The GiveWell Blog

A tax-deductible top charity for Australians

(updated on: ) | by Rebecca Raible

Updated November 2022: Australian donors can now make tax-deductible donations according to our Top Charities Fund and to some of our top charities through Effective Altruism Australia. Australian donors can also donate to some of our top charities through The Life You Can Save. You can find a list of tax-advantaged donation options for other countries here.

For many years we’ve received emails from donors asking whether donations to any of our top charities were tax-deductible in Australia and we’ve had to tell them that we did not have a tax-deductible option to offer them. So, we’re happy to share the news that the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) has just received Deductible Gift Recipient status in Australia, which means that donations to AMF (Australia) are now tax-deductible. You can read AMF’s announcement here.

AMF has been seeking this status since 2009 and we are glad that its efforts have paid off. Of GiveWell’s top charities, AMF is the only one to have tax-deductible status in Australia at this point in time. More information on the tax-deductibility of donations to our top charities in various countries is available here.

AMF has told us it is happy to share information about its experience with the application process with other organizations that are considering applying for Deductible Gift Recipient status in Australia. It has posted information about the process, including some of its application materials, here.

The process of hiring our first cause-specific Program Officer

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Earlier this year, we announced Chloe Cockburn as our incoming Program Officer for criminal justice reform. Chloe started her new role at the end of August.

This hire was the top priority we set in our March update on U.S. policy. It represents the first time we’ve hired someone for a senior, cause-specific role. Chloe will be the primary person responsible for recommending $5+ million a year of grants in this space. As such, hiring Chloe is one of the highest-stakes decisions we’ve made yet for the Open Philanthropy Project, certainly higher-stakes than any particular grant to date. As such, we are writing up a summary of our thinking (including reservations), and the process we ran for this job search.

We also see this blog post as a major part of the case for future grants we make in criminal justice reform. Part of the goal of this process was to hire a person with context, experience, and relationships that go well beyond what it would be realistic to put in a writeup. We expect that future criminal justice reform grants will be subject to a good deal of critical discussion, and accompanied by writeups; at the same time, for readers who want to fully understand the thinking behind our grants, it is important to note that our bigger-picture bet on Chloe’s judgment will be a major input into each grant recommendation in this area.

Note that Chloe reviewed this post.

Table of contents:

History of philanthropy case study: The impact of philanthropy on the passage of the Affordable Care Act

(updated on: ) | by Milan Griffes

Benjamin Soskis, who has been working for us on our history of philanthropy project, has completed a case study of philanthropy’s impact on the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The case study focuses first on the Atlantic Philanthropies’ funding of Health Care for America Now! (HCAN), as well as on HCAN’s activities and impact. The second part of the study surveys the activities of other funders involved in health care reform, such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Commonwealth Fund.

The case study concludes that, as a whole, philanthropic spending had a critical, though not necessarily easily quantifiable, role in the passage of the ACA. In the following passage, Dr. Soskis quotes HCAN’s Doneg McDonough:

“There’s just no way health reform would have passed without the [philanthropically funded] outside efforts going on. No question about it. Beyond that, it gets a little fuzzy. How much of an impact did [any particular intervention] have and which things actually were critical to making the ACA happen?”

This last statement, with its combination of broadly conceived certitude and localized indeterminacy, epitomizes one of this report’s central findings regarding the claims of philanthropic impact. (Case Study, Pg. 4)

Dr. Soskis’s study also examines the difficulty of disentangling the impact of any one funder from the impact of philanthropy as a whole. He writes:

In fact, disaggregating the specific contributions of particular philanthropic funders and determining how to weigh them against each other proved one of the most significant challenges of this project. This would be an issue for any major policy initiative, but for national [health care reform], given the large number of funders involved and the efforts to coordinate activities between them, it proved even more challenging. This suggests one of the main paradoxes of evaluating the impact of philanthropy on the passage of health care reform legislation. Precisely those features which many considered essential to the passage of the ACA – the breadth, variety, and scale of philanthropic initiatives – also made it especially difficult to evaluate the contributions of any particular intervention. And the report highlights another paradox as well, one which presides over the entire study of policy impact evaluation: the more significant the legislative achievement, and the greater the impulse for various stakeholders involved to claim a definite degree of impact, the less likely it is that any determination of clear causal agency is actually possible. (Case Study, Pg. 4)

Read the full case study here (.pdf)

Coming down to earth: What if a big geomagnetic storm does hit?

(updated on: ) | by David Roodman

This is the fourth post in a series about geomagnetic storms as a global catastrophic risk. A paper covering the material in this series was recently released.

I devoted the first three posts in this series to describing geomagnetic storms and assessing the odds that a Big One is coming. I concluded that the iconic Carrington superstorm of 1859 was neither as intense nor as overdue for an encore as some prominent analysts have suggested. (I suppose that’s unsurprising: those who say more-alarming things get more attention.) But my analysis is not certain. To paraphrase Churchill, the sun is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a corona. And great harm would flow from what I cannot rule out: a blackout spanning states and lasting months.

