The GiveWell Blog

Why we prefer the carrot to the stick

A couple of the commenters on a previous post object to our idea of “rewarding failure” and prefer to focus on “putting the bad charities out of business.” In theory, I’d like to see a world where all charities are evaluated meaningfully, and only the effective ones survive. But the world we’re in is just…

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Uncharitable

Dan Pallotta sent me a copy of Uncharitable about a month ago, and I’ve been late in taking a look at it. I highly recommend it for people interested in general discussions of the nonprofit sector. The discussion I’ve seen of the book so far (Nicholas Kristof and Sean Stannard-Stockton) has focused on how much…

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A proposal to reward failure

Here’s a grant idea we’d probably pursue if we had the funds to do so. I’d be interested in what other grantmakers think of it. I believe enormous good could be done by offering grants to charities that can prove their programs don’t work. Proving a program’s ineffectiveness is difficult and expensive – just as…

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Guest post: Proven programs are the exception, not the rule

In 2017, the organization 80,000 Hours conducted a project to update the findings in this post. Their work is here. This is a guest post from David Anderson, Assistant Director at the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, the group responsible for the Evidenced-based Programs website. Mr. Anderson’s responsibilities include reviewing studies of effectiveness and looking for…

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Before you donate

Nathaniel Whittemore’s Social Entrepreneurship Blog asks bloggers for “one thing you need to know before you donate to charity this holiday season.” My answer: you need to know that your favorite social program might just not work. This isn’t a warning against fraud or inefficiency (though both of those are important too). It’s a warning…

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Strong results for malaria vaccine

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports strong results from a clinical trial testing the efficacy of a malaria vaccine. The double-blind, randomized trial found a significant impact on malaria incidence among the group receiving the malaria vaccine. The full study is available here. The summary results: 894 children were randomly…

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