Efficient charitable giving

[liv]

wildeabandon posted something thoughtful about giving to charity a while ago, and it made me realize just why I am uncomfortable with the idea currently fashionable among my friends of trying to maximize the efficiency of charitable giving. Unfortunately I started getting into a debate based on my new insight just a few days before I got married, so didn't really have time to follow up.

This is going to be an unpopular opinion, certainly, but I don't really agree with the principle that there's a moral imperative to use your money to save as many lives as possible. On the face of it that's a seductive idea, because saving lives is obviously a good thing, so saving more lives is obviously better, right? Also using resources efficiently is obviously better than wasting money. What kind of twisted person would disagree with that?

I think part of my issue is that I am not by nature a utilitarian. There was a discussion at Veizla recently where someone I don't know was claiming that utilitarianism is the only "rational" moral system. IJ pointed out that utilitarianism fails to take into account the possibility that one may have a stronger moral obligation to people one is more connected with. That felt like a succinct summary of where I'm coming from morally. It's tricky, because it's easy to use the idea of connectedness carrying moral weight to justify untenable positions like "rich, white, English people like me have more value than poor brown foreign people". That's not my belief at all; I believe I have more obligation to my family, my close friends, my local community, and to some extent my region and country than to random strangers. But I don't believe that my family and friends are inherently superior to anyone else.

OK, that's a little abstract. Let's talk about practical details. I'm aware that the efficient giving approach can be extremely nuanced, and I don't want to argue against a complete straw man version of it. But in a lot of cases it pretty much boils down to, give as much as you can reasonably afford to charities which spend the money efficiently on treating easily curable childhood diseases in resource-poor countries. The thing is, if your calculus is based on how many lives you can save for a fixed amount, that particular kind of giving is pretty much always going to come out on top. I'm not against doing that, but I don't think it's the only possible moral thing to do. Partly because I do believe that people also have specific moral obligations to themselves and the people they immediately interact with, not just to humanity in the abstract.

But also partly because I am just not convinced by the concept of "efficiency" in this sense. Efficiency might be trying to ensure that the largest possible number of people live for the longest possible amount of time. If you have one choice between saving a child and saving an older person, there's a case to be made for saving the child as you have potentially provided them with more years of life. But if you always prioritize children over adults and working adults over the elderly, well, it's easy to see the problems with that. And if you always prioritize financially efficient saving the lives of children dying of dysentery now over expensive long-term goals like building infrastructure to provide clean water so future children don't get dysentery, you're kind of making the wrong calculus. I am aware that many people who think seriously about efficient giving do think about long-term and infrastructure issues, not just how many lives can be saved right now. But once you start considering those factors, there isn't a simple, linear measure of what counts as "efficiency".

And now we come to the nub of the issue, for me. You can save more lives for the same amount of money if you spend it on basic medicines for simple, acute conditions, and calories for people who are right now in danger of starving to death. But particularly, you can save more lives for the same amount of money if you spend it in resource-poor countries, and even more in some ways if you spend it in war-torn countries in the throes of humanitarian disasters. And that's where I really have a moral problem. I mean, there's a fundamental unfairness about the fact that some countries have no functional economy and no rule of law, while our country has generally excellent infrastructure including high-quality healthcare and a functioning if less than ideal welfare state. This didn't "just happen" by chance, it was caused by colonialism and continues to be exacerbated by unfair international trade practices etc. It's bad enough that we benefit from cheap consumer goods produced by people in countries with terrible wages and terrible labour practices. And in turn it's that unfairness that means that people like me have plenty of spare cash (and time!) to even be having philosophical debates about how to use it most "efficiently" for humanitarian purposes. But I really can't stomach the idea that I get cheap humanitarian benefit by spending my money in the developing world rather than at home.

That's not just a moral squick. It's also the fact that injecting cash from rich countries where its value is relatively little into countries where its value is relatively great perpetuates inequality. That is to say, the very fact that I can spend 50p on a bar of chocolate over here (or lose it down the back of the sofa and not really notice the difference), but the same money buys enough medicine to cure several sick children in a different country, well, that's very nice in the sense that I managed to save several children's lives for a trivial sum of money. But it's probably long-term bad for the recipient country because it's so much easier to buy the medicine with my casual, almost valueless donation than it is for local people who might have to do a whole day's labour or more to be able to afford the same medicine. And that just contributes to the cycle where people in resource-poor countries are aid dependent and basically never have a chance to build up their own economies.

My belief that people are entitled to fair compensation for their labour still applies when that labour is directed towards humanitarian ends. Medicine in resource-poor countries is cheap because fuel is cheap, which means that the people who extract it and distribute it are underpaid, and because the people who maintain the roads and transport the medicines are underpaid and because most of the people who build, clean and work in the clinics are underpaid (even if the actual doctors and nurses are volunteers from richer parts of the world.) And the marginal costs of treating additional sick children are tiny because the people doing the treating have access to all the infrastructure of former colonial powers, factories to produce medicines and vehicles to transport them in, education to produce the kind of skilled workers needed to handle the logistics (let alone the doctors, nurses, educators etc who are going to be part of any aid programme). Maybe the benefit of saving children's lives outweighs all these disadvantages, but it's not a straightforward calculus.

I don't think it's necessarily morally wrong to give some money to support this kind of aid; I just don't think it should be everybody's priority to make sure as much of their income as they can possibly afford goes to this kind of cause. In particular, I think it's right to give some or all of your charitable money to local causes, even though it's relatively expensive to help someone who lives in the UK. Perhaps even more controversially, I also think it's right to give some or all of your charitable money to causes that are inherently "inefficient" in terms of return on investment: political lobbying, where most of the money gets spent on things like fancy dinners for politicians who may or may not have any influence, and scientific research.

Yes, research. I'm aware that part of the reason why I react negatively to the efficient giving style of thinking is that I'm a professional cancer researcher. And cancer research is the Big Bad in the minds of the efficient giving people. I'm quite aware that it's inherently going to cost a lot of money; after all I've spent the last three years desperately trying to raise funds to run a very small cancer project. Just think how much rehydration therapy could have been provided for children with diarrhoea in resource-poor countries for £70,000! That's barely the minimum threshold needed to carry out the smallest possible experiments for three years. Cancer research is carried out in fancy labs, using a lot of high-tech equipment and extremely expensive biochemicals, and it's done by highly trained personnel who may earn less than some professionals but are still paid fairly generous salaries even by the standards of a rich country. The great majority of it doesn't lead directly or at all to life-saving treatments. Even when it does, those treatments are themselves extremely expensive, partly because of drug patents but also partly because pharmaceutical and medical tech companies have to recoup the extremely high costs of research, and because doctors are highly paid and the infrastructure costs of running hospitals are astronomical, and cancer treatment takes a long time and takes up a lot of medical resources. Further, most people with cancer are elderly, so you're only saving them a few years of life anyway!

