The GiveWell Blog

Unorthodox Prize

(updated on: ) | by Holden

A couple of years ago, an anonymous family foundation launched a call for “extraordinary and unorthodox” philanthropic opportunities. We wrote critically about this at the time, but the winner of the contest turned out to be GiveDirectly (currently our #2 charity), which received its initial funding from the contest. We’ve since had some interactions with the funder, and we’ve been impressed with its thinking and with its broad interest in doing as much good as possible. (The funder has also been supportive of GiveWell in terms of contacts and has expressed potential interest in funding us directly, though no direct funding has occurred to date.)

The funder is now holding another contest with a similar aim to the previous one: to “identify and support one new great idea” that “can improve the lives of the world’s most disadvantaged people.”

We’ve played with the idea of a similar contest ourselves, with the hope of unearthing giving opportunities that fall outside “traditional” causes. To date we haven’t felt that holding such a contest would be the best use of our capacity, but we’d like to do what we can to support such a contest when another organization is holding it. Therefore, we’re publicizing this contest via our blog.

If you have – or know someone who has – an extraordinary and unorthodox idea for improving the lives of the world’s most disadvantaged people, please consider submitting it to the Extraordinary and Unorthodox Prize (and contacting us with it as well).

Broad market efficiency

(updated on: ) | by Holden

It’s common to debate how “efficient” financial markets are. Broadly speaking, an “efficient” market is one in which the participants are quick to spot profit-making opportunities, so that prices quickly adjust to reflect available information and it’s very difficult for an outsider to “beat the market,” i.e., consistently earn outsized returns. (If one is interested in more details, I recommend searching for discussions of the “efficient-market hypothesis.”)

Not all opportunities to accomplish good are opportunities to make money. Yet I believe that it’s useful to use a similar concept in the world of philanthropy – to speak of a “broad market” in which people are rewarded (though not always financially) for accomplishing good, and in which we therefore have some reason to expect that (a) the “easiest” opportunities for accomplishing good will get funded and carried out without our help; (b) finding opportunities to do good that aren’t already funded will be challenging.

The question of how efficient the broad market is (and how its efficiency varies from domain to domain) seems to me like a crucial one, and it is a question that we are constantly debating and looking for new information on. It’s equivalent to the question of how effective the world as it exists today is at “scooping up opportunities to do good,” and thus how difficult we should expect it to be to find outstanding such opportunities. When we started GiveWell, the seemingly low quality of dialogue around giving led me to expect extremely low efficiency; over the years, I’ve substantially (though not overwhelmingly) raised our estimate of how much “efficiency” already exists.

The remainder of this post will:

  • Discuss why I’ve raised my estimate of “broad market efficiency” and what my current working view is.
  • Elaborate on why one’s estimate of “broad market efficiency” is important.

First, a point of clarification. I generally view “market efficiency” as a spectrum: the more efficient a particular market is, the higher the level of intensity and intelligence around finding good opportunities, and therefore the more intelligent and dedicated one will need to be in order to consistently “beat the market.” The most efficient markets can be consistently beaten only by the most talented/dedicated players, while the least efficient ones can be beaten with fairly little in the way of talent and dedication. This way of discussing market efficiency contrasts with the “Are markets efficient, yes or no?” approach that some others take to the question.

How efficient is the “broad market?”
When we started GiveWell, my basic picture of the world was that

  • For-profit markets are relatively efficient. Therefore, if there’s an opportunity to do good that’s also an opportunity to make money, it’s very likely that someone will seize on this opportunity relatively quickly.
  • Nonprofits accomplish good as well, but in the nonprofit world, funding almost exclusively chases “good stories” rather than good ideas. Therefore, there ought to be many opportunities to accomplish enormous amounts of good via nonprofit activities with a strong analytical case but no competitively compelling emotional pitch.

I still hold both these views to a degree, but several observations have complicated the picture for me.

