Let a balance of moral priorities, liberty and efficiency be your guide
The Economist
Unfortunately, the idea that you should treat charitable donations methodically has been tarnished by effective altruism, a movement associated with Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), a convicted crypto con man who insinuated that his fraudulent enterprise was ultimately all about doing good. Happily, the notion that there is a wise way to give has a long and noble history. Aristotle suggested that virtue stemmed from correct giving: to the right people, in the right amounts, for the right reasons and at the right times.
For the modern giver, three considerations could usefully serve as a guide. First should be to observe your own moral priorities. Giving to rescue dying languages and to save dying children both have an intrinsic value. Religion and philosophy may help you balance their competing claims. But ultimately, how important you find one good cause compared with another is a matter of personal choice.
Another consideration is how much freedom you should allow worthy recipients to choose between different good things for themselves. You might be fired up with the mission to lift up the neediest out of poverty. But they may prefer to spend your precious money on a funeral for a close friend than to invest in a cow as a source of future income. You need to decide how much to defer to their wishes. This way of thinking helps explain why schemes offering cash transfers have become more popular in recent years. GiveDirectly, which offers such handouts in poor countries, has alone raised over half a billion dollars in the past three years.
The third consideration is efficiency. Be it preventing river blindness, improving literacy or doling out cash, some organisations are better than others at getting the job done.
However, it is not always possible to know how efficient charities are. Sometimes the dollar gains for each dollar spent are hard to measure, if not impossible. How do you quantify whether a programme to support democracy has been successful? If an autocrat ends up in power, you may conclude the effort was futile; then again, you may think it was worth staving off democratic collapse at least for a while. Smaller charities can struggle to collect the data they need to evaluate their work. That does not mean charities that try to solve complex problems or lack data are worse; just that how well they do good is anyone’s guess.
When you can get evidence about charities’ efficiency, it should enter your calculations. A defined goal, such as digging wells for clean water, should be measurable. So, too, should programmes that promise quick results. Because some charities really do get more done per dollar, whom you give to can matter as much as how much you give.
GiveWell, a charity ranker, spends thousands of hours on such calculations to produce a list of the best charities. Drawing on the SBF-free insights behind effective altruism, it focuses on the organisations with plenty of data and places special weight on saving the lives of young children. Charities themselves could do more to be transparent on efficiency, so as to help donors make more informed decisions.
Not just for Christmas
Obviously, there is more than one way of measuring efficiency and different methodologies will reflect different priorities. Rigorous giving calls for thought and judgment. That may seem like hard work, but the effort helps donors maximise the benefit of what is given. And, as Aristotle argued, it makes those who give better, too. ■
新英文外刊
每日精选优质外刊文章
扫码关注我们
