Reading this and your article on using dead children as currencies reminds me of an event a few years ago which might have helped stop me from becoming another religious nutcase.
I did not know anything about rationality or utilitarian ethics at the time, and I was involved in a youth group at church that was going to be making aid kits for Ethiopia. One of the items that was requested was some kind of clothing, so I picked it up from a second hand store and put the kit together. Later when we were talking about the kits, I was told that we were only supposed to bring new items. when I asked why, the person in charge said something about respecting the feelings of the people who were receiving the gifts, and wanting them to feel like they had been given something special, instead of a discarded item. Everyone else in the group seemed to accept this easily, but I asked how many more people we could have helped with bargain items. This time, they pretty much ignored what I had just said.
I think this was the point when it finally hit me that good intentions and appearing kind are horrible indicators that you are really making the world better. So anyway, I probably would never have tried to find out about websites like this without my experiences dealing with religion. Too bad we cannot all just be taught utilitarian ethics and rationality by our parents and school instead of discovering them the hard way.
I'm going to assign this to my introductory microeconomics students to help them understand opportunity costs.
That sort of terrifies me, but in a good way.
At the risk of tooting my own horn, this essay only incidentally addresses opportunity costs, but I wrote another essay a few years ago in a different style that addresses them more directly: A Modest Proposal
I discussed the ideas in this essay with my students. I first ask my students how much an iPad costs. They give me some dollar amount, but then I say something like "I don't want the answer in dollars but rather in dead African children." Since we have just been discussing opportunity costs they catch on quickly to what I'm getting at.
Have you considered submitting your essay to LW? It might not fit the general objective perfectly well, but I believe it should be promoted and that many people would enjoy reading it.
That said, I have to thank you for all your great posts. It is a pleasure to read them. Being clear and concise you provide valuable insights while dissolvig important topics.
I'd certainly upvote any such submission. I mean:
"Not like I am any saint myself. The past two years, I've spent about two dead puppies on books from Amazon.com alone. I am probably going to spend very close to a whole dead child to fly home for my two week winter break, and I spent ten dead children on my trip around the world this summer. I spent four infected wounds on fantasy map-making software. But at least in the back of my mind I realize I'm doing it. Can the people who spend a dead kid plus a dead puppy on the world's most expensive sundae say the same? What about the Japanese guy spending 1050 dead kids on a mobile phone strap?"
Come on!
I wasn't being sarcastic. The implied expansion of my last comment is 'Come on [, how can you not like or appreciate that paragraph among others?]!'
This week on Facebook, Derek Sivers (founder of CD Baby) wrote that this article had more impact on him than anything else he read all year. He said: "Of all the articles I've read in the past 6 months, this one had the biggest impact on me."
Pretty much a corollary of this is Steve Landsburg's (for some reason controversial) point that you should only ever be donating money to one charity at a time (unless you're ridiculously rich). The charity which makes the best use out of your first $1 donation is almost certainly also the charity which makes the best use out of your 1000th dollar as well. Once you've done the calculation, spreading your money between different charities isn't hedging your bets, it's giving money to the wrong charity.
See his Slate article for a slightly more fleshed out version of the reasoning.
There is one exception to this, which is political charities (ACLU, for instance). Giving to political charities, has a signalling effect: a political charity can say "we have twelve million donors," and this tells politicians that they had better listen to that charity or those twelve million people might be voting for someone else.
That said, a $10 donation is enough to get this effect.
It's a useful exercise for aspiring economists and rationalists to dissect charity into separate components of warm fuzzies vs. efficiency. However, maybe it's best for the general population not to be fully conscious that these are separate components, since the spirit of giving is like a frog: you can dissect it, but it dies in the process (adaptation of an E.B. White quote).
Lemma: we want charity to be enjoyable, so that more people are motivated to do it. (Analogy: capitalist countries let rich people keep their riches, to create an incentive for economic growth, even though it might create more utility in the short term to tax rich people very highly.)
Consider this quote from the article:
If he went to the beach because he wanted the sunlight and the fresh air and the warm feeling of personally contributing to something, that's fine. If he actually wanted to help people by beautifying the beach, he's chosen an objectively wrong way to go about it.
Sure, but making the lawyer conscious of this will give him a complete buzzkill. He will realize that he was unconsciously doing the act for selfish (and kind of silly) reasons. Your hope in telling him this is that he will instead...
This is a genuine problem you're presenting, and I think it requires a third solution besides the presented options of "Let the lawyer do what he wants" and "Give the lawyer a buzzkill". What we need to do is find a way of getting the lawyer to understand what the right thing to do is, without making them feel defensive or like a jerk. If we make the bullet tasty enough, it'll get easier to swallow.
Rationalist marketing FTU (For The Utilons).