I have still chosen to devote my life to this, rather than earning five times as much in a city finance job and giving away most of my salary to cost-efficient development charities. That's partly because I am somewhat selfish and care about my own quality of life and job satisfaction and so on. But also because I think cancer research is a genuinely worthwhile thing to be doing, even if it's not financially efficient. I believe increasing human knowledge is a morally valid goal in its own right. I also believe that a lot of these inefficient ways of spending money contribute are efficient if you think on the right scale. It's similar to my argument that spending money on clean water infrastructure, or political action to ensure better trade arrangements between the developed and developing world, or working to prevent and mitigate the conflicts that lead to large numbers of people depending on pocket-money amounts of foreign aid to have the basic necessities are efficient in the long term in the sense of improving overall quality of life and tackling the root causes of the satisfyingly cheap to treat problems. In the same way, high-tech medical research is efficient on the long term scale because the aim of development charities is (or should be, in my opinion!) to do something about the situation where half the people in the world are barely subsisting, so eventually we get to a situation where everybody lives to 60 or more in relatively good health, which means that everybody is going to need treatment for the diseases that currently primarily affect rich, elderly westerners.

I do agree with many of the principles of efficient giving. I mean, once you've chosen which cause matters to you, it's a good idea to do research to find out which charities are actually putting most of their donations into actually tackling that cause, and which are using most of it on the salaries of overpaid directors or unsuitable interventions which feel good to donors but don't have much benefit (or are actively harmful) on the ground. If you care about breast cancer, it's almost certainly right to give money to Breakthrough Breast Cancer rather than some company that sells tacky pink shit and donates a few pennies out of their profit to vaguely cancer-related causes. Should you prefer Breakthrough Breast Cancer, who fund cancer research, over the kinds of organizations that provide emotional support to people going through cancer? Really hard to argue on "efficiency" grounds; emotional support is vastly, almost immeasurably cheaper, but the benefits are nebulous and hard to measure too, and are unlikely to save many lives. Emotional support helps pretty much everyone with breast cancer; most scientific research produces only negative results (that would be why it's research rather than "stuff we know already!"). Or should you bypass charitable giving altogether, and lobby politically for the government to assign more tax money to breast-cancer related causes?

However, when you're choosing which causes to support with your charitable donations, I don't think it's morally right to always gravitate towards the cheapest causes. Particularly if they're cheap because of systematic inequalities, rather than because they're actually cheap (eg treating a child with diarrhoea in the UK through our high-tech medical infrastructure with doctors, nurses and other health professionals involved in their care, versus treating hundreds of children with diarrhoea in resource-poor countries with marginal costs of pennies per case for oral rehydration salts and boiled water to make them up with.) But even if you're comparing dealing with something inherently expensive to tackle with something inherently cheap within the same economic context, I'm very wary of making it a moral absolute to prefer the cheaper problems. Because it's very easy to slide from that to start valuing financial efficiency over actual people; for example, quite reputable moral philosophers have argued not just for healthcare rationing, but for actual euthanasia, for people with severe disabilities. Not just on the grounds that all the money spent on their care and needed adaptations could help hundreds or thousands of starving children in resource poor countries, though that's bad enough, but because living with a major disability means that your quality of life is going to be too low to be worth it no matter how much money is poured in. I reject that view completely, though I'm aware that it's not shared by all proponents of efficient giving.

There's also the issue of how much of your money should go to humanitarian causes. I think most people agree there's a sensible balance between spending every spare penny on efficient charity, and always prioritizing fun toys and entertainment over worthwhile causes; other than teenagers who have just discovered utilitarianism, everybody understands that this is a nuanced issue. Still, efficiency alone can't be the only criterion; for example, where should the balance be between paying tax, which includes giving some of your income to things that are generally good for society and even these days some foreign aid, and buying things which directly effect the happiness of yourself and the people who depend on you, and spending money on officially charitable causes? Where's the balance between spending your time earning the highest possible hourly rate which can then be used to support worthwhile causes, and spending your time actually doing practically beneficial things for other people? Some charitable efficiency people argue that highly paid professionals should basically never do volunteer work, because it's always more efficient to work longer hours and use the extra cash for cost-efficient causes. I disagree with that, because I think volunteering has benefits beyond the merely practical; again, this is tied up with my view that people have moral obligations towards those they are personally connected to.

Where I do agree with the efficiency people is that it's far better to actually make positive decisions about which charities you want to support, and how much you can afford, and make a regular donation to your chosen cause, than to just give money randomly whenever you happen to encounter a moving appeal. Partly because just giving on a whim almost always means giving less, and if you can afford more and morally think it's right to give more, then you should set yourself up to do so, not set yourself up to forget because you're not in the habit or because you saw a shiny thing which took up all your spare money this month. Partly because haphazard giving rewards causes that spend a whole bunch of money on advertising and chuggers and generally encouraging people to importune you in order to pick up your haphazard donations. I do agree that it's better to support charities that spend their money on the actual problem, not superfluous stuff.

I wonder how many people I've mortally offended with this post...

Comments

[rmc28]

I agree with much of what you say - I have been brewing a post about my own giving for about 18 months (because I have a certain amount of discomfort about it to break through) and while I have found the "efficient giving to help lots of people a long way away" compelling, it is not the whole of what I want to fund. It doesn't cover all the ways in which I would like to see the world improve.

[liv]

Fair enough! I agree that talking about money like this is really awkward; I have talked about general principles in this post, not about how much and how I personally give to charity.

Regarding funding other stuff apart from very cheap humanitarian interventions, in addition to my qualms about market distortion, I think people do have a right to contribute to causes that are close to their hearts, even if those are not the most pressingly urgent causes! Like, if I give some money for terminally ill kids to go on fun holidays (I don't, but it's an example), that's still better than spending the money on tat that I don't really need and just adds to landfill. Even if one might argue that it's "worse" than spending the same money on treating preventable blindness in children in resource-poor countries, though I'm not completely convinced that's true in all circumstances.

[jack]

Utilitarianism

I think (along with just about every other philosophical idea ever), utilitarianism was a great idea that solved a major problem and is an excellent way to think about things, but is not the magic endpoint where it's the only sort of thought we ever need. So does "being a utilitarian" mean "thinking utilitarian thought was a useful advance over the ten commandments" or "think that we can turn our brains off and not consider how to advance knowledge into the gaping holes utilitarianism leaves unfullfilled?"

