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Carnegie’s public libraries\nsummary: Andrew Carnegie paid for more than 2,500 library buildings on one condition, that each town keep its library running with public money. The gift built the buildings, and the towns’ commitment made them last.\nkind: success\nera: 1881–1917\nplace: United States, Scotland and other countries\ndepth: 3\nlessons:\n  - A matching condition can turn a one-time gift into a permanent institution. Carnegie paid for the building, and the town promised to pay for the library every year after.\n  - Simple, standard terms let a small office run thousands of grants. One application form set the same conditions for every town.\n  - A program that defers to local power inherits local exclusions. Who counts as “the community” decides who a community gift serves.\nconditions: [short-horizon, missing-voice]\nsources:\n  - title: 'Andrew Carnegie’s Library Legacy: A Timeline'\n    publisher: Carnegie Corporation of New York (renamed the Andrew Carnegie Foundation in 2026)\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://carnegie.org/article/andrew-carnegies-library-legacy/\n  - title: Carnegie Libraries\n    publisher: John Spurgeon, Encyclopedia of Arkansas\n    url: https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/carnegie-libraries-6466/\n  - title: 'The Roots of Community: project overview'\n    publisher: Matthew R. Griffis, University of Southern Mississippi\n    url: https://aquila.usm.edu/rocpartners/\n  - title: 'Knowledge Access: The Effects of Carnegie Libraries on Innovation'\n    publisher: Enrico Berkes and Peter Nencka, SSRN working paper\n    year: 2020\n    url: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3629299\n  - title: 'Knowledge Access: The Effects of Carnegie Libraries on Innovation, seminar abstract'\n    publisher: EPFL Virtual Innovation Seminar\n    year: 2020\n    url: https://memento.epfl.ch/event/knowledge-access-the-effects-of-carnegie-libraries\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nAndrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, made his first library gift in 1881, to Dunfermline in Scotland, where he was born. By the time the last grants for library buildings were made in 1917, he and the Carnegie Corporation of New York had given some $56 million for 2,509 public libraries. According to the corporation, 1,681 of those buildings went up in the United States, in 1,412 communities.\n\nThe grants came with conditions. A town had to show that it needed a library, provide the site, keep the library free to all and promise yearly support equal to 10 percent of the grant, paid for by local taxes. Carnegie wrote that a free library was the best gift, “provided the community will accept and maintain it as a public institution.” His secretary, James Bertram, ran the program through one standard application form, the “Schedule of Questions,” and steered towns toward model floor plans. Money was released in stages as the building went up.\n\nThe libraries lasted. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas reports that more than half were still operating in the 21st century. In a working paper, the researchers Enrico Berkes and Peter Nencka compared towns that got a Carnegie library with towns that were approved for one but never built it, and found that patenting rose in the library towns over the next 20 years.\n\nThe program also followed local custom. Matthew Griffis, who directs a research project on Carnegie’s segregated libraries, writes that in most Southern communities, white attitudes dismissed the need for any library service for Black residents. He counts only eleven communities in the whole country that opened libraries for African Americans through Carnegie’s program.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe buildings were bricks. The lasting change was a rule: towns taxed themselves to run a free public library. That is **structure** (level 3) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth). It is also a counterexample to the [Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/). Carnegie paid the one-time cost, and the gift was built to outlive him because the community took over the running costs.\n\nThe design gave towns a voice in a narrow sense. A library came only if local leaders asked for it and agreed to pay for it. But the people who decided were the people who held local power. Where Black residents were shut out of public life, the program worked within segregation, and the few libraries it funded for African Americans were separate ones. This is the [Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/) in a different form: a gift that answers to “the community” serves whoever the community’s gatekeepers count.\n\n## What carries over\n\nPair capital with a commitment to running costs, so the gift doesn’t die when the giver stops paying. Keep the terms simple enough to run at scale. And before relying on local consent, ask whose consent it is. Carnegie’s own philosophy of giving is in [The Gospel of Wealth](/record/traditions/the-gospel-of-wealth/).\n"},{"byteLength":4986,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"7eabbd3e04ffcd678b563d99db23b6504b9f62e31b4438fdbc4f37c7a29834ca","id":"source:current-cases-dare","path":"src/content/cases/dare.md","sha256":"f1a09b302d257a42c26698dae5b86d3130ef1019c6120114bf86a502590fd565","text":"---\ntitle: D.A.R.E.’s original curriculum\nsummary: Police officers teaching children to resist drugs became the most widely used school drug prevention program in the United States. Rigorous evaluations of the original curriculum found little or no effect on drug use, and the program eventually replaced it.\nkind: failure\nera: 1983–2013\nplace: United States\ndepth: 2\nlessons:\n  - Popularity and evidence can run on separate tracks for decades. The program stayed dominant while rigorous studies found small or no effects.\n  - How a lesson is taught can matter as much as what it says. In a 1994 comparison, interactive programs that built social skills did better than D.A.R.E.’s officer-led lessons.\n  - An evaluation changes nothing until it reaches the people who decide what gets funded.\n  - An organization can change course on evidence and say so. D.A.R.E. now states on its own history page that the original curriculum had little long-term effect.\nconditions: [missing-feedback-loop, silence-about-failure]\nsources:\n  - title: How effective is drug abuse resistance education? A meta-analysis of Project DARE outcome evaluations\n    publisher: Susan T. Ennett, Nancy S. Tobler, Christopher L. Ringwalt and Robert L. Flewelling, American Journal of Public Health 84(9)\n    year: 1994\n    url: https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.84.9.1394\n  - title: 'Project DARE: no effects at 10-year follow-up'\n    publisher: Donald R. Lynam and colleagues, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 67(4)\n    year: 1999\n    url: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.67.4.590\n  - title: Project D.A.R.E. Outcome Effectiveness Revisited\n    publisher: Steven L. West and Keri K. O’Neal, American Journal of Public Health 94(6)\n    year: 2004\n    url: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1448384/\n  - title: History\n    publisher: D.A.R.E. America\n    url: https://dare.org/history/\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nD.A.R.E., short for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, began in 1983 as a partnership between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Police officers taught a 17-lesson curriculum to elementary school students. A nonprofit, D.A.R.E. America, was founded in 1989 to oversee the program, and it spread quickly across the country and abroad. By 1994 it was the most widely used school-based drug prevention program in the United States.\n\nThe evaluations were consistent:\n\n- **1994.** Susan Ennett and colleagues pooled the results of eight rigorous evaluations, a method called meta-analysis, and found D.A.R.E.’s short-term effect on drug use was small, and smaller than that of interactive programs focused on social skills.\n- **1999.** Donald Lynam and colleagues followed 1,002 young people who had received either D.A.R.E. or standard drug education in sixth grade. At age 20 there were few differences in drug use or attitudes, and in no case did the D.A.R.E. group do better.\n- **2004.** A meta-analysis of 11 studies by Steven West and Keri O’Neal found an extremely small effect that was not statistically significant. They described D.A.R.E. as the country’s largest school-based prevention program in federal spending.