  • As we recently wrote, it appears that the most proven cost-effective interventions are often able to attract funding from major funders. While I do believe we’ve found some places in which more money is needed to deliver more proven cost-effective interventions, doing so has been far more difficult than I expected.And while I believe there exist good opportunities to fund more research and strengthen health systems (which could lead to more opportunities to fund delivery of proven cost-effective interventions), I also have not seen a large amount of obvious low-hanging fruit (outstanding, unfunded giving opportunities) in these areas. In particular, many of the interventions whose effects are easiest to study are the ones that have already been fairly well studied; to create good research on other interventions could be much more difficult. I believe there are exceptions to this pattern, but that it does hold as a general pattern.
  • In 2012, we developed an interest in meta-research that grew out of our experiences reviewing evidence, and we noted at the time that we couldn’t identify any major foundations working in this area (based on our review of major foundations). We saw this as a promising but potentially ignored area. However, the more we investigated it and got involved in it, the more we saw that there are already many movements afoot that can be categorized as “meta-research” – and several major funders that are interested specifically in this area. Furthermore, it often appears to be the case that “meta-research projects” get funded by funders who don’t explicitly focus on “meta-research,” but instead focus on the field in question. (A future update will give more details on this.)The other funders focused on meta-research are roughly as new to the area as we are; we have uncovered some ideas that may qualify as “promising and un-funded”; and I still have the intuition that this is an extremely promising and under-resourced area. But it’s instructive that our best guess for a “promising but ignored” area turned out to have a non-negligible amount of interest from funders, once we looked more closely.
  • We’ve also seen various “global catastrophic risks” highlighted to us as causes that are highly likely to be neglected, because the scenarios in question are highly “farfetched” and low-probability, and philanthropic investments are unlikely to pay off in any tangible way. Thus, it seems that funding these causes might require a highly analytical and genuinely altruistic bent. We’ve done some light investigation of global catastrophic risks, and have found some substantial activity on some of the more “farfetched” ones. For example, on asteroid impacts, tens of millions of dollars are being spent on asteroid detection and the expected lives lost due to such impacts has reached a fairly low level. On threats from epidemics, bioterrorism and other biological threats, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ran a program (archived link) for several years in this area, and reports having closed the program after seeing substantial increases in government funding (as a side note, we don’t find its causal attribution compelling): 
      “Sloan’s Biosecurity Program has been very successful in bringing attention to the issues and challenges posed by biological threats. When our program began in 2000, the US government funding for strictly biodefense was approximately $50 million. The FY2010 budget is $1.09 billion.”

     

     

  • We’ve generally struggled to find proposals for projects that are fully fleshed out and immediately compelling, yet un-funded. We believe this is largely because of the dynamics of the philanthropic sector in which proposals tend to be written only after there is strong interest from a funder, but in a less efficient “broad market” we’d have expected to find some strong, exhaustively argued yet un-funded proposals by now.
  • In general, in interacting with major foundations (such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, CIFF and Open Society Foundations), we’ve encountered many program officers whom we perceive as well-informed, genuinely altruistic, and relatively analytical in their approach. It’s difficult to evaluate the quality of these people’s work, but they certainly don’t fit the stereotype of the “story-oriented donor.”

In general, it seems nearly impossible to find a promising area or idea that is completely ignored (though many may be underfunded relative to other areas and ideas).

It seems to me that there is a real sense in which people are “rewarded” nonfinancially for working on something with high altruistic value – whether through recognition from others, through pride in doing well at the job they’ve been hired for, or of course through altruism – as well as a real sense in which people are drawn toward areas that they perceive as neglected (foundation staff have cited the latter factor to us in many discussions). Even without any particular person taking a bird’s-eye view of the philanthropic world and making analytical, strategic calculations to find the most under-explored causes, an ecosystem with a large number of people who have various drives toward altruism and toward working on what’s neglected can be expected to produce some degree of “broad market efficiency” – a tendency to find and execute on the most outstanding and neglected ideas.

