If you’re here to read the latest update on the GiveWell project, see this post.

There are a lot of possible objections to my last post; to voice them, I’m bringing back our old friend, the Straw Man, for an exclusive interview.

Straw Man: When you say you prefer charity (helping individuals) to philanthropy (addressing root causes), do you mean you ALWAYS prefer short-term to long-term solutions, and that all research/advocacy/outreach programs should be illegal?

Holden: No. But I think there’s value in making charity the default mode, asking for a higher burden of proof before switching to more difficult and ambitious methods. I think most foundations go in the opposite order, jumping straight to “How can we wipe out this problem?” The two examples I gave in my last post seem like really good ones.

Straw Man: But don’t you think that by helping individuals, you’ll be perpetuating the very problems you seek to address??

Holden: How so?

Straw Man: Hang on, I’m still recovering from how cool I sounded just now. OK. There are a couple different arguments that charity perpetuates the very problems it seeks to address. First, the lefty one: by helping people, you’ll give the government an excuse to ignore them.

Holden: Are there any instances in recorded history where a popular social program lost support because of the argument that charity takes care of it? I doubt it, and here’s why. A charity isn’t a reasonable candidate to replace the government until it’s covering all affected parties (which generally is not a possibility, even in the long term) – and until that point, the charity’s successes are just evidence that more of its activities are needed. If a charity addresses 1%-95% of the needy population, and it’s clear that what it’s doing is working and that that 1%-95% is far better off for it, that seems to me like it helps rather than hurts the case for universalizing the program. Anecdotally, I’ve already seen this with NYC education – the state is willing to partner in “experimental” initiatives (small schools, for example) that already have some track record thanks to the voluntary sector.

“This is a great program, it clearly works, it’s clearly good for our society, but we shouldn’t allocate government funding to it because 501(c)(3)’s already have it covered” doesn’t sound like an argument that would fly in an actual political contest (let me know if there are any examples of this happening). It sounds like the kind of argument that people are afraid “other people” will be snookered by.

Straw Man: OK, now the righty argument that charity perpetuates the very problems it seeks to address. By providing people with free health care, education, etc., you remove the incentive for them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Holden: I don’t think I’ll ever understand where people get the idea that depriving someone of basic needs is a necessary, or appropriate, way to motivate them to work. All of the most driven, entrepreneurial, hard-working people I know have never had to worry about having food, shelter, health care, or education. In fact, most of them have never had to worry about anything much. People want more than they have, period (whether we’re talking about money, meaning, or anything else you get from hard work). So what if food surpluses mean farmers don’t have to grow food anymore? They’ll do something else useful – just like the rest of us who’ve never had to grow food.

Straw Man: But what about sustainability? By providing free medicine, we could be stopping programs that seek to provide cheap medicine. That’s not just a waste of money – it could be stopping people from providing services in much more sustainable, expandable ways.

Holden: This is a real concern. It’s one of many reasons that charity has to be researched carefully and monitored constantly. In fact, I think one of the questions any charity has to ask itself is, “How much can our clients pay for our services?” They should charge as much as possible, until the point where they’d be pricing out people who need help. And they should always be revisiting this question.

That said, leaving people to rot until/unless “the market” solves their problems is irresponsible. There’s no question that there are people out there who need help they can’t afford to pay for, and this fact isn’t going away anytime soon (especially if nobody’s providing them with the things every human needs to become self-supporting). Serving people who need help, while constantly reassessing how much they need it, seems like the only appropriate road to take.

Straw Man: So to sum up: you just like Band-Aids, and you don’t want to see real change in the world.

Holden: First off, every person helped is real change; secondly, I do want to see large-scale change, but I’d rather learn as we go than spend 20 years trying to implement an untried master plan. What I really want to see is a kind of “research” grounded in reality: donors simultaneously helping people and learning how best to help people, by documenting and discussing what they’ve done. This approach – transparent, heavily evaluated, results-oriented charity – can’t solve all our problems or fully replace direct assaults on “root causes,” but it has the potential to build the evidence and knowledge we need for enormous changes, as well as making sure that we’re doing some actual good along the way.