\n\nThe program changed, slowly. The model was substantially revamped in 2001 with help from a $13.6 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. D.A.R.E. later adopted a different curriculum, keepin’ it REAL, built on interactive small-group learning instead of lectures, for middle schools in 2008 and elementary schools in 2013. D.A.R.E.’s own history page says independent evaluations of the original curriculum in the 1990s found “minimal long-term influence on drug use,” and that a later pilot curriculum did not show positive results.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe aim was **prevention** (level 2) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth). The lesson is about the system around it. The evidence was public by 1994, yet a decade later the program was still the country’s largest school-based prevention program in federal spending. Charitology’s reading is that the people closest to the program could see children engaged in class and a police officer in the school, while drug use years later stayed out of view. That is the [Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/): the signal that mattered never reached the people choosing what to fund.\n\nThe ending runs against the [Silence About Failure](/diagnosis/silence-about-failure/). D.A.R.E. now says in public what didn’t work, including a curriculum of its own that failed a pilot. That kind of candor is what the [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/) hopes to make normal.\n\n## What carries over\n\nFund evaluation early, and decide in advance what result would change the plan. When a well-loved program turns out not to work, keep the relationships and the delivery system, and change the content. Whether the new curriculum works as delivered is a question for the same kind of evaluation.\n"},{"byteLength":5145,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"4c10b2055ebc1208d760979f5a3c17b313ba5376e20d381626151e6973d253f8","id":"source:current-cases-green-revolution","path":"src/content/cases/green-revolution.md","sha256":"435108f0b5bf0b1da4bd4cd08f7430dba2841714295489d6773c31f14913d8d5","text":"---\ntitle: The Green Revolution\nsummary: Foundation-funded crop research gave farmers high-yield wheat and rice, and cereal harvests in the developing world roughly tripled. The gains were uneven, and some of the costs, from falling water tables to narrower diets, showed up decades later.\nkind: mixed\nera: 1943–2000\nplace: Mexico, South and Southeast Asia, and other developing regions\ndepth: 3\nlessons:\n  - Research that every farmer can use is a public good. Funding the institutions that keep producing it can change a whole food system, not one farm at a time.\n  - Measuring success in one unit, tons of grain, hid costs that were counted in other units, such as water, soil, diets and who was left out.\n  - Many of the harms grew from the rules around the technology, such as subsidies that encouraged overuse of inputs. The same tool does more or less damage depending on the policies it arrives with.\n  - Costs that arrive decades later are easy to leave out of a success story. Long-horizon work needs long-horizon accounting.\nconditions: [single-lens, short-horizon]\nsources:\n  - title: 'Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead'\n    publisher: Prabhu L. Pingali, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(31)\n    year: 2012\n    url: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3411969/\n  - title: 'Photo Essay: Mexico and the Launch of the Green Revolution'\n    publisher: Liesel Vink, Rockefeller Archive Center\n    year: 2019\n    url: https://resource.rockarch.org/story/photo-essay-mexico-and-the-launch-of-the-green-revolution/\n  - title: Norman Borlaug, Facts\n    publisher: NobelPrize.org\n    url: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1970/borlaug/facts/\n  - title: India groundwater\n    publisher: University of California, Irvine, on Rodell, Velicogna and Famiglietti in Nature 460\n    year: 2009\n    url: https://news.uci.edu/2009/08/12/india-groundwater\n    note: Reports a satellite study finding that northern India lost more than 109 cubic kilometers of groundwater between 2002 and 2008, mainly to irrigation pumping.\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nIn 1943 the Rockefeller Foundation began a farm research program with Mexico’s government. Mexico supplied the research station, and the foundation paid the scientists. One of them, the plant pathologist Norman Borlaug, bred dwarf wheat suited to Mexican conditions, and by 1956 Mexico was self-sufficient in wheat. In the mid-1960s he brought dwarf wheat to India and Pakistan, where production rose sharply. The Rockefeller and Ford foundations also built the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, which opened in 1960 and bred the high-yield rice IR-8. A 1968 speech called the movement a “Green Revolution,” and in 1970 Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize.\n\nThe scale of the result is hard to overstate. In a 2012 review, Prabhu Pingali of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reports that cereal production in the developing world tripled over about 50 years, while the population more than doubled and farmland grew by only about 30 percent. The review cites estimates that without the new crop varieties, food production in developing countries would have been almost 20 percent lower and world food and feed prices 35 to 65 percent higher. In Asia, each 1 percent rise in crop productivity has been estimated to cut the number of poor people by 0.48 percent.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nOn the [depth scale](/method/#depth) this is **structure** (level 3). The work changed the institutions that produce food. The early research centers in Mexico and the Philippines grew into a permanent international network for crop research.\n\nIt is mixed because the ledger has more than one column, and Pingali’s own review documents the other columns. The gains were concentrated in irrigated, high-rainfall areas. Poorer rain-fed regions and women farmers gained less. By 1998 modern varieties covered 82 percent of the planted area in Asia but only 27 percent in Africa. Diets gained calories but often lost variety. Overuse of fertilizer, pesticides and water degraded soils and polluted water, harms Pingali attributes mostly to subsidies and price policies rather than to the seeds themselves. In northern India, a satellite study found groundwater falling fast between 2002 and 2008, mainly because of pumping for irrigation.\n\nSeen through one lens, yield, this is among the great successes in history. Seen through others, such as the environment, future generations or fairness, the picture is more complicated. That gap is the [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/). The costs that came due decades later are the [Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/).\n\n## What carries over\n\nPaying for public research, and for the institutions that keep it going, can change a whole system. The same reach means the side effects are system-sized too. Count every column of the ledger before calling the result, and keep counting after the headlines move on. How much harms to future people should weigh against gains today is [Open Problem 13, Discounting the Future](/open-problems/discounting-the-future/).\n"},{"byteLength":5688,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"c079ab5fc2bb9483a6a49f88469fea5bbe574f7e1f0c67735ac6c2c79cb9564f","id":"source:current-cases-haiti-earthquake-reconstruction","path":"src/content/cases/haiti-earthquake-reconstruction.md","sha256":"7cf8153c305090495f37cec33cc64f8d82e1af09f6d104e068a835d819836b15","text":"---\ntitle: Rebuilding Haiti after the 2010 earthquake\nsummary: Billions of dollars poured into Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, almost all of the relief aid through international organizations. In 2015 ProPublica and NPR reported that the American Red Cross had raised nearly half a billion dollars and built six permanent homes. The Red Cross said it had helped millions of Haitians in other ways.\nkind: failure\nera: 2010–2015\nplace: Haiti\ndepth: 1\nlessons:\n  - Giving that follows the news arrives in a burst, mostly without research, and attention fades long before rebuilding is done.\n  - Money raised for one disaster is, in practice, tied to that place and to the group that raised it. When land titles, partners and government capacity take years to sort out, a large earmarked sum can outrun the ability to spend it well.\n  - Aid that goes around local institutions leaves them no stronger. Almost all relief aid went to international agencies and organizations rather than through Haitian ones.\n  - Counting people helped is not the same as measuring what changed. Without project-level spending and results, big claims can’t be checked by anyone.