I find I run into a conundrum on this question, because there is a bias I fear overcompensating for. I know as a human that I am biased to care more about the one person standing in front of me than those ten thousand people starving in India that I'll never meet, but I find it difficult to apply that information. I know that donating money to, say, those malaria nets, will probably save more lives than donating to, say, my local food pantry. By these arguments, it seems that that fact should trump all, and I should donate to those malaria nets.
However, I know that my local food pantry is an organization that feeds people who really need food, that it has virtually no overhead, and that there are children who would be malnourished without it. I also know that there are people all over the world who will contribute to malaria nets, but it is highly unlikely that anyone outside my community will contribute to my local food pantry.
I agree that it is vitally important to think carefully about how we spend our charity money, and I understand that the difficulty I am having with this topic is an indication that I need to think more deeply on it, but I keep coming up against two b...
The second point is something that really gets me. It seems to me that rather than feeling bad about donating to one charity rather than a more efficient or more "important" other charity, we should feel bad about spending money on frivolities rather than donating to charity. Nonprofit organizations are forced to compete against each other for slender resources in many ways, including donor dollars -- why can't they compete against things that have less moral value instead? It would be awesome if there were more social pressure to donate to charity rather than going to the movies or buying pretty clothes.
Interestingly, however, there is some social stigma against donating "too much". A few years ago, there was a New York gentleman who donated a much larger than "normal" percentage of his money to charity, as well as his kidney, plus some other stuff. (I'm sorry, I really wish I could remember his name, but I am very sure I have these details correct, because I read a lot about it at the time.) People speculated in the press about his mental status and other children mocked his kids at school, although his family was hardly left poor by the experi...
I (for one) have tried dedicating all my time to doing activism that seemed "more important" (HIV in Africa) rather than the activism that is most interesting to me (various types of sexuality stuff in America), and I was both less happy and less effective
There's a story I like to tell when I hear this. Louise and Claire are both concerned about global warming. Louise is full of passion for the subject and does what moves her most; through her hard work persuades a thousand people to unplug their phone chargers at night. Claire can't get worked up about it even though she understands it's important; in a drunken conversation one night she persuades one friend to turn down their central heating one degree.
Claire's choice of an efficient way to reduce CO2 emissions absolutely swamps the difference in enthusiasm; she does considerably more good than Louise.
This makes me wonder if giving out free clothing vouchers in winter might be an effective global warming hack.
we should feel bad about spending money on frivolities rather than donating to charity.
This is standard religious dogma. Secular activists rarely have the gumption to make it part of their pitches.
Interestingly, however, there is some social stigma against donating "too much".
When you take seriously something other people are hypocritical about, it makes them edgy.
most of us are sex-positive activists, and sex-positive activism is arguably an extremely "low priority" type of activism.
Not for me. Keep up the good work :D
Additionally, it is undeniable that someone has to work on the issues I care about, or else who would I donate money to even if I had a lot of it?
Comparative advantage. Compare you being an activist and your donors working (which includes you working a low-value job to donate to yourself) and you working and donating to the marginal activist. Which scenario is superior?
The standard lawyer/secretary example comes to mind- even if the lawyer types much faster, they're better off having their secretary type for them. As an activist, are you a lawyer or a secretary? If gainfully employed, would you be a lawyer or a secretary?
Should I feel guilty for donating money to public radio because it doesn't save children? No.
I agree and would go even further. Guilt is a terrible motivator and one that I would does not apply to anything involving charitable contributions. Well except for, say, mugging the aid workers to steal other's contributions. In such cases guilt serves an entirely different and somewhat useful role.
This is a simple question of "What do you want?" If you want to reduce malaria infections buy nets (probably). If you want to save a radio station save a radio station. If you have multiple things you want to prioritize them and do multiplications or approximations thereof.
Never let anyone make you feel guilty for doing things that achieve your goals. Even yourself.
My point was that it is not any more wrong to spend money on public radio than to spend money on cable tv or a new iPod. Yes, in theory all my money not spent on food and shelter could go to saving children, but you are not going to do that, I am not going to do that, and no one either of us knows is going to do that.
I can't see any flaws in the argument, but the conclusion is far more radical than most of us would be willing to admit.
Am I the sort of person who would value my computer over another human being's life? I hope not, that makes me sound like the most horrible sort of psychopath---it is basically the morality of Stalin. But at the same time, did I sell my computer to feed kids in Africa? I did not. Nor did any of you, unless you are reading this at a library computer (in which case I'm sure I can find something you could have given up that would have allowed you to give just a little bit more to some worthy charitable cause.)
It gets worse: Is my college education worth the lives of fifty starving children? Because I surely paid more than that. Is this house I'm living in worth eight hundred life-saving mosquito nets? Because that's how much it cost.
Our entire economic system is based on purchases that would be "unjustified"---even immoral---on the view that every single purchase must be made on this kind of metric. And so if we all stopped doing that, our economy would collapse and we would be starving instead.
I think it comes down to this: Consequentialism is a lot harder...