I think utilitarian thought is useful, but I agree that any sensible system of morality has to make people more responsible for the people close to them, if only because people are going to act like that anyway.

The question of "how much are we responsible to our own country" is a difficult one for me. On the one hand, for politics, infrastructure, rights, etc, it's pretty much avoidable that people should be responsible for making sure their country is ok. On the other hand, I don't want to say "an english person's life is worth more than a nigerian's life" because that sounds abominable!

[liv]

Yeah, I don't think utilitarianism is inherently stupid, I just got annoyed with the guy at Veizla for claiming it's the "only rational" basis for morality. And obviously if you're trying for the greatest happiness for the greatest number, you're still going to make sensible calculations and not be completely short term like: must kill myself to donate all my organs! or other ridiculous parodies of utilitarianism.

It's notoriously hard to articulate how connectedness and morality work together. I'm sort of ok with that, because I suspect an effective moral system is not going to be reducible to a simple statement or formula. It's something to do with how much responsibility you have being proportional to how much influence you have. Also people like Buber and Levinas always sound really sensible to me when other people explain their moral philosophies, but I'm not confident I can explain why I agree with them very well. They were somewhat reacting against Heidegger in the light of the fact that if you try to make a purely objective / rational moral system without taking into account any personal relationships, you kind of end up with Naziism. (Sorry, Godwin!)

[naath]

utilitarianism>
Problem is that step 1 is to choose the uttility function... It's not clear to me the right thing is 'save greatest number of lives', although it might be a good start.

People here>
I think that mostly in the UK my effort is better spent lobbying the government to help people; whereas disaster victiims need urgent help. Sense? Not sure.

[jack]

Infrastructure

I think you're right that anything that can improve matters long term is almost certainly a top target for any sort of development, and if people are ignoring that it's a problem.

But I think you may need to make the case that it's being ignored in the efficient giving ideas (not just that IF it is THEN it's a problem, with which I agree) -- this may well be right and be obvious to you, but it wasn't obvious to me, and I suspect it's not obvious to people more involved with those ideas either, which may make them just confused and defensive, rather than convinced.

PS. *hugs*

[liv]

No, I totally realize that people who think seriously about efficient giving are cognizant of long-term versus short-term issues. My point is not that they're all morons who always want to spend all the money on curing cheap, acute childhood illnesses and never on prevention or infrastructure or political change. It's just that once you have acknowledged that there are different scales, then "efficiency" isn't nearly as useful a measurement as you thought it was.

[jack]

cancer research is the Big Bad in the minds of the efficient giving people.

I think this is something else where I've not been exposed to that idea.

I can see why it arises, if one thinks cancer is over researched at the expense of other diseases which can be equally bad but less in the public consciousness. Although I don't want to think that because (a) I want to think that scientific knowledge is always good and (b) I want Liv's work to be awesome.

But because I've not been personally lambasted with it, it always seems to come out of left field when someone rebutts it. Is this really entrenched? Or is it a bad example people coming back to? I can imagine how it would make me feel awful (whether or not it were correct), but I only get it in second and third hand echoes, so I keep forgetting it's an issue.

[liv]

Some people think that cancer gets a disproportionate amount of research money and attention at the expense of other diseases. That's not entirely untrue, I think. But the efficient giving people think that all medical research conducted in the western world is a horrible immoral waste of money that should be better spent saving lots of lives in humanitarian disasters, and cancer is just the worst culprit.

[lethargic_man]

I think this is something else where I've not been exposed to that idea.

Quite, and I've never come across this concept of utilitarianism or efficiency in donation either. (This happens from time to time on your (liv's) blog.)

As far as I'm concerned, I want to help cancer research for purely selfish reasons: so that the cancer I'm statistically not unlikely to get in later life is curable, or at least treatable, by the time I get it. But OTOH I recognise the point about cancer research being prioritised at the expense of other diseases, which is why I give to Alzheimer's research too, thanks to Terry Pratchett's drawing attention to the inequality of funding there.

I don't know how prevalent this argument of utilitarianism is; for me, and probably many people too, the question is not how can I most efficiently give to charity, but what is a sensible amount to give to charity, and how can I best split what I'm giving amongst what I care about?

As you know, Bob, Jewish tradition encourages giving 10% of one's income; but this is complicated for us because we live in a world where a substantial portion of our income is siphoned off by the government through income tax and other taxes, which government then gives a proportion of it to charity.

I wish there was an easy way of knowing how much of the money I give to the government ends up going to charity, so I could calibrate how much I give. (But with different taxes going to different places, and Gift Aid, and GAYE, it's all probably too complicated to work out.)

In about 1990 New Scientist published a piece about the "personal pound"—turning the telephone-figure sums governments deal in into amounts in pounds and pennies for each of the people in the UK. That would be quite useful here too.

Hmmm, I seem to have sidetracked the scope of the discussion somewhat...

[crystalpyramid]

You make a lot of really good points here, and you've managed to articulate some arguments that were just nebulously floating around in my head. A couple of my friends are very focused on efficient giving — there was an odd thread awhile back about trying to maximize their earnings so they could donate the most possible to charity, rather than trying to maximize their job satisfaction or the direct impact of their actual work, and it seemed very wrong to me.

In the upper-middle-class (American) circles I run in, people tend to overvalue independence and undervalue interdependence. Those people who have strong friend networks that act like family are very proud to have discovered such a thing; actual family ties seem severely deemphasized, and forget about things like ties to one's local community. Other than buying local food and supporting local rather than chain coffee shops, I mean! We believe in local economic/commercial support, but much less in the social safety net one's community ought to provide.

I thought this sentence

But I really can't stomach the idea that I get cheap humanitarian benefit by spending my money in the developing world rather than at home.

was gold. Look, we can even outsource our charitable giving to the third world! The return on investment is so much greater there! It's so completely and utterly distasteful when put that way, and it's supported by valid arguments, too.

Would it be okay if I linked to this?

[liv]

Thank you, I'm really happy to know that this spoke to you! Also, I'm really glad you got my point about why I find some of the efficiency arguments so distasteful.

And yes, absolutely, local community and family are really important, and easy to ignore when you're trying to come up with a simple formula. Really good point that youngish, relatively well-off people who like to argue left-wing positions on the internet are likely to perceive themselves as independent of their communities or underestimate how important communities are to other people from different backgrounds.

Please do link, I always like links to my little essays!

[jack]

that just contributes to the cycle where people in resource-poor countries are aid dependent and basically never have a chance to build up their own economies

I am aware this is a significant problem (although that's all I know, I wish I knew more about it). But what _is_ helpful? Are roads and medicines something that do need an initial injection to get the system kickstarted?

