[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.