When choosing a charity, the go-to idea is to give to an entity that helps the most people/pets/places, etc. But is that always the right move? New York Times business features writer Emma Goldberg joins host Krys Boyd to discuss hyper-efficiency in philanthropy — attracting donors by promising the most bang for their buck — and why this leaves smaller nonprofits behind. Plus, we’ll ponder the question: Should multiplying our dollars be the only reason we give? Her article is “What if Charity Shouldn’t Be Optimized?”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Whatever your goal these days, finding stuff to watch or accustomed tailored eating plan or the best vacation destination based on what you like to do. Apps and algorithms can take in your specific preferences and calculate what works best for you and only you. In a world where thousands of charities are competing for support, there is a movement to also optimize the impact of our philanthropic contributions by putting our dollars toward whatever can save the most human lives for the least cost. But are those the only factors that should matter to donors? From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Emma Goldberg is a business features writer at the New York Times, which published her article. “What If Charity Shouldn’t Be Optimized?” It explores the undeniable benefits of what is called effective altruism, but also notes the ways that unyielding adherence to efficiency can harm small local organizations that may not directly save lives, but can improve their quality. Emma, welcome to Think.
Emma Goldberg [00:01:00] Thanks for having me on.
Krys Boyd [00:01:03] You start by noting our collective obsession with tools like smartwatches, which promise to optimize our sleep in our steps and our water intake and calories. Given our belief that we can objectively determine what is best for our bodies, maybe it’s not surprising that many of us want to do the same thing with other aspects of our lives, like charitable giving.
Emma Goldberg [00:01:24] It’s a good point. I think what prompted me to write this article is that I’m very sympathetic to what you just said. I and so many people all around me rely on so many tools to optimize how productive we are at work and how healthy we are. You know, I use apps that track my running, for example, and my reading. And I think then the question just became, when we choose where to give away money. It’s also it’s a question of effectiveness and efficiency, but it’s also a question of really how we define the very question of what it means to do good and what morality means to us. So I think it’s worth just asking the question can we introduce one more layer of inquiry and curiosity in addition to just saying let’s optimize, let’s maximize impact. Can we also just add the additional layer of questioning? What does good mean to us?
Krys Boyd [00:02:26] What does it look like to base a decision about charitable giving primarily on metrics as opposed to the old fashioned way where something stirs us and we just write a check or, you know, throw some cash in the pot.
Emma Goldberg [00:02:39] It’s a great question, and I think something really constructive that the effective altruism movement has done is, first of all, prompt us to ask, how can we do the absolute most good possible with the money we have? And then also to spread around tools that allow us to actually answer that question. So there are now organizations that rate how effective and impactful specific charities are. And there are charities that actually promise to just very directly give cash to the people in the world who need it most. And for a lot of people, that’s a wonderful option for how to give away money because it allows you to say you can actually just take the money you want to give it, you want to give away and through an organization, give it directly to the people in the world who need it the very most and then allow them to put it to use for the needs that are most immediate in their lives. And so I think that the point of my piece was just to say, can you save a little bit of the money you’re giving away to not necessarily not give it to those causes, but to just take a moment to really probe what gives my life meaning and how can I extend that meaning into other people’s lives.
Krys Boyd [00:03:50] Just to be clear, for people who think I’ve heard this before, we’re not talking about websites that tell you how much, say, a nonprofit, you know, pays its executives and how much of the money actually goes to the causes. This is far beyond that.
Emma Goldberg [00:04:06] The movement does go beyond that, although you could argue that that that’s one layer of it. But what this movement does is also just say, think about the people in the world who absolutely need the money the most. And let’s let’s get the money into their hands. And often that means impoverished people in developing countries who really desperately need some of their very basic needs met.
Krys Boyd [00:04:28] This philosophy was first articulated by Peter Singer, who’s been on the show a couple of times. It’s called Effective Altruism. Will you just lay out for us the sort of basic principles of this?