\nconditions: [story-bias, restriction-reflex, missing-voice, measurement-gap]\nsources:\n  - title: How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti and Built Six Homes\n    publisher: Justin Elliott (ProPublica) and Laura Sullivan (NPR)\n    year: 2015\n    url: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes\n  - title: American Red Cross Responds to Latest ProPublica and NPR Coverage\n    publisher: American Red Cross\n    year: 2015\n    url: https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-release/american-red-cross-responds-to-latest-propublica-and-npr-coverag.html\n  - title: Give aid directly to Haitian institutions to build back better, says UN report\n    publisher: UN News, on a report by the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Haiti\n    year: 2011\n    url: https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/06/379512\n  - title: 'Haiti: Where Has All the Money Gone?'\n    publisher: Vijaya Ramachandran and Julie Walz, Center for Global Development\n    year: 2012\n    url: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/haiti-where-has-all-money-gone\n  - title: Real Time Charitable Giving\n    publisher: Aaron Smith, Pew Research Center\n    year: 2012\n    url: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2012/01/12/real-time-charitable-giving/\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nThe earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 drew a wave of giving. Americans gave an estimated $43 million by text message alone. In a Pew survey of those text donors, most had heard about the appeal on television, and half gave the moment they heard. By 2012, the Center for Global Development counted almost $6 billion in official aid disbursed and an estimated $3 billion more in private donations to charities.\n\nThe American Red Cross raised nearly half a billion dollars. In June 2015 ProPublica and NPR reported that it had built six permanent homes in all of Haiti. The Red Cross said it had provided homes to more than 130,000 people. The reporters found that count included people who got short-term rental aid, temporary shelters or construction training. A housing project in the Campeche neighborhood, for which an internal proposal estimated about 700 homes, built none. The Red Cross said it could not secure land rights. The reporters also described internal documents on staffing problems and, for one $5.4 million shelter project, layers of overhead that left about 60 percent for the work itself.\n\nThe Red Cross published a response the same day. It said donors’ money had built and run eight hospitals and clinics, helped stem a cholera outbreak, provided clean water and sanitation, and moved more than 100,000 people out of tents into safer housing. When land for new homes wasn’t available, it said, it paid for rental subsidies, repairs and retrofits. It said 90 percent of its Haiti staff were Haitian and criticized what it called the reporting’s “lack of balance, context and accuracy.”\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nRebuilding homes is **repair** (level 1) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth). The lessons are about the channels the money took, and they reach far beyond one organization.\n\n- **Attention.** The money followed the headlines ([Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/)). In a 2012 Pew survey of text donors, 58 percent were following the rebuilding “not too closely” or not at all.\n- **Restriction.** Money given for Haiti was, in effect, committed to Haiti and to the group that raised it, even where land disputes and government delays, the obstacles the Red Cross itself cited, made building slow ([the Restriction Reflex](/diagnosis/restriction-reflex/)).\n- **Local voice.** About 99 percent of relief aid after the quake went to international agencies, the Red Cross movement and international charities and contractors, according to the UN Special Envoy’s office, which urged donors to work through Haitian institutions instead ([the Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/)).\n- **Measurement.** The Center for Global Development found few evaluations of what aid in Haiti had delivered, and called for spending and results to be published ([the Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/)).\n\n## What carries over\n\nBefore giving after a disaster, ask who is already working there, how much of the money will reach local organizations and how results will be reported. See the [Disaster Response Guide](/tools/disaster-response-guide/) and [Open Problem 8, the Optimal Restriction](/open-problems/the-optimal-restriction/).\n"},{"byteLength":4373,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"ae7b567ef7ba8e0914ffd4e505fb1af24c911cab8b43127b9eb288f16617e62d","id":"source:current-cases-hookworm-campaign","path":"src/content/cases/hookworm-campaign.md","sha256":"62a136889888521301241a5730fe5a6e086ce3035e83ee8dd050d21ea11e7a61","text":"---\ntitle: The hookworm campaign in the American South\nsummary: A five-year, $1 million Rockefeller commission surveyed hundreds of Southern counties, treated more than 400,000 people for hookworm and pushed for sanitary privies. Hookworm was not eradicated, but school enrollment and literacy rose most where infection had been worst.\nkind: success\nera: 1909–1914\nplace: Southern United States\ndepth: 3\nlessons:\n  - Measuring the problem first gave the campaign a baseline. County surveys before treatment, and resurveys after, showed whether the work was paying off.\n  - A time-limited funder can leave something permanent by working through public agencies. State and local governments took over some of the work as the commission wound down.\n  - Treating infected people repairs the damage, while privies and shoes stop new infections. Treatment alone lets a parasite come back.\n  - A name can overpromise. The commission was for “eradication,” and hookworm was reduced, not eliminated.\nconditions: [measurement-gap, short-horizon, symptom-trap]\nsources:\n  - title: 'Disease and Development: Evidence from Hookworm Eradication in the American South'\n    publisher: Hoyt Bleakley, Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(1)\n    year: 2007\n    url: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3800113/\n  - title: 'Photo Essay: The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission and the American South'\n    publisher: Liesel Vink, Rockefeller Archive Center\n    year: 2019\n    url: https://resource.rockarch.org/story/the-rockefeller-sanitary-commission-and-the-south/\n  - title: Hookworm Eradication\n    publisher: Rebecca Haden, Encyclopedia of Arkansas\n    url: https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/hookworm-eradication-2233/\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nHookworm larvae live in soil polluted by human waste and burrow in through the skin, often through bare feet. Infected children are often listless, anemic and stunted. In 1909 John D. Rockefeller gave $1 million to create the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease, a five-year effort across eleven Southern states.\n\nThe commission started by measuring. It surveyed hundreds of counties and found that, on average, about 40 percent of school-age children were infected. Then it went to work: traveling dispensaries gave free treatment, lecturers and exhibits taught doctors, teachers and families to recognize the disease, and the campaign pushed for sanitary privies at schools and churches. It treated more than 400,000 people. In Arkansas, children were required to wear shoes to school, and meetings took on a carnival air, with testimonials, singing and refreshments.\n\nThe commission closed at the end of 1914. State governments had increased their own anti-hookworm spending as it wound down, and the newly founded Rockefeller Foundation carried the model abroad. Resurveys found infection had fallen by about 30 percentage points across the infected areas.\n\nHookworm was not eradicated. But the economist Hoyt Bleakley found that counties with more infection before the campaign saw bigger gains afterward in school enrollment, attendance and literacy. Following those children into adulthood, he found a substantial gain in income.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe campaign worked at several depths at once. Treatment was **repair** (level 1). Privies and shoes were **prevention** (level 2). Its lasting effect, the Rockefeller Archive Center notes, was to set a model for public health by building services into state and local government. That is **structure** (level 3) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth), and it is why a commission with a five-year life could have effects that lasted.\n\nIt is also an early answer to the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/). Because the commission surveyed before it treated, it knew where the problem was worst and could check its own progress. Nobody had to guess. And it avoided the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/) by pairing treatment with the sanitation that stops reinfection.