[rusk]

Just cross-referencing jk2323 here who makes an interesting point in this regard [0]

  *He should improve contraception instead*

You're pointing out that a lot of these organisations are based on a Catholic ethos. Given the church's outspoken position on contraception, could the pointed nature of these donations actually be doing some harm?

Given 1000 donors donating a million vs 1 donor with a billion (as somebody else points out below) you could imagine such biases being averaged out ...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15024948

[saint_fiasco]

When donors with different biases donate to causes with different political implications, they don't always average out. Sometimes they cancel out.

For example political campaign donations are obviously zero-sum, as is lobbying for mutually exclusive well-intentioned causes.

[rusk]

You're presuming a zero-sum balance between all causes political and/or charitable. I'd need to see this thesis more thoroughly fleshed out before I could comment further, but I think on the face of it it's grossly a flawed assumption. Maybe that's not what you mean though.

[saint_fiasco]

Only political causes. And only most of them.

For example suppose that we want to do a cost-benefit analysis to see if convincing people to use contraception is a more effective charitable intervention than whatever Gates is doing.

If the Catholic Church really hates contraception, they would oppose that. They might tell Catholic charities to refuse to work with Gates. They might spend a little money and a lot of cheap labor on convincing people to not use contraception. Generally they will spend resources on doing the opposite thing and Gates would have to spend more resources just to cancel out the Catholic influence.

Since we know beforehand that this is very likely to happen, we should include that in the cost part of our cost-benefit analysis. It's possible Gates did just that and concluded that working with Catholics instead of against them is better.

[rusk]

All sounds very far fetched.