Emma Goldberg [00:04:42] Absolutely. And I want to start by saying effective altruism is such a broad movement with so many diverse thinkers and practitioners. So I don’t want to say that any one person or any one school of thought sums it up. But the base was definitely laid with Peter Singer, who I interviewed in the course of working on this story, too, and and who’s thinking I’ve learned a lot from him. And he wrote this really important essay on affluence and famine and morality and really boiled down what it said is, if there’s anyone in the world whose life can be saved with the money you can give away, why not give to that person? You know, why not do the absolute best you can for the people who need it the most? And then in the in the early 2000s, in the 20 tens, there were philosophers in the UK who sort of took that Peter Singer thinking and turned it into action. And they created organizations and a center that actually started to say, How can we put Peter Singer’s thinking into action and help people take the step to give away money in the most impactful way possible?
Krys Boyd [00:05:51] So these organizations promised to apply empirical research to helping donors practice effective altruism, which may go by multiple names. What kinds of things get measured? Emma?
Emma Goldberg [00:06:04] Well, it starts with asking the question of who in the world needs the money most. Because when we look at charity in the US, money goes to so many different kinds of places. Some people give to cultural centers and museums. Some people give to their alma mater to their schools. Some people give to local groups that help the homeless or the impoverished or children that need literacy lessons. And then some people give to organizations in developing countries and far away. And so one of the things one of the really useful interventions that the movement made is when you’re going to give away money, start with the question who in the world absolutely needs that money the most? Is it the person who you happen to have just passed on the street or is it maybe someone thousands of miles away who really needs a malaria net or a, you know, just a meal, one meal in a day? And so they were asking a really useful question, how can we actually start to use data to say, if you have $1 to give, what’s the maximum impact that dollar can have?
Krys Boyd [00:07:12] So a small local charity that, say, provides winter coats to low income people or puts books into school libraries or art on the walls of museums. These are objectives that can make lives better and maybe pay some dividends down the road. But they are not life and death issues, are they?
Emma Goldberg [00:07:28] And they’re not necessarily going to make your dollar go the furthest in that. So let’s say you have $10 to give that might buy a pack of t shirts for someone in your neighborhood, but then not money to an organization in the developing country. And that might be that might go much further toward transforming or even saving a life. So I think one of the really useful questions that this movement asks is just look at the amount of money you’re prepared to give away. Where is the absolute furthest it can go?
Krys Boyd [00:08:02] It is a really interesting challenge to the idea that, you know, many people sort of choose causes based on on needs that they can see. But there are you know, this is a very big world with lots of need in many places. And and this is kind of a call to look for places that might not ordinarily cross our radar screen.
Emma Goldberg [00:08:26] Absolutely. And I think, you know, I got a lot of pushback to the article that I did, which is why I’m very happy to be doing this show, because I think effective altruism asks so many critical questions and can prompt people’s spending toward simply doing the most good, which is wonderful. And I think one thing I just wanted to sort of explore was this question of like in the course of doing so, in the course of giving away money sometimes, maybe in accordance with what effective altruism would steer you toward. Is it possible to just ask some of the meaningful questions that this sort of giving can also prompt about what makes your life meaningful?
Krys Boyd [00:09:04] The article made me think about the fact that we’ve probably all given to causes here are there simply because we were asked without necessarily having, you know, much knowledge about something. You know, if someone is raising money in my neighborhood for something, I’m often likely to give because it’s a neighbor as opposed to because I have looked into the cause and really decide that it’s something important to take care of.
Emma Goldberg [00:09:30] I think that’s a really, really good point. Some people just get an email campaign in their inbox fundraising for a particular group that they didn’t even realize they were connected to, and so they click donate. And I think one of the useful things EA does as a movement is to just say before you click that button, just look there. There are very clear ways that you can make that money go a little bit further. And so that’s a really useful intervention. But in general, I think it’s a great practice to just ask before clicking the button and making giving automatic what what is important to you and what priorities can you express with your giving.
Krys Boyd [00:10:07] And we’ll note again, that’s to be distinguished from deciding that you shouldn’t give money anywhere if you have the means to do so.
Emma Goldberg [00:10:15] Right. I think a lot of this is kind of if you’re already going to take the step of giving, which is wonderful, how can you structure that choice? How can you make sure that you’re giving to groups that are really giving away that money in an impactful way or according to EA how can you make sure that your money is going the absolute furthest you can set? You’re doing the most good for what you have, or according to some of the other scholars that are interviewed, it’s an opportunity to ask, How can you extend the most meaningful parts of your life into other people’s lives?
