The ugly sides of two approaches to charity

A quick estimate is that global GDP divided by the world population would be about $13,000 per person. (Of course, actually dividing up all the money in the world would also break the economy, so it would soon be less.) That’s about the GDP of El Salvador or Sri Lanka. That doesn’t leave much room for funding museums, etc.

For what it's worth, I believe that many people can live pretty great lives for $13k/year. I think that healthy-ish Americans today can do this, with a bit of prep and being willing to live in the right places.

I'd expect that if a magic wand were raised and everyone had their incomes changed to $13k/yr, it would go much better than many people here might imagine. In the US, services would quickly change to cater to less expensive needs. That said, there is a major question of how this would actually work in practice. It's hard to imagine, as this would have profound implications for real estate prices, salaries, living costs, etc. 

Happiness is currently correlated with well-being in the US, but (A) it's not clear how much causation there is, in which way, (B) it includes a lot of zero-sum comparisons, and (C), even the low ends aren't too catastrophic. 

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/as-incomes-rise-variability-in-happiness-shrinks

Related, incomes in the US have gone up a ton in the last hundred years, but happiness levels have moved surprisingly little. 

Lastly, I'd flag that in this world, I'd expect there would likely be more culture (i.e. museum-like experiences) generated yearly in total. The extra people with income would offset the losses we get at the top.

I'm not saying that I don't prefer the extra wealth - just that I don't see a need to feel bad about a picture of the world where everyone has $13k/yr. I think this would be much better than what we have now, in total (as those elevated would gain more than those who lose would lose). 

"Feeling good" or "Feeling bad" about the current state of such a complex world is a hard thing to be objectively correct or incorrect about. 

Thanks Julia for writing this. It’s correct all the way around.

I can’t help but feel though that there is something a little mean-spirited in targeting those donating to Notre Dame, the opera, etc. There is a common and (in my opinion) somewhat toxic pattern where if someone spends their money on yachts, mansions, etc., then nobody complains but as soon as they do something even a little bit public spirited then all of a sudden everyone feels free to criticize. Like, we can have plenty of objections to MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropic choices, but shouldn’t Jeff Bezos get at least as much commentary for his non-philanthropic choices?

Everyone can afford roses and bread, the western world just is not ready for that because then you would actually need to pay the fair price for your garments/goods/services and everything else we do for you. 

My opinion on this is, do charity in systemic solutions, rather than providing anti-virals for malaria and that's all, help the affected regions drain their wetlands, eliminate the populations of mosquitos, help them with spraying equipment and pesticides, introduce predators etc.

Food-insecure places should get food yes, but help their agriculture as well, give them mechanization and the know-how, help them out with money. A tractor costs the same everywhere, but a farmer earning 10-15k$ per year will never afford a 20-30k$ tractor, therefore he will be stuck doing manual labor on a small field with small inputs and very underperforming outputs.

Poverty is a cycle, and to break cycles we need to do big changes in infrastructure, education and personal engagement.

Another field that is gatekept by westerners is knowledge, we really can't afford your libraries of published articles, hell I live on an income that would pay for 10 articles from Elsevier, god forbid if I have to buy everything (Thank you Alexandra Elbakyan).

Thanks for this great post. 

My first reaction to the original article (which I saw scrolling through the NY Times online, without any realisation that it was about EA or Effective Giving), it made me really angry. It still makes me angry, and I'm not normally the type to get angry. 

First, given that I had just co-founded an Effective Giving organisation in Ireland, following a @Charity Entrepreneurship Incubator, I found it very sad that people were sharing such ill-informed articles, which would potentially discourage many donors from using their donations to help many more people. I cannot help but wonder how many more children will die because of this article? How many more animals will suffer in factory farms because of this article? 

Because this article is wrong in a very bad way. It doesn't just focus on the benefits of giving to charities that are close to your heart - it also actively criticises effective giving as if it were something that only truly insensitive people would do, as if EA's as a species were somehow less than human because we dare care more about the people we want to help than about the warm fuzzy glow we get when we donate. 

