What's an effective charity?

[zestyping]

Thinking about charities to support? Perhaps you have opinions? I think it's good to talk about this stuff openly, so we can learn from and encourage each other.
If you're curious or looking for ideas, these were my top picks in 2010:

• Partners in Health
• Second Harvest
• charity:water
• CAMFED
• Doctors Without Borders
• Project Respite 2.0
• Oxfam
• UNICEF

Comments

[dushai]

One topic I don't see discussed often is the question of what type of charities make the biggest impact in the long run. How do you decide whether to help feed the hungry vs. control a disease vs. promote education vs. save the environment? Most people tend to start with a cause in mind, and look for the organizations that are most effective at that cause. But if you have no attachment to any particular cause and you just want to do the most good in the world with your philanthropic dollar, what cause should one support?

Take poverty, for example. One argument is that if we help a certain country out of poverty, then either they'll be dependent on foreign aid for at least a while, or they won't be able to support their population -- they can progress from that state to something more stable, but it would be more effective if other problems were solved first. (And the problem is often compounded by political instability.) A counter-argument is that once people have the expectation of the baseline stability of a minimally-acceptable standard of living, consequences such as reduced birth rate and increased political stability follow. (And therefore, for example, we don't need to worry that getting millions of people with a birth rate of 10 out of poverty will result in tens of millions of people in poverty in the next generation.)

Obviously the discussion of what type of charity would most effectively make the world better depends implicitly on a shared concept of what makes the world better, and rational people can disagree on that. But I still think that a discussion is possible, and important.

[almiqui]

I think you don't see this discussed often because there isn't much to discuss---we just don't have the tools to build a useful argument about whether trying to feed the hungry is better than trying to cure the sick. Development economics is far, far, far from an exact science, and I suspect it won't be much better by the time I die. Here's hoping, though?

[dushai]

It may be an inexact science, and hard data may be limited, but all that means is that definitive, incontrovertible, peer-reviewed conclusions can't be reached. The conversation that I had hoped would be more widespread would be (at its minimum) a discussion group of like-minded people who want maximum impact for their philanthropic dollar, or better yet, people who collectively have enough information to reach provisional conclusions such as "If you believe in Theory-Of-Change A, and you think Chain-Of-Events B is more likely then Chain-Of-Events C, then you probably want to support Cause D over Cause E."

Or "An argument can be made that supporting Cause J will help the world more than supporting Cause K, because your dollar will accomplish X, which will lead to improvement Y. On the other hand, here is the counter-argument for supporting Cause K over Cause J. Should I make my choice of J vs. K based on which of these two arguments I believe more, or does anyone know of a better argument for either cause?"