\n\n## What carries over\n\nMeasure the problem before you treat it, and plan for who will carry on the work when you stop. A short-lived funder can leave behind a permanent public capacity if it builds through the institutions that will remain. Be careful with words like “eradication” unless eradication is really on the table.\n"},{"byteLength":4304,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"77742630b2963fd3696cbd84438bdd5f55213a22f4cdff60d33069e2d842a9ee","id":"source:current-cases-ice-bucket-challenge","path":"src/content/cases/ice-bucket-challenge.md","sha256":"0803922e180f38e35b79c6d8f52cbf6ba45c6ee26b769dd7e66dc21e447f5a92","text":"---\ntitle: The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge\nsummary: In the summer of 2014 a viral video challenge raised $115 million for the ALS Association, which turned the money into research grants, clinics and advocacy. It is a case of attention-driven giving that funded lasting work, and a reminder that attention picks causes by what spreads, not by need.\nkind: mixed\nera: 2014–2024\nplace: United States and online worldwide\ndepth: 1\nlessons:\n  - Attention can raise a fortune in a single summer, but it chooses causes by what spreads, not by the size or neglect of the need.\n  - A windfall does the most good when it is turned into things that keep working, such as research teams, clinics and trained people.\n  - Self-reported impact needs independent checks. The 10-year evaluation leaned on a grantee survey that only about a quarter of grantees answered.\n  - A campaign total can’t say whether the money was new giving or giving moved from other causes. That counterfactual is the question that matters most and is the hardest to answer.\nconditions: [story-bias, measurement-gap]\nsources:\n  - title: The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge\n    publisher: The ALS Association\n    url: https://www.als.org/ibc\n  - title: ALS Association Ice Bucket Challenge Impact Evaluation Report\n    publisher: Joshua Schnell and colleagues, RTI International\n    year: 2024\n    url: https://www.als.org/sites/default/files/2024-08/ALS_IBC10_Impact_Report.pdf\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nIn the summer of 2014, people around the world filmed themselves dumping buckets of ice water over their heads and challenged their friends to do the same and give to the fight against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also called Lou Gehrig’s disease. The ALS Association credits Anthony Senerchia, Pete Frates and Pat Quinn with launching the movement. It says 17 million people took part and the challenge raised $115 million for the association.\n\nA 10-year evaluation by RTI International, published by the association in 2024, describes where the money went. From 2013 to 2024 the association awarded $154.7 million in 560 research grants. Grantees reported new genes, biomarkers and treatment targets, and close to 80 percent of those who answered a survey said the funding let them expand their ALS research. The association says the number of multidisciplinary ALS clinics has more than doubled since 2014, from 100 to more than 220. Federal research money grew too: NIH funding for ALS research nearly tripled between 2011–2013 and 2021–2023, adjusted for inflation, while the NIH budget as a whole grew about 21 percent. The evaluators say that attributing this growth specifically to the association is beyond the scope of their study.\n\n## Why it’s mixed\n\nThe money was real and so was the research. But the way it arrived is not a model for how giving should choose causes. ALS got a viral moment that most diseases never get, and nothing in the challenge compared ALS with other needs. The windfall came once. RTI calls it a “once-in-a-generation phenomenon.”\n\nThe evidence on impact is also thinner than the totals suggest. The grantee survey had a 27 percent response rate, a limitation the report itself flags. And most care for people living with ALS is still palliative, the evaluators note.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe money worked at several depths. Clinic care is relief, research aims at treatments, which on the [depth scale](/method/#depth) is **repair** (level 1), and advocacy for federal funding works on structure. The way the money was raised is a clear case of [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/): a fun, social, shareable act, attached to one cause. The way its impact is reported shows the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/), where outputs such as grants, papers and clinics are counted, while the outcome that matters most, years of life for people with ALS, is much harder to measure.\n\n## What carries over\n\nWhen attention brings a windfall, put it into capacity that lasts and commission evaluation that doesn’t rely on the people funded. And ask the question no campaign total answers: did this money add to the world’s giving or move it from somewhere else? That is [Open Problem 4, the Counterfactual Problem](/open-problems/the-counterfactual-problem/).\n"},{"byteLength":5024,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"f49c580bf9926e60ef56f6dcff50817e3ce3297f6ea61c44bc29f3b31aac1ec0","id":"source:current-cases-one-laptop-per-child","path":"src/content/cases/one-laptop-per-child.md","sha256":"fa0c6751c2c3e2d75b3c74246c4065ae0859ea40811315ec069a3b181f089dbd","text":"---\ntitle: One Laptop per Child\nsummary: A nonprofit started by MIT Media Lab faculty set out to give schoolchildren around the world low-cost laptops of their own, and governments bought hundreds of thousands. In Peru children used computers far more but did no better in math or language, and in Uruguay reading and math scores did not improve.\nkind: mixed\nera: 2005–2014\nplace: Peru, Uruguay and other countries\ndepth: 3\nlessons:\n  - Delivering a thing is not the same as delivering what the thing is for. The laptops reached children, and better test scores did not follow.\n  - Test the theory of change before scaling it. The big evaluations reported after governments had already bought laptops for whole school systems.\n  - What you measure shapes what you learn. Peru’s evaluation found no effect on test scores and inconclusive gains in general thinking skills, and observers disagreed about which outcomes mattered most.\n  - Randomizing during a national rollout is what made these lessons knowable. That choice deserves as much attention as the results.\nconditions: [measurement-gap, story-bias]\nsources:\n  - title: Annan presents prototype $100 laptop at World Summit on Information Society\n    publisher: MIT News\n    year: 2005\n    url: https://news.mit.edu/2005/laptop-1116\n  - title: 'Technology and Child Development: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program'\n    publisher: Julian Cristia, Pablo Ibarrarán, Santiago Cueto, Ana Santiago and Eugenio Severín, American Economic Journal, Applied Economics 9(3)\n    year: 2017\n    url: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20150385\n  - title: 'The Impact of a One Laptop per Child Program on Learning: Evidence from Uruguay'\n    publisher: Gioia De Melo, Alina Machado and Alfonso Miranda, IZA Discussion Paper 8489\n    year: 2014\n    url: https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/8489/the-impact-of-a-one-laptop-per-child-program-on-learning-evidence-from-uruguay\n  - title: Evaluating One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) in Peru\n    publisher: Michael Trucano, World Bank Blogs\n    year: 2012\n    url: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/olpc-peru2\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nIn November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan unveiled the first working prototype of a “$100 laptop,” alongside Nicholas Negroponte, cofounder of the MIT Media Lab. The machine came from One Laptop per Child, a nonprofit created by Media Lab faculty to give schoolchildren and their teachers a personal, connected computer. It was rugged, ran on very little power and could share one internet connection across many machines. Governments would buy the laptops, and schools would hand them out, one per child.\n\nGovernments did buy. Peru ran the largest deployment, with a commonly reported 902,000 laptops. Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal was, according to the economists who studied it, the only deployment to cover a whole country.\n\nThen came the evaluations. In Peru, a team led by researchers at the Inter-American Development Bank ran a randomized evaluation in 318 rural primary schools. After 15 months, treatment schools had gone from about one computer for every eight students to more than one each, and children used computers far more at school and at home. But the study found no effect on math or language test scores, and only inconclusive evidence of gains in general thinking skills. In Uruguay, economists found the program had no effect on math or reading scores in its first two years, possibly because students mainly used the laptops in class to search the internet.