I am not saying that “all the good giving opportunities are taken” or that “philanthropic capital is allocated as well as it could be” – I very much don’t believe that. I believe that a great deal of giving is done with very little thought and goes to causes that are far inferior to the best ones out there; I believe that strategic cause selection is itself a neglected approach, and that it will lead to far more impact than we could achieve otherwise. Even if (as isn’t necessarily the case) the best $10 million worth of funding opportunities for a given cause are already funded, funding the next $10 million down in the most promising causes (as opposed to causes chosen with little reflection) could have enormous value. In addition, I believe that looking at existing giving opportunities doesn’t tell you the full story about a cause’s potential (as discussed previously), and raising the profile of the more important causes could generate outstanding giving opportunities that haven’t yet been surfaced.

What I no longer believe is that there’s any easy way to tell which areas are under-funded. All it takes is one or two idiosyncratic major funders to turn a cause area from under-funded to over-funded or appropriately funded. Thus, the mere fact that a cause is “wonky” (strong from an analytical perspective, but not from a storytelling perspective) or “wacky” (controversial, farfetched or otherwise unappealing to conventionally minded people) doesn’t guarantee that it will be neglected. When it comes to assessing what areas are neglected, there’s no substitute for doing the legwork of figuring out who’s working on them.

Why one’s view of “broad market efficiency” matters
In theory, it would be ideal to examine all possible giving opportunities and compare the “expected good accomplished” for each. In practice, it’s important to have good rules for prioritizing which areas and projects to investigate further. And having a view on “broad market efficiency” is important for such prioritization. Our view on “broad market efficiency” affects (a) how easy we expect it to be to find good giving opportunities in a given cause (and thus how much effort we expect to put in before having a good idea of what’s available); (b) what sort of claims about giving opportunities we consider highly plausible vs. which will immediately raise our skepticism that a piece of the picture is missing; (c) what sorts of giving opportunities are outstanding enough, in the scheme of things, for us to prioritize them.

If we expected extremely minimal “broad market efficiency,” we might be looking for projects that fit just about all the criteria one could ask for – strong track record, strong upside, strong people, etc. – and we’d deprioritize causes in which these projects didn’t quickly emerge. If we expected extremely strong “broad market efficiency,” we might place high emphasis on our personal interests and experiences, reasoning that these would be the areas in which we’d be most likely to “beat the market.” Our current view is in between the two extremes. Our intuition is that some causes are extremely under-funded relative to others, and we expect strategic cause selection to have major payoffs. (Note that while we have raised our estimate of “broad market efficiency” we’ve also become more confident that strategic cause selection is extremely rare, perhaps even nonexistent, in the philanthropic world.) On the other hand, we expect exploring a given cause to take a good deal of legwork and learning, and we’re inherently suspicious of projects that look “too good to be true.”

Another reason one’s view of “broad market efficiency” matters is it represents one mechanism for what I sometimes term the “fungibility of good” – the idea that making progress on one problem often leads to progress on other problems. For example, reducing the burden of malaria may make it more likely (depending on the degree of broad market efficiency) that other philanthropists shift from addressing malaria to addressing other problems. Thus, even if cause X is more important than cause Y, making progress on cause Y may cause other philanthropists to reallocate their giving away from cause Y and toward cause X, and may thus have some value for cause X.

The “fungibility of good” is one possible contributor to “regression to the mean” in philanthropic opportunities, and one possible justification for placing weight on tractability (what one can accomplish within a cause) and not just importance (the value of progress on a cause).

Ways to follow GiveWell

| by Elie

This is just a reminder of the various ways you can stay updated on GiveWell’s work.

If you’re reading this, you’re following our blog, which is a great way to stay updated on major research progress. In addition to following on the web, you can follow the blog via RSS or email.

