The problem with US charity is that it’s not effective enough

In September 1973, the hi-fi sound equipment mogul Avery Fisher made a massive gift of $10 million (about $70 million in today’s dollars) to the New York Philharmonic. In thanks, Lincoln Center renamed the venue where the orchestra performs Avery Fisher Hall. Fisher was reportedly reluctant to agree to have the hall named after him, but nonetheless, the donation specified that his name be used “in perpetuity.” But in 2015, Lincoln Center wanted more money, and the record company billionaire David Geffen wanted to put his name on some stuff. He wanted that very hall to be renamed in his own honor, despite the Fisher name supposedly being forever. Geffen succeeded with a gift of $100 million to Lincoln Center and — perhaps more importantly — Lincoln Center paid $15 million to Fisher’s descendants so they would not sue. What that means is that the most prominent cultural organization in New York City lit $15 million on fire so that Geffen’s name would be on a concert hall. That $15 million didn’t even go to renovating the hall — it was just a bribe for Geffen’s own vanity, taking $15 million away from other things Lincoln Center could have invested in. Don’t worry though, the other $100 million reportedly helped with a variety of “acoustical shortcomings” in the concert hall. Meanwhile, about 586,000 people, most of them children under the age of 5, died of malaria in 2015, a disease that is easily treatable and preventable with inexpensive interventions that Geffen could have funded instead. But he wanted his name on a theater. A piece this week in the New York Times, however, warns that we’re at risk of giving too much money to malaria and not enough money to less optimized causes, like fixing acoustical shortcomings in concert halls. Author Emma Goldberg laments that effective altruism (EA), which asks us to use reason and evidence to find the charitable causes that can do the most good per dollar, has become “the dominant way to think about charity,” which “argues, essentially, that you do not get to feel good for having done anything at all.” The second claim is so bizarre it’s hard to know where to start: I have been part of the EA community for a decade at this point, and I have never once heard someone argue that you should not feel good for helping others. Most EAs I know have complex and nuanced feelings about how their emotions and their giving relate. In general, if you hear a group described as believing something obviously ridiculous, you should consider the possibility that you’re being lied to. But the first claim, that EA has become the dominant way that charity is done in the US, is even more wrong, and more insidious. The best data I’ve seen aggregating donations from major effective altruist groups — like grants from the Open Philanthropy group, individual donations given through GiveWell, etc. — found that a little under $900 million was donated by EA funders in 2022. Those donations were mostly, but not exclusively, made in the US. By contrast, total US charitable donations in 2022 were $499 billion. That means that even if all EA funding were in the US, it would amount to a whopping 0.18 percent of all giving. Giving to the arts alone that year totaled $24.67 billion, or over 27 times more than was allocated based on EA ideas. Put differently: US philanthropy is still much, much, much more about rich guys like David Geffen slapping their names on concert halls than it is about donating to help people dying from malaria, or animals being tortured in factory farms, or preventing deaths from pandemics and out-of-control AI, to name a few EA-associated causes. Pretending otherwise, though, lets more complacent philanthropists off the hook for refusing to think through the consequences of their actions. Goldberg approvingly cites the writer and political philosopher Amy Schiller, arguing that philanthropic funds are better spent on, say, rebuilding Notre Dame than on anti-malarial bednets: “She wanted to know,” Goldberg writes of Schiller, “how could anyone put a numerical value on a holy space?” The life you didn’t save Well, here’s one way. The Notre Dame restoration cost a reported $760 million. Top anti-malaria charities like the Malaria Consortium and the Against Malaria Foundation can save a life for $8,000, taking the highest estimate for the latter. Let’s double that, just in case it’s still too optimistic; after all, $760 million, even spread over a few years, would require these groups to massively grow in size, and they might be less cost-efficient during that growth stage. At $16,000 per life, the Notre Dame restoration budget could save 47,500 people’s lives from malaria. Effective altruism often involves consideration of quantitative evidence, and as such, proponents are often accused of being more interested in numbers than humanity. But I’d like the Notre Dame champions like Schiller to think about this in terms of concrete humanity. 47,500 people is about five times the population of the town I grew up in, Hanover, New Hampshire, which, as it happens, contains the college that Schiller now teaches at. It’s useful to imagine walking down Main Street, stopping at each table at the diner Lou’s, shaking hands with as many people as you can, and telling them, “I think you need to die to make a cathedral pretty.” And then going to the next town over and doing it again, and again, until you’ve told 47,500 people why they have to die. Kids over cathedrals EA is in many ways an offshoot of consequentialism, the school of moral philosophy that evaluates moral actions based solely on the goodness or badness of their consequences. One of the major rivals to consequentialism is a theory called “contractualism,” which asks instead: Are you acting according to principles that no one could reasonably reject? Or, put another way, do you feel you can defend the rule you’re following to everyone affected by it? Whatever your philosophical leanings, it’s a useful thought experiment. And there are some versions of that conversation I can imagine having. I think it’s okay to tell someone at risk of malaria that they’re not getting pills or bednets to prevent it because the money is going instead to develop a vaccine against tuberculosis so that even more people’s lives could be saved. That’s a reasonable principle to act on. In her piece, Goldberg worries that an effective altruist philanthropic strategy that among other things insists that foreigners’ lives count equally — a foundational part of EA — could fray “people’s already threadbare ties to local charities like soup kitchens and shelters, worsening civic isolation.” I think it’s worth thinking through the comparison here a bit more carefully. Housing vouchers for people experiencing homelessness in the District of Columbia, where I live now, run up to $30,000 a year. As horrific as conditions for DC-ers experiencing homelessness are, am I willing to let a couple of kids in West Africa die to put up one of my neighbors for a year? I’m not. That said, it’s a harder question than the Notre Dame one. I can imagine explaining to kids waiting for bednets that my tax dollars are going to help people suffering in the US, not Nigeria, because we live in a democracy, and democracies have to respond more to the needs of their citizens, even if the needs in a much poorer country like Nigeria are much greater. I won’t feel great, but at least there’s some kind of legitimate reason. But can I imagine going down Main Street and telling people they need to die for Notre Dame? Of course not. If I were to file effective altruism down to its more core, elemental truth, it’s this: “We should let children die to rebuild a cathedral” is not a principle anyone should be willing to accept. Every reasonable person should reject it. The sight of rich Westerners like David Geffen directing their philanthropy not toward saving lives but toward improving the acoustics of the New York Phil fills me with visceral disgust. There are hard questions in the ethics of philanthropy, but this is simply not one of them. Maybe when the bednets crew amounts to more than 0.18 percent of giving, it’ll be worth asking if we’ve gone too far. But if the question is really Notre Dame versus dying kids, there is only one right answer.