PS. Sorry if I sound disagree-ing, I just always focus on the things I'm not sure of in a long essay... :)

[liv]

That's a good question, and I'm ashamed to say I don't know as much about this as I ought to. It's definitely a many-faceted argument. There is no question that direct aid is often needed, especially in the face of an acute disaster whether natural or man-made. So I wouldn't want to say that people in rich countries should never spend charitable money on urgent problems (including treatable disease and starvation) in resource poor countries. Just that shouldn't be assumed to be always superior to every other means of improving the situation in poorer parts of the world.

This is Teju Cole's much-reported essay about the white savior industrial complex; the name almost says it all, really! And this is a random recent article I found by Googling "Trade not aid", which is pretty damning, though I'm sure it's only one side of the story.

[aphenine]

I thought about this a while back and came to the conclusion that the real problem of any form of efficient charitable giving was that it rendered unnecessary any feeling of kindness on the part of the giver. Being efficient requires a rational approach, where one thinks and quantifies the potential gain and acts to maximise it. Yet I've found a sense of charity and kindness tends to come from having emotional traits like empathy and caring, which make one feel bad when someone else is suffering. So by getting too rational about it, one loses sight of the whole reason for giving aid in the first place.

Empathy is not always the most efficient approach, but it's pretty good. Those suffering immediately around us are always more prioritised than those suffering far away and that isn't right. Yet I've always felt that, if you can't feel for the people suffering close to you, you have no business trying to feel for the people suffering far away, even in a statistical sense. It strikes me as bizarre that people have developed a sense of empathy evolutionarily and now people think that it can be bypassed for better results by completely avoiding any sense of sentiment and emotion.

When I think about it, I can see why it's worked well for millennia. First of all, to help someone, you need to know something about them. Giving to charity is a lot like more pre-Credit Crunch investment has turned out to be. Most of the information about how you have helped someone is stripped out, as a consequence of distance and organisation, and it's crazy to think that you know how to help people better than they do, when you know nothing about them. But that's what efficient giving causes to happen.

Locally, resources can be deployed much more efficiently because you have the knowledge to do so. You know your community, your area, the people in it, the legal and ethical frameworks you live in. You know what's necessary and how to go about making it better.

Given how much the mind and body are linked, I've found that rational forms of support usually work against themselves. For example, giving someone medicine to fix something, but giving them no emotional support while they're on it, causing them to get depressed, stop eating and looking after their health, causing the medicine to stop acting causing them to die. That's just so efficient... That's why empathic people are drawn to work on both material and emotional aid. You have to look after both.

Although empathy causes you to focus on groups of people you know, statistically, it tends to to be that, even if you focus on groups you know, everyone gets covered eventually because all people are linked. And it's easy to empathise with people far away, since many people choose to do voluntary service overseas, which they follow up by more material donations. They've lived and worked with the people they're helping and they don't suffer from any of the informational problems that dog so many of us.

Also, I've found that trying to be efficient introduces a sense of hopelessness, since you can't solve all the word's problems by yourself, just those you can, so why bother doing anything at all? Yet usually helping people out on the small scale is how people get helped out on the big scale. To paraphrase The Art of War, helping a large group of people is the same as helping a small group of people, it is merely a matter of organisation. So if you cripple charitable giving on the small scale, there isn't anything to work with on the big scale.

[liv]

I have a lot of time for this line of argument. It's not possible to be purely rational anyway (real life people with brain damage who don't experience emotions aren't like Mr Spock, they basically find they can't make any decisions at all, and it's significantly disabling). One of the big problems I have with the movement that values "rationality" above everything is not taking any account of actual biology.

I think there are definitely things that can be accomplished at a distance using money, especially if you take steps (as the efficient giving folk do) to make sure the money goes to locally-led groups. However that is by no means the only way of helping others. I agree with the advantages you've mentioned of working directly in your own local community, particularly that emotional support is important even though it's hard to put numbers on how many lives it saves.

[ptc24]

The thing about utilitarianism... which I blow hot and cold on... is that there seems to be a gamut of positions on how deep it should be. At one end of the spectrum there's treating it as a decision procedure; making decisions case-by-case from first principles, towards the other end there's a much more meta-ethical approach where you use it to derive practical moral/ethical principles to live by, or to critique existing principles, or to have lying around so that you can squint at some existing principle and say "yep, I bet I could derive that from utilitarian principles if I tried hard enough" or "nope, I really can't see the point here", or just say "I've got a first philosophy lying around here somewhere, I've a hunch it could justify the bulk of my thoughts and practises, no need to worry then, now how's about that game of backgammon you were talking about?"

It reminds me a bit of the sorts of debates between people who like to use "reductionism" as a pejorative and then claim all sorts of ideas and practises aren't reductionist, and the people who like to defend reductionism, often by claiming that most of those things are reductionist after all. One feels they are using different meanings of "reductionism", but I don't feel the debate can be reduced to just that.

The term I learned quite recently was "self-effacing utilitarianism" - the idea is you start off from utilitarian principles and quite swiftly deduce that following the following principle would maximise utility: "don't promote utilitarianism".

[liv]

Yes, this is a good point, you can apply utilitarianism at different levels. And the self-effacing utilitarianism idea is kind of hilarious! I think the same is true for "efficiency" (or effectiveness, as some people seem to prefer); if you measure the amount of good you can do with your money in a simplistic way, you miss important issues and are likely to come up with counterproductively short-term approaches. But if you measure it in a way that's at all sophisticated and considers different scales, then efficiency isn't even a thing any more, you're right back where you started in trying to make decisions.

[ajollypyruvate]

I very much like Orwell's take on so many humanitarian efforts:
"All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite..."

The "cheap consumer goods" very much highlights this attitude. In the U.S., there are -still- people who believe that child labour is just fine. I've seen news articles and blog posts of outrage at such an idea... so long as one is talking about the U.S., of course. (Yes, many people oppose these practices wherever they occur but they're still buying those products.)

In Burma Chronicles by Mr. Delisle, one of the several conversations he recounts has to do with why certain NGOs left the country: Because they aid they were giving simply allowed the dictatorship to ignore its responsibility to the people of Burma and instead continue to grossly exploit them. (I was going to read more about the ruby trade but I don't think I can stomach it right now.)

[liv]

Thank you for that quotation; Orwell is, as so often, extremely apt even several decades after he wrote. It seems like the efficient giving people are taking what he describes as hypocrisy even further: they're not just benefitting from incredibly exploitative markets and labour conditions, they're claiming it as a good thing that food and medicine are so cheap in resource-poor countries, so they get to help more people with less outlay.