Other ways to follow GiveWell:

  • We send out a ~monthly email with highlights from the month’s blog posts and other news about GiveWell (e.g., new hires, mentions in major media). Sign up for email updates here.
  • We announce the publication of each new report on our website and each time we publish notes from a conversation with a charity representative or other expert. You can follow these announcements via our “new content feed.” You can join the feed by subscribing to its emails (sign up here or send an email to this address) or by following on RSS.
  • You can follow us on Facebook (includes links to new blog posts) and Twitter (includes links to new blog posts and links to new content).

GiveWell Labs update

(updated on: ) | by Holden

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.]

While we haven’t spent as much time as hoped on GiveWell Labs, we have made some progress. This post summarizes how we’ve spent our time, what we’ve learned, and what we’re planning next.

We’ve put substantial time into each of the following:

  • Partnering with Good Ventures on “co-funding” with major foundations. Good Ventures has spoken with multiple major foundations (some conversations off the record, some on the record), asking for recommendations for particularly strong projects that Good Ventures might join in funding. It has committed $1 million to a project with the Gates Foundation and is in the process of considering other possible projects. We have sat in on most of the relevant conversations, advised Good Ventures, and published notes when possible to our website. We had hoped this experience would give us an opportunity to “learn from the pros” – to understand how established foundations go about sourcing and evaluating giving opportunities. To some extent, it has; for example, we’ve learned about the importance and pervasiveness of active funding among major foundations, and we’ve gotten a sense for what program officers do to find giving opportunities (it seems that the most common core activity is networking intensively with people in the field, while emphasizing their own strategic priorities). At the same time, we’ve found the giving opportunities themselves difficult to evaluate, both before and after execution. As discussed previously, the information that is easily available is often not in-depth enough for us to gain high confidence regarding the merit of the project without substantial further investigation (the case for these gifts relies largely on the fact that the partner foundation finds them worthwhile, as well as the learning opportunities they present to us).
  • Top-level investigation of the history and current state of philanthropy. We wrote about our understanding of philanthropy’s success stories, and collected data on philanthropy’s current funding allocations. Since then, we’ve continued to look for more information about the history of philanthropy – we think it’s important to understand what the major success stories have been and how they came about – but we have found little. We are now exploring the possibility of recommending funding to produce more such history.
  • Meta-research. Last year we expressed an interest in meta-research, or “improving the incentives in the academic world, to bring them more in line with producing work of maximal benefit to society.” We ended up spending much of our GiveWell-Labs-related time on this cause because we not only found it promising (and had significant starting context on it due to our direct experiences as consumers of research), but also found it to be a fairly nascent field. Thus, we had opportunities to explore opportunities and participate in meetings that would have been difficult with our level of experience in other areas.
    • We were originally interested in meta-research for the field of development economics, the field most directly relevant to our work. We joined a major funder in having preliminary exploratory conversations with relevant researchers (some were off the record, but some have notes posted to the “social sciences” section of this link) and I attended an April 2012 meeting at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation regarding preregistration.
    • We recommended a quick grant to the U.S. Cochrane Center, and in the process of investigating it we turned up some evidence that medical meta-research is a promising (largely because neglected) area. We are now finishing a more thorough investigation of that cause.
    • We also put a small amount of time into exploring the idea of meta-research for the “harder” sciences (biology, computer science, etc.) We advised a volunteer, Paul Christiano, who has had multiple conversations (notes forthcoming) in the field of computer science, and I attended the first meeting (notes) of Vannevar, a group started by Dario Amodei to explore ways to make scientific research more efficient, collaborative and productive. Dario and I also had a preliminary conversation about the world of biomedical research.
  • We advised Good Ventures on its investigation of the cause of drug policy reform, seeing it as an opportunity to start learning about politics without a major commitment. Two consultants were retained to look into this area, and we aim to publish a public version of their report in the next month. I’ve also had many informal conversations about the world of political advocacy, and am starting to form a plan for understanding it better.