Because that is what effective giving is. It is saying "When I donate, I am going to decide how to donate not based on what feels good to me, but rather on what will help the most people or animals." 

But also, almost nobody in the effective giving movement discourages "non-effective" charity. First, because most of us arrived there not because we were super-logicians, but rather because we've been donating all our lives to causes we care deeply about, and started to realise that some of these donations weren't helping people in desperate need as much as they might. But we still kept donating - and then when we discovered Effective Giving, it was like opening our eyes to a world of people who thought just like us, but had taken it a step further and devoted their lives to it. 

It sickens me to see how these people, some of the most sensitive, generous and caring people I've ever encountered, have been mischaracterised in this article as unfeeling cynics who were in it for the joy of the math. 

There are benefits to giving to all charitable causes* and that it is absolutely great when a person donates to a charitable cause close to their heart, or with which they have a personal connection to it. Effective Giving organisations want to help raise their awareness that there is also the option to give some of their money to very effective causes. We don't ask that they stop giving to causes they already support. Indeed, there is a famous "3 pots" thinking (I first heard this from @Bram Schaper, the inspiring leader of the Dutch effective giving organisation, Doneer Effectief)  that we often share: If you have some money available after all your costs have been paid, why not share it out into 3 pots:

• something for yourself, your family, your friends, ...
• something for a charity close to your heart
• something for a highly effective charity that will ensure your donation really helps someone a lot.

I really wanted someone with some credibility to reply to this article and call it out for what it was, which is just nonsense, low-quality, one-sided journalism. But apparently it's OK to display bias as long as the people you're biased against are mostly well off white males, which is unfortunately the stereotype of EA's. The problem was that it wasn't the well off white male EA's who were the victims of the article, but rather the people that we are all trying to help, the people who desperately need help. 


But, I decided to reflect a while before posting an angry comment on here, and I actually read some other comments about the article. Calm, measured, accepting that people have a right to their opinions. They focused on the fact that the journalist probably meant well and was probably a good person - and kind of glossed over the minor detail that that same journalist had shockingly and intentionally mis-characterised the entire EA and Effective Giving movements in a very harmful way. 

Can you imagine how any other group would feel if they were treated like that? 

Where was the anger? Where was the passion to stand up for what we believe in? 

It's very easy to sit comfortably in our chairs and debate the subtle details of arguments. But that's not how we're going to change the world. If we're willing to let people attack the EA movement and Effective Giving and not defend ourselves, how can we expect to convince others? 

We may be mostly in the 99th percentile for calm, logical reasoning, but the vast majority of people** are not. History shows that great movements require not just great thinkers and strategies, but also passionate advocates, and even sometimes stubborn, pig-headed supporters who do not back down. 

And if we want to be scientific about it, we can. There is a huge amount of science related to effective ways to communicate with and convince the general public. Writing precise, detailed arguments is one of the least effective parts of this - although it is still vital that someone does this. 

The world right now is utterly broken. In a world with the technology and capacity to feed and clothe and nourish and educate and care for everyone, we have billions of people who literally do not have the most basic necessities like clean water or enough food to avoid starvation. We have wars started because individual Sudanese generals or national leaders decide they want more power or a stronger image - and so hundreds of thousands die. We have an out of control AI development program led by a group of immature men with no history of responsible behaviour. We have a growing risk of nuclear war. We have a climate crisis that we're effectively ignoring and denying even as the evidence grows more incontrovertible every day. 

EA's are among the few groups who really care about this. But if we remain a niche group and let ourselves be defeated by inaccurate stereotypes and biased communicators, we're not going to have the impact that the world desperately needs us to have. 

We have great thinkers and wonderful, good people within the EA movement. But we could use more overt passion - many of us are deeply passionate about EA, but too many of us do not want to share that passion with the world, to shout out our demands and lead others towards our ideas, without them necessarily having to go through the same deep thought process that brought many of us here. 