And the consumer goods issue, argh, it's so complicated and difficult. I am trying to reduce the contribution of child labour to my lifestyle, but I'm not doing as much as I should. And I am concerned that efficient giving philosophy would mean that I should buy the cheapest, slave-labour produced everything in order to save more of my money to send for cheap medical treatments in resource-poor countries, because the economic differential means that I can save more lives with the money than I'm harming by buying unethical goods in the first place! This seems like a horrible loop to get into.

Men are not potatoes

[elf]

There's a passage in Starship Troopers (the book, not the bug-hunt movie with all the philosophy removed):

"Are a thousand unreleased prisoners sufficient reason to start or resume a war? Bear in mind that millions of innocent people may die, almost certainly will die, if war is started or resumed."

I didn’t hesitate. "Yes, sir! More than enough reason."

" ‘More than enough.’ Very well, is one prisoner, unreleased by the enemy, enough reason to start or resume a war?"

I hesitated. I knew the M. I. answer — but I didn’t think that was the one he wanted. He said sharply, "Come, come, Mister! We have an upper limit of one thousand; I invited you to consider a lower limit of one. But you can’t pay a promissory note which reads ‘somewhere between one and one thousand pounds’ — and starting a war is much more serious than paying a trifle of money. Wouldn’t it be criminal to endanger a country — two countries in fact — to save one man? Especially as he may not deserve it? Or may die in the meantime? Thousands of people get killed every day in accidents . . . so why hesitate over one man? Answer! Answer yes, or answer no — you’re holding up the class."

He got my goat. I gave him the cap trooper’s answer. "Yes, sir!"

" ‘Yes’ what?"

"It doesn’t matter whether it’s a thousand — or just one, sir. You fight."

"Aha! The number of prisoners is irrelevant. Good. Now prove your answer."

I was stuck. I knew it was the right answer. But I didn’t know why. He kept hounding me. "Speak up, Mr. Rico. This is an exact science. You have made a mathematical statement; you must give proof. Someone may claim that you have asserted, by analogy, that one potato is worth the same price, no more, no less, as one thousand potatoes. No?"

"No, sir!"

"Why not? Prove it."

"Men are not potatoes."

The "most efficient" forms of aid assume that all humans are equal blobs of no specific value, and with no relation or connection to each other. The idea that we "should" spend our money helping hundreds of total strangers overseas rather than our neighbors or our families is ridiculous. (Certainly, no sane parent says, "I'm not treating my child's broken leg; I've spent all our money on medical treatments for children in other countries. After all, that way I've helped hundreds of children be healthy, not just one.")

The drive for "efficient charity", I think, comes out of guilt: if we try to help locally, we're stuck trying to figure out what's valuable and what's not, which organizations are corrupt and which ones actually help, and what causes are worth our support. In short, involves an endless string of judgement calls.

Helping charities overseas that feed and provide medical aid to third-world families, however, bypasses all that. It doesn't matter if the management is corrupt and skimming money--whatever money gets through *is* helpful. It doesn't matter if they're working for long-term changes to alleviate the problems in the future if there's the excuse of immediate help now. It doesn't matter if they fail to fight sexism or racism; they can claim to be too busy feeding people and providing antibiotics to care about "politics."

Which is not to say they're bad causes; it *IS* good to feed people now and worry about social dynamics later. It's just that no, "the most aid to the most people as fast as possible" is not the only possible moral decision. Our relationships and our communities aren't built on the idea that we're all interchangeable units of humanity, and charities that acknowledge that we have a vested interest in caring for the people close to us are not doing it wrong.

(I am not saying that it's worth going to war over one prisoner. I am saying that the value of individuals to a community is not based on their numbers. Moral obligations and empathy are not universally transferable.)

Re: Men are not potatoes

[liv]

Thank you for that quotation. I'm glad I made this post because there really is some excellent writing on this very practical aspect of ethics, and it's good to see some of the texts different people are taking as touchstones here.

This definitely encapsulates why I am not a utilitarian; you can't sum up "happiness" in an arithmetical way, precisely because people are not interchangeable, or Men are not potatoes. I absolutely believe the connections and relationships between people, between specific individuals, have moral as well as emotional weight.

The drive for "efficient charity", I think, comes out of guilt
That's a really interesting take on it! I do think some people genuinely want to make their contributions go as far as possible, but it's a very important point that international donations like this avoid lots of the messiness and balancing benefits and harms that occur when you engage needy people directly.

[merrythebard]

This is a really interesting post, thank you. :-)

I feel somewhat... well, genuinely ambivalent about the whole issue. A lot of the utilitarian, efficient-giving arguments weigh with me quite highly, and I am and remain very happy that I'm giving 10% of my income (such as it is) to SCI.

But I'm not a utilitarian. And the infrastructure issues worry me, and I knew there was something about the wording of some of the efficient giving stuff that was squicking me, and that felt dehumanising and appropriative. Thank you for expressing it so well! And I had no *idea* that GWWC has a picture of a would-be killer of disabled people on the front - that is utterly disgusting. :-( (And argh, the use of "Disability Adjusted Life Years". It is Very Problematic. My life did not suddenly become more worthwhile when I stopped being a wheelchair user. *growls*)

I also completely, *thoroughly* agree that we have an extra responsibility to those we have a connection with - our partners, families, friends, communities, land-masses. It is difficult because the UK is so much wealthier than a lot of other countries, and while I have on occasion needed to lend or give money to friends for food, it doesn't happen often. En masse, the people I am extra responsible are better off than the vast majority of other people on the planet. And three of the reasons for that are the British Empire, slavery, and perpetuated economic injustices. I think part of the trick with charitable giving is to balance both of these considerations. Plus an awareness that we do have *some* responsibility for everybody else on the planet.

If everyone gave to SCI and no one gave to any charities based in wealthy nations, I think this would be a Bad Thing. (Especially living in a country where the government are doing their best to abdicate responsibility for a lot of things that should be achieved through taxation.) So, on top of my 10% giving, I buy from and donate things to charity shops from a range of charities, and I will happily sponsor people and I will put things in collecting boxes, etc. etc. And my plan is to make larger one-off donations on months when I have the spare money to do so. And so on.