It’s slowly dawned on me that I almost never see the word “charity” on the other blogs in this space, and I rarely see it in foundation literature either. Meanwhile, you’ll almost never see the word “philanthropy” on this blog. For a while, the reason for this was simply that I think “philanthropy” is one of the ugliest words that it’s possible to construct. But I’ve picked up another reason to prefer “charity,” as I’ve discovered why others avoid it. In Sean’s words, “philanthropy [is] the practice of dealing with root causes rather than the derisively referred to ‘charity’ which is ‘just about managing symptoms.’” Put me down for managing symptoms, thanks.

Severe diarrhea kills millions of children a year. When are we going to find a cure?? Um, actually, we have one – in fact, we have several reliable, simple, cheap methods of both treating it (with a packet of nutrients that costs pennies) and preventing it (with water purification tablets, among other things). So may I ask why the Gates Foundation is determined to attack this problem by developing and researching new drugs and treatments?

The Google.org blog reports that polio is nearly eradicated, with under 2000 reported cases. I don’t know anything about polio, but I have to wonder why Google feels that its funds are best spent making a movie to raise awareness about this issue rather than just attacking it head-on. Making a movie isn’t cheap, and competing with Knocked Up for attention isn’t easy; using treatments and methods that have already worked thousands of times is both.

It’s hard for me to say much about what foundations do, what they’re thinking, and whether they’re reasonable, for the usual reason: it’s incredibly hard to get information from them on why they make the choices they make. But my general impression is that they place too much emphasis on “eliminating problems,” rather than on improving human beings’ lives.

When you’re trying to accomplish as much good as possible with your dollar, as in everything else, you have to factor in certainty (the same reason that people buy stocks and CDs instead of just lottery tickets). Of course I’d love to cure cancer or save Darfur, and I’d rather eliminate a disease than save 100 people from it. But as a strategy gets longer-term and gets more moving parts, my confidence in it falls exponentially. And my confidence falls even faster when all I know about a strategy is that it involves “research” (competing with thousands of other causes for the best scientists), “advocacy” (competing for political airtime), or “raising awareness” (good luck if you don’t have Al Gore or Michael Moore in your corner). The burden of proof should be high for a direct-service charity, but it should be 1000x higher for strategies along these lines – no matter how wonderful the goal.

That – not any philosophical opposition to government intervention or anything else – is why I generally prefer my donations to work one person at a time. (That distinguishes me from this fellow, whose argument against “root causes” appears to actually be an argument against large-scale charity.) The chance to truly change the world is, of course, incredibly tempting, and there are times when it’s the right thing to aim for. But it’s also important to remember that the dichotomy between “getting results” and “treating symptoms” is a false one, if improving humans’ lives – not promoting abstractions – is your ultimate goal. Saving a person from starvation – even if makes no dent in the causes of world hunger – is itself a result, and wonderful one.

I’ve had to be judicious with my online time, but there’s a real post coming later today. Meanwhile, I just have to point out this ludicrous example of the “We can never ever take even the tiniest risk of keeping a penny away from a charity, no matter what they’re doing with it” mentality. UK site Intelligent Giving, a third-party evaluator that I generally think is fantastic (I wish we had something like it here in the U.S.), found out that the Wallace & Gromit’s Children Foundation did not give away a penny of its funding last year – but sat on the story so as not to discourage people from giving to it.

Read the post and try to figure out their reasoning. They want charities to be accountable, but they never want to risk hurting a charity’s fundraising appeal. Well, those two are incompatible. Period. You have to choose. Part of putting pressure on charities to do a good job is withholding money when they don’t.

And it’s worth it. In all other spheres, we can recognize that cutting your budget in half while making it better spent can result in a better job done. In the nonprofit sector, a third-party evaluator is afraid to disclose that a charity is doing nothing with its funds, because it might result in less funds. Talk about overvaluing money.

My experience with Time Warner Cable has always been good in the past, but then, I’ve always lived in areas where DSL is also available.

