Are there any really good reasons for this kind of charity (throwing money at some highly specific problem affecting some very poor people without changing anything about the system), as opposed to paying for vastly underfunded highly scalable public goods such as wikileaks, wikipedia, or even GiveWell for that matter?
In the world we currently live in, nearly all "poor" people are reasonably well off by historical standards, with their standards of living extremely rapidly improving anyway. Global inequality is far below historical peak as well.
I like what GiveWell does on the margin, but we'll run out of abjectly poor people outside warzones (like DRC, Afghanistan) or disaster zones (like Haiti) before they get good at what they're doing.
To give you some perspective, take a look at this map. You see those black areas? They still live longer, are better nourished, better educated, and better off in every possible sense than world average just a century ago and very rapidly improving.
A hypothetical charity running programs like VillageReach's but which embezzled 95% of its budget at the cost of correspondingly greatly reduced the cost-effectiveness would still be doing far more good per dollar than the Make-A-Wish Foundation or the least effective developing world charities do.
This brings to mind the fate of The Chasers (Australian satirical comedians). Their 'Make a Realistic Wish Foundation' skit effectively scuttled them. It was in poor taste even in my judgement yet the reactions to it made it clear that the very thought of looking closely at just how useful such activities are is unthinkable. Because they are sick children!
A hypothetical charity running programs like VillageReach's but which embezzled 95% of its budget at the cost of correspondingly greatly reduced the cost-effectiveness would still be doing far more good per dollar than the Make-A-Wish Foundation or the least effective developing world charities do.
This is a good sentence (and would make a fine conclusion - I think generalised conclusions don't play on availability bias nearly enough) but there's a bit of a problem in the middle there.
Also: you have caused me to update my beliefs about how to evaluate charities, and also you have caused me to desire to donate more and more often.
Great post!
Your worked examples of Make-A-Wish, Nurse-Family Partnership, and VillageReach were terrifically presented. I think your style also helped you present points I tried to cover in my more broad piece more effectively here. I was aiming for a slightly different objective, so I think these two complement each other well now. I like how you discuss a more focused sub-section of what I cover, but in a more complete way than my quick, fragmented overviews ever could. In fact, your entire piece presents a better discussion of #2 (Identify a cause w...
For those who have high earning potential and lack skills that are especially rare in the philanthropic world the most efficient way of helping people will typically be taking a high paying job and donating one's income to an efficient charity. Of course, many people who volunteer or forgo income to work at a non-profit do so not only with a view toward helping people but also because they want to experience the visceral sense of helping people directly or of working directly on a cause that they feel passionate about.
There's also the issue of doing no ...
Thank you for contributing towards this! Some hopefully constructive criticism:
The lack of the efficient market assumption is very important.
Another implication of "no efficient markets in charity" is that you should look for absolute advantage rather than comparative advantage. E.g. even if you have a lot of experience with, say, looking after children, you should not get involved with childrens' charities, you should go make money and give it to the most efficient charity (probably existential risks).
Thanks for this post. I never thought about the overhead ratio like that before, it looks like I'll be reevaluating the charities I support.
Let's see how rationalist people are here...
Without anything coming remotely close, the single most amazing success story in sustainable reduction of abject poverty for largest number of people, most rapidly in history of humanity is - without any doubt - People's Republic of China. They're as effective now as they've been over the last four decades, and they still have plenty of work to do - coastal provinces are pretty well off, but Western parts of China are still spectacularly poor.
Is anybody convinced by this that one of the best kinds of charity woul...
So if Charity Navigator was one of the groups that issued that joint press release about the uselessness of Overhead Ratio, why in Sam Blazes do they award the Make-A-Wish Foundation their highest rating based on that ratio?
Looking at all the charitable resources expended on signalling virtue, perhaps one of the more effective ways to help would be to try and help create a social environment where charitable signalling better is better correlated with positive outcomes for the people the donations are purporting to help.
