While some people feel that GiveWell puts too much emphasis on the measurable and quantifiable, there are others who go further than we do in quantification, and justify their giving (or other) decisions based on fully explicit expected-value formulas. The latter group tends to critique us – or at least disagree with us – based…
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A charity to watch: GiveDirectly
Note: we sent GiveDirectly an early draft of this post and have made modifications after some back-and-forth. We’ve been interested for a long time in the idea of simply giving out cash to the very poor, as a promising form of charity, and we’ve long been puzzled over why there don’t seem to be any…
GAVI appears to be out of room for more funding (good news)
We’ve always been interested in GAVI, a large funding vehicle for immunizations (which we consider to be one of the best interventions out there for accomplishing good). Until recently, GAVI projected a need for $3.7 billion between 2011-2015 (archived). However, yesterday there was an announcement that GAVI had raised $4.3 billion, more than enough to…
Why we should expect good giving to be hard
We’ve written before about a couple of consistent worldview differences we encounter: Our default assumption is that a charity isn’t succeeding; most people’s default assumption is that a charity is succeeding. We think that helping people is hard; most people seem to think it’s easy. When discussing any specific charity, I can usually think of…
Profile of a GiveWell customer
The Money for Good study examined the size of the potential audience for work like GiveWell’s. What we’d like to see next would be a study on the nature of this audience: what sort of donor is open to giving based on third-party research? How do they think, what sorts of causes are they interested…
In defense of the streetlight effect
In a recent guest post for Development Impact, Martin Ravallion writes: The current fashion [for evaluating aid projects] is for randomized control trials (RCTs) and social experiments more generally … The problem is that the interventions for which currently favored methods are feasible constitute a non-random subset of the things that are done by donors…