Our major takeaways to date from these investigations:

  • Due partly to the potential importance of active funding, it appears helpful to think of a “cause” or “sector” – rather than a “project” – as the most relevant unit of inquiry. We now plan on investigating a large number of potentially promising causes at very low depth, and investigating a smaller number at a higher level of depth.
  • Most of philanthropy seems to use some combination of (a) direct service delivery; (b) funding of research; (c) political advocacy. We feel that we have done substantial research on, and attained substantial understanding of, (a), while we understand very little about how (b) and (c) work in general. It is a priority for us to learn more, generally, about how the world of scientific research works (which involves understanding the incentives and evaluation mechanisms for academics) and about how the world of political advocacy works (which involves understanding the basic tools that are used in advocacy and how one might expect their effectiveness to vary with different issues).
  • It is very difficult to get a sense of what has worked, and failed, in philanthropy’s past. Our value of transparency is hopefully a step in the right direction for the future, but for our own learning we may find it necessary to do substantially more investigation of history.

Accordingly, for the next few months we expect to prioritize the activities of

  • Investigating a relatively large number of causes at relatively low depth, and investigating a smaller number at high depth. (We are currently finishing a higher-depth investigation of medical meta-research.)
  • Forming plans for improving our general understanding of scientific research and political advocacy.
  • Exploring the possibility of funding journalists and/or historians to produce better data on what has worked and failed in philanthropy in the past. (More)

Challenges of passive funding

(updated on: ) | by Holden

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.]

Something I think about a lot is the spectrum from “passive funding” to “active funding.” By “passive funding,” I mean a dynamic in which the funder’s role is to review others’ proposals/ideas/arguments and pick which to fund, and by “active funding,” I mean a dynamic in which the funder’s role is to participate in – or lead – the development of a strategy, and find partners to “implement” it. Active funders, in other words, are participating at some level in “management” of partner organizations, whereas passive funders are merely choosing between plans that other nonprofits have already come up with.

My instinct is generally to try the most “passive” approach that’s feasible. Broadly speaking, it seems that a good partner organization will generally know their field and environment better than we do and therefore be best positioned to design strategy; in addition, I’d expect a project to go better when its implementer has fully bought into the plan as opposed to carrying out what the funder wants. However, (a) this philosophy seems to contrast heavily with how most existing major funders operate; (b) I’ve seen multiple reasons to believe the “active” approach may have more relative merits than we had originally anticipated. This post discusses our observations on this front, and the implications. Note that Good Ventures has played a major role in facilitating and participating in conversations with other major funders, which is where most of our learning on this front comes from.

Brief summary:

  • Major funders very frequently take a highly active approach to funding, in some cases going so far as to play a major role in creating partner organizations.
  • In the nonprofit world of today, it seems to us that funder interests are major drivers of which ideas that get proposed and fleshed out, and therefore, as a funder, it’s important to express interests rather than trying to be fully “passive.”
  • While we still wish to err on the side of being as “passive” as possible, we are recognizing the importance of clearly articulating our values/strategy, and also recognizing that an area can be underfunded even if we can’t easily find shovel-ready funding opportunities in it.

Major funders appear to be highly active
Since we launched GiveWell Labs, we’ve spent a fair amount of time talking to major funders. Unfortunately, in many cases we’ve been able to have these conversations only under condition of confidentiality, but we’ve posted notes from conversations when possible and we can share examples of patterns we’ve observed.

Perhaps the most vivid example of an “active” funder is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which we also perceive as one of the most generally impressive foundations we’ve interacted with.

  • The Gates Foundation has been integral in the creation of many of the organizations it has made major grants to, such as GAVI (which has received several of its largest grants), Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, Innovative Vector Control Consortium, Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, and PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.
  • On polio eradication, it describes itself as providing “technical and financial” (not just financial) resources.
  • In a conversation with Cynthia Lewis of the Gates Foundation’s Tobacco Initiative, Cynthia emphasized that much of the Foundation’s work is “hands-on,” and also stressed that when going into a new area it may be necessary for a grantmaker to “create” the partner organizations it needs to fulfill specific objectives. When we asked her how one might go about this, she gave an example of an anti-tobacco organization whose team had been largely recruited by a program officer at another foundation. (At the same time, she characterized much of her own work as providing more “hands-off” funding to particularly strong organizations, indicating that there’s a time and place for both styles of grantmaking.) We will soon be publishing conversation notes from another conversation on this specific topic, which will give many more examples of cases in which various foundations were instrumental in the creation of partner organizations.