Krys Boyd [00:10:47] So the question at the heart of this is, you know, is there a right way and by extension, a wrong way to give money away? I think you and I could probably spend hours just wrestling with that question. But effective altruists generally believe there is no question about this, there is a right and wrong way.
Emma Goldberg [00:11:05] Yeah, there can be, I think, a level of certainty that some people sort of glean from the movement. I found in interviewing some leaders in the movement that there was a lot of intellectual openness to saying you don’t need to be dogmatic, you don’t need to let one style of thinking dictate all your giving. You can use this as a major lens through which to understand giving and then also draw on some diverse viewpoints. And so I was really curious in the course of doing this story, to just use the opportunity to interview some of the thinkers who have introduced really interesting out of the box ways of thinking about giving. And there are a couple I mentioned in the story who I’d love to just talk a little bit about. Sure. So one of them is a woman named Amy Schiller, who I interviewed in whose book I read. And she has some really interesting scholarship on giving. And she talks about giving as being an opportunity to introduce Magnificent into the world. And her book is a little bit of utopian thinking in it. But one of the things she argues is what if we could live in a society where government can be relied on to meet a lot of people’s basic needs? And you could maybe even give away money in a way that pushes toward bringing into being a government that cares for people’s basic needs and basic needs. And that creates a basic safety net and then use giving as a way to make people’s lives magnificent. And whether that means funding religious and sacred institutions or cultural institutions or libraries like libraries can be such a staple of just making people’s lives even feel livable. She says. Why don’t we treat giving as an opportunity to make life magnificent and then rely on government to create a basic social safety net? So that’s one school of thinking I thought was really interesting and just worth exploring and getting into. There are others who say giving can be a way to to create social reform. And basically, you know, what some of those thinkers say is that giving can be an opportunity to question why wealth exists in the first place and to push toward redistributive policies and ways that alleviate not just poverty, but also massive inequality. And so I thought that was another really interesting way of thinking about this, because we live in a moment when we have so many mega philanthropists who have accumulated such a vast amount of money that it’s worth asking, should anyone have that vast of an amount of money or can we actually contribute to groups that are pushing for redistribution so that we alleviate not just poverty, but also, you know, disparities in wealth?
Krys Boyd [00:13:52] The thing about this, Emma, is that, I mean, most of us are inclined to think about charity in emotional rather than rational terms or at least emotional as well as rational terms. Like we are moved by a cause typically because it touches us in some ways. Is there something wrong with that?
Emma Goldberg [00:14:13] I think there’s a real case to be made for bringing in the head and the heart. And I think what he does so well is say, you know, if you’re going to give away money. Take a moment and ask, what’s the maximum you can do with it? Who in the world needs it the most? We now live in a society where we’re actually blessedly, really connected to people who are thousands of miles away. And our money can move from wherever we might be in the US to someone on the other side of the planet who needs it far more than we do, or even far more than the people around us need it. I think the heart is worth bringing into it too, because I think one of the risks of optimized living in general is that your processes become really automated. The way that you work out, the way that you connect with other people, the way that you work. Everything becomes geared toward numbers. And I think that there’s a real you know, there can be something stopped out of life in terms of emotion and meaning when everything is steered by data. And so I think that there’s always opportunities to just let a little bit of emotion into all of these processes and think about why do these things bring you joy and how can you, you know, maximize the amount of joy and meaning you derive from that because that makes your life more radiant or shimmering, more transcendent, more beautiful and livable.
Krys Boyd [00:15:34] Helping local causes does have the effect often of connecting us to our own communities in fundamental ways. But the benefits of those connections don’t respond well to quantification methods, do they?
Emma Goldberg [00:15:49] Well, I think this is something that Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, explores so beautifully, which is that we become far more atomized in so many ways. Right. Like a lot of people no longer go to church or to religious services. People don’t feel as connected to their neighbors or they don’t. What Bob Putnam talks about in terms of joining, they don’t necessarily join a local bowling league as one of the things he explores or a civic group. And so in in general, volunteering or giving can be a way to just strengthen some of those connections to the people around you, which I think can yield really important social and civic effects. There’s a journalist named Rachel Cohen at Fox who wrote a wonderful essay about why she started to rethink the importance of volunteering in recent years because she felt that she was part of a generation who had been raised to think the only thing that really mattered was systemic change. So don’t even really think about the change that you can make as an individual. I think in general, we’re at a moment of so much flux that it’s worth asking with all the tools we have at our disposal to measure the impact we have or to measure the efficacy of anything we do. How do we also create room for emotions, for things that strengthen relationships, for things that make us feel more bonded to the people around us, to the communities or part of civic groups around us, because that’s the bedrock of a strong society.