Naming and shaming dud charities, and attempting to identify virtuous ones would be part of that. Other needed elements include raising awareness of the whole issue, so visibly supporting the dud-charities becomes more of a social faux pas - and people are fo...
Excellent article. One slight qualm I have is that I have encountered people who object to saving the lives of foriegners (because they think it unpatriotic and they think it causes moral hazard and rent-seeking). For such people, VillageReach might not be acceptable. Is there some charity in the USA that is more efficient than make-a-wish? Presumably yes.
No parent would prefer to send a child to Disney World over preventing even a single one of his or her children from contracting a life threatening illness!
This kind of criticism seems inappropriate to me. It is so utterly obvious that foreign lives could be saved for less money than a trip to Disney World, that it should be an automatic conclusion that people who donate to Make-A-Wish are deliberately purchasing fuzzies, not attempting to purchase utilons. In other words, I highly doubt that people who donate to Make-a-Wish are doing so because they th...
Also this artile really needs to finish on a practical, "what to do next" sentence. Provide links to the relevant LW articles, to GWWC and to GiveWell, right at the end. Maybe even to the existential risks career network.
For many utility functions, I think donating to an organisation working on decreasing existential risk would be incredibly efficient, as:
Even if we use the most conservative of [estimates of the utility of decreasing existential risk], which entirely ignores the possibility of space colonisation and software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater than the value of 10^16 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred times the value of a million human lives. (Bostrom, Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority)
Minor nitpick: I find it rather silly when people say "a full x percent" (as in, a full 89%) of something - either you're being correct and specific, and you mean 89% exactly, or you're being fairly specific and mean 89.124535% or something. You wouldn't use it to mean "around 89%" or "just under but close to 89%" - you'd round down to 88% or, again, be specific.
This was an excellent article, though - something I have thought about fleetingly before but never really considered. My personal area of interest is animal rights, wh...
By coincidence I read this post today and, a few hours later, this news just in: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/the-benefits-of-cash-without-conditions/?_r=0
Is anyone doing charitable work which covers reducing the incidence of iodine deficiency in third world countries?
The reason why humans evolved charitable tendencies is because such tendencies served as marker to nearby humans that a given individual is a dependable ally. Those who expend their resources to help others are more likely than others to care about people in general and are therefore more likely than others to care about their companions.
Yes, exactly. So: why write a guide on how to give so as to help people - rather than a guide about how to appear to be caring and generous?
Presumably there is an audience interested in that topic - but what are their m...
The (evo psych) reason why humans evolved sexual tendencies presumably has something to do with reproduction. So why write guides on how to give and get sexual pleasure, rather than guides to fertility?
Presumably there is an audience sincerely interested in giving and getting sexual pleasure for its own sake. I doubt that this fact surprises you. So why do you pretend to be surprised that there are people who want to help the world for the sake of actually helping the world?
I checked with http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/our-members.php
Of 64 members, 18 listed themselves as philosophers - or budding philosophers.
I think this further supports the "signalling" theory of charitable giving. For one thing, pledge makers are listed publicly. Those individuals are among those most likely to benefit through having a reputation for being a goody-two-shoes. The pledge appears to be totally non-binding. That would appeal to those wanting to signal generosity - rather than actually wanting to commit themselves to it.
I wrote this article in response to Roko's request for an article about efficient charity. As a disclosure of a possible conflict of interest I'll note that I have served as a volunteer for GiveWell. Last edited 12/06/10.
Charitable giving is widely considered to be virtuous and admirable. If statistical behavior is any guide, most people regard charitable donations to be worthwhile expenditures. In 2001 a full 89% of American households donated money to charity and during 2009 Americans donated $303.75 billion to charity [1].