Other examples of “active funding” can be seen in our notes from discussing drug policy with Open Society Foundation representatives and in CIFF’s description of its approach to funding. An Atlantic Philanthropies document on political philanthropy states, “Once a grantmaker decides to support an advocacy campaign, there are several options for how to manage advocacy-oriented funding. Determine early on whether there is 1) a grantee, or coalition of grantees, that is already actively involved in a campaign or can easily take leadership; 2) a third party group that should be contracted to act as the manager for a new campaign initiated by the funder(s); or 3) the campaign would best be managed directly by foundation staff. Each approach has its own benefits and risks depending upon the issue and the funder(s).” In all three cases, it is clear that foundation staff sometimes intend to restrict funds and/or manage projects quite actively rather than simply providing funding.

Limitations of a passive approach
When we first started work on GiveWell Labs, we contemplated a highly passive approach in which we would ask major charities – and major foundations – for the “best projects that aren’t already funded.” This approach seemed to face many obstacles. When speaking with major charities, we found that:

  • Some groups (such as GAVI and PATH) emphasized the need for unrestricted funds to respond to opportunities as they came up, rather than pointing to specific un-funded opportunities.
  • Other groups (such as GAIN and Micronutrient Initiative) listed many possible projects, at a very broad level, and asked us to direct them to the ones we were most interested in.
  • In all cases, it’s been a consistent fact that there are no existing detailed writeups on the ideas ready for us to review. Rather, it seems to consistently be the case that detailed writeups on potential projects are developed for (and in collaboration with) potential funders. (Every project proposal we’ve ever seen from a large organization has been for a specific funder).

When speaking with major funders, we were often presented with more specific project proposals, about which more written information was available. However, in these cases, it wasn’t always clear to us that the projects we were looking at needed more funding to go forward. In the case of the PSI project that Good Ventures co-funded with the Gates Foundation, we initially believed there was a concrete funding gap and later changed our view. In the case of the Wellcome Trust, it was made explicit to us that there are rarely specific projects that are outlined and ready to go but not funded.

Without detailed writeups, and without a good deal of context, it’s very difficult to assess a potential project. Asking for a detailed writeup would be, to some extent, indicating and committing interest in the potential project. Because of this dynamic, it’s very difficult to a purely “passive” funder: one needs a sense of which sorts of projects one is most interested in.

This may also help explain the shortcomings of the “maximally passive” approach we took in 2007. (See our July 2012 blog post discussing this.) We had hoped that many charities would fully make the case for their impact to us, and that we would simply choose the best case. But when writeups are usually done for – and in collaboration with – specific funders, this sort of approach isn’t possible, and it’s necessary to have an idea of one’s criteria in order to even decide what to evaluate.

Another approach to “passive” funding is to focus on smaller, startup-like nonprofits rather than large charities and foundations, as Ashoka does. However, even when seeking out groups like this, we see possible advantages to being active:

