Goodness, this post is long and dry. The headline is: I read the paper everyone points to as “hard evidence of microfinance’s effectiveness,” and I came out with tons of questions and a need to visit the library. I’ve learned nothing about how microlending works (is it financing investment? Smoothing consumption? What kinds of activity…
The GiveWell Blog
Month: September 2007
Averages
Averages really annoy me. Average income, average test score, etc. When we’re talking about any kind of analysis of people, I have a hard time thinking of any case where you should be looking at the average of anything. I much prefer “% of people above some threshold” type measures: % of students who graduated…
Experience vs. data, or, why I just muted the Yankees game
So I’ve been watching the ballgame, and it struck me how much sports announcers have impacted my outlook on charity. I can explain. The most common form of “evidence” we get from charities goes something like this: “We don’t have the data, but we’re here, every day. We work with the children, personally. We’ve been…
Want to see what we mean by “bias?”
The US government commissioned an evaluation of its Talent Search program, designed to fight the college enrollment gap by providing advice (mostly on financial aid) to disadvantaged students. The evaluation is pretty thorough, rigorous, and straightforward about what it did and didn’t find, as we’ve come to expect with government-funded evaluations. (This is probably because…
Final finalists finalized
Our Cause 4 finalists are (in off-the-top-of-my-head order) KIPP, Achievement First, Replications Inc., New Visions for Public Schools, Student Sponsor Partners, Children’s Scholarship Fund, LEAP, Teach for America, the LEDA Scholars Program, the St. Aloysius School, Harlem Center for Education, and Double Discovery Center. Rather than put our reasoning here, I edited it into last…
Two futures
My thoughts on the latest Giving Carnival: Fundraising today is all about the pitch; 10 years from now, I hope it will be about the product. Fundraising today reminds me a lot of car commercials. Car commercials try to convince you that a Ford is better than a Toyota or a Volvo outclasses a Volkswagen…