A heart-breaking fact about modern human experience is that there's little connection between such generosity and positive social impact. The reason why humans evolved charitable tendencies is because such tendencies served as marker to nearby humans that a given individual is a dependable ally. Those who expend their resources to help others are more likely than others to care about people in general and are therefore more likely than others to care about their companions. But one can tell that people care based exclusively on their willingness to make sacrifices independently of whether these sacrifices actually help anybody.
Modern human society is very far removed from our ancestral environment. Technological and social innovations have made it possible for us to influence people on the other side of the globe and potentially to have a profound impact on the long term survival of the human race. The current population of New York is ten times the human population of the entire world in our ancestral environment. In view of these radical changes it should be no surprise that the impact of a typical charitable donation falls staggeringly short of the impact of donation optimized to help people as much as possible.
While this may not be a problem for donors who are unconcerned about their donations helping people, it's a huge problem for donors who want their donations to help people as much as possible and it's a huge problem for the people who lose out on assistance because of inefficiency in the philanthropic world. Picking out charities that have high positive impact per dollar is a task no less difficult than picking good financial investments and one that requires heavy use of critical and quantitative reasoning. Donors who wish for their donations to help people as much as possible should engage in such reasoning and/or rely on the recommendations of trusted parties who have done so.
The Overhead Ratio: Not a Good Metric
A commonly used statistic for charity evaluation which has a thin veneer of analytical rigor is a charity's “overhead ratio”: that is, the relative amounts of money spent on programs vs. administration. According to a press release issued in December 2009 by Philanthropy Action, Charity Navigator, GiveWell, Great Nonprofits, Guidestar and Philanthropedia :
For years, people have turned to the overhead ratio—a measure of how much of each donation is spent on “programs” versus administrative and fundraising costs—to guide their choice of charity. But overhead ratios and executive salaries are useless for evaluating a nonprofit’s impact.
While the idea of sending money “straight to the beneficiaries” is tempting, nonprofit experts agree that judging charities by how much of their money goes to “programs” is counterproductive. “Achieving a low overhead ratio drives many charities to behaviors that make them less effective and means more, not less, wasted dollars,” says Paul Brest, President of the Hewlett Foundation, and co-author of Money Well Spent.
The common focus on low overhead ratio has produced perverse incentives; pressuring some charities to skimp on administrative costs that would improve the efficacy of their programs. More importantly, cost-effectiveness of different charities' activities varies so dramatically as to totally eclipse any usefulness that the overhead ratio might have in a world of charities performing homogeneous activities.
A Comparison of Cost-Effectiveness
A well-known and well-funded charity is the Make-A-Wish Foundation, “a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in the United States that grants wishes to children (2.5 years to 18 years old) who have life-threatening medical conditions.” According to the website's Managing Our Funds page:
The Make-A-Wish Foundation® is proud of the way it manages and safeguards the generous contributions it receives from individual donors, corporations and other organizations.
Seventy-six percent of the revenue the Make-A-Wish Foundation receives is allotted to program services. This percentage well exceeds the standard upheld by organizations that monitor the work of charities.
And indeed, the percentage allotted to program services is sufficiently high in juxtaposition with other financial statistics so that Charity Navigator grants the Make-A-Wish Foundation its highest rating. But how cost-effective are the charity's programs?
The Make-A-Wish Foundation 2009 Annual Report states that “A record-breaking 13,471 children had their wishes come true in FY09.” The annual report gives a break down of wishes by type: for example, 40.3% of the wishes were trips to the Walt Disney World Resort, 11.7% of them were shopping sprees, 7.1% of them were celebrity meetings and 5.5% of them were cruises.
The annual report claims that in 2009 the charity's “total program and support services” amounted a figure of $203,865,550. Thus, the Make-A-Wish Foundation implicitly reports to spending an average of $15,134 for each wish that it grants.
A charity that helps children in the United States far more efficiently is Nurse-Family Partnership which provides an approximately three year long program of weekly nurse visits to inexperienced expectant and early mothers for at a cost of $11,200 yielding improved prenatal health, fewer childhood injuries and improved school readiness. A deeper appreciation of how little good per dollar the Make-A-Wish Foundation does relative to what is possible requires a digression.