Now, I’ve apparently moved into an area where they are the only option – and the difference is amazing and immediate. They miss appointments. They ignore complaints. They don’t fix things that are broken and they’re content to let their customers rot. I’ll spare you the details, but chalk up one more for the case that if you want someone to do a good job with anything, your best bet is to get them competing against someone else.

This is a long way of telling you that my Internet access is sporadic today and I can’t promise a full blog post. The one coming up is a good one – a real update on our project – and it’ll be here within the next few days.

Meanwhile, one micro-rant to hold you over. When I see someone who normally only criticizes charities open a post with “I come today not to bury a charity, but to praise one,” I get excited. I think I’m going to read about someone with a brilliant method for helping people. When, instead, I read about yet another innovative fundraising technique … with no mention of the charity’s activities … and I remember that in my search through the philanthropy blogosphere, I’ve find one blog that discusses how to help people and 14,000 that discuss how to raise money … I’m not happy. It seems clear to me that in the current state of things, charities compete all right – just on the wrong terms.

An objection to our project that I get occasionally goes something like this: sure, it would be great if people really understood the complexities involved in helping people and gave accordingly – but aren’t we worried that revealing these complexities will just make them want to give less? What happens when people learn that charity in Africa is more complicated than “5 cents saves a life,” that charity in the US is more complicated than “Check it out, an adorable child,” and finding a low Straw Ratio isn’t the same thing as finding the best use of your donation?

Well, let’s break it down. If we succeed in creating a public dialogue about how best to help people, and a website where any donor can get a picture of what charities do and whether it works, there will be some ways in which this might make the pie bigger (more total giving) and others in which it might make the pie smaller (less).

Pie bigger: some donors are too analytical for traditional fundraising to work on them; the only way they can have confidence in something is if they have real information. As I argued here, giving them that information is key to getting them to give.

Pie bigger: some donors simply do not know where to start. That’s the boat I was in when I started GiveWell, and it took seconds to find like-minded people. As I argued here, there’s a world of difference between a resource that gives a “checkup” on thousands of charities and one that gives them a fully thought out decision to start playing with.

Pie bigger: controversy and conflict aren’t always a bad thing. As I argued here, bringing out the complexity and difficulty of charity means turning it into something challenging and engaging, rather than sweet and boring.

Pie smaller: some donors honestly believe that the charities they donate to – unlike every organization in the world – have never made a debatable choice or (heavens forbid) a mistake. As soon as they get wind, it’s less charity and bigger houses for them.

Pie smaller: some donors don’t want to be bothered with the details. Giving them a lot of information will overwhelm them, and they’ll give up before they can ever get out their credit cards.

So it could go either way, in theory. A couple things, though.

First off, the balance is tilted quite a bit by the simple fact of life that people seek out what interests them. We all know how people behave when they don’t want to think too hard about their vote: they just vote, straight-ticket, and ignore all the debates and analysis going on around them. In the end, donors who either don’t recognize or don’t want to understand the complexity in charity will just ignore us, and listen to the fundraisers. That’s extremely easy to do – much easier than doing things our way. (If it ever isn’t, that means we must have gotten really big.) By the time someone reads our research, they’re already expressing (a) an active interest in giving (b) a willingness to put effort into understanding the whole story. It’s hard to do that while fitting the profile of someone who quits in the face of imperfection or complexity. Bottom line, it seems pretty farfetched to think that we’ll reach more people who don’t care about what we’re doing than people who do care.

Secondly, it doesn’t just matter how big the pie is, it matters what’s in it. The donors we’re in danger of “pushing out” (again, I find it hard to believe they will even be aware of us) are the least intelligent and/or least engaged ones. The donations we’re in danger of eliminating are the ones that are floating about almost at random, to whatever charity says “We’re perfect” first. Meanwhile, the donors we hope to bring in are the ones who care enough to want to put in some extra time and figure out how to do as much good as possible. They’re the ones who can contribute to the dialogue, and they’ll probably be contributing more money as well. Contrary to what you may have heard, there are worse things than a smaller pie. Like a half-baked one.

(To those of you who saw that ending coming 5 paragraphs ago, I apologize. The marketing dept made me do it.)