I think overall my perspective is.. it *all* needs doing. All of it. The social justice campaigning, and the treating preventable diseases in poor countries, and the famine relief, and the homeless shelters and the helplines and the medical research and the animal welfare and environmental campaigning and... *ALL* of it. Most charities and NGOs exist for very good reasons. And part of the solution to that is mass political and economic changes, to create a much more just, equal and peaceful world (and, preferably, one that's going to adjust well to Peak Everything). And part of that is that, well, probably most people need to do more than they are doing, in terms of both giving and volunteering, if we really are going to achieve the kind of world that we are collectively capable of achieving. So while, "this charity is really awesome because" makes complete sense to me (and I do think that SCI is awesome). "This charity is rubbish because your money doesn't go very far" doesn't seem like a good argument to me if the thing the charity is trying to achieve is a genuinely good thing. Which in most cases it will be.

[(Anonymous)]

I got puzzled by the Singer-hate, as I mainly know him as a pretty bright ethicist.

Singer is on the front page of Giving What We Can because he's doing the philosophical heavy lifting for the organisation, by the looks of it (and himself gives away over a fifth of his income, according to http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/peter-singer-you-ask-the-questions-415524.html).

I looked for stuff he had written on killing disabled people and it appeared to be a consistent application of the law that a disabled foetus may be aborted at any point (the primary source is http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1993----.htm): by his lights, Singer is not in favour of killing disabled people at all, since he does not regard any babies (whether disabled or not) as people.

Likewise, his thoughts on QALY are consistent with the idea that disabled people would prefer to be cured if possible (see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html?pagewanted=5&_r=4&hpw for example).

The point of QALY and giving efficiently is that governments (or whoever pays for health care) and individuals cannot in fact do it all, because our resources are finite, so we need some way of deciding who gets what. What Singer and NICE are doing is aiming for consistent utilitarianism (which may not be the ethical system everyone prefers, but which at least gives them a model into which to put some numbers).

Paul, http://pw201.livejournal.com/ (I would have logged in with OpenID but LJ is down again).

[lavendersparkle]

I think as a government economist I get a similar kind of visceral reaction against people arguing against trying to come up with ways to compare and work out the more efficient ways of doing good with limited resources that you, as a cancer researcher, get from people arguing against giving to cancer research charities.

I'm not a utilitarian and I do agree with some things you've said. I'm tired and need to get ready for Shabbat, so I'll have to leave my bid to win the Moral Vacuum of the Year award by arguing against giving to cancer research charities the day after I attended the funeral of someone who died of cancer until after Shabbat goes out (by which time it will be at least two days since the funeral).

[liv]

Thank you for joining in the discussion; you're definitely one of the people who have a right to feel attacked here, so I appreciate your being willing to engage! I am not at all against efficiency, and I don't hate government economists. I just think that the right time to make efficiency calculations is when you're deciding how best to promote the cause that you care about, and not when you're deciding which cause you should support.

Also that giving money for medicines in resource-poor countries isn't "efficient", it's exploiting existing inequalities. I'm writing against the pretence that there are just no consequences to this approach to philanthropy, as if you could just directly compare the amount of medicine (or "doing good") you can get for the same amount of cash.

[ephemera]

thank you - that's interesting reading. I haven't hit up too hard against hard-line "efficient giving" - more on the "making sure your support is turned into the impact you were looking for" efficiency than the more meta version of how you choose those causes / impacts.

Personally, I've felt the need to make peace with the fact that I can't give all the money to all the good causes - however good they are - and to just do *something* with what I can, both time, money, and attention-wise, because something is better than nothing, even if it's not everything.

[liv]

Thanks for commenting. I'm much more in favour of efficiency when it's about choosing how to address a cause, than when it's extended to choosing which cause to address. And yes, absolutely, everybody is making compromises about how much of their money (and lives in general) they devote to altruistic aims, and something is entirely better than nothing, I don't think anyone would disagree with that.

[forestofglory]

I've set aside a small amount of my (small) income to give to charity this last year, and then kind of dithered about what organizations to give the money to and not spent it. (The current plan is to give it all to a marriage equality charity in honor of my wedding.) There are so many good causes I'd like to support, and the amount of money I have is so small that it's just a drop in the bucket. Still if I can one put a drop in one bucket it's hard to decide which one bucket, but many smaller drops in more buckets doesn't seem that great. I'm sure that give money is better than dithering though.

With cancer charities I'm rather irritated at the way many of them frame their mission as about a cure for cancer, because it treats cancer as unpreventable and ignores the environmental health issues that can cause cancer. And I guess I am a bit utilitarian here -- because I think more focus on prevention and environmental issues could prevent more pain and suffering then finding a cure. This may be more of an issue here in the US where the standards of what chemicals are used in everyday products is much loser than in Europe.

[liv]

Really interesting comments, thank you. It definitely is hard to choose between causes, but I don't think a purely rational, efficiency approach is any better than a purely emotive approach for dealing with that difficult problem. I definitely do relate to the problem of feeling that the problems are so big compared to what you can possibly contribute; in some ways the efficiency thing is a response to that helplessness, because global inequalities mean that even a relatively poor person in the developed world can make a lot of difference to a lot of people in resource-poor countries. I'm just not convinced that's an unalloyed good thing, though, because it's still benefitting from and perpetuating the inequalities.

I think your instinct is probably right, that "hedging your bets" by giving to lots of different charities isn't really the right answer. There are real inefficiencies in collecting lots and lots of tiny donations rather than fewer, larger donations. Though there is some merit in giving trivial amounts of money to random things just to promote social cohesion. Giving change to a beggar so that they feel less rejected, or agreeing to sponsor someone who is raising money for a cause you don't strongly believe in just to be polite and friendly. A marriage equality charity sounds like a really good idea, and really symbolically appropriate!

Your point about cancer charities focusing on cure rather than environmental health issues is a really cogent one. I think it's a symptom of a fairly general problem that people don't even want to try to fix society-wide problems, though this could well be more effective than focusing on individual issues.

[pj]

I am unexpectedly working today so short and sweet. Thank you for a well-thought out essay. I do not prize efficient giving over other forms such as what you mentioned with strengthening infrastructure. I do not prize infrastructure giving over "can help NOW" giving. I want balance and both to be done.

What I want most is people to know enough about their charities to be comfortable giving to them and I prefer a mix of international, national, and local charitable helping. This is my preference because this is what I do and I am highly biased that my way is the best way. (If I weren't I'd being doing something other, obviously.)

I have a monthly allotment that goes to Doctors Without Borders. When I got the solicitation phone call mor than a year ago the man on the other end of the line was floored that I quickly agreed to a monthly amount. He stammered something about, "What if you lose your job?" (I generally engage people on the phone and we'd roundabouted to jobs, economy, my hours being cut at work, etc. before I said I'd commit to the monthly amount) I laughed and said I was perfectly capable of discontinuing the charity if need be due to there not being enough funds to put food on my own table. I was so enamoured of the fact that he wasn't only pulling his charity, but concerned with the givers that I don't see me discontinuing unless I can't even afford rice for sustenance.