In November 2010 the United Nations released its 2010 Human Development Report ranking the world's countries according to a "Human Development Index" based on data concerning life expectancy, education and per-capita GDP. One of the lowest ranked countries on this list is Mozambique which has an infant mortality rate around 10%. This contrasts dramatically with the infant mortality rate in the United States which is less than 1%. Every tenth pregnancy in Mozambique is followed by the grief of losing a child within several years. A child in sub-Saharan Africa who survives past the age of five is more likely than not to live a full life extending past the age of 60 [2].
Why is the infant mortality rate in Mozambique so high? A major cause of death is infectious disease. Around a third of infants in Mozambique do not have the opportunity to receive the standard vaccinations for polio, measles, tentanus, tuberculosis, diphtheria and other fatal diseases because of the poverty of their surroundings and some of them will die as a result.
An organization called VillageReach is working to improve Mozambique's health logistics. Between 2002 and 2008 VillageReach ran a pilot program in the Mozambique province of Cabo Delgado designed to improve the province's health logistics. This program was dramatically successful. One tangible indicator of impact is that VillageReach increased the percentage of Cabo Delgado infants who received the third and final dose of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine from 68.9% to 95.4%, yielding a final percentage higher than that of the average in any sub-Saharan African country. When one looks at the available evidence in juxtaposition with the cost of the program and runs through cost-effectiveness calculations one finds that under conservative assumptions VillageReach saved an infant's life for every $545 donated to VillageReach.
Now VillageReach is in the process of expanding its operations to more provinces of Mozambique, hoping to expand its pilot project into seven more of Mozambique's eleven provinces over the next six years. VillageReach requires an additional ~ $1.5 million [3] to implement its proposal as fast as possible. In light of the fact that VillageReach has so far received only about 20-25% of this funding, it's plausible that additional donations will have a cost-effectiveness similar to that of those used for the pilot project.
Thus we see that while a $15,134 donation to the Make-A-Wish Foundation can be expected to grant an average of one wish to an ill child (a good thing all else being equal), a donation to VillageReach can 27 infants lives! With this framing it becomes clear that the amount of good per dollar that the Make-A-Wish Foundation is doing is negligible relative to that of VillageReach . No parent would prefer to send a child to Disney World over preventing even a single one of his or her children from contracting a life threatening illness!
Nor is this phenomenon of badly suboptimal giving specific to Make-A-Wish Foundation donors. Even if one restricts one's attention to the cause of health in the developing world [4], many donors donate to charities pursuing health interventions in the developing world that do a thousand times less good per dollar than the most cost-effective health interventions.
A hypothetical charity running programs like VillageReach's which embezzled 95% of its budget and had correspondingly greatly reduced cost-effectiveness would still be doing far more good per dollar than the Make-A-Wish Foundation or the least effective developing world charities do. This example makes it clear how profoundly useless the overhead ratio is for assessing the relative quality of a charity.
Holding Charities Accountable
Donors should be aware that charities frequently cite misleading cost-effectiveness figures in their promotional materials. And just because a charity claims to be performing activities of very high value doesn't mean that the charity is performing the activity as reported. William Easterly recently commented on Peter Singer's child in a pond metaphor [5] saying:
In our situation trying to help a poor person, what we're actually doing is we're not physically able to rush in ourselves and save the child. In fact, we are not even able to observe whether the child is saved or not. What we are doing is we're sending money off to someone else on the other side of the world...and we're counting on them to save the child. And so I guess to put the metaphor another way, if your person who was saving a child was in a situation where they were physically unable to help and they knew they had to delegate it to someone else, then it would also be morally reprehensible if they did not find a person who was reliable who they were sure was going to save the child. And it would be morally reprehensible if they did not in fact check up to make sure that the child was saved. That would be just as morally objectionable as your situation of yourself directly failing to rush to the aid of the child.
