I used to think of myself as a “political junkie,” because I had strong opinions about what should and shouldn’t be left to the free market, what we should and shouldn’t be doing with our military, etc.

At a certain point I realized that I wasn’t a political junkie, and had never been one. Political junkies don’t actually talk about whether we should have universal health care; they talk about whether we’re going to get it. They almost never talk about who should be President; they talk about who from their party has the best chance of winning. “Political stories” in the media are the same. Every time I watch a debate, there is zero analysis afterward of whether one person’s positions seem more reasonable than the other’s; there are ungodly amounts of analysis of who “appealed to the voters” and “won the debate.”

I’m interested in the question, “How should the world be?” Politics isn’t for people who are interested in that question; it’s for people who are convinced they already have the answer, and are interested in how they can manipulate others to make it come about.

I want to form a theory (about, say, how to close the achievement gap); read what others have already done to test the theory; revise my theory; then try my theory out on a small scale; test it; revise it again. Political junkies are sure they already know how to close the achievement gap (they generally, though not always, inherit their solution from their party), and spend all their time fighting to get their idea implemented across the whole nation, which is of course a battle that takes decades and leaves no room for testing or learning about their solution. Charity seems like a better place for someone who wants to actually try something, see if it works, and try something else.

The problem is, in charity I’m running into the same phenomenon. I’m dealing with fundraisers who are sure that what they do is the best way to help people, and they’re spending their lives raising money for it.

Yes, there are some issues that I think are clear-cut, and I respect the people that fight for the right side. But I wish more people would step back and say, “Helping people is hard, not easy. My guess at how to do it is a guess, not a divine truth opposed only by evil people and the dupes who listen to them.

“There are evil people and interest groups on every issue, but even if we struck them down, we’d be left with the question of what to do. That’s the question I’m interested in.”

1) Going to a top college
2) Being smart enough to get into a top college

Here’s a strong case for #2. (Hat tip: Eduwonkette)

Needless to say, we’re not surprised by the answer. Selection bias is a cruel mistress.

So much of what makes me passionate about this project is the feeling that the world’s best minds are just thinking about the wrong things right now. I want to show them that charity isn’t just about being “nice,” that the world’s most important problems are interesting and challenging and worthy of their attention.

Mark Cuban is such a smart guy. If only, if only we could get him thinking about this 1/2 as much as he thinks about this!

We’re still right in the thick of things in Cause 1: we’ve received applications from about half our finalists and are still waiting on the other half. Two of those we received are causing me the most difficulty: Population Services International and UNICEF.

PSI didn’t fill out our matrix, but it sent us their version. PSI measures the units of pills, condoms, bed-nets, etc. that they sell every year (giving us data back to 1999), and they match up volumes sold with research on disease prevalence, treatment efficacy, and expected utilization rates. That, combined with clear measures of how much they spend each year allows us to create a picture that’s clear about exactly what PSI is accomplishing.

UNICEF, because it’s so big – roughly 5 times the size of PSI, itself one of the largest non-profits out there – sent us a variety of reports, outcomes, and research papers, all of which just scratch the surface on UNICEF’s activities. But, what UNICEF gave us raises the question that their approach could be better.

UNICEF provided a top down picture of the biggest killers of children around the world, the priority places to implement their programs, and a fully-integrated approach to attacking all the barriers to healthy life facing African children. In one of the programs detailed, UNICEF provides full medical care to children in specific areas and then measures the impact on the villages it works in relative to other surrounding villages that don’t have the necessary services. UNICEF doesn’t just care for a subset of disease or conditions – they focus on a group of people and work to keep them healthy. While there’s a lot to be said for distributing cheap, effective medicine to needy people, given the complexity of problems and the multitude of diseases an approach based on people might be smarter.

But, then again, it’s hard to know because UNICEF is huge and only provided data for a couple programs that barely scratch the surface of the array of programs they run. Though we think UNICEF’s approach is smart, we have no idea what good we’re buying with our grant.

So what do we do? Even if Holden and I had the capacity to read aggregate and understand every report UNICEF has, they don’t have time to collect them all and send them to us. They just have too much information. So, you could argue that PSI can prove what they accomplish, and UNICEF can’t, so PSI is the better choice. But, neither Holden nor I likes the idea of awarding a grant because someone measures what they do. We want to pick the organizations that do the most good, and measurement is the best way to figure that out. We’ve got one organization giving us the whole story, and another giving us part of what might be a better one. Thoughts?

I’ve been thinking a lot today about the idea of “investing in people.” We are pretty obsessed with finding charities that have good results, but many people (including our applicants, and including some of the friends I’m making overseas ), are urging me to put more focus on finding great people, and trusting them.

Here’s the thing: I love this idea. I am all for investing in great people. GiveWell wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for this phenomenon; in fact, nothing would exist, because you need to get past your startup phase before you can start demonstrating effectiveness. And there is a set of people I know that I would call confidently call “great people” (in the specific sense of competence – there are other people I like personally but wouldn’t trust to invest a coupon for 50% off peanut butter). Any of these great people could come up to me and say “I’m starting a charity” and already be 90% of the way to getting half or more of my charitable budget.

But here’s the other thing. None of these great people run charities; they all do something else. That isn’t a comment on the nonprofit sector, it just reflects that I’ve spent most of my life outside it. And, all of these people have impressed me through substantial interaction, and by showing themselves to be intelligent and capable in the things they do focus on. I can’t just dial up a “great person” in whatever area I want.

I can’t determine whether someone is a “great person” through a one-hour abstract conversation or a two-hour site visit. I can’t do it by looking up my friend’s friend’s friend’s friend’s friend, even if I use Facebook … there are only so many degrees out that I trust people’s opinions. (2.) By the same token, I definitely can’t conclude that someone’s a great person from their “reputation.” And even if I could do any of these things, why should donors who’ve never met me trust my assessment?

That leaves me with the other way of finding a great person: looking at what they’ve accomplished. That’s how I’ve come to think that Steve Jobs is great at what he does, and that Frank Thomas is great at what he does; that’s how I’ve identified all the great people I haven’t met. Not a perfect method, but not bad.

A lot of investing and donating comes through personal connections, and rightfully so. But the world is too big for all of it to work this way. Someone who is great at helping people, and is past the startup phase (as all our applicants are), will have evidence that s/he’s helped people. I might double-check my impression with a site visit; a relationship might develop eventually; but it seems fair to judge an executive starting with the organization they spend their life running, rather than the other way around.

What do you think? Any other ideas on how to integrate the “great person” test into our grantmaking?