I give "local" in-country to St. Jude's Children's Hospital (also monthly) because I believe in research and the future value of it. And local in my personal community I do not give a monthly thing to any one place, I spread it around. Some is money, some is goods, some is body participation.

And occasionally I fund things on Kickstarter for folks who are trying to get on their feet through a business venture or project.

If I am ever forced to stop giving to any of the places I will cut the international DWB first because of my desire to help in my corner of the world first. I am filled with the arrogant belief that if everybody worked to do this in their own corner of the world then as a whole the world would be "good, and right, and fair". <----- I know this is false, but it makes me feels good to believe it. Charitable giving is about both empathy and selfish conceit. Doing good to do good and to feel good about the doing. Outward and inward reward keeps the giving going, so to speak.

And look - my reply was not short at all and now I must run!

[liv]

Thank you, this was really interesting. I feel a bit bad that joining this discussion kept you from getting to work, but there's loads to say about it and people have such an interesting range of perspectives! I definitely agree that there are lots of different reasons for giving and lots of different causes that do different things, not a single "best" charity.

I'm a great fan of MSF/Doctors Without Borders, cool that you chose them for your regular donation. And it's great that the person who was trying to persuade you was so thoughtful and friendly! I also give to research charities, usually UK ones for lots of obvious reasons. I like the idea of participating in your community as well as just giving money; that's very important to me too.

[nameandnature]

President Bartlet: Why is a Kundunese life worth less to me than an American life?
Will Bailey: I don't know, sir, but it is.
("Equatorial Kundu" is the fictional African basket-case state in The West Wing.)

I guess one utilitarian get-out for helping people near you is "Purchase utilons and fuzzies separately" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z): no-body said you couldn't do the stuff that makes you feel good and limbers up your altruism muscles, it's just that that comes out of your "feeling good" budget, not your "making the world better" budget.

The "cheap virtue" thing didn't really make sense to me: the people you help are helped whether it was easy or hard for you to come up with the money. Do you have the feeling that if something was hard to come by it's thereby better? That's awfully Protestant of you :-)

I don't really understand the objection that because it's cheaper to help developing countries because of bad stuff in the past, we shouldn't do it, as long as by doing it we're not perpetuating the effects of the bad stuff. In this case, I don't really understand how this perpetuation of bad stuff is supposed to occur.

I do think there's the danger here of prioritising short term certain interventions over long term uncertain ones. Under a "shut up and multiply" regime, I guess Givewell would factor in a probability that they'd get the desired outcome, but it's not clear how you come up with that probability in the case of pure research.

I think that the Givewell types are also assuming that utilitarians must have a utility function which doesn't differentiate between people, but I'm not sure that's a requirement of utilitarianism, it's just a popular version of it. (It might be that there's no way to consistently do it without it leading to other weird conclusions, but I haven't thought about that very hard).

[liv]

I think utilitarianism as applied to philanthropy in this way is starting from the completely valid premise that people are of equal worth regardless of where they live in the world. That's a good basis for a morality which leads you not to be racist. But it's a wrong (though superficially appealing) inference to go from there to the conclusion that you should always try to save hundreds of lives in the third world cheaply rather than help one person in the first world expensively. The flaw is that although all people have equal value, they are not fungible. I don't totally buy the Heinlein thing quoted elsethread, but not-potatoes is probably a more useful concept than potatoes. Or "utilons", for that matter (seriously, utilons and fuzzies! some of this rationality stuff is really starting to vanish up its own arse...)

The problem I have with cheap virtue is not that it only "counts" if it's a serious sacrifice. The problem is that purchasing things that are cheap to us but expensive to people in the remote countries where we buy them is really bad for the economies of these remote countries. And that's still true even if the things are lovely fluffy things like food and medicine for the starving and sick. I think this kind of thing precisely is perpetuating the effects of the bad stuff. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, because clearly doing nothing at all to deal with starvation and preventable diseases isn't better! But it does mean that giving lots of money to charities that will spend it on cheap medicines in poor countries isn't the ultimate good.

Some of the efficient giving people definitely are looking at probabilities and going after long-term but uncertain society fixing rather than only immediate and certain but localized disease-curing. But once you start doing that you no longer have a soundbitey "give 10% of your income to SCI" single optimal solution to the moral issue, and people who care about efficiency are going to have just as much to argue about as people who are using other moral frameworks.

I also still think that using efficiency as a basis for choosing your causes is completely the wrong level to apply that principle. Clearly you should be as efficient as possible in trying to accomplish your goal, but "doing good" isn't a goal, it's too vague, it's at best a meta-goal. And because it isn't actually a measurable, defined goal, you can't make sensical statements about which types of philanthropy do the "most" good. I think this has a similar flaw to Pascal's wager: it's trying to do arithmetic with things that can't meaningfully be quantified. I don't mean that in a soppy "human life is sacred so mustn't be measured" sense, I mean it in a practical, empirical sense, you can't measure how much "good" you're doing in order to calculate your probabilities. Calling "the amount of good" a "utilon" merely obscures that flaw, it doesn't actually solve it.

[shreena]

I'm probably just being slow but there a couple of bits of this post that I just don't follow.

This point that you make - "And that just contributes to the cycle where people in resource-poor countries are aid dependent and basically never have a chance to build up their own economies." So, I think what you're saying is that giving aid prevents resource-poor countries from building up their economies. Does that mean that you're saying that not giving aid would help resource-poor countries to build up their own economies? If that is what you're saying, can you explain how you think that would help? Because I just don't see it. I think giving aid is perhaps not the best long-term solution for these countries but I think not giving aid would be even worse so I think giving aid is the less-bad option rather than the awesomely great option.

The other thing that I'm finding hard to follow in your post is that you say that you think we have a higher moral duty to those who we are closer to. I think I agree with that - if my father were dying, I would spend pretty much as much money as it took to get myself to his deathbed, even if I could save lots of starving children in Africa for that money and I would not feel in the tiniest bit guilty for it. But you seem to extend that to a moral duty to help local charities, "I think it's right to give some or all of your charitable money to local causes" - and I don't really understand that slide you're making from "people close to you" to "people geographically close to you". Can you explain this a bit?

[liv]

I'm not making an argument against aid! I definitely agree that giving aid is the less-bad option in this situation. What I'm arguing against is giving absolute priority to immediate, direct aid to people in crisis over every other possible type of intervention. Giving aid is better than doing nothing at all, but it's not necessarily better than, say, political action for things like debt forgiveness and equitable international trade, and against things like selling arms to corrupt regimes, or things like investment in infrastructure and education, or simply research into what is in fact the most beneficial thing to do in a given situation (even though some of that research will yield negative results and in some sense "waste" the money invested). Furthermore, helping people in resource-poor, formerly colonized countries isn't necessarily better than helping people in the UK just because it's cheaper.