Krys Boyd [00:17:18] How much stock do effective altruists generally place on the feelings that result from charitable giving? Is that something where we’re discouraged from thinking too much about?
Emma Goldberg [00:17:30] Absolutely. We’re discouraged from thinking too much about that. And I think for good reason. You know, they raise a really good point about why should giving be about the donor? And I agree. I don’t think it should be about the donor. It should be about the people who need the money. And I think the intervention that I was hoping to make in this story is just to say, of course, it should be about the recipient. It can also be worth thinking about the byproduct of what effect it does have on the donor, because if that if that makes for better communities, if that makes for more meaningful lives, if that makes for more connected groups and societies, then there’s no harm.
Krys Boyd [00:18:09] Yeah. And the truth is, if we feel good about something, I get that that shouldn’t matter. But it does affect our choices. If we feel good, we might be more inclined to come back and give more later on.
Emma Goldberg [00:18:21] Right. You might keep doing it.
Krys Boyd [00:18:24] So who are the most visible proponents of effective altruism at this moment? What kinds of people are really pushing this?
Emma Goldberg [00:18:33] It’s been heavily associated with the tech sector, and I think that makes sense. You know, we’re living in a moment of this first generation of ultra wealth that came from engineers and from data people and from technology. And so I think in some ways, effective altruism has kind of extended that emphasis and that comfort with data into the way those fortunes are given away, too. And certainly it’s better that the people who have amassed that amount of wealth want to give it away. And some of the faces of this movement have been, for example, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna. But Elon Musk has also said that if activists effective altruist thinking aligned with his views. So in general, it’s been heavily associated with Silicon Valley, with rationalism.
Krys Boyd [00:19:24] One classic example of this is Sam Bankman-Fried. People may remember that name because he was the founder of the cryptocurrency currency FDX. He’s fallen into some disgrace. He’s just one guy. But like, what sort of guiding principles did he apply to his vast acquisition of wealth based on his commitment to altruism?
Emma Goldberg [00:19:49] So SPF was definitely a pain point for the effective altruism movement because he did sort of make himself aligned with it as a sort of celebrity figure. He would wear this t-shirt with the movement symbol, for example, and he embraced a particular kind of affective altruism called earning to give, which meant he said he was just making billions of dollars for the purpose of then giving them away. I think the problem that exposed it in which a lot of people have raised and grappled with is that that earning gift mentality can then justify going to extremes to just earn more and more.
Krys Boyd [00:20:27] If the proponents of effective altruism and the patrons of these clearinghouses meant to steer donations in this direction are by and large, donors at the very like tip top of the income scale. Is there any risk that creates a world where is billionaires who are driving the direction of all philanthropy?
Emma Goldberg [00:20:49] I think some of the online discourse in particular can feel very driven by the loudest voices and the wealthiest voices in the room. And that’s what some of the critics that I interviewed made the point very effectively, that it’s just important to also leave room for some agency and and for really open debate about how to give, because one of the best things that can happen is if people are engaging in really deep conversation about how they want to give, I think that’s a great outgrowth of this movement in general is for there to be vibrant conversation that involves a lot of people and empowers a lot of people. And one thing that that some of the critics I interviewed emphasized that I think is really important is also involve the recipients. This should be just a conversation between people who are giving money, between people who are getting money, between the really wealthy and the not so wealthy and the impoverished that everyone should feel agency and an opportunity to be part of this conversation.
Krys Boyd [00:21:50] Yeah, I mean, there’s no doubt that throughout the history of this country, the money of very wealthy people has done some good things. One concern critics have is that the most privileged people in society are taking this position, that they have the right ideas for what the least privileged people actually need to thrive. And you can get into some some dicey territory there.
Emma Goldberg [00:22:13] Absolutely. And, you know, I did I spoke with this group called Solidarity, which brings together people who do want to give away large sums of money. And what they try and do is be entirely driven by the voices of the recipients. So so they’re saying it’s not just collecting data on how far the money is going. It’s actually kind of passing the figurative microphone to the people who are getting the money and asking them what do they need, what do they want and what do they envision doing with funds that that they’re receiving?