\n\nReactions split on what the results meant. Michael Trucano of the World Bank called the habit of handing out hardware first “classic worst practice,” and also asked whether standardized tests were measuring the right things.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe program aimed at **structure** (level 3) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth): changing what every school gives every child. But a new input changes the structure of learning only if it changes what produces learning, such as what children do in class and how teachers teach. The evaluations suggest that, on its own, it didn’t.\n\nThis is the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/) in its classic form: [outputs and outcomes](/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/) are different things. Laptops delivered were the output. Learning was the outcome. A bold, simple promise, unveiled at a world summit, made the output easy to sell ([Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/)). The randomized evaluation during Peru’s rollout is the reason anyone knows the difference.\n\n## What carries over\n\nWrite down the [theory of change](/record/encyclopedia/theory-of-change/), the chain from what you deliver to the change you want, and test its weakest link at small scale before buying for a whole country. Decide in advance which outcomes count, so a disappointing result can’t be explained away and a promising one isn’t missed.\n"},{"byteLength":4935,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"7abdc3ecb43f3420d8372210cbb55bc24f8f58f8236e01264538c94444d74b73","id":"source:current-cases-oral-rehydration-therapy-spread","path":"src/content/cases/oral-rehydration-therapy-spread.md","sha256":"bf4d833274e25ddc03c23f5ea29e70d830ecfa0a1d2daca0eb2ab02bd2222ad3","text":"---\ntitle: How oral rehydration therapy spread\nsummary: A drink of clean water, sugar and salt can save a child from dying of diarrhea. After it was used to treat refugees during a 1971 cholera outbreak, it spread through health programs and door-to-door teaching, while child deaths from diarrhea fell from an estimated 4.6 million a year in 1980 to about 1.5 million by 2000.\nkind: success\nera: 1971–2000\nplace: Bangladesh, India and worldwide\ndepth: 0\nlessons:\n  - The cheapest fix can be one of the biggest. Oral rehydration salts cost a few cents per treatment.\n  - Putting treatment in families’ hands, not only in clinics, is what let it reach millions. That meant convincing doctors that people with little training could give it.\n  - Checking whether people can really do what they were taught is part of the intervention. Years after BRAC’s campaign, researchers tested the solutions mothers made at home.\n  - Relief at scale is not a lesser good. A treatment that meets the need today, everywhere, can save more lives than far more ambitious programs.\nconditions: [missing-voice, measurement-gap]\nsources:\n  - title: Reducing deaths from diarrhoea through oral rehydration therapy\n    publisher: Cesar G. Victora, Jennifer Bryce, Olivier Fontaine and Roeland Monasch, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 78(10)\n    year: 2000\n    url: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2560623/\n  - title: Miracle cure for an old scourge\n    publisher: Bulletin of the World Health Organization 87(2)\n    year: 2009\n    url: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2636196/\n  - title: 'The status of ORT (oral rehydration therapy) in Bangladesh: how widely is it used?'\n    publisher: A. Mushtaque R. Chowdhury, Fazlul Karim, Sanjit K. Sarkar, Richard A. Cash and Abbas Bhuiya, Health Policy and Planning 12(1)\n    year: 1997\n    url: https://doi.org/10.1093/heapol/12.1.58\n  - title: Diarrhoeal disease, fact sheet\n    publisher: World Health Organization\n    year: 2024\n    url: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/diarrhoeal-disease\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nFor most of history, diarrhea killed mainly through dehydration, draining the body of water and salts. Oral rehydration salts, a mix of clean water, sugar and salt, are absorbed in the small intestine and replace what is lost. A treatment costs a few cents.\n\nThe formula came out of years of studies in Kolkata and Dhaka. In 1971, during a cholera outbreak among refugees from what is now Bangladesh, Dilip Mahalanabis of the Johns Hopkins center in Kolkata treated patients at Bangaon, India, with the solution, dispensed from drums. He and Dhiman Barua of the World Health Organization had to persuade a skeptical medical profession that people with little training could give it. In 1978 Barua set up WHO’s program to control diarrheal diseases. After oral rehydration therapy was introduced in 1979, it quickly became the cornerstone of diarrhea control programs. The Lancet called it “potentially the most important medical advance” of the century.\n\nIn Bangladesh, the nonprofit BRAC took it door to door. Between 1980 and 1990 it taught more than 12 million mothers to make the solution at home with common salt and unrefined brown sugar. In 1993 researchers revisited more than 9,000 households and tested solutions made by a sample of mothers. More than 70 percent of mothers could make one that was chemically safe and effective, and many of them had been very young during the campaign. The solution was used in 60 percent of recent bouts of diarrhea.\n\nWorldwide, deaths of children under five from diarrhea fell from an estimated 4.6 million in 1980 to about 1.5 million by 2000. Oral rehydration played a significant part, though not the only one.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nOn the [depth scale](/method/#depth) this is **relief** (level 0). It treats the illness in front of you and does not stop diarrhea from happening. That is the point of the case: depth describes, it doesn’t grade, and relief delivered everywhere saved millions of lives.\n\nThe spread is a counterexample to the [Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/). The breakthrough was trusting families, not only doctors, to deliver care. And it shows the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/) from both sides. Researchers in Bangladesh tested what mothers could actually do, while a 2000 review of the global record found that patchy data and differing definitions of the therapy made trends hard to track.\n\n## What carries over\n\nSimple, cheap, taught at home and checked: that combination carried a relief treatment to millions of families. Relief does not end the need, though. Diarrhea still kills around 443,832 children under five a year, according to WHO, and preventing it takes safe water, sanitation, handwashing and rotavirus vaccines. See the [Intervention Database entry](/record/interventions/oral-rehydration-therapy/).\n"},{"byteLength":5202,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"aff70c9bb34cf3af770067b325703ab71179abdbd72b252ee5a3f4748b4099b7","id":"source:current-cases-playpumps","path":"src/content/cases/playpumps.md","sha256":"b900fc4a0798ccbb9bb2f08fde6b591a435b01129a8e3301bc30e323715242cf","text":"---\ntitle: PlayPumps\nsummary: A merry-go-round that pumped water as children played drew $16.4 million in pledges and wide celebrity support. Field reports later found many pumps broken, unused or slower than the hand pumps they replaced, and the backers stopped the rollout and said so publicly.\nkind: failure\nera: 2005–2010\nplace: Southern Africa\ndepth: 2\nlessons:\n  - A story can outrun the evidence. The picture of children playing while water flowed raised millions and a 4,000-pump target before independent field assessments came in.\n  - Bad news traveled slowly. Field partners saw breakdowns early and a 2007 UNICEF assessment raised concerns, but the report stayed internal, and the first public acknowledgment came in 2009.\n  - When the people who will use a technology don’t choose it, mismatches follow. In some places a PlayPump replaced a hand pump that delivered more water per hour.\n  - Stopping a program and explaining why, in public, is how the field learns. It works best when it happens early.\nconditions: [story-bias, missing-feedback-loop, missing-voice, silence-about-failure]\nsources:\n  - title: 'Southern Africa: Troubled Water'\n    publisher: Amy Costello, FRONTLINE/World, PBS\n    year: 2010\n    url: https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/southernafrica904/\n  - title: 'Timeline: The PlayPump Trail'\n    publisher: FRONTLINE/World, PBS\n    year: 2010\n    url: https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/southernafrica904/timeline_tw.html\n    note: Summarizes the 2007 UNICEF assessment, the 2008 report for Mozambique’s government, PlayPumps International’s 2009 letters and Jean Case’s 2010 letter.\n  - title: 'The PlayPump: What Went Wrong?'