About the closeness thing. I do find it very difficult to define what I mean, which means that it's fuzzy and you're quite right to challenge me on it. I think communities consist of more than just families, in short. I have obligations to people I interact with, not just my blood relatives, and the people I interact with most extensively are the people who have common interests with me and live close by. It's not just directly proportional to the distance between our houses!

One example would be that (as you probably know) I spend quite a lot of time volunteering with the synagogue here, when I could be spending the time earning more money to give to cost-effective charities. It's not "efficient" for me to spend my time comforting an old man dealing with the death of his wife of sixty years, or providing a listening ear for a young woman who's trying to work out where she fits in spiritually, or making sure that a bunch of lonely people have regular social contact and someone to notice if they have flu and are trapped at home. But I want to live in a world where people do these things for eachother.

Another example is that I include the local hospice among my preferred causes for financial donations. Hospice care is completely not efficient, it can be very expensive indeed and the whole point of it is that it doesn't save any lives at all. I choose the hospice in my town because I know something about it, I know some of the people involved, and I've observed how it's a very positive force within the community around here. I also feel that I'm indirectly helping the people I'm personally connected to, because my support of hospices means that if someone dear to me or a close relation should find themselves coping with a terminal illness, the service will be there to look after them.

[lavendersparkle]

This conversation reminds me of this cartoon.

I'm not a utilitarian. I'm never quite sure whether I'm an ontological ethicist who looks like a virtue ethicist or a virtue ethicist who looks like an ontological ethicist. Either way my ethical views come from a theistic position. I think I might be a nihilist if I had a purely materialist world view. So I'm coming from a pretty different position to Peter singer fanboys, but still I may be one of those horrible efficient giving types who has in the past explained to people why I don't give money to cancer research charities and shocked them even more by telling them that I've never even given a penny to any organisation researching my husbands incurable chronic illness that our children may inherit from him.

I do think that we have greater obligations to those closer to us than those more remote from us. As elf pointed out, you'd get pretty short shrift if you neglected your own children and justified it by giving money to feed and clothe many more children overseas. I think people vary in which people they think of as closer to them and how much they think that closeness increases the level of obligation. There are lots of reasons why this obligation might be greater, from giving being about relationship rather than just redistribution, to having a better idea of what is needed by those closer to you.

Unfortunately, in a world where wealth, power and other resources are unequally redistributed and the wealth and power of people close to you is correlated with your own, feeling more of an obligation toward those closest to you may actually perpetuate and even exacerbate societal inequalities. Someone might donate to their old independent school, further increasing educational inequalities. If everyone donated to medical research charities related to the disease their relatives suffered from or died of it could widen the disparity in life expectancy between income groups, because the diseases which tend to kill rich people will receive much more research funding than those which kill poor people. (My husband's illness is positively correlated with income and quite common among Ashkenazi Jews, so there's likely to be a cure in our lifetime.)

Another issue is that is hard to work out where exactly 'I have a stronger moral obligation toward people closer to me' shades into racism. I think it really is difficult to work out where that line is. I also think that quite a lot of people don't give to overseas NGOs because they're racist and really do think that African lives are not worth as much as British lives and see Africans as a dependent hopeless blob which is overpopulating and could probably do with there being fewer of and then try to justify their position with flaily about statements about corruption and dependency. (I hope that doesn't sound like I'm accusing you of being secretly racist. I'm not.)

I find it interesting that you're response to being a beneficiary of colonialism is to shy away from donating to the victims. To me it seems like the least I can do to hand my cash over to them.

I think something which annoys people who are into cost effective giving is that a lot of people put very little thought into who to donate to. That doesn't mean that anyone who put thought into it would give to SCI, but a lot of people have very little idea what their money will be used for and how effective the charities they give to are. I think most people would put more thought than that into their financial investments and I think we do have an obligation to put at least as much thought into the resources we handle to benefit others as those we handle to benefit ourselves.

I think in your post you have some misconceptions about what advocates of cost effective giving advocate. Charities which are cost effective tend not to be disaster relief or war zones. Those kinds of places tend to relatively expensive to operate in because they're dangerous and have less infrastructure. Also, charities tend to use disasters to raise donations so: a) there's lots of funding for disaster relief, decreasing the marginal benefit from more funds and b) NGOs can act in some pretty unhelpful ways within the disaster because it's their big chance to raise some serious cash. The charities Give What We Can recommends don't do disaster relief.

You also seem to think that cost effective giving advocates only care about short term aims and life saving treatments. In fact if you look at the charities Give What We Can recommends, they actually mainly reduce morbidity rather than mortality rates. A lot of the benefits from treating neglected tropical diseases are from the long term benefits of people getting a better education and being less prone to medical complications later in life due to the effect of the worms during childhood. Also, concerns about infrastructure and aid disrupting local economies in a way which is unhelpful in the long run are things which efficient giving advocates are really concerned about and part of the reason they favour charities putting resource into actually rigorously investigating the impact of their work, to avoid these kinds of problems.

You also seem to think that a cost effective giving approach isn't compatible with giving to political advocacy groups but Give What We Can right on their website say that some political advocacy groups may be more cost effective than the charities they recommend but they don't have enough research to make a call either way at the moment.

[liv]

Yes, I nearly linked to the XKCD cartoon! I do definitely acknowledge the problem that feeling more of an obligation toward those closest to you may actually perpetuate and even exacerbate societal inequalities. But just as not giving direct aid to the world's poorest isn't a solution to the problems caused by that kind of aid, not supporting your own community and those close to you isn't a solution to the problems of nepotism and inherited wealth divides and racism / racial inequality.

you're response to being a beneficiary of colonialism is to shy away from donating to the victims
That's not entirely true. I do donate to the victims of colonialism, particularly through Kiva. When I'm picking recipients I even give some priority to people in countries formerly colonized by the UK itself, as well as to Palestinians, precisely because those are the exploitations I most benefit from personally. My point is not that our country is responsible for harm in these countries, so we shouldn't donate, my point is that by buying stuff at cut price in countries suffering from the effects of colonialism, we are still exploiting the unfair situation (and possibly making it worse, because no local person can ever compete with foreign money). That's still true even if the stuff in question is medicines to help sick children. It's not a good thing that medicine is so much cheaper in resource poor countries, it's a bad thing, it's evidence (and possibly a partial cause) of unfairness that I want to help to end.