Yesterday I wrote about Effective Altruists.
It’s one thing to judge the charitable giving of others, so today I’ll write about myself.
In doing so, I hope to make the issue of giving more relevant to a reader of this blog, as well as to increase accountability for me to give. So long as this blog is going, I’ll be public about what percentage of my income I’m giving to charity, as well as where I donate it.
This Dylan Matthews post is a good foray into individual giving. In reviewing Jeb Bush’s charitable giving, he writes:
So how am I doing?
I calculated my giving like this: (my giving to charities) + (10% of my taxes paid).
From what I gather, about 10% of our taxes goes to helping the poor, so I think it’s fair to count that as (forced) charitable giving. Others might disagree / view this as cheating. Perhaps.
All told: 6% of my earnings went to helping those less off.
Where did I give?
100% of my charitable giving went to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI).
I made this donation because Give Well ranked it as a top charity.
I chose to give to deworming rather than the Against Malaria Foundation (another top rated charity) for no real rationale reason. I just picked it.
I choose not to fund Give Directly (another top rated charity) because my read on the evidence is that conditional cash transfers work better than direct cash transfers. Give Well has spent more time on this than I have, so I surely might be wrong, but I had questions about Give Well ranking unconditional cash transfers so highly.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Give Well is the end all be all of charitable giving. Many organizations are doing work that is difficult to measure in controlled experiments. But I don’t have a lot of time to evaluate these organizations, so I’d rather give to a place that has been vetted than one that has not.
If either Give Well or another charity evaluator began attempting to analyze the effectiveness of these types of organizations, I might shift my charity allocations.
I can do better
How much is enough? I surely won’t be able to answer that question in this post.
But I’d like to get it up to 10%.
In December, I’ll let you know if I do.
Hopefully if we’re all more transparent about how much we give, as well as where we give it, we can increase the amount and effectiveness of our collective giving.