\n    publisher: Daniel Stellar, State of the Planet, Columbia Climate School\n    year: 2010\n    url: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-what-went-wrong/\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nThe PlayPump was a children’s merry-go-round attached to a water pump. As children spun it, it pumped groundwater into a storage tower, and advertising on the tower was meant to pay for upkeep. Its founder, Trevor Field, had installed hundreds across South Africa and its neighbors, and in 2000 the World Bank recognized the technology for innovation. FRONTLINE/World profiled it in 2005, and the story helped build enthusiasm among donors.\n\nIn September 2006, at the Clinton Global Initiative, Laura Bush, Bill Clinton and the philanthropists Jean and Steve Case announced $16.4 million to install PlayPumps across sub-Saharan Africa: $10 million from the U.S. government, $5 million from the Case Foundation and $1.4 million from the MCJ Foundation. A new nonprofit, PlayPumps International, set out to install 4,000 pumps by 2010, and celebrities joined the fundraising.\n\nTrouble showed up in the field. Save the Children, a partner, heard on site visits that pumps were breaking down and that some communities were rejecting them. By late 2009, only 42 of its 80 planned pumps in Mozambique had been installed, and 13 of those were working properly. A 2007 UNICEF assessment in South Africa, Mozambique and Zambia raised concerns about safety, maintenance and effectiveness and recommended installing PlayPumps only at schools, but the report was not released publicly. A 2008 report for Mozambique’s government noted the technology’s merits but found installation and maintenance problems. No advertisers had come forward in rural areas to pay for upkeep, and the pumps delivered less water per hour than the hand pumps they had often replaced.\n\nIn September 2009 PlayPumps International acknowledged “challenges” and temporarily suspended new installations. It gave its remaining pumps to the charity Water for People, and in 2010 it stopped raising money for the technology. Jean Case published a personal letter on the Case Foundation’s website about what the foundation had learned. FRONTLINE/World, whose first story had helped make the pump famous, broadcast its own follow-up investigation in June 2010.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nClean water for a village is **prevention** (level 2) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth). What failed was not the goal but the system around it. A vivid image drew money faster than evidence could ([Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/)). Problems seen in the field took years to reach donors ([the Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/)). Some communities rejected the pumps, and some lost hand pumps that had worked better, a sign that the people who would use the water were not the ones deciding what to install ([the Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/)). And a critical assessment stayed internal while fundraising went on ([the Silence About Failure](/diagnosis/silence-about-failure/)).\n\n## What carries over\n\nPilot and measure before scaling, ask users before installing, and treat early warnings from field partners as data. The public admission at the end is the behavior a healthy system should reward, and the [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/) exists to make such admissions normal and early. What would make it so is [Open Problem 9, the Failure Commons](/open-problems/the-failure-commons/).\n"},{"byteLength":4856,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"f8e78c699940de87ac0276bb9f9eb62d7031b229d4114f566d40e434eca01e6f","id":"source:current-cases-polio-eradication","path":"src/content/cases/polio-eradication.md","sha256":"e49d5f1d1f7de6696daf6d470f9a6b3028b8b2679bf3f0cd85eb7e9ced5d3191","text":"---\ntitle: The campaign to eradicate polio\nsummary: Since 1988 a global partnership has cut wild polio cases by more than 99 percent and eradicated two of the three wild strains. The original deadline was the year 2000, and the last stretch has proved the hardest.\nkind: mixed\nera: 1985–present\nplace: Worldwide\ndepth: 4\nlessons:\n  - A precise goal with a shared scoreboard, zero cases, has held governments, agencies and a volunteer movement together for decades.\n  - A civic network can be funder, fundraiser and advocate at once. Rotary helped start the effort, and its members have contributed more than $2.7 billion.\n  - The last 1 percent can be harder than the first 99. A deadline set at the start rarely survives the hardest places.\n  - Program data can look better than reality. Independent audits are how a campaign finds out what its own numbers miss.\nconditions: [fragmentation, measurement-gap, short-horizon]\nsources:\n  - title: Global eradication of poliomyelitis by the year 2000 (resolution WHA41.28)\n    publisher: World Health Assembly\n    year: 1988\n    url: https://www.archive.polioeradication.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/19880513_resolution-2.pdf\n  - title: Poliomyelitis, fact sheet\n    publisher: World Health Organization\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/poliomyelitis\n  - title: 'History of Polio: Key Milestones & Global Eradication'\n    publisher: Global Polio Eradication Initiative\n    url: https://polioeradication.org/about-polio/history-of-polio/\n  - title: Partners\n    publisher: Global Polio Eradication Initiative\n    url: https://polioeradication.org/who-we-are/partners/\n  - title: 'Update on the ongoing public health emergencies of international concern: poliomyelitis (EB/SCHEPPR/8/2)'\n    publisher: World Health Organization, report by the Director-General\n    year: 2026\n    url: https://apps.who.int/gb/scheppr/pdf_files/SCHEPPR8/EB_SCHEPPR8_2-en.pdf\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nIn 1985 Rotary International launched PolioPlus, its program to end polio. In May 1988 the World Health Assembly committed the World Health Organization to eradicating polio by the year 2000, which launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. That year there were an estimated 350,000 cases in more than 125 countries where the virus was endemic. The partnership grew to include WHO, Rotary, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation and Gavi, among others. Rotary members alone have contributed more than $2.7 billion, and more than a million of them have volunteered.\n\nThe results are enormous. Wild polio cases have fallen by more than 99 percent. Wild poliovirus type 2 was declared eradicated in 2015 and type 3 in 2019. Every WHO region except the Eastern Mediterranean has been certified free of wild polio, Africa most recently, in 2020.\n\n## Why it’s mixed\n\nThe year-2000 deadline passed long ago. Wild poliovirus type 1 still circulates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which had reported 39 cases for 2025 by the end of the year, down from 99 in 2024, with a backlog of samples still untested. A second problem comes from the oral vaccine itself. Its weakened virus can regain the ability to cause paralysis and spread where too few children are vaccinated. There were 202 such vaccine-derived cases in 2025, down from 463 in 2024. WHO links them to insecurity, displacement and large numbers of unvaccinated children. A newer oral vaccine is much less likely to revert.\n\nMeasurement has been hard too. In late 2025 an independent audit in Karachi found that the program’s data did not give an accurate picture of campaign quality, that coverage was being overestimated and that more children were being missed than the data showed. Funding has tightened, and the partnership adopted a leaner plan for 2026.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nEradication removes a disease for good, which makes it **source** work (level 4) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth), like the eradication of [smallpox](/record/case-studies/smallpox-eradication/). Until the last virus is gone, though, every vaccination round is prevention that has to be repeated.\n\nThe campaign is also a working answer to [Fragmentation](/diagnosis/fragmentation/). Very different organizations share one target and one scoreboard. The Karachi audit shows the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/) inside even a data-rich program, and four decades of work is a long test of funders’ patience against the [Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/).\n\n## What carries over\n\nA shared, measurable goal can hold a coalition together for a generation. The last steps of an eradication campaign happen in the hardest places, so funders need patience, flexible money and outside checks on the numbers. A program that is 99 percent finished is not finished.