The GiveWell Blog

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…

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You can save a life

We ask you, as a donor, to turn down some great pitches – “Your interest-free loan will help this person escape poverty forever,” “You can give a cow to a poor family for Christmas,” etc. – and give instead to charities that aren’t terribly good at storytelling. Why? It comes down to this. We think…

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Charity isn’t about helping?

One person who’s more critical of charity than we are or than David Hunter is is the economist Robin Hanson. He has stated that “charity isn’t about helping” and spelled out this view somewhat in a post about the founder of Rite Aid: when folks like Alex spend their later years trying to “do good”…

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A conflict of Bayesian priors?

This question might be at the core of our disagreements with many: When you have no information one way or the other about a charity’s effectiveness, what should you assume by default? Our default assumption, or prior, is that a charity – at least in one of the areas we’ve studied most, U.S. equality of…

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By default, assume aid projects aren’t reaching the poorest

If you don’t have evidence one way or the other, should you assume an aid’s projects benefits are reaching the poorest? We think it’s fair to assume the people with the most need are the people with the least power. We’d also guess that, in general, the people with the most power are best positioned…

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Why are we always criticizing charities?

Recently, we’ve criticized (in one way or another) many well-known, presumably well-intentioned charities (Smile Train, Acumen Fund, UNICEF, Kiva), which might lead some to ask: should GiveWell focus on the bad (which may discourage donors from giving) as opposed to the good (which would encourage them to give more)? Why so much negativity and not…

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