Krys Boyd [00:22:47] Do different kinds of philanthropic causes tend to win or lose, depending on the approach donors take to their charitable giving?
Emma Goldberg [00:22:57] I think one swath of the nonprofit and the charitable landscape that people worry about is some of the small local groups because they really depend on having small dollar local donors who feel connected to them and support them. So if people see a value in their being these small dollar groups and different communities that sustain the communities and make them more vibrant and also meet the needs of the most impoverished close to home, Those are the ones that really depend on these these small dollar donors who are close to them and feel emotionally connected and feel like it’s important for them to be part of the fabric of their community.
Krys Boyd [00:23:38] I mean, full disclosure, I work for an organization that relies heavily on small dollar donors to keep our work going. So I’ll just put that out there and acknowledge it. I wonder, like, it’s hard to argue that effective altruism can do good things in the world. It is counterintuitive to think that it might actually perpetuate inequality in some cases. Why do critics worry about that?
Emma Goldberg [00:24:08] I think that’s partly in the school of the kind of earning to give mentality that that SBF was a proponent of this idea that it’s actually fine to accumulate a lot of money as long as you’re giving it away. Because critics of extreme wealth say that’s not okay. Actually, we need like taxation policy to tax policies that redistribute. And some people say there shouldn’t even be billionaires. So to some critics, there’s this idea that, you know, effective altruism can almost justify the existence of the extreme wealth because there’s a sense that it’s going to be given away anyway. And some people say, no, that extreme wealth shouldn’t exist in the first place. There’s a really astute philosopher, Rutger Bregman, who has made this point, and he went to Davos, for example, and he looked around and he said this really memorable thing, which is that he felt like he was at a fire fighting convention and no one was talking about water. Meaning taxes are a very obvious way to think about, you know, alleviating inequality. But sometimes he felt like he was around all of these mega wealthy individuals who didn’t even who they wanted to talk about alleviating poverty. They didn’t want to talk about taxes.
Krys Boyd [00:25:25] Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s the question of, you know, should the focus be alleviating poverty or should the focus be on eliminating inequality? Those two things are quite different from one another.
Emma Goldberg [00:25:39] Absolutely. And I think that’s why, you know, effective altruism in some ways has introduced so much important thinking into the giving space because they’re saying, let’s put a spotlight on the people who absolutely need this money the most, the most the people who are living in really desperate poverty in the world. But I think some social and political critics are coming out of the woodwork to say it’s also worth grappling with the question of how can inequality be alleviated, because that in itself can cause real grievance and a sense of atomization and polarization. It can make people feel really, you know, socially distant and politically distant and just at odds with their neighbors. And so if you want to think about fixing that, too, that might need a whole different set of solutions.
Krys Boyd [00:26:29] I’ll note, Emma, there are many people who say there shouldn’t be billionaires. I don’t think there are a lot of billionaires who are saying there shouldn’t be billionaires. I mean, it is it’s frustrating, I think, to those of us who don’t have that level of wealth to see people who do and think that it’s probably unnecessary. It’s also, you know, billionaires are still human beings. It’s not so surprising that they imagine they must have better ideas to sort of privately direct their wealth than than government, especially in this climate where so many people are suspicious of the effectiveness of government to solve social problems.
Emma Goldberg [00:27:07] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that is a whole topic that we could probably get into all day. The existence of billionaires, I was really moved by one group I spoke with for this story, which is this group Solidaire, because that is a group that actually it came out of Occupy Wall Street and it came from people who were down by the Occupy site with some of the activists who were in their tent. And they looked around and they said, Why aren’t there more mega wealthy individuals who want to fund social movements like this? And in some ways, like the answer to that, as you were just alluding to, is really obvious. Like how rare is it to have a member of the 1% who wants to fund a movement that says we are the 99%? That might be rare. And at the same time, like this group of people felt like those ultra wealthy individuals are out there. And so that’s what they formed Solidaire to do, which is to bring together people who want to give away pretty large sums of money but want to give it to social and political reform organizations that are agitating about inequality of all kind. And so I think that sort of mindset is rare, but it’s not nonexistent, This idea of really ultra wealthy individuals who are frustrated with the existence of extreme wealth.