I shift in this post from whether the Big One is coming to what will happen if it does. And here, unfortunately, my facility with statistics does less good, for the top questions are now about power engineering: how grids and high-voltage transformers respond to planetary magnetic concussions.

One reason for my incomplete understanding of power engineering is that the stuff is complicated. Another is the upshot of this post: I dug far enough to conclude that more research is needed. That phrase is a dead cliche, but I mean it. We need to learn more! Considering the potential stakes, the effects of magnetic storms on grids are too poorly studied. Seven-figure expenditures on research might stave off 12-figure damages (as in trillions). For an employee of a philanthropy, that’s a bottom line. And the practical conclusion being reached, and my time being tight, it seemed efficient to stop there.

I’ll explain that conclusion just below. But first I stress that my view on the potential value of funding in this area is attributable only to me. The Open Philanthropy Project will weigh this cause against other possible focus areas.

I’ll touch on four lines of evidence:

  • Case studies of failed transformers
  • Statistical correlations between storm activity and transformer failures
  • Field tests of transformers to simulate geomagnetic stress
  • Mathematical modeling of power systems

Change in our fundraising policy for the Open Philanthropy Project

(updated on: ) | by Elie

We previously decided to cap the amount of funding we would request from Good Ventures at 20% of GiveWell’s operating budget (more in our October 2013 blog post).

In our most recent board meeting (Attachment E), we changed this policy and now plan to cap our request for funding from Good Ventures at:

  • 20% of costs that are attributed to GiveWell’s top charities work
  • 50% of costs that are attributed to the Open Philanthropy Project

When we initially set the cap in October 2013, the Open Philanthropy Project (then called GiveWell Labs) was a small part of our overall budget. Now, it accounts for approximately 50% of our operating expenses (primarily staff salaries).

We plan to post a complete update on our fundraising needs at the end of the year. Attachments D and F from our most recent board meeting provide a limited update on our current situation.

The long-term significance of reducing global catastrophic risks

(updated on: ) | by Nick Beckstead

Note: this post aims to help a particular subset of our audience understand the assumptions behind our work on global catastrophic risks.

One focus area for the Open Philanthropy Project is reducing global catastrophic risks (such as from pandemics, potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, geoengineering, and geomagnetic storms). A major reason that the Open Philanthropy Project is interested in global catastrophic risks is that a sufficiently severe catastrophe may risk changing the long-term trajectory of civilization in an unfavorable direction (potentially including human extinction if a catastrophe is particularly severe and our response is inadequate).

One possible perspective on such risks—which I associate with the Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and some people in the effective altruism community who are interested in the very long-term future—is that (a) the moral value of the very long-term future overwhelms other moral considerations; (b) given any catastrophe short of an outright extinction event, humanity would eventually recover, leaving humanity’s eventual long-term prospects relatively unchanged. On this view, seeking to prevent potential outright extinction events has overwhelmingly greater significance for humanity’s ultimate future than seeking to prevent less severe global catastrophes.

In contrast, the Open Philanthropy Project’s work on global catastrophic risks focuses on both potential outright extinction events and global catastrophes that, while not threatening direct extinction, could have deaths amounting to a significant fraction of the world’s population or cause global disruptions far outside the range of historical experience. This post explains why I believe this approach is appropriate even when accepting (a) from the previous paragraph, i.e., when assigning overwhelming moral importance to the question of whether civilization eventually realizes a substantial fraction of its long-run potential. While it focuses on my own views, these views are broadly shared by several others who focus on global catastrophic risk reduction at the Open Philanthropy Project, and have informed the approach we’re taking.

In brief:

  • Civilization’s progress over the last few centuries—in scientific, technological, and social domains—has no historical parallel.
  • With the possible exception of advanced artificial intelligence, for every potential global catastrophic risk I am aware of, I believe that the probability of an outright extinction event is much smaller than the probability of other global catastrophes. My understanding is that most people who favor focusing work almost entirely on outright extinction events would agree with this.
  • If a global catastrophe occurs, I believe there is some (highly uncertain) probability that civilization would not fully recover (though I would also guess that recovery is significantly more likely than not). This seems possible to me for the general and non-specific reason that the mechanisms of civilizational progress are not understood and there is essentially no historical precedent for events severe enough to kill a substantial fraction of the world’s population. I also think that there are more specific reasons to believe that an extreme catastrophe could degrade the culture and institutions necessary for scientific and social progress, and/or upset a relatively favorable geopolitical situation. This could result in increased and extended exposure to other global catastrophic risks, an advanced civilization with a flawed realization of human values, failure to realize other “global upside possibilities,” and/or other issues.
  • Consequently, for almost every potential global catastrophic risk I am aware of, I believe that total risk (in terms of failing to reach a substantial fraction of humanity’s long-run potential) from events that could kill a substantial fraction of the world’s population is at least in the same ballpark as the total risk to the future of humanity from potential outright extinction events.

Therefore, when it comes to risks such as pandemics, nuclear weapons, geoengineering, or geomagnetic storms, there is no clear case for focusing on preventing potential outright extinction events to the exclusion of preventing other global catastrophic risks. This argument seems most debatable in the case of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, and we plan to discuss that further in the future.