Most of us allocate a particular percentage to charity, despite the fact that most people would say that nearly nothing we spend money on is as important as saving childrens lives.
I don't know whether you think it's that we overestimate how much we value saving childrens lives, or underestimate how important xbox games, social events, large tvs and eating tasty food are to us. Or perhaps you think it's none of that, and that we're being simply irrational.
I doubt that anyone could consistently live as if the difference between choice of renting a nice flat and renting a dive was one life per month, or that halving normal grocery consumption for a month was a childs life that month, etc. If that's really the aim, we're going to have to do a significant amount of emotional engineering.
I also want to stick up for the necessity of analysing the way that a charity works, not just what they do. For example, charities that employ local people and local equipment may save fewer people per dollar in the short term, but may be less likely to create a culture of dependence, and may be more sustainable in the long term. These considerations are important too.
Although I definitely agree with the thrust of the article, I don't feel that lives-saved is necessarily a very good metric of utility. A child in the Third World might be saved from malaria, but grow up nutrient deficient leading to reduced mental capacity, work on a subsistence farm, contract HIV, and die after having three kids, who subsequently starve. A charity that prevented fewer deaths in a predictable causal sequence might still be a better utility maximizer if it had a greater positive effect on people's quality of life.
Of course, a lot of us already agree on the best available utility maximizing charity, but even among the more "mundane" options I think that causes such as promoting education in the third world may beat out direct life-saving maximizers.
"The lawyer who quits a high-powered law firm to work at a nonprofit organization certainly seems like a good person. But if we define "good" as helping people, then the lawyer who stays at his law firm but donates the profit to charity is taking Cato's path of maximizing how much good he does, rather than how good he looks."
Wouldn't that depend on how much harm the lawyer might do by remaining at the high-powered law firm? What if the law firm specializes in socially-harmful activities, like defending corporate malfeasance or (pick your example). How does that fit into the equation?
In other words, I don't think it's that simple, although it's an excellent place to start, and I will certainly check out GiveWell for our next charitable tithing session.
I have a question. This article suggests that for a given utility function there is one single charity that is best and that's the one one should give money to. That looks a bit problematic to me - for example, if everyone invests in malaria nets because that's the single one that saves most lives, then nobody is investing in any other kind of charity, but shouldn't those things get done too ?
We can get around this by considering that the efficiency function varies with time - for example, once everybody gives their money to buy nets the marginal cost of e...
What happens in that situation is that people continue to invest in malaria nets, so much that the marginal cost of saving another life goes from say, $500 to $700, and for $600 dollars you can dig a well, saving another persons life. In essence, you donate to the most efficient charity until that money has caused the charity to have to pay more to save lives, and therefore stops being the most efficient charity.
I once donated some money to VillageReach a few minutes before getting the GiveWell newsletter issue announcing that VillageReach wasn't going to be among the top charities in the next update because their founding gap had mostly closed and encouraging people to wait for the next update before deciding whom to donate money to. True story!
If you are to "love your neighbor as yourself"
Why use that particular phrase? I think I don't need to love my neighbor as much as me to be interested in charity. And while I suppose the phrase sits well aesthetically in the text, I think it might unfortunately evoke with it a few Christian cached toughs. Pure selflessness rewarded in afterlife don't really seem applicable to what people here want to do.
I think this might be correct but that humans are prone to prioritising the welfare of kin and close friends, and so someone working directly with people and forming some kind of relationship with them may be more likely to donate financial resources to that group in future. The lawyer may be more willing to spend money to keep a beach safe and free of litter if he or she has some personal experience which increases the importance of that beach in his mind. Most of us don't give much weight to mosquito nets because our own experience doesn't even put that ...
I wonder how many people would just give up on charity altogether if they accepted this argument. I know I did, I pretty much see charity as supererogatory now.
Anyone know what the probability of a whole blood or platelet donation saving a life is? That isn't rated by GiveWell, and I failed at finding the data in a Google search.
I always try to give blood as often as possible under the assumption that I save at least one life each time
That can't possibly be right, not on the margins.
Maybe I'm just being naive here, but in a case that straightforward and that possible for the average person to understand, where there's nothing odd or unprestigious about the action and lots of people are doing it already, where, on the margins, an additional American life is saved each time another person donates blood, I have trouble believing that even a world this insane wouldn't push blood donations a little harder.
I happen to administer a lot of blood to my patients, so let me answer some of the factual questions.
The way they calculate "up to 3 lives" is in the most trivial way: blood you donate is fractionated into red cells, plasma, and platelets. Each of those may go to a different recipient.
All blood administered to patients comes from voluntary, uncompensated donations. Plasma used in research studies may be compensated, but may not be transfused. This is the most important factor keeping our blood supply safe, and is far more effective than laboratory testing alone.