\n"},{"byteLength":5205,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"89af61edc6361bcce78672d8f9e034df5f7cbc21c2369b06adc43315fbb40f94","id":"source:current-cases-rosenwald-schools","path":"src/content/cases/rosenwald-schools.md","sha256":"bea302caaeeafbeaa833a248b85780008d553fe9afa5e0123bdf9f64b94b9da6","text":"---\ntitle: The Rosenwald schools\nsummary: A Black educator and a Chicago businessman started a program that built nearly 5,000 schools for Black children in the segregated rural South, with local communities and governments paying most of the cost. Economists later found the schools explain a large share of that era’s gains in Black education.\nkind: success\nera: 1912–1932\nplace: Rural South, United States\ndepth: 3\nlessons:\n  - Matching grants can multiply a gift and build ownership. Over time the fund’s share of a school’s cost fell from about a quarter to 10 to 15 percent, with local people and governments paying the rest.\n  - In a system that tends to redirect money away from the people it is meant for, funding things that are hard to divert, like buildings, desks and books, protects the gift.\n  - Matching has a cost too. Communities that could not raise their share could be turned down, so a match can favor the places that need help least.\n  - A fund built to spend itself out can move fast and avoid outliving its purpose.\nconditions: [parked-money, missing-voice]\nsources:\n  - title: The Impact of Rosenwald Schools on Black Achievement\n    publisher: Daniel Aaronson and Bhashkar Mazumder, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago working paper 2009-26, published in the Journal of Political Economy 119(5)\n    year: 2011\n    url: https://www.chicagofed.org/-/media/publications/working-papers/2009/wp2009-26-pdf.pdf\n  - title: Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Schools Act of 2020 (Public Law 116-336)\n    publisher: U.S. Congress\n    year: 2021\n    url: https://www.congress.gov/116/plaws/publ336/PLAW-116publ336.htm\n  - title: Rosenwald Fund Schools (1912-1932)\n    publisher: Holly Roose, BlackPast.org\n    year: 2011\n    url: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/rosenwald-fund-schools-1912-1932/\n  - title: Julius Rosenwald’s Crusade\n    publisher: Peter M. Ascoli, Philanthropy magazine (Philanthropy Roundtable)\n    year: 2006\n    url: https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazine/julius-rosenwalds-crusade/\n    note: The author is Rosenwald’s grandson and biographer.\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nIn the early 1900s, schools for Black children in the rural South were badly underfunded by white-run county boards. In 1930 the average county still spent 39 cents per person on salaries in Black schools for every dollar it spent in white schools. Booker T. Washington, the principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, sought Northern donors to build better schools, and Julius Rosenwald, the Chicago businessman who built Sears, Roebuck, agreed to help. After six pilot schools near Tuskegee around 1913 and 1914, the program spread across the South. Between 1912 and 1932 it helped build 5,357 schools and related buildings, such as teachers’ homes and workshops, in 15 states.\n\nThe fund’s rule, as the economists Daniel Aaronson and Bhashkar Mazumder summarize it, was to help “only where help was wanted.” Rosenwald money came only if Black residents and local governments put in money too, and together they paid most of the cost. The fund set standards for light, ventilation and sanitation, and it required desks, blackboards and books. It concentrated on physical things that county boards could not easily shift to white schools.\n\nIt worked. Aaronson and Mazumder found that rural Black students with access to a Rosenwald school completed more than a full extra year of schooling, with gains in literacy and test scores too. They estimate the schools explain close to 40 percent of the narrowing of the Black-white education gap in the South for children born between 1910 and 1925. The gains were largest in the most disadvantaged counties.\n\nThe building program ended in 1932, the year Rosenwald died. He had required his fund to spend all its money within 25 years of his death, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund dissolved in 1948.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nOn the [depth scale](/method/#depth) this is **structure** (level 3). Each school was a building, but the deal changed what county school systems built and paid for, because public money and upkeep were part of the match. Requiring local demand and contributions also put the community, not the donor, at the start of every project, the opposite of the [Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/).\n\nIn a 1929 essay Rosenwald wrote, “I am opposed to gifts in perpetuity for any purpose.” His fund is an early answer to what Charitology calls [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/).\n\nThe program worked inside segregation rather than against it. Washington’s strategy of putting education and economic progress first brought deep conflict with W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP. The schools show what building within the system achieved, not whether challenging it directly would have achieved more.\n\n## What carries over\n\nMatching can multiply money and build ownership, but it can also screen out the poorest places, so a match needs a plan for those who can’t meet it. A fund with an end date has to spend where it can do good now. How fast philanthropic money should be spent is [Open Problem 12, the Payout Question](/open-problems/the-payout-question/).\n"},{"byteLength":4800,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"bde6098bd9f443a8e23f3c042501cbae48040b5b7fce6d3feac2595b4d22226f","id":"source:current-cases-scared-straight","path":"src/content/cases/scared-straight.md","sha256":"04a5ceb8cc6ff169541b0341fd851aa849721dc4ccd8f29f641f7dcd8c787ff0","text":"---\ntitle: Scared Straight\nsummary: Programs that brought at-risk teenagers into prisons to be confronted by inmates spread across the United States on the strength of a documentary. Randomized trials found they increased later offending, yet versions of the programs carried on for decades.\nkind: failure\nera: 1970s–2010s\nplace: United States and other countries\ndepth: 2\nlessons:\n  - Success stories without a comparison group can’t show that a program works. The original documentary reported that 16 of 17 teenagers stayed out of trouble for three months, and compared them with no one.\n  - A program can feel right, cost almost nothing and still cause harm. Only randomized comparisons revealed it.\n  - Evidence of harm does not stop a program by itself. In one case, negative results ended the evaluation instead of the program.\n  - The more dramatic, cheap and intuitive a program is, the faster it spreads, so those are the programs most in need of testing.\nconditions: [story-bias, measurement-gap, missing-feedback-loop]\nsources:\n  - title: Scared Straight and Other Juvenile Awareness Programs for Preventing Juvenile Delinquency, a systematic review\n    publisher: Anthony Petrosino, Carolyn Turpin-Petrosino, Meghan E. Hollis-Peel and Julia G. Lavenberg, Campbell Systematic Reviews 2013:5\n    year: 2013\n    url: https://doi.org/10.4073/csr.2013.5\n    note: A free copy is held by the University of Tübingen repository at https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/64695\n  - title: Justice Department Discourages the Use of “Scared Straight” Programs\n    publisher: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, OJJDP News @ a Glance\n    year: 2011\n    url: https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/sites/ojjdp/files/pubs/news_at_glance/234084/topstory.html\nreview: draft\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nIn the 1970s, inmates serving life sentences at a New Jersey prison started a program to scare at-risk and delinquent teenagers away from crime. The teenagers visited the prison and sat through aggressive presentations about prison life, often with exaggerated stories of violence. A television documentary that aired in 1978 reported that 16 of the 17 teenagers it followed stayed law-abiding for three months afterward, a 94 percent success rate. There was no comparison group. The program was copied in more than 30 jurisdictions, and Congress held hearings on it.\n\nIt is easy to see why it spread. The idea is deterrence, which matches a common intuition about how to stop crime. It was cheap, too: one Maryland version cost less than a dollar per participant.\n\nThen the evidence came in. A randomized trial of the New Jersey program, published in 1982, reported that participants were more likely to be arrested than similar teenagers who didn’t take part. In 2013 a Campbell Collaboration review led by Anthony Petrosino pooled the results of randomized trials run over 25 years in eight jurisdictions. Across them, the programs made later offending more likely: the odds rose by a factor of about 1.6 to 1.7. “Doing nothing would have been better than exposing juveniles to the program,” the authors wrote.