed. Nobody needs that much money per year to live on. In fact, that hypothetical CEO's annual salary would support me and my cats for TWENTY years in our current circumstances.

Any charitable stuff I do or give is because it matters to me personally, and I tend to keep it local, unless it's something that really dug in to the point that my conscience wouldn't let me not give something... like veterinary care for stray animals, or to help low-income people with veterinary bills. Yeah, most of my charitable giving, whether in cash, in kind, or donations of my time, has to do with cats and dogs, not with humans. That's not to say I don't care about humans; I've donated to various social agencies around here like the Women's Shelter and the youth shelter, The Lending Cupboard (agency that allows low-income people to borrow needed medical equipment such as walkers, hospital beds, crutches, etc. on short or long term basis according to what they need), and so on.

That does a hell of a lot more good in my view than any small amount I could give to a charity that pays its upper tier employees obscene amounts of money.

 

[Ayatollah So]

GiveWell is awesome. When I give money, it's usually in order to help people. That means I want to make the largest positive difference to the most lives that I can. I don't care if the charity saves lives from cancer, or saves lives from malaria. I do care if they have a 1% chance to save one life from cancer, vs a 1% chance for each of 200 lives to save people from malaria, for a given donation amount.

There's a lot of straw men in the above comments. A haystack full. You don't have to be a utilitarian to like GiveWell. You don't have to stop giving to the arts, if the arts are particularly important to you. You don't have to stop giving to local causes, or to your alma mater. Maybe you feel a duty to give back to your college, or to your local community. But when you are trying to help people - which for me is by far the largest chunk of charitable change - then for goodness sake, do it to the max.

 

[Traitorfish]

"In a world that had overcome extreme poverty and other major problems that face us now, promoting the arts would be a worthy goal," philosopher Peter Singer

Yeah, that sounds like Singer, right enough.

 

[classical_hero]

Thank goodness I know that I can give money through my local church and know that 100% of the funds go to project I know are needed. Take the recent disaster that happened in Vanuatu. My church supports a missionary that works in the region and has been able to work in helping the people get back on their feet after that disaster.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I like these guys:

http://www.heifer.org/gift-catalog/animals-nutrition/flock-of-ducks-donation.html

Giving people a future means of local "wealth" seems like a pretty nice path. We have given donations as gifts, but I'm not sure all the recipients appreciated the idea.