Krys Boyd [00:28:30] Just to make this more uncomfortable for many people listening. You know, I think the thing about Occupy Wall Street and talking about the 99% and the 1%, I mean, the 1% is a is a thing. And they have a great deal of power or more assets than most of us can even imagine. But it really kind of lets the top fifth off the hook. And that group of individual Americans continues to have a lot more than the rest of the country. And those folks often get lost in these debates.
Emma Goldberg [00:29:05] Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of nuance to all of this. It’s nothing is as simple as this group is wrong as this group is right or very little is. I would say one of the helpful tools that came out of Occupy Wall Street, according to some of the people I spoke with, is just this framework of understanding, like the 99%, that’s a lot of this country that is most of this country. And that feeling of unity between all those people and there being some sort of collective need and shared sense of what might be right among 99% of people. I think that according to some of the people I spoke with, that was a helpful vocabulary and sensibility that came out of that movement, and that has extended into some of the giving and the activism among the people I interviewed for this story.
Krys Boyd [00:29:55] Yeah, when you frame it that way, it does make sense that many of the policies in this country feel as if they are shaped by and for those folks in the 1%. And the rest of the country might have different ideas but don’t have the political or financial capital to make them happen.
Emma Goldberg [00:30:12] Right. And I think a lot of it I mean, even giving can be an expression of people’s political and social beliefs. Right. Like people give to political groups, but they can also give to social movements and giving I think had some of it can be optimized. Some of it could be going to do to someone on the other side of the world who needs it the most. Some giving can also be toward, for example, you know, the YIMBY movement or toward, you know, saying that you’re fed up with the housing crisis in this country. So I think people can think of their giving as an expression of their values in the way they want to see the world reshaped.
Krys Boyd [00:30:51] Emma, you note the debate over the restoration of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. It was very recently reopened after this devastating fire in 2019. Why did somebody like Peter Singer object to the large amounts of money raised to repair it?
Emma Goldberg [00:31:08] Yeah, that was a really interesting question to get into in this in the reporting for this piece, because the piece actually happened to come out the same week that Notre Dame was the newly repaired part was reopening. And it just looked magnificent. And so it was really interesting to go back to the moment when the fire happened in 2019 and affluent people in France came forward to donate generously to repairing it. And Peter Singer intervened, I think courageously to say, wait a minute, you’re giving money to repair a building? How many lives could be saved with that money that you’re giving away and is a newly repaired and restored Notre Dame worth it to you over actually literally saving people’s lives? And so that’s a really worthwhile intervention. But Amy Schiller, this critic, I interviewed him back at that with her own response, which was, well, maybe that’s not really a fair question to ask to her. She felt like, actually, we do need cultural landmarks, beautiful sacred spaces, things that kind of hold together the fabric of a society and of a community. And Notre Dame is is symbolically and culturally and historically one of the most important symbols to people in France. And so that’s a really interesting debate between these two thinkers. One saying it’s not worth the money. And the other thing. Actually, maybe it is. I’ve been able to get into because I was surprised. There were a lot of people who responded to the article by saying, Of course, Peter Singer was right. But on the other hand, you know, clearly we see from the reopening of Notre Dame that a lot of people felt that he wasn’t right and they felt it was worth donating to. So I think that kind of comes down to the idea that there’s just so many different versions of of what goodness looks like to people. And I you know, I don’t know where I myself come down on that, but I think of Peter Singer’s question as courageous and important, like if that money could have gone to saving lives, how could you possibly justify the repairing of a building? And at the same time, how much does our society and does coherent, cohesive society rely on having cultural, symbolic, beautiful things that hold people together? I don’t know.
Krys Boyd [00:33:31] What was the experience that led Amy Schiller to start to question effective altruism as the only and primary way for people to decide how to donate money?
Emma Goldberg [00:33:45] Well, and she wrote a wonderful book about this that gets into a lot of her different critiques of the way philanthropy works. But for Schiller, she was actually working in as a fundraising consultant all day, and she had told me that she kept encountering donors who basically sort of said they wanted to just look for the best bang for their buck. And it made sense to her. But it also kind of left her with this latent sense of discomfort because she felt like there had to be more diverse approaches to charitable giving than that, because it felt almost hearing her describe it, it seemed like it was like people are almost bargain hunting. And she wanted there to be just a certain magnificence and meaning making and a sense of goodness and really. Almost like transcendent, sacred, beautiful feeling built into the experience of giving.
