[citricsquid]

I feel conflicted about donating to charity, Kiva(.org) is my money-for-good vehicle of choice but sometimes it feels as if my money could be better spent donating to charities that help people that can't afford to eat, eat. Long term spending of money to help people better themselves and those around them is the more sustainable model but short term helping people that are starving have access to life essentials has a greater impact and is more compassionate. If only it was simple as "I have $xxx, how can I have the greatest positive impact?".

[arjunnarayan]

Part of the nuance of the issue is the difference between "give a man a fish" versus "teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime". There is a moral dilemma between spending money now to feed 100 people versus teaching one person to fish for a lifetime. That is a tough dilemma to solve. But different charities approach this in different ways.

The philosophy behind Kiva is to help people build sustainable businesses in poorer countries which have semi-functioning states (say poorer Latin American countries prone to dictatorships but still have some notion of property rights and trials for murders). This has the potential to bring entire communities to a more well-off state. Is it a good use of money? Undoubtedly. Are you better off giving that money to better charities that target people with more acute needs? Probably.

Here's another example: you might have seen criticism of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for spending lots of money on eradicating polio. The argument is that instead of spending upwards of $1000 a head on eradicating Polio (cost divided by number of annual polio deaths), they could spend that at $10 a head on reducing malaria deaths. The counter argument is that _eradication_ is a huge win because once you've eradicated polio you can stop all future payments on Polio containment (which is in the billions of dollars annually) because you've permanently solved the problem, for present and future poor people. It turns out that the net present value of all those future payments equaling zero (just as today we spend zero dollars on small pox containment and treatment and vaccination now that we've eradicated it) makes it worth it to actually spend a disproportionate amount of money on polio vaccines on the ground (as the Gates foundation is doing), even if the marginal dollar saves less lives today than if we put it into malaria vaccines.

If you're interested in this line of work, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is probably one of the best charities out there, since they actually grapple with these questions. But they're not actually capital starved (they're spending money as fast as they can). To answer that meta-question, you should look at GiveWell, which is probably the best meta-charity (they actually evaluate charities, and also factor in things like scalability, so they rank charities but also state how much money they think that charity needs before your marginal dollar should be allocated to the next one on the list since the first one will have enough money to accomplish their goals). They also look at how well run the charities are at actually accomplishing what they want to accomplish, etc.

In short, if you want to do the most good in a utilitarian sense, you can't do any better than going to GiveWell and donating to charities as per their recommendation. Honestly, if you needed to calculate a joint probability function over total human utility, and wanted to target your dollars at maximizing that function, Holden Karnofsky (the guy at the head of GiveWell) is exactly the person you should be asking.

[Sealy]

I agree with you that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is one of the best charities out there however I'm stunned that they do not (openly) accept donations:

Q. Does the foundation accept donations? A. From time to time, people generously offer to contribute money to the foundation. We prefer that people give directly to our grantee organizations rather than to the foundation if they want to help advance the causes we’re passionate about.

Source: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Informatio...

[a3n]

I suppose it's a tax management tool for the Gates, besides being an excellent charity. I don't mean to take away at all from the good they do, but why else wouldn't they accept donations except to not muddy the tax waters?

[iamshs]

Because then people will use the "name that gets associated with Bill Gates upon donating", to further their own cause and popularity. Besides, they are rich enough to sustain their charity's causes, I am pretty sure they know about budgeting.

[ZeroGravitas]

Do you know if the Gates foundation, Kiva or GiveWell have done any research into the effect of a Basic Income (i.e. giving everyone in a country a small amount of money with no strings attached)?

It kind of falls slightly outside the realm of charity, more a Government intervention, but it's also the kind of intervention that I'd expect these rational charities to be interested in.

edit: Looks like GiveWell are interested in the concept:

http://blog.givewell.org/2009/05/20/why-not-just-give-out-ca...

"Why do cash handouts seem to be so rare in the charity world? Perhaps it’s because extensive experience and study have shown this approach to be inferior to others. Or perhaps it has more to do with the fact that giving out cash fundamentally puts the people, rather than the charity, in control."

That's exactly the kind of harsh but almost certainly true commentary I'd expect from a true charity watchdog. My esteem for GiveWell has gone up a few notches as a result.

And one of their charities is a charitable version of the concept (though with major differences e.g. it's one-off, limited to the very poor etc.):

http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give-dir...

[ChuckMcM]

I always seem to evaluate that training a new fisherperson returns longer lifetime value. One to the mysteries of my generation is how persistent poverty can be in places.

[nowarninglabel]

That's something I've pressed for here a lot at Kiva, showing how positive your impact is. Last year, we started rating our partners on "catalytic"-ness, which is somewhat of a proxy for impact, and now 33% of our loans are rated highly catalytic. There's some studies which have shown impact both of microfinance in general and some that include our specific partners, but in general not nearly enough studies. And I'm sure with enough data, we'd find that microloans can have one of the greatest impacts, but that there are certainly situations where charitable giving can be even more impactful under the right circumstances. The problem is studies are hard to do right and expensive, and thus it's hard to get data on what is most impactful. From an engineering perspective, I'd love to solve this problem, but it seems to be one of those problems that requires more of an academic solution.

[daeken]

All I have to say is: thank you. Thank you to every single person involved with Kiva in any way. Every month I have an auto-deposit into my Kiva account, and I'm always excited to jump in and distribute the funds.

The team I'm in (http://www.kiva.org/team/nerdfighters) is open to anyone and has themes where each month we fund women, people from specific nations, etc and work together to make sure that the recipients' loans are filled. It's both fun and helps decrease world suck.

Keep up the good work -- to you and the rest of the team at Kiva. You rock.

[nowarninglabel]

Nerdfighters are awesome, thanks for being a part! I actually built that auto-deposit feature during a 3 day all-nighter a while back, I couldn't believe we hadn't built it yet so I did it during one of our innovation iterations :)

[sbierwagen]

This is known as the efficient charity problem. GiveWell is the one of the few groups trying to solve it: http://www.givewell.org/

[JumpCrisscross]

The Robin Hood Foundation, a charity which aims to "find, fund and partner with programs that have proven they are an effective remedy to poverty" [1] in New York City, has built robust metrics, at least on par with the Bill & Melinda Gates and Bloomberg Foundations. They work rigorously to identify where their dollars "have the greatest positive impact". More on Robin Hood's metrics: https://www.robinhood.org/metrics.

Disclaimer: I donate to the Robin Hood Foundation

[1] https://www.robinhood.org/about

[chmike]

In my analysis of this "dilemma" I refer to this example: the man who stopped the desert http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/the-man-who-...

The desert progress can be assimilate to poverty, something we beleive to be unstoppable. But the man above stopped the desert progress by planting little trees. In the long run it proved much more efficient than giving some water to the starving plants at the desert border. Kiva is like planting little trees.

On the other hand I also understand that some people want to contribute where urgent help is needed.

[vijayr]

I guess we can divide giving into three broad categories

1. Organizations that concentrate on infrastructure/research - building roads, schools etc

2. Immediate help - food, medical care etc (like Watsi)

3. Helping people help themselves - like what Kiva is doing

It would be nice to have some kind of model/formula that can help with lending, especially for small time donors/lenders.

Another Kiva fan here :)

Are there any think tanks that look into world issues as a whole and give recommendations (other than UN agencies)?