How to choose a charity
I have been thinking recently about to choose a charity to support. I'd like your opinions the issue. It's not at all straight forward. Simply giving to a charity that happens to spend lots of money on advertising itself or on fund-raising seems to me to be a bad decision. The alternative - making an informed decision - is surely better, but is surprisingly challenging.
Finding reliable, independent information and making a decision is difficult and time consuming. Americans can at least check sites such as charitynavigator.org; I'm not aware of any easy way for someone in Ireland to verify that a charity is trustworthy, financially efficient and actually likely to achieve its stated aims. That's a problem, because for anyone (such as me) who doesn't intend to make very large donations, the time and effort involved might be too large to justify. (It's a little like the situation with investment strategy, except of course that the financial services sector has index funds and managed funds so that small investors don't need to research lots of individual companies.)
Leaving that aside, how in principle could an informed person choose the best cause to give to? There are problems of subjectivity and comparability - how can I compare an animal welfare charity with an environmental advocacy organisation? Ideally the good that a charity does could be quantified, at least to some degree. Efficiency and effectiveness of spending is only part of that. A more fundamental question, and one that I'd like you views on, is: how can I judge how worthwhile a cause is? That is, leaving aside the effectiveness of any particular organisation, how do I quantify the value of a goal? How do I decide what sort of action would most benefit the world/society?
For example, there's a case to be made that environmental causes trump most others because they simply matter more: reducing short-term suffering is, arguably, ultimately just not as important as preventing massive, civilization threatening climate change. (Let's not get into the plausibility of the environmental threat in this thread, please.) A more straight-forward comparison would be to question the cost effectiveness of blind-dog charities (expensive per person helped) versus medical intervention to prevent blindness (potentially very cheap). Even in that case though, matters aren't clear cut. Possibly all the medical treatments in the world don't matter if the underlying problem is poverty, lack of education and, above all, political instability.
This is a serious problem for donors, even big ones like the EU. Why build a hospital if someone bombs it? Why ship in food aid if warlords will just steal it? And this points at a bigger issue: many of the world problems are matters of politics and economics, and it's not clear that charity can help much.
One answer to that is to keep donations local, and 'invest' in projects and organisations with clear aims with a low risk of waste, unintended consequences and moral hazard. Another answer is not to donate at all; this is not necessarily a selfish choice, given that people should perhaps aim to ensure they are themselves not a burden, and that they can look after their family and friends, before donating to others.
So, your thoughts please. How can I evaluate whether it is worthwhile to give to charity in general, and choose which to give to, and how much? And if you're going to say "Charity XYZ is great" please back it up with facts.
Finding reliable, independent information and making a decision is difficult and time consuming. Americans can at least check sites such as charitynavigator.org; I'm not aware of any easy way for someone in Ireland to verify that a charity is trustworthy, financially efficient and actually likely to achieve its stated aims. That's a problem, because for anyone (such as me) who doesn't intend to make very large donations, the time and effort involved might be too large to justify. (It's a little like the situation with investment strategy, except of course that the financial services sector has index funds and managed funds so that small investors don't need to research lots of individual companies.)
Leaving that aside, how in principle could an informed person choose the best cause to give to? There are problems of subjectivity and comparability - how can I compare an animal welfare charity with an environmental advocacy organisation? Ideally the good that a charity does could be quantified, at least to some degree. Efficiency and effectiveness of spending is only part of that. A more fundamental question, and one that I'd like you views on, is: how can I judge how worthwhile a cause is? That is, leaving aside the effectiveness of any particular organisation, how do I quantify the value of a goal? How do I decide what sort of action would most benefit the world/society?
For example, there's a case to be made that environmental causes trump most others because they simply matter more: reducing short-term suffering is, arguably, ultimately just not as important as preventing massive, civilization threatening climate change. (Let's not get into the plausibility of the environmental threat in this thread, please.) A more straight-forward comparison would be to question the cost effectiveness of blind-dog charities (expensive per person helped) versus medical intervention to prevent blindness (potentially very cheap). Even in that case though, matters aren't clear cut. Possibly all the medical treatments in the world don't matter if the underlying problem is poverty, lack of education and, above all, political instability.
This is a serious problem for donors, even big ones like the EU. Why build a hospital if someone bombs it? Why ship in food aid if warlords will just steal it? And this points at a bigger issue: many of the world problems are matters of politics and economics, and it's not clear that charity can help much.
One answer to that is to keep donations local, and 'invest' in projects and organisations with clear aims with a low risk of waste, unintended consequences and moral hazard. Another answer is not to donate at all; this is not necessarily a selfish choice, given that people should perhaps aim to ensure they are themselves not a burden, and that they can look after their family and friends, before donating to others.
So, your thoughts please. How can I evaluate whether it is worthwhile to give to charity in general, and choose which to give to, and how much? And if you're going to say "Charity XYZ is great" please back it up with facts.