I had a rewarding email exchange with my brother about six months ago about charitable donations. I quoted Benjamin Franklin, I cited specific numbers, I did other could-be-humble-but-could-be-self-aggrandizing things that I’m comfortable doing in private conversation with Dave. He is, after all, both the most reflective person I know and the person most similar in thought to me (I believe the latter does not shade the former, although that may be hopelessly optimistic.)
So, parable about woman giving her farthings or whatever, I’m skipping the numbers and the hyperbole. Basically — how do I divide my contributions?
Steven E. Landsburg wrote an article in Slate on this topic, wherein he argues that splitting your contribution is inherently flawed. To his credit, he actually presents the calculus, and by “calculus” I don’t just mean “calculations”, I literally mean multivariate calculus. Here is a link to the math page. Go check it out.
That is one of the most ridiculous arguments I have ever read, but the reason why it’s ridiculous is (to be charitable to Landsburg) a bit subtle. For his approximation to be valid, one has to imagine “good” to be a scalar; that is, everything else stripped away, a single number that can be compared to other single numbers. But that’s not how charity works. Charities define an n-space — a multidimensional mathematical world with very many dimensions — and we’re not trying to optimize a number, we’re trying to optimize a containing volume. Follow? If you think you glork from context, you probably do, regardless of the lingo.
So, that’s out the window. And here enters the most frustrating thing about this argument, for me: this is a perfect AskMeFi question, and is precisely the single question I cannot ask there. Google “metafilter givewell” and prepare to spend an arbitrarily large amount of time on the inner clockwork of a community you probably don’t care about. It might be worth it, though, to add two useful terms to your vocabulary: astroturfing and sockpuppetry.
Dave provided CharityNavigator, which I know from the MeFi clusterfrak, and it is extremely useful for making fine-grained distinctions. But I am interested — very, very interested, and I mean you — by your theories for optimal charitable giving. Do you give it all to one charity? One meta-charity? Several charities? Do you pay back all of the readers of your blog who’ve lent you money (another large number), and only worry about charity when you reach a zero balance (we’ll take that one as a given)? I don’t care about your list (maybe I’ll do another post for that) — what I care about is your criteria and, generally, your theory. If you’ve thought about it, I want to read about it. And how do you donate? My method of choice is an anonymous money order made out to the charity in an envelope with no return address. I don’t want them to incur Visa charges; I don’t want them to send me free return address labels; in fact, I don’t want to waste a single penny — or a single sheet of paper — on an acknowledgment letter, no matter how nice it is or how much they mean it. That’s the case even if they wouldn’t sell my address for other kinda-like-minded charities to use for mass mailings of expensive glossy press kits, and their likelihood of doing that, to their great shame, is essentially 100%.
Please comment. I want this to be ultra-useful to people, especially if AskMeFi cannot.
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My friend “Nick”, whose real identity I swore to take to my grave, contributed the following. Posted by permission:
Not surprisingly I give most of my charitable giving to my church…which rather begs the question since the church then splits it up and gives it to a variety of causes. On the other hand I have some influence in the causes, so to criteria.
One major criteria for me is the percentage of my giving that ends up going to the cause and not to overhead. There are a variety of websites dedicated to finding out those numbers. I never give to an organization that doesn’t have open books. As a matter of fact we had major involvement in a large poverty relief group in downtown LA that I ended because their books are closed.
As a result I find myself usually giving extra to Lutheran World Relief…again an organization for relief and advocacy…because something like 97% of giving goes directly to cause. That’s because the Lutheran Church pays all the overhead. The 3% goes toward a little advertising. It is also why LWF is always in the top 3-5 rated agencies in the county for giving.