Given that blood banks need to keep a sufficient store of blood available of each type, rarer blood types are generally in greater need than, say, A After all, a larger proportion of blood of those types must be discarded. O blood is obviously highly useful in trauma situations, and is therefore in high demand as well.
The distribution of donors' and recipients' blood types should not be assumed to be equal: people with blood type A are significantly more likely to donate than people with blood type B. This exacerbates the discrepancies due to point 3.
The number of lives saved can be calculated in tw
Your donations are not marginally useless! (unless you've been pregnant a couple times - in that case, consider stopping).
The reason for the discrepancies in donation rates between types A and B is both simple and complex: ethnicity. In the interests of safety (avoidance of Hepatitis C, HIV, etc) we've set up a system that subtly encourages certain types of donors and discourages others. The system is not racist per se, but it is most effective in obtaining donations from white, middle-aged, middle-class males.
Regarding signaling reasons: we are obviously very afraid of blood donated for signaling purposes. Accordingly, we do not allow people to donate to their relatives except under very unusual circumstances. Additionally, we give people an "out" by checking a box which tells the center to draw and discard their blood. That way people who fear they may be high-risk donors can get the social approval of donating without harming any patients.
It totally devalues the value of 'saving a life' to the point of utter meaningless.
Which part? I thought that started silly (it's explaining the logic behind a non-profit's puffery, did you expect it to be rigorous?) but then got better. The idea of "saving a life" is pretty meaningless when you poke at it- it's all just lifespan extension. And so the idea that each emergency treatment extends lifespans by the 'natural span of a life' is silly. If someone would die if they don't receive a unit of blood at 50 separate occasions on their life, should each transfusion get the full moral weight of saving a life? If so, we just gave this person 50 lives. If not, then we need to abandon the language of "saving a life" and talk about "extending a lifespan" (because we can say those units of blood each added a year to the person's life, for example).
Giving blood is important to me. It is so important that I have chosen not to pursue relationships with other men in order than I can continue to give blood without lying to do so.
On the margins, I expect that each marginal pint of blood saves only a very small fraction of a life. As several readers pointed out, this doesn't mean that we should ordinarily be calculating on the margins, since it's not like you can use a pint of blood for something else instead; in terms of moral credit, you should think of yourself as part of a reference class of people who all choose to donate blood for around the same reasons, and who all get an equal share of the lives saved.
However, the Red Cross has already decided that they're willing to X out the entire homosexual community, and I would expect the reference class of those who refrain from sexual activity in order to continue donating blood to be small, and I would guess that if this entire reference class refrained from donating blood, not a single additional life might be lost.
Modern-day hospitals are not, so far as I know, blood-limited. They need a routine flow of blood in order to routinely save lives. They do not need more blood t...
This is Holden Karnofsky, the co-Executive Director of GiveWell, which is referenced in the top-level article and elsewhere on this thread.
I think there is an important difference between discussing the marginal impact of a blood donation and the marginal impact of a vote. When it comes to blood donations, it is possible for everyone to simultaneously follow the rule: "Give blood only when the supply of donations is low enough that an additional donation would have high expected impact", with a reasonable outcome. It is not possible for everyone to behave this way in elections: no voter is able to consider the existing distribution of votes before casting their own.
I am only casually familiar with TDT/UDT, but it seems to me that that "Give blood only when the supply of donations is low enough that an additional donation would have high expected impact" should get about the same amount of credit under TDT/UDT as giving blood, and thus the extra impact of actually giving blood (as opposed to following that rule) is small regardless of what decision theory one is using.
I bring this up because the discussion of marginal blood donations is parallel to analysis Giv...
However, I am curious as to why it's obvious to you that 3 lives is too high of a number on the margins.
Around 15 million pints of whole blood are donated per year in the US. At 3 lives per pint that comes out to 45 million. We can also assume that if lives per pint is 3 at the margin then the more efficient cases it will be even more than that. The population of the US just isn't high enough to account for that.
Oh, then there there is the fact that a lot of cases use a whole heap more than one pint of blood. (For example.)
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?
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 the choice is between charities making antimalarial drugs run by competent people, and charities making (more useful) mosquito nets run by incompetent people, then yes on the short term you might see incompetent people with loads of cash, but then other charities will probably pop up making malarial nets with low overhead, and then they'll get the most donarions.
Or if you're concerned about competent people all getting a "real" job and donating money: it's only rational to do so when the marginal utility of volunteering is less than the marginal utility of working and donating. If that's the case now (too many volunteers, not enough money), that doesn't mean that all volunteers should stop and go get a job.
If no lawyers take time off and contribute their expertise to a charity, then how do charities protect themselves from lawsuits, for example?
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".
I just had a conversation with my father on this subject which significantly clarified my thinking, and resolved most of my internal dilemma. The argument put forward in this post is correct, but there is one significant problem. I care about more than just saving children. I also care about how efficiently it is done, what peripheral good a charity is doing in the community by, say, employing locals, and any number of other things. "Children saved" is an important metric and should absolutely be considered, and it is a decision that should b...
