NYT - What if Charity Shouldn't be Optimized

I’m quite disappointed by this article. I talked to her and tried to steer her towards more substantive and novel concerns. I know that other knowledgeable people talked to her as well. That didn’t seem to make much of an impact.

Seems a lot of it is saying “you can’t put a price on x” — and then going ahead and putting a price on x anyway by saying we should prefer to fund x over y.

In her book, Ms. Schiller ties her criticism of effective altruism to broader questions about optimization, writing: “At a time when we are under enormous pressure to optimize our time, be maximally productive, hustle and stay healthy (so we can keep hustling), we need philanthropy to make pleasure, splendor and abundance available for everyone.”

Her conception of the good can include magnificence and meaning and abundance. But how can we make that available for everyone without the kinds of reasoning decried as ‘optimization’?

I feel like the people saying “you can’t put a price on a beautiful holy site” are trying to avoid saying “you can, and the holy site is worth more than the lives the money could have saved” - it’s not impossible that Notre Dame is worth the lives unsaved (with its millions of visitors a year), but it is impossible to refute the claim unless they are honest about how they’re valuing it.

It seems they’re missing the mood that our problems are larger than the resources we have to fix them, and so advocating for not facing the uncomfortable triage questions.

(My comments inspired by / plagiarised from https://x.com/trevposts/status/1865495961612542233 )

Here are the three most popular comments as of now. One, "giving to effective charities can create poverty in the form of exploited charity workers":

I’ve worked for a non-profit in the past at an unlivable wage. One of my concerns when I am looking at charities to give to and hearing that we need to give only to those that are most efficient, is that we are creating more poverty by paying the workers at some charities wages that they can’t live on.

Two, "US charities exist because the rich aren't taxed enough":

Our whole system of charity in the US has developed because the wealthy aren’t taxed enough, and hence our government doesn’t do enough. Allowing the rich to keep so much wealth means we don’t have enough national or state level funding for food, housing, healthcare, or education. We also don’t have adequate government programs to protect the environment, conduct scientific research, and support art and culture. I’m deluged every day by mail from dozens of organizations trying to fill these gaps. But their efforts will never have the impact that well planned longterm government action could.

Three, "I just tip generously":

Lately I’ve been in the mindset of giving money to anyone who clearly has less than me when I have the opportunity. This mostly means extra generous tipping (when I know the tips go to the workers and not a corporation). Definitely not efficient, but hopefully makes a tiny difference.

These just seem really weak to me. What other options did the underpaid charity workers have, that were presumably worse than working for the charity? Even if the US taxed the rich very heavily, there would still be lots of great giving opportunities (e.g., to help people in other countries, and to help animals everywhere). Tipping generously is sort of admirable, but if it's admittedly inefficient, why not do the better thing instead? I guess these comments just illustrate that there is a lot of room for the core ideas of effective altruism (and basic instrumental rationality) to gain wider adoption.

Overall, not one of the stronger critiques that I've read.

The "how could anyone put a numerical value on a holy space" snippet struck me. I'm no expert in measurement, but the answer to this question seems to be similar to "how do you measure how extraverted a person is?" or "how do you measure the sum total of all economic activity in a country?" or "how do you measure media censorship?" The answer is that you do it carefully, with the use of tools/assessments, proxies, parametric estimating, etc.

There is plenty of research that basically involves asking people "Would you rather have A or B," and with clever research design you really can measure how much people value various intangible things.^[1] And I don't even study or specialize in that area. So it stuck me as odd to have such an established set of solutions which weren't even mentioned. How to Measure Anything is great, but there is also lots written about willingness to pay.

1. ^{^}

   For anyone not familiar with that kind of research, a simplistic version would basically be asking people "Would you rather have an extra $100 each week or have a local art museum," and by varying the numbers you can get an idea of what dollar value people put on that specific experience. For anyone familiar with the research, please forgive me for my vast simplifications.

I think most of the article is pretty stock-standard, but I did want to elucidate a novel angle to replying to these kinds of critiques if you see them around:

When Notre Dame caught on fire in 2019, affluent people in France rushed to donate to repair the cathedral, a beloved national landmark. Mr. Singer wrote an essay questioning the donations, asking: How many lives could have been saved with the charitable funds devoted to repairing this landmark? This was when a critique of effective altruism crystallized for Ms. Schiller. “He’s asking the wrong question,” she recalled thinking at the time. She wanted to know: How could anyone put a numerical value on a holy space?

Ms. Schiller had first become uncomfortable with effective altruism while working as a fund-raising consultant. She encountered donors who told her, effectively, “I’m looking for the best bang for my buck.” They just wanted to know their money was well spent. That made sense, though Ms. Schiller couldn’t help but feel there was something missing in this approach. It turned the search for a charitable cause into an exercise of bargain hunting.

The school of philanthropy that Ms. Schiller now proposes focuses on “magnificence.” In studying the literal meaning of philanthropy — “love of humanity” in Greek — she decided we need charitable causes that make people’s lives feel meaningful, radiant, sacred. Think nature conservancies, cultural centers and places of worship. These are institutions that lend life its texture and color, and not just bare bones existence.

I’d humbly propose that, without good guardrails, this kind of thinking has good shot at turning racist/anglo-centric. It’s notable, of course, that the article mentioned the Notre Dame, and not the ongoing destruction of religious history in Gaza or Syria or Afghanistan or Sudan or Ukraine (for example). If critics of EA don’t examine their own biases about what constitutes ‘magnificence’, they risk contributing to worldviews that they probably abhor. Moreover, in many of these cases, these kinds of fundraisers contribute to projects that should be—and usually otherwise would be—funded by government.

If you value civic life and culture, but only contribute to your local, Western civic life and culture, then you are a schmuck and have been taken advantage of by politicians who want to cut taxes for the wealthy. Please, at least direct your giving outward.