Many people just want to be part of a movement - why not let that movement be one that will make the world better. Instead, we are literally being out-thought by people like Donald Trump, who understands people's need to be part of a movement and is more than happy to cynically exploit it. 

Imagine how much better off we'd be if people were chanting "no more factory-farms" and "stop the wars" rather than anti-immigrant slogans. But we won't get there by just imagining it. 

 

*although, especially in the US, some tax-exempt causes like extremely rich universities attended by some of the richest students, are IMHO pushing the definition of "charity" a bit too far.

**more than 98% of people, to be exact!

Thank you for this beautiful post, Julia. Your writing always really resonates with me.

Really nicely written and interesting post. I have one part I'd like to question.

Often defences of inequality take the form "You can either have rich and poor, or you can just have poor". Which on the face of it is not just a zero-sum frame, but actually a negative-sum frame, which seems an unfair representation until you add the claim that it is inequality itself that allows for the sort of dynamic wealth generation needed to create the rich. The point about Michelangelo and Yo-Yo Ma makes an argument of the same type but regarding cultural riches. But I think this misses the point that cultural dynamism transcends wealth distribution. Take the idea of genius for instance.

I don't doubt that Yo-Yo Ma is a genius, and that Michelangelo may have been one too, though I think Leonardo is a better candidate for genius. The framing goes if there wasn't inequality that allowed for funding a life of contemplation for such geniuses they never would have arisen. I think the opposite is more likely.

Let's assume that Leonardo is a genuine 1 in 10,000 genius. Let's put him in a population of 1,000,000, where 1% of the population have the capacity to fully reach their potential, while the other 99% live in an agricultural or later industrial state of perpetual labour, and never get to reach their potential. Lucky Leonardo, he's the one genius who arises in this situation 1,000,000 x 1% = 10,000 and one in 10,000 people are geniuses so, that's one genius reaching their potential.

So, now let's allow for a more egalitarian society, where everyone works, but not for ever hour of the day, they get some time to contemplate the world, and be creative. Now out of your population of 1,000,000 you have 100 genuine 1 in 10,000 geniuses, each with a chance of being discovered.

What world is more likely to create the greatest art and have the greatest progress? I think it's obvious: the latter. You see, it's important to recognise that we don't necessarily live in the best of all possible worlds, the past isn't by definition the best it might have been, so the depictions of old biblical stories by Michelangelo aren't necessarily the best artworks that might have been created.

I don't find the decision about Notre Dame difficult in the slightest. It's a building, it's not lives, lives have value, buildings only have value in as much as the serve lives, and it's difficult to make the case that the pleasure or national income that Notre Dame generates gets even close to the benefit of saving the lives that the equivalent funds could save.

There are other interesting points in the post, but this is one I feel could be pushed back against. At the same time I completely agree with @Ian Turner when he points out that criticism of charitable choices is often more prevalent than criticism of not giving to charity at all. So, I think it's advisable to use positive terminology when assessing efficacy, as "in which of these two good options is better" rather than the zero-sum framing that not effectively giving is tantamount to taking away from a more effective charity.

Great piece! I noticed that you wrote "Goldstein" a few times.

Thanks for sharing this, wonderful writing! Have you thought about sending this to Emma Goldberg? :-)

Executive summary: While both effectiveness-focused and magnificence-focused approaches to charity have flaws, the best path forward combines multiple approaches while prioritizing basic needs and existential risks, with cultural funding focused on accessibility and preservation.