At the risk of provoking defensiveness I will say that it really sounds like you are trying to rationalize your preferences as being rational when they aren't.
I say this because the examples that you were giving (local food kitchen, public radio), when compared to truly efficient charities (save lives, improve health, foster local entrepreneurship), are nothing like "save 9 kids + some other benefits" vs. "save 10 kids and nothing else". It''s more like "save 0.1 kids that you know are in your neighborhood" vs. "save 10 kids that you will never meet" (and that's probably an overestimate on the local option). Your choice of a close number is suspicious because it is so wrong and so appealing (by justifying the giving that makes you happy).
The amount of happiness that you create through local first world charities is orders of magnitude less than third world charities. Therefore, if you are choosing local first world charities that help "malnourished" kids who are fabulously nourished by third world standards, we can infer that the weight you put on "saving the lives of children" (and with it, "maximizing human quality-adjusted life years") is basically zero. Therefore, you are almost certainly buying warm fuzzies. That's consumption, not charity. I'm all for consumption, I just don't like people pretending that it's charity so they can tick their mental "give to charity" box and move on.
I'm bothered by the intertemporal implications of this, i.e. if I have $100 that I will spend to help the most humans possible, then I could either spend it today or invest it and spend $105 next year (assumed 5% ROR). Will I then ever spend the money on charity? Or will I always invest it, and just let this amassed wealth be distributed when I die?
Assuming that charities can invest and borrow at prevailing interest rates (and large charitable trusts can in fact borrow from their endowment), you should be indifferent to this choice. Robin Hanson has addressed this issue here.
If you spend $500 on saving the painting Blue Rigi, [...] it contributes to the education of thousands of British children, many of whom will grow up to create and donate large amounts of wealth/knowledge
Contributes how much? For each child, how much more knowledge do you expect they will create because they saw the original, rather than a facsimile, Blue Rigi? My estimate for this is so close to 0 that I can't conscience paying even $1 for Blue Rigi, except for aesthetic reasons.
Muddled thinking is when your line of argumentation "painting contributes to museum, museum contributes to education, education contributes to productivity, productivity contributes to charity" implies there's some single metric each of these increase, which can be traced from one to the other simply, step by step.
An original painting may contribute to museum's "quality", but it needn't contribute to the educational quality of the museum, so you can't transfer that sort of contribution down that next step.
An art museum contributes to education, but it needn't contribute to education in such a manner that it becomes the sort of "productivity" that saves lives. Art is about aesthetics, which contribute to quality of life, but not the preservation of such. Art contributes, but it contributes differently - and you were told that already.
Education may contribute to productivity, but depending what you're educated to value, it may increase or decrease the amounts of charity provided. For example, if you're taught to value the presence of original paintings, you'll probably give money to keep original paintings in your nation, not to save lives.
Wanting an ori...
Very well presented.
Just a minor technical note: All the links that linked to other LW pages are broken. It looks like somehow the links ended up having those articles's names being appended to the link for this one.
For instance, the one that was supposed to link to money being the unit of caring instead tries to link to this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others/lw/65/money_the_unit_of_caring/
And likewise, there is only one best charity: the one that helps the most people the greatest amount per dollar.
I disagree. Giving money to charity is not different from spending money on a latte at Starbucks. I spend money according to my values. And I still buy lattes. I am not Zachary Baumkletterer. Even Jesus said, "The poor you will have with you always", to justify spending an INCREDIBLE amount of money (enough to buy ten people's entire lives, in an era with no inflation, making it comparable to ten million US dollars today) on pou...
To some degree, this article is less about moralizing and more of a "how to" guide. If you want to help people, this is how to do it. If you don't want to help people, and you prefer to have lattes or works of fine art or whatever, then a how-to guide on how to help people isn't relevant to your interests.
To the degree that it is more than that, the article is an attempt to expose certain thought processes into consciousness so that they can be evaluated by conscious systems. People may be donating to these inefficient charities because they feel like it and they don't examine their feelings, even though if they were to consciously think the problem through they would give to more efficient charities. If, after realizing that the choice is between one kid's life or 1/1000 of a painting, someone still prefers the painting, I don't really have anything more I can say - but my guess is that's not a lot of the population.
You made a really good point in your mysticism post on Discussion, about the difference between categorizing things by their causes and categorizing things by their effects. When you talk about spiritual and unselfish choices, you're categorizing things by th...
Even Jesus said, "The poor you will have with you always", to justify spending an INCREDIBLE amount of money (enough to buy ten people's entire lives, in an era with no inflation, making it comparable to ten million US dollars today) on pouring perfume once on Jesus' feet
"Even Jesus"? Does it occur to you that making this a religious example is actually even MORE likely to get us to notice the moral dissonance, not convince us to excuse it?