\n\nThe programs didn’t stop. The review notes that when a California version produced negative results, the response was to end the evaluation, not the program. A 2011 television series, *Beyond Scared Straight*, revived interest. That year two senior U.S. Justice Department officials wrote publicly that the department did not support such programs, and Maryland and California suspended theirs. The department’s juvenile justice office added that bringing court-involved youth into contact with adult inmates could violate federal law.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe aim was **prevention** (level 2) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth): stopping crime before it happened. Its failure is a lesson about the system’s signals. A documentary carried the story further than any data could ([Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/)). The people who saw the program in action, such as inmates, staff, parents and viewers, saw what happened in the room, not arrest records a year later ([the Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/)). And before-and-after counts without a comparison group looked like evidence when they weren’t ([the Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/)).\n\n## What carries over\n\nGood intentions and a plausible theory are not evidence. A [randomized controlled trial](/record/encyclopedia/randomized-controlled-trials/) was the only thing that showed this program was doing harm. See the myth [If a program sounds logical, it works](/record/myths/if-a-program-sounds-logical-it-works/), and for the wider question of when help hurts, [Open Problem 20, When Charity Harms](/open-problems/when-charity-harms/).\n"},{"byteLength":2383,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"c6605175cfa1af2d96a9e6629dca2e693077ec70b280b6a09cc8813927ee6a32","id":"source:current-cases-smallpox-eradication","path":"src/content/cases/smallpox-eradication.md","sha256":"0044154ea72ec456dc979d4fbe4a94c1d003ec2018bab745497ad290d91146ae","text":"---\ntitle: The eradication of smallpox\nsummary: A coordinated global campaign ended a disease that had killed people for thousands of years. It remains the only human disease ever eradicated.\nkind: success\nera: 1967–1980\nplace: Worldwide\ndepth: 4\nlessons:\n  - A precise, shared goal (zero cases) let thousands of organizations and governments coordinate around one measurable target.\n  - Surveillance and ring vaccination, which meant finding cases and vaccinating everyone around them, beat trying to vaccinate everyone everywhere. Learning which approach worked mattered as much as the money.\n  - Eradication can end recurring disease and treatment, while preparedness and safe handling of laboratory stocks still need support.\nconditions: [fragmentation, short-horizon]\nsources:\n  - title: Smallpox\n    publisher: World Health Organization\n    url: https://www.who.int/health-topics/smallpox\n  - title: 'Smallpox: A Great and Terrible Scourge, “Success”'\n    publisher: U.S. National Library of Medicine\n    url: https://nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/smallpox/sp_success.html\n  - title: The WHO and the Eradication of Smallpox\n    publisher: Origins, Ohio State University\n    url: https://origins.osu.edu/read/who-and-eradication-smallpox\n---\n\n## What happened\n\nEfforts to eliminate smallpox go back to the 1950s, and in 1967 the World Health Organization launched an intensified eradication program. Alongside widespread vaccination, teams increasingly found each case and vaccinated the people around it, an approach called surveillance and containment. The last naturally occurring case was recorded in Somalia in 1977. On 8 May 1980 the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated.\n\n## Why it’s a source-level case\n\nEradication ended naturally occurring smallpox. WHO still oversees laboratory stocks, research on vaccines and treatments, and emergency preparedness, so the disease has not disappeared from public health budgets. On the depth scale Charitology describes the end of natural transmission as a **source** (level 4) outcome for one disease. The campaign was a feat of [coordination](/diagnosis/fragmentation/) as much as of medicine.\n\n## What carries over\n\nFew problems can be eradicated the way a virus with no animal host can. But the campaign shows what a precise shared goal, honest measurement and a willingness to change methods mid-course can do.\n"},{"byteLength":5132,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"63b9d85c2ccb2ed02db0b76f5b810397e08312933fc7d81f6f888d20a9dcc69c","id":"source:current-journal-depth-without-a-ladder","path":"src/content/journal/depth-without-a-ladder.md","sha256":"dfccdd48fd0430345d56c953970835bb228317dc4c3d419eccef4be238345153","text":"---\ntitle: \"Depth without a ladder: a protocol for describing where work acts\"\nauthor: \"Charitology editorial project (AI-assisted draft)\"\ndate: 2026-10-25\nsummary: \"A reproducible proposal for classifying activities across relief, repair, prevention, structure and source without turning description into a rating.\"\nvolume: 0\nissue: 2\nreview: draft\nsources:\n  - title: \"Humanity's Checklist\"\n    url: https://humanityschecklist.org/\n    note: \"The proposed source framework cited in this draft, not established causal evidence.\"\n---\n\n**Article type: proposed method. Peer review: not completed.** This paper makes no claim that the depth framework predicts impact. Its purpose is to make that hypothesis testable and its classifications reproducible.\n\n## The unit is an activity\n\nAn organization can operate a shelter, campaign for housing rules and convene a coordination network. Assigning one depth to the entire organization erases those differences. Begin with an activity, a period and a stated outcome. Keep its money and volunteer time in separate fields unless a defensible conversion is explicitly supplied.\n\nRecord a short mechanism: “If this activity happens, what changes, for whom, through which step?” A statement such as “addresses root causes” is not enough. Name the recurring mechanism being changed. The source categories proposed by [Humanity’s Checklist](https://humanityschecklist.org/) are hypotheses that may help generate questions; invoking one does not demonstrate causality.\n\n## A proposed coding rule\n\nUse **0 relief** when the activity reduces an immediate burden; **1 repair** when it restores a damaged capacity; **2 prevention** when it reduces recurrence or exposure; **3 structure** when it changes a durable rule, institution or allocation; and **4 source** when it tests a proposed upstream mechanism that feeds several problems. These are Charitology’s definitions. They are not ordinal grades of merit.\n\nAn activity can span levels. Record a primary level only when the evidence for its mechanism supports that choice. Otherwise use multiple labels or “unclassified.” Do not allocate equal percentages merely because several labels apply. Budget shares require a stated allocation rule and evidence.\n\n## An illustrative coding exercise\n\nConsider a fictional water program. Delivering emergency water is relief. Restoring a broken pump can be repair. Scheduled maintenance may prevent outages. A change to accountable utility governance can act on structure. A coordination experiment connecting previously disconnected maintainers may test a source hypothesis.\n\nThe example does not establish which intervention works, what it costs or which deserves funding. Emergency delivery could be essential while an institutional reform fails. The coding tells us what to investigate, not which activity wins.\n\n## Independent coding and disagreement\n\nGive two coders the same public materials, definitions and period. Each records the claimed mechanism, supporting source, depth label, uncertainty and alternative interpretation before seeing the other’s answer. Compare the raw assignments before resolving disagreements. Publish the original codes and the adjudication separately.\n\nDisagreements can reveal a vague definition, missing activity-level information or an actual causal dispute. Do not hide them by averaging labels. A project described as level 2 by one coder and level 4 by another is not thereby level 3.\n\n## Denominators and unknowns\n\nA census should publish total eligible activities, activities with usable records, money covered and money unclassified. An observed zero is different from an absent record. “No source work found in this sample” is different from “no source work exists.” Funding shares across different years, geographic scopes or accounting definitions cannot be added without reconciliation.\n\nThe [Gap Map](/record/gap-map/) provides a local worksheet for