  • There are already multiple groups that take a systematic, “sector-agnostic” approach to funding smaller and more startup-like groups. (Ashoka, Draper Richards Kaplan, Echoing Green; Skoll Foundation at a later developmental stage.) We’re not sure whether we’d have substantial value-added over such groups if we focused on taking a similar approach.
  • We’ve seen multiple cases in which a funder’s “active” strategy was crucial in finding – or even creating – a “startup-like” nonprofit. Some of these involved interactions with other funders from which we have not produced public information, but we can discuss cases that involved us directly. These are intended to give examples of how one’s active strategy can be crucial in becoming aware of (or even contributing to the creation of) a “startup-like” nonprofit; we don’t intend these examples to be interpreted as groups we’re actively considering funding.
    • In one case, we spoke to a professor about the Cochrane Collaboration, and after he saw our post on meta-research, he asked whether we’d be interested in a proposal for the creation of a meta-research-oriented group. He explained to us that he had wanted to write up such a proposal for a long time, but had not done so previously, because he couldn’t identify any funders that would likely be interested.
    • Dario Amodei has also been influenced by our discussion of meta-research. As an academic himself, he has considered trying to get involved in improving the system of academia. Our interest in this area has helped give shape to his interests, and has played a role in the creation of Vannevar, a group of scientists dedicated to making scientific research more efficient, collaborative and productive. According to Dario, the knowledge that a funder might be interested in his collected observations on academia – even though the interest was very preliminary and did not come with any funding commitment – has spurred him to conceptualize, and follow through on, a strategy focused on producing the sort of information such a funder might find valuable.

I think the above observations point to a potential disanalogy between the for-profit and nonprofit worlds. In the for-profit world, a business gets capital from investors but ultimately gets its revenue from customers (and if it can’t raise capital, it can often “bootstrap” to the point where it has something more impressive to show funders). In the nonprofit world, funders provide both the capital needed to get started and the ultimate verdict on whether a project succeeded. Thus, in the nonprofit world, it seems that the “what projects are people trying to start?” question and the “what projects do people think major funders will be interested in?” question are tightly integrated. Expressing clear interests (as we did with our meta-research post) can cause new opportunities to emerge; simply looking for “shovel-ready” projects may severely limit a funder’s options.

Another possibility that has occurred to me is that the role of “strategy development” may be structurally more common at foundations/grantors than at charities/grantees. Since foundations ultimately decide which strategies get funded, people who are oriented toward developing strategies may gravitate toward foundations.

Implications
In the nonprofit world of today, it seems to us that funder interests are major drivers of which ideas get proposed and fleshed out, and therefore, as a funder, it’s important to express interests rather than trying to be fully “passive.”

It’s possible, and perhaps desirable, that the nonprofit world of the future will work differently. If funders had greater commitments to transparency, and posted the proposals they chose not to fund, it’s possible that a database of “shovel-ready” proposals could emerge. We certainly intend to share the proposals we don’t fund, when possible, and to encourage others to do the same. But in the world as it exists, it seems important to recognize that articulating preferences and areas of interest is an important thing for a funder to do.

Partly for this reason, we’ve largely de-emphasized the kind of thinking we were doing in 2011 about “sector-agnostic” giving (looking across all issue areas for the most outstanding projects), in favor of the related idea of strategic cause selection. In strategically choosing causes, we want to place some weight on the criterion of room for more funding, and therefore we’d conceptually like to choose causes based partly on what projects are available to fund within them. However, we don’t believe that looking at the current set of “shovel-ready” projects is a reliable way to assess conceptual “room for more funding,” and we believe it may sometimes be fruitful and necessary to express interest in a cause despite not having a good sense of what projects are available within it. We will have to find other – and perhaps rougher – ways of estimating which causes are “overfunded” as opposed to “underfunded.”

Is the world getting better?

| by Elie

I recently spoke with Robin Hanson and he proposed that donors invest their money in order to give more in the future.

One question that came up was whether the world is improving such that opportunities to cost-effectively accomplish good are running out.

I think there’s a strong argument that this may be the case, at least when it comes to improving the health and opportunities of the world’s poorest. The following charts illustrate that child deaths have been falling dramatically and population growth has been slowing as incomes have risen. (In the charts, the trails show each country’s changes over time, from the first year noted in the bubble with the country’s name until the present day.)

The graphs below come from Gapminder.org. The charts below only show several countries for several indicators, but they’re broadly representative of what has happened. To see more, click through to Gapminder.

Child mortality has fallen dramatically since the 1960s as incomes have risen
Population growth has slowed as incomes have risen