Key points:

1. Effectiveness-focused charity (like EA) prioritizes saving lives but risks creating a minimal-wellbeing world, while magnificence-focused charity often neglects basic needs of the poor.
2. Current arts/culture funding is highly concentrated in wealthy areas - over 50% goes to the top 2% of projects, primarily benefiting already-privileged communities.
3. Global inequality means most people can't access "finer things" - global GDP per capita is ~$13,000, and nearly half the world lives below $6.85/day.
4. Recommended balanced approach: maintain diverse philanthropy but expand beyond local bubbles, focus cultural funding on preservation and scalable works, and increase funding for existential risks.
5. Key crux: Whether charity should optimize for measurable impact (like preventing deaths) versus funding harder-to-quantify benefits like cultural institutions and beauty.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

Executive Summary:
The post critiques two contrasting approaches to charity—emphasizing either effectiveness or cultural "magnificence"—and advocates for a balanced model that addresses global inequality, prioritizes critical risks, and makes cultural treasures accessible to a wider population.

Key Points:

1. Effective altruism focuses on maximizing measurable impact, such as saving lives, but can seem excessively utilitarian, reducing complex values to numbers.
2. The "magnificence" approach prioritizes funding cultural and artistic projects that enrich life’s meaning but often neglects pressing humanitarian needs in poorer regions.
3. Current inequalities in philanthropy favor wealthy communities, often overlooking global disparities and life-saving interventions in poorer areas.
4. Both approaches have moral downsides: excessive focus on effectiveness risks a "bare-bones" world, while prioritizing magnificence may overlook basic survival needs.
5. The post suggests diversified philanthropy: scaling accessible cultural projects, funding existential risk reduction, and bridging connections beyond local bubbles.
6. A balanced future would aim for global access to "bread and roses," enabling both survival and enrichment for all, rather than perpetuating privilege or extreme minimalism.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

Thank you for sharing these reflections, Julia! I absolutely agree with the points you raise—this is a topic that comes up regularly in discussions about effective giving for me as well. As you point out, neither extreme approach is feasible in real life, and finding a balance is key.

One aspect I sometimes overlook is the role of rich countries as cultural role models. If we entirely neglect or avoid funding areas like the arts, we risk depriving the richer world of the additional meaning and inspiration these areas provide. At the same time, I agree that focusing on interventions where the majority will benefit is a stronger guiding principle. Striving for a world where everyone can have both bread and roses feels like an ideal worth working towards!

Thanks for the post, Julia!

Apologies for leaving out animal welfare entirely for the sake of simplicity.

I have got you covered ;). I think criticising spending on cathedrals in high income countries because people in extreme poverty are worse off, and helping them increases impartial welfare more cost-effectively is in some tension with helping such people instead of farmed animals. I believe:

• Farmed animals are worse off. People in extreme poverty are thought to have positive lives (otherwise, saving them would be bad for them), whereas I estimate farmed chickens and shrimp have negative lives.
• Helping animals increases impartial welfare much more cost-effectively. I estimate cage-free campaigns are 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities, and that the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has been 64.3 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
• The difference in cost-effectiveness between helping people in high income countries and extreme poverty can easily be much smaller than that between helping people in extreme poverty and animals. For example, under the typical assumption than welfare increases with the logarithm of consumption, donating to people in extreme poverty with a consumption of 1 $/d, or 365 $/year, would only be 100 times (= 36.5*10^3/365) as cost-effective as donating to someone with a consumption of 36.5 k$/year. The rations above are higher than 100.
• It is unclear whether saving human lives is beneficial or harmful due to the meat-eating problem. I see improving the conditions of farmed animals as much more robustly beneficial.

I understand one can prioritise helping humans in extreme poverty over animals (at the margin, which is what matters for career choice and donations) by strongly rejecting impartial hedonism^[1]. However, the same is true about prioritising spending on cathedrals in high income countries over helping people in extreme poverty. I suppose many of the people who are more enthusiastic about donating to rebuild or preserve the Notre Dame than to GiveWell's top charities would happily concede such charities save human lives way more cheaply. However, they still prefer supporting the Notre Dame for e.g. nationalistic, cultural, artistic or religious reasons.

1. ^{^}

   In my mind, the key is strongly rejecting impartiality, since animals arguably matter a lot under non-hedonistic views.