Charitology
The science of doing the most good.
Americans gave $617.2 billion to charity in 2025. The generosity is real, and so is the good it does. But the system that aims it, meaning the signals, incentives and habits that decide where the money goes, deserves careful study. Charitology brings those questions into one open project.
Figure: Giving USA Foundation.
A ten-dollar beginning, and an open invitation
The project’s founding story begins with charitology.org, registered in October 2026 for about ten dollars. The name offered a home for an ambition: to make the system of giving easier to study, question and improve.
Research on philanthropy already exists. This project adds a particular lens: follow generosity through the whole system, from the signals that aim it to the outcomes and feedback that should help it learn.
Read the manifesto, “Ten Dollars” →Charity is a system
Money moves from givers, through the signals they see and the channels that hold it, into work that ranges from relief to source, and on to outcomes. Results rarely travel back. Each pin below is a condition of the system, placed where it acts.
- 1
Givers
Individuals 64% · Foundations 19% · Bequests 10% · Corporations 7%
U.S. giving by source, 2025
- 2
Signals
Stories, faces, overhead ratios, rankings, prestige, tax breaks
- 3
Channels
Charities, foundations, donor-advised funds, giving platforms
- 4
The work
- Source
- Structure
- Prevention
- Repair
- Relief
- 5
Outcomes
Lives, institutions, futures
No judgment of the good being done
Every food bank, clinic and volunteer is doing real good. Charitology studies the system that aims them, not their hearts.
Symptoms and sources
Most problems keep coming back until their sources change. Charitology asks every gift where it acts, and asks the system whether its mix is right.
Unknown stays unknown
A science says what it doesn’t know. Every claim here is labeled established, documented, debated or hypothesis.
From relief to source
Every piece of work acts somewhere on the chain from symptom to source. Depth describes the work. It never grades it: every level is needed. The question is always the mix.
- 0 Relief Meets the need today A meal at a food bank, emergency surgery, a disaster shelter.
- 1 Repair Restores what was lost Rebuilding a home, rehabilitation after an injury, a job after a layoff.
- 2 Prevention Stops it happening to these people Bed nets, vaccines, clean water for a village.
- 3 Structure Changes the rules that produce it A lead-paint ban, a new public health system, a corporate standard.
- 4 Source Changes what feeds many problems at once The story a society tells itself, how people coordinate, what a culture rewards.
Fifteen conditions of the charity system
The subject is the system. Each condition is labeled with its evidence; hypotheses are questions to test.
- C01 The Missing Feedback Loop Documented
- C02 The Overhead Myth Established
- C03 The Story Bias Debated
- C04 The Symptom Trap Hypothesis
- C05 The Restriction Reflex Documented
- C06 The Silence About Failure Hypothesis
- C07 The Measurement Gap Debated
- C08 The Fragmentation Problem Debated
- C09 Parked Money Debated
- C10 The Short Horizon Hypothesis
- C11 The Missing Voice Documented
- C12 The Prestige Economy Hypothesis
- C13 The Single Lens Hypothesis
- C14 The Proximity Pull Debated
- C15 The Missing Profession Hypothesis
23 open questions about doing good
The list is an invitation to research: make a question precise, inspect what is already known and explain what evidence would change a decision. Each problem has a scope and a proposed way to make progress.
- 01 The Depth Census What share of the world’s charitable money goes to relief, repair, prevention, structure and source work?
- 02 The Exchange Rate Problem Can outcomes in different causes (a life saved, a species protected, a law changed, a child educated) be compared on a common scale, and where must comparison stop?
- 03 Measuring the Source How do you measure the impact of source-level work, such as changing a story, a norm or an institution, when the effects are diffuse, shared and delayed?
- 04 The Counterfactual Problem How can a giver estimate what would have happened without their gift, cheaply and at scale?
- 05 Closing the Feedback Loop What mechanism lets the people a charity serves send a signal that moves money, the way prices do in markets?
- 06 The Overhead Replacement What simple public measure could replace overhead ratios as the default way donors judge a charity, without being easy to game?
Everything a science needs, built in the open
Live means the software or publication described on its page is available. Nine programs still need the people, funding and authority in their charters before they can operate as institutions.
Programs
Research to find out what works, funding to act on it, training to grow the field.
26 available functions · 0 seeded · 0 designed
20Tools
Practical instruments for giving, evidence and coordination. Each page explains what it does and where your work is stored.
20 available functions · 0 seeded · 0 designed
21The Record
What the field knows, and what it doesn’t yet, with every claim sourced and labeled.
21 available functions · 0 seeded · 0 designed
Open projects charitology builds on
Independent, open tools that already measure parts of the system. Charitology links them into one field.
Humanity’s Checklist
Six root causes that sit upstream of every world problem, each with one beachhead project. Charitology’s source level comes from here.
Structural-change evidenceSystemic Altruism
A beta tracker of charities working on structural change, with inspectable judgments, uncertainty ranges and a searchable IRS registry.
Where the money goesCharity Impact Media
Sourced Form 990 spending breakdowns for about 25,000 U.S. charities with $10 million or more in revenue. No ratings.
Who funds whomWHOFUNDS
The open grant graph of U.S. private foundations, built from Form 990-PF filings, with its own miss rate on the page.
Become a charitologist
The field is open. Study it, question it, test it, teach it. Prove a claim wrong and make it better. Every page here is a file anyone can improve.
- Researchers take on an open problem.
- Builders ship a designed tool or program.
- Writers grow the Record, with sources.
- Critics red-team any claim on the site.
- Givers try the tools and tell us what broke.