Krys Boyd [00:34:43] Yeah. I mean, the truth is we make consumer decisions in various ways, chasing various outcomes every day, right? Like, maybe not every decision, but plenty of them. We might not choose a house or an apartment that offers the maximum square footage for the price. If the layout doesn’t feel right or the neighborhood doesn’t seem like home or something else, even though, you know, arguably that is a decision that should be able to be easily quantified for people.
Emma Goldberg [00:35:13] Absolutely. I think the challenge of having data at our fingertips about everything is that you do ultimately then have to start to make some choices about what parts of your life should be data driven and empirical and rational, and where can you let a little bit of emotion or heart and not just head in through the caps?
Krys Boyd [00:35:34] What is the good ancestor movement?
Emma Goldberg [00:35:38] Yeah, that was a really interesting part of this to learn about, and that is a group that actually is in the in Britain, in the UK, and the founder of it, Stephanie Roby, used to work as a private wealth lawyer and she had this sort of crisis of conscience. Because she realized that she’d been helping her clients shield themselves from having to pay taxes when she actually really believed in those taxes. And she knew that they were vital to support public institutions. So she quit that line of work and she started this good investor movement, which is basically a course that brings donors together to study economic history and think about how their money can be used to change economic policy.
Krys Boyd [00:36:25] So some philanthropists want to create a world where devastating inequality that requires altruism no longer exists in the same way it does now. Do these folks believe that is possible, or do they think that no matter what, you know, well-intentioned people do with whatever philosophy of giving, we will always have problems to solve with our charitable donation?
Emma Goldberg [00:36:55] I think that for some of them, you know, there’s a sense that you you know, you kind of have to believe it’s possible otherwise given up before starting the process of trying to make it possible. And so I think for some of these philanthropies or for smaller dollar givers to people, just share the sense that if you’re not giving to support causes you believe in, then you know, those causes are just going to be extinguished. And that includes social and political reform. So, for example, for the good investor movement, they’re asking like really pie in the sky, big picture questions about what does a quote unquote, just economy look like. So they’re actually going back to the fundamentals and saying, what do they want the economy to look like and how can they start to give money away to a way that makes that even a little bit more possible? So I think for some of these junctures, there’s sort of an element of utopian thinking in it. But on the other hand, if they don’t hold on to some optimism or some belief in the possibility of reimagining and and redistributing, then all of those causes that they believe in are sort of dead on arrival.
Krys Boyd [00:38:03] So we’ve talked about the fact that some small, local focused charities may suffer if people commit only to effective altruism. What about charities devoted to things like social justice? Do they also lose out in this debate?
Emma Goldberg [00:38:20] Definitely. I mean, I think for some of those groups, the impact is really hard to measure. Like if you’re funding a social reform or, you know, social justice group, it could be really hard to ask what does the effect of that look like in terms of numbers? And it doesn’t always translate so well. So for some people, just has to be a little bit of faith in the idea of in the values of what that group is building. And that’s something I spoke a little bit with Solidaire about because they’re not this is the group that mobilizes larger dollar givers to support social justice groups and social movements, including racial justice, climate justice and transgender protection. And one thing they told me is that they understand that a lot of these groups like you can’t really put an exact number on what you’re looking to get out of a donation. And so you have to actually just listen to the recipients and hear their vision and then believe in and fund that vision. But I think in the same way of what we were talking about before, if those groups are funded, then they’ll go away. So I think for some people it’s an expression of like their funding, the sort of equality and justice they believe in, and then giving to the groups who they think have like the strategy and the tactics to to bring those into being a little bit.
Krys Boyd [00:39:40] It also takes time to change the social climate, even if, you know, arguably given enough time, things will change. I mean, it’s really easy to print out a spreadsheet and say, we gave out this many bednets and I’m not against, you know, bednets to prevent malaria. But it’s, it’s easy to, to tabulate that, right? This many kids didn’t get very sick or die from malaria because this many bednets were given out. It’s harder to say, like you can’t really say, well, now the country is, you know, 11% less racist than it was four years ago because of whatever efforts.