With respect to the lawyer example, I understand that the lawyer can maximize the good he does by remaining a lawyer instead of working for a non-profit. But if all the most talented/productive people (and thus those with the highest potential salaries in the private sector) took private sector jobs, then only the least talented/productive people would be available to start and run the non-profits. Given that we can expect this low talent pool to make many mistakes, a lot of the high talent pool's donations will be squandered and wasted. So having all ...
For the "lawyer work for another hour and donate the money vs. volunteer", it also what matters what the side effects of his labor are, right? If the lawyer can make $1000 an hour, but only in ways that actually harm society (working on frivolous lawsuits against hospitals, for example), then working for another hour and donating the money isn't necessarily the best thing he could be doing. Now, on the other hand, if his work also genuinely helps society and creates more wealth for people, then it's even better then the null case.
There's one flaw in the argument about Buy a Brushstroke vs African sanitation systems, which is the assumption/implication that if they hadn't given that money to Buy a Brushstroke they would have given it to African sanitation systems instead. It's a false dichotomy. Sure, the money would have been better spent on African sanitation systems, but you can say that about anything. The money they spent on their cars, the money I just spent on my lunch, in fact somewhere probably over 99.9% of all non-African-sanitation-system-purchases made in the first-worl...
This speaks in favor of the moral qualities of the camera manufacturer
Why is this? Is it unethical to profit from trade? This made my little inner Objectivist cringe pretty hard... but otherwise, I like this post a lot. It makes an important point about efficiency that isn't obvious and needs to be reinforced.
This is an excellent article. A quick comment on one of the sentences:
GiveWell.org, a site which collects and interprets data on the effectiveness of charities, predicts that antimalarial drugs save one child from malaria per $5,000 worth of bed medicine, but insecticide-treated bed nets save one child from malaria per $500 worth of drugs.
I find this sentence somewhat confusing. Should the "worth of bed medicine" be just "medicine", and the "worth of drugs" be "worth of netting"?
The Pollination Project is run by a guy who gives $1,000 a day, to a different recipient every day. Rational justifications for this approach include minimizing the model risk - i.e., perhaps the model you used to decide which single charitable cause is the best is wrong. Also, small donations seem likely to produce a high velocity of the money donated.
Interesting article.
But if you really really want to do more good, you also have to change the way you see people in need. This might involve buying a ticket to Sudan and seeing children face to face while they are starving to death.
So in the long run, your $5k trip to Sudan might do more good than giving a one time $5k donation to an organization, because by changing the way you think about starving people, you will have the urgency of actually changing your priorities. So you will literally work for those who die of starvation in other countries, and deprive yourself from buying useless stuff or entertainment in order to feed more children in Sudan.
... unless you're psychopath, of course. ;-)
It is important to be rational about charity for the same reason it is important to be rational about Arctic exploration: it requires the same awareness of opportunity costs and the same hard-headed commitment to investigating efficient use of resources
In his Mars Direct talks, Robert Zubrin cited the shoestring budget Amundsen expedition through the Northwest Passage in comparison to around 30 contemporary government funded expeditions with state of the art steam frigates and huge logistics trains. The Amundsen expedition traveled in a cheap little sea...
Congratulations! I Liked the article very much.
I just have some doubts about two specific points:
In the part that there's the text:
"And when your life is on the line, things like impressing your friends and buying organic pale in comparison."
I got the impression that it's missing the end of the sentence. As my english is not good, maybe it's my fault. Sorry if that is the case.
The other thing is that I found a little problematic the math comparing U$ 10.000 spent on a U$ 500 charity with overhead of 50% and the one spent on a U$ 10.000 charity with 0% overhead. It's said that in the first case we could save 10 people and in the second just 2. Isn't that 20 people in the first case?
I agree with the idea that efficiency should be taken into account when considering charitable actions, but I do not know if I agree with your conclusion of what is most efficient. Alleviating a problem does not cure it. While paying for malaria nets, cleaning up the beach, donating to charities alleviates real social issues, it does not address the issue of their causation. In my opinion, what is most efficient is not concentrating on recuperation, but attacking the sickness. Without changing the causal conditions the disease will continue to grow endl...
I apologize if I am rehashing somebody else's post; I find that skimming the comments and then putting my own .02 in is a more valuable use of my time than thoroughly reading the comments (and thus allocating less time to an English paper I have coming up) and trying to sound like I'd exhaustively researched the topic (which would take way too much time). The payoff in terms of lives saved per work unit expended (either directly through volunteering or indirectly via donating money) varies from person to person. Even among those who consider themselves r...
Nice post. You could write a similar one on helping the environment. How often do you hear people say, about helping the environment, that "every little bit helps"?
Would anyone of average intelligence who wants to do as much good as possible fail flagrantly in giving where it maximizes welfare? Why then the drastic difference between personal buying and donation? Someone planning an Arctic trip will not make the contemplated mistakes, which is why you used personal buying to contrast with donation practices. Whether the desire to benefit mankind is powered by warm fuzzies or some other expression of altruistic motivation, if contributors were human-welfare maximizers they would do a lot better at maximizing welfare. ...