Of course, for a donor with limited time and energy it is frequently not possible to personally check that a charity is performing its stated function. As such, it is useful to have independent charity evaluators that evaluate charities for impact. The only such organization that I'm familiar with is GiveWell which has reviewed 409 charities working in the areas of equality of opportunity in the United States, health in the developing world, and economic empowerment in the developing world and has highlighted those charities with the strongest evidence of positive impact. VillageReach is currently GiveWell's top ranked charity in the cause of health in the developing world.
There are many causes that GiveWell has not yet covered and there may be charities working in them that absorb donations substantially more cost-effectively than VillageReach does. GiveWell has prepared a Do-it-Yourself Charity Evaluation Guide as an aid to donors who are interested in personally investigating charities working in causes that GiveWell has not yet covered.
Volunteering, Nonprofit Work and Cost-Effectiveness
So far I've restricted my discussion to charitable giving. Giving is not the only philanthropic activity that people engage in; some people volunteer their time to benefit others and some people choose to forgo income to work at a lower paying nonprofit job that they deem to have greater social value than the job that they would otherwise take. There are many instances in which such philanthropic activities are the best way to help people, but one should consider such activities against the backdrop of there being huge variability in the cost-effectiveness of philanthropic activities. GiveWell's recommended charities have set a concrete minimal standard for optimizing cost-effectiveness of philanthropic activities.
To determine whether or not volunteering or taking a nonprofit job is a good way of helping people, one should compare additional positive impact that one would have by switching jobs with the positive impact that one would have by donating all of one's forgone income to the most efficient charity that one can find. For those with low earning potential and skills that are useful and rare in the philanthropic world, the most efficient way of helping people will typically be volunteering and/or non-profit work. For those who have high earning potential and lack skills that are especially rare in the philanthropic world the most efficient way of helping people will typically be taking a high paying job and donating one's income to an efficient charity. [6]
Of course, many people who volunteer or forgo income to work at a non-profit do so not only with a view toward helping people but also because they want to experience the visceral sense of helping people directly or of working directly on a cause that they feel passionate about. This latter factor can be a good reason to engage in such activities. Humans are not automatons capable of persistently adopting the most efficient course possible. Fulfilling our own very substantial personal needs and desires is important to maintaining good health and energy. At the same time, in view of the great variability of cost-effectiveness of various philanthropic activities, if one doesn't devote some resources toward helping people as efficiently as possible, one will probably accomplish very little of one's potential capacity to make the world a better place. [7]
Conclusion
People often have good intentions and frequently fail to direct them to create the substantial positive impact that they could if they thought carefully about how to do as much good as possible. I have already mentioned GiveWell as a useful resource for donors who interested in accomplishing the most good for their dollar. Such donors may also find it useful to visit Giving What We Can which is a society whose members pledge to donate a portion of their income “to whichever organizations can most effectively use it to fight poverty in developing countries” and whose members “share advice on the most effective ways to give.” By thinking critically and making use of available resources, one can reasonably expect to be able to have a much greater positive social impact than one otherwise would be able to.
Footnotes
[1] Figures taken from a survey by Independent Sector and The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2009.
[2] According to calculations by GiveWell using data from the World Health Organization.
[3] See the section of GiveWell's review of VillageReach titled Room For More Funds?
[4] For an indication of the relative cost-effectiveness of health interventions in the U.S. refer to a 1995 academic journal article from titled Five-Hundred Life-Saving Interventions and Their Cost-Effectiveness.
[5] In a December 2009 BloggingHeads Diavlog with Peter Singer. William Easterly is an economist at NYU and author of the Aid Watch blog
[6] Alan Dawrst's essay titled Why Activists Should Consider Making Lots of Money gives more on this topic.
[7] Eliezer Yudkowsky's Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately gives a nice discussion of this theme.
