ata comments on Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others... - Less Wrong
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The points made here are sound. I was particularly awakened by calling out the rule about overhead as wrong, since that has been a major factor in my charitiable giving in the past.
However, if we imagine everyone behaving according to these rules, we wind up with very few (incompetent) people running a few charities with piles of cash. If no lawyers take time off and contribute their expertise to a charity, then how do charities protect themselves from lawsuits, for example? The optimal charity solution is not for everyone to follow your guidelines, but for almost everyone to follow your guidelines, and a few people to deviate. Yet, how do we know whether we should be the ones who deviate?
The lawyer example wasn't about lawyers donating lawyering to charities, it was about lawyers buying fuzzies by doing volunteer work like picking up litter or working at a food bank instead of doing overtime legal work and using the extra money to generate ten times as much charitable work.
Under some circumstances, the most efficient thing might be for a lawyer to provide pro-bono legal work to a charity, if a good lawyer is willing to do that, but in general, the answer to "how do charities protect themselves from lawsuits?" is "by paying for legal representation with part of the money people donate to them".