Isn't that obvious?
Yes. It should also be obvious that it succeeds because "appearing to desire welfare maximization and warm fuzzies" is the signal. If you donated to a charity that burned your money to reduce inflation your signal would fail.
It is less obvious but hopefully inferred by many that one of the intentions of this post and posts like it (and one of the intentions of charity-rating initiatives) is to break conventional giving, turn it into a failed signal, and replace it with efficient giving. That way, all the signalling donors will continue to donate as they did before, signalling the same things, achieving the same status gain, and accidentally helping the world more.
Good guide, indeed having more money to spend through whatever career may allow for being more useful for charity.
The expedition analogy is good. I'll get into discussing the specific goal or utility function. What is the goal we're heading to?
I'd say the goal as I see it is to increase the intelligence (or cure the lack of it) to make the agents of this world able to willingly solve their problems, and thereby reach a state of technological advancement that allows them to get rid of all problems for good, and start doing better things such as spending t...
A good article, if your goal is to save as many lives as possible from perishing. But I'm going to say, for most people, this is not their goal. Yes, if you ask someone directly "would you save a painting, or save 1000 lives", they would almost all say "lives of course". But in reality, people don't have an emotional attachment to 1000 people they have no idea about.
In my case, I really don't care if 1000 lives are lost if I don't do something. I know that makes me sound like a bad person. But what are people really? We're a self-repli...
http://jackt123.blogspot.com/2012/02/efficient-charity-or-is-that-oxymoron.html
The essence of this argument is that charities which save human lives are more valuable than charities which don't. Furthermore, it assumes that charities which save the most lives per dollar donated are the most worthy charities and the most deserving of our contributions.
How valid is this philosophy? Is saving human lives really the most crucial goal towards which we all should advance? If we explore the author's contention that the frivolous waste of money on a painting would...
This was originally posted as part of the efficient charity contest back in November. Thanks to Roko, multifoliaterose, Louie, jmmcd, jsalvatier, and others I forget for help, corrections, encouragement, and bothering me until I finally remembered to post this here.
Imagine you are setting out on a dangerous expedition through the Arctic on a limited budget. The grizzled old prospector at the general store shakes his head sadly: you can't afford everything you need; you'll just have to purchase the bare essentials and hope you get lucky. But what is essential? Should you buy the warmest parka, if it means you can't afford a sleeping bag? Should you bring an extra week's food, just in case, even if it means going without a rifle? Or can you buy the rifle, leave the food, and hunt for your dinner?
And how about the field guide to Arctic flowers? You like flowers, and you'd hate to feel like you're failing to appreciate the harsh yet delicate environment around you. And a digital camera, of course - if you make it back alive, you'll have to put the Arctic expedition pics up on Facebook. And a hand-crafted scarf with authentic Inuit tribal patterns woven from organic fibres! Wicked!
...but of course buying any of those items would be insane. The problem is what economists call opportunity costs: buying one thing costs money that could be used to buy others. A hand-crafted designer scarf might have some value in the Arctic, but it would cost so much it would prevent you from buying much more important things. And when your life is on the line, things like impressing your friends and buying organic pale in comparison. You have one goal - staying alive - and your only problem is how to distribute your resources to keep your chances as high as possible. These sorts of economics concepts are natural enough when faced with a journey through the freezing tundra.
But they are decidedly not natural when facing a decision about charitable giving. Most donors say they want to "help people". If that's true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don't. In the "Buy A Brushstroke" campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 to keep the famous painting "Blue Rigi" in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease. Each individual $50 donation could have given a year of normal life back to a Third Worlder afflicted with a disabling condition like blindness or limb deformity..
Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people by preserving access to the original canvas of a beautiful painting. And most of those 11,000 donors, if you asked, would say that a thousand people's lives are more important than a beautiful painting, original or no. But these people didn't have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.
If you are to "love your neighbor as yourself", then you should be as careful in maximizing the benefit to others when donating to charity as you would be in maximizing the benefit to yourself when choosing purchases for a polar trek. And if you wouldn't buy a pretty picture to hang on your sled in preference to a parka, you should consider not helping save a famous painting in preference to helping save a thousand lives.
Not all charitable choices are as simple as that one, but many charitable choices do have right answers. GiveWell.org, a site which collects and interprets data on the effectiveness of charities, predicts that antimalarial drugs save one child from malaria per $5,000 worth of medicine, but insecticide-treated bed nets save one child from malaria per $500 worth of netting. If you want to save children, donating bed nets instead of antimalarial drugs is the objectively right answer, the same way buying a $500 TV instead of an identical TV that costs $5,000 is the right answer. And since saving a child from diarrheal disease costs $5,000, donating to an organization fighting malaria instead of an organization fighting diarrhea is the right answer, unless you are donating based on some criteria other than whether you're helping children or not.