Emma Goldberg [00:40:15] Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of this is about making a little bit of room for groups whose impact is harder to measure and not as a guide. Like if you’re saying your approach to giving isn’t going to be dogmatic, then how do you build space for those groups who are not able to just like spit out the data on where your dollars have gone to? Because otherwise you’re ruling out a group that can’t say exactly like, Yes, we’re going to make your dollar go the furthest you can and there’s a risk and not or if it really can limit the kind of giving landscape.
Krys Boyd [00:40:47] So you’ve mentioned and you note in the article, any philosophy of philanthropy, whether formalized or, you know, one, that we just hold ourselves, it poses a set of questions we can ask ourselves. What are some of the things you now consider when you’re thinking about what causes to give money to maybe by virtue of having worked on this article?
Emma Goldberg [00:41:08] Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, one thing that I’ve been thinking about is I was really heartened by talking with people who work in effective altruism, who are saying like, nothing needs to be dogmatic. You can start with a question and then think about like, you know, a lot of different things you want to support. And something I realized that I’ve done in the past is when someone sends me an email and says that they’re fundraising for X group, I’ll sort of just say, Okay, great, that’s a friend that I have who’s trying to raise money for this group they really care about. And the instinct is sort of to just click and donate. But I want to think more about the groups that aren’t just like immediately falling in my lap that way, but you know that I can go seek out. I do think like GiveDirectly from, you know, learning more about them in the course of researching this is doing really important and wonderful work. And I also think that there’s, you know, local groups. To me, like the homelessness crisis in all of our cities is. Devastating. And also, like it’s almost like a kind of moral injury, you know, to walk around and just like turn away from people who are sleeping in the street who desperately need the help. And so supporting local homelessness, you know, local groups for the homeless, I think is really important because it just says that you believe in eliminating poverty but also inequality in your own community. And that was something that I also as I was working on this piece, I was simultaneously working on a piece about the homeless in Louisville, Kentucky, actually. And I was following outreach workers who go into homeless encampments in that area to help get people started on a path toward housing. And so I just witnessed all these interactions firsthand of what it means when you go up to someone who’s sleeping on the street and who has lost everything and just show them that you care about them, and also that they have this path forward toward getting housed and toward getting more of their their needs met and feeling this like they’re not just completely on their own. And so I wanted to sort of bring some of that back to New York City, where I live, and to supporting people who are homeless here. So I think a lot of questions I’m thinking about are just like, how can I diversify the types of groups I support, make those choices less automatic, and then think about giving growth to groups that optimize and to groups where I just think we’re living in a moral like a crisis and how can we give our money toward addressing that?
Krys Boyd [00:43:50] Right. Like, these two approaches might seem incompatible, but they’re not mutually exclusive unless we make them so.
Emma Goldberg [00:43:57] Right? Of course, you can just live with all of these. I don’t even want to say contradictions because it’s not. I think just saying like, you know, you want to give toward people on the other side of the world who need it most and who will make your dollar go the furthest it can. You want to give toward making your own immediate surrounding community a little bit safer and better off and less horrendously unequal, and give toward groups that extend the sources of meaning in your own life into other people’s lives.
Krys Boyd [00:44:30] Do you believe these big questions apply mostly to people giving away millions or billions of dollars? Or should they apply to those of us who might be writing checks or doing online payments in the range of tens or hundreds of dollars?
Emma Goldberg [00:44:45] My gosh. I think it’s definitely for everybody. Really? Really everybody. Young people who are don’t have much to give away and older people don’t have much to give away. And, you know, that was really the intent of of working on this story because I think some people can feel like the conversations around giving are geared by the choices of the most wealthy because those are also just the most visible to us, like we see when millions or billions of dollars are being given away. And so then those choices have a kind of amplified impact and message. But I think anyone who has any little bit of money to give away can engage with these questions.
Krys Boyd [00:45:24] Emma Goldberg is a business features writer at the New York Times, which published her article “What If Charity Shouldn’t Be Optimized?” Emma, thanks for making time to talk about this.
Emma Goldberg [00:45:33] Yeah, thanks for having me on. What a wonderful conversation.
Krys Boyd [00:45:37] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and anywhere you get podcasts. The website is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