Say all of the best Arctic explorers agree that the three most important things for surviving in the Arctic are good boots, a good coat, and good food. Perhaps they have run highly unethical studies in which they release thousands of people into the Arctic with different combination of gear, and consistently find that only the ones with good boots, coats, and food survive. Then there is only one best answer to the question "What gear do I buy if I want to survive" - good boots, good food, and a good coat. Your preferences are irrelevant; you may choose to go with alternate gear, but only if you don't mind dying.
And likewise, there is only one best charity: the one that helps the most people the greatest amount per dollar. This is vague, and it is up to you to decide whether a charity that raises forty children's marks by one letter grade for $100 helps people more or less than one that prevents one fatal case of tuberculosis per $100 or one that saves twenty acres of rainforest per $100. But you cannot abdicate the decision, or you risk ending up like the 11,000 people who accidentally decided that a pretty picture was worth more than a thousand people's lives.
Deciding which charity is the best is hard. It may be straightforward to say that one form of antimalarial therapy is more effective than another. But how do both compare to financing medical research that might or might not develop a "magic bullet" cure for malaria? Or financing development of a new kind of supercomputer that might speed up all medical research? There is no easy answer, but the question has to be asked.
What about just comparing charities on overhead costs, the one easy-to-find statistic that's universally applicable across all organizations? This solution is simple, elegant, and wrong. High overhead costs are only one possible failure mode for a charity. Consider again the Arctic explorer, trying to decide between a $200 parka and a $200 digital camera. Perhaps a parka only cost $100 to make and the manufacturer takes $100 profit, but the camera cost $200 to make and the manufacturer is selling it at cost. This speaks in favor of the moral qualities of the camera manufacturer, but given the choice the explorer should still buy the parka. The camera does something useless very efficiently, the parka does something vital inefficiently. A parka sold at cost would be best, but in its absence the explorer shouldn't hesitate to choose the the parka over the camera. The same applies to charity. An antimalarial net charity that saves one life per $500 with 50% overhead is better than an antidiarrheal drug charity that saves one life per $5000 with 0% overhead: $10,000 donated to the high-overhead charity will save ten lives; $10,000 to the lower-overhead will only save two. Here the right answer is to donate to the antimalarial charity while encouraging it to find ways to lower its overhead. In any case, examining the financial practices of a charity is helpful but not enough to answer the "which is the best charity?" question.
Just as there is only one best charity, there is only one best way to donate to that charity. Whether you volunteer versus donate money versus raise awareness is your own choice, but that choice has consequences. If a high-powered lawyer who makes $1,000 an hour chooses to take an hour off to help clean up litter on the beach, he's wasted the opportunity to work overtime that day, make $1,000, donate to a charity that will hire a hundred poor people for $10/hour to clean up litter, and end up with a hundred times more litter removed. If he went to the beach because he wanted the sunlight and the fresh air and the warm feeling of personally contributing to something, that's fine. If he actually wanted to help people by beautifying the beach, he's chosen an objectively wrong way to go about it. And if he wanted to help people, period, he's chosen a very wrong way to go about it, since that $1,000 could save two people from malaria. Unless the litter he removed is really worth more than two people's lives to him, he's erring even according to his own value system.
...and the same is true if his philanthropy leads him to work full-time at a nonprofit instead of going to law school to become a lawyer who makes $1,000 / hour in the first place. Unless it's one HELL of a nonprofit.
The Roman historian Sallust said of Cato "He preferred to be good, rather than to seem so". The lawyer who quits a high-powered law firm to work at a nonprofit organization certainly seems like a good person. But if we define "good" as helping people, then the lawyer who stays at his law firm but donates the profit to charity is taking Cato's path of maximizing how much good he does, rather than how good he looks.
And this dichotomy between being and seeming good applies not only to looking good to others, but to ourselves. When we donate to charity, one incentive is the warm glow of a job well done. A lawyer who spends his day picking up litter will feel a sense of personal connection to his sacrifice and relive the memory of how nice he is every time he and his friends return to that beach. A lawyer who works overtime and donates the money online to starving orphans in Romania may never get that same warm glow. But concern with a warm glow is, at root, concern about seeming good rather than being good - albeit seeming good to yourself rather than to others. There's nothing wrong with donating to charity as a form of entertainment if it's what you want - giving money to the Art Fund may well be a quicker way to give yourself a warm feeling than seeing a romantic comedy at the cinema - but charity given by people who genuinely want to be good and not just to feel that way requires more forethought.
It is important to be rational about charity for the same reason it is important to be rational about Arctic exploration: it requires the same awareness of opportunity costs and the same hard-headed commitment to investigating efficient use of resources, and it may well be a matter of life and death. Consider going to www.GiveWell.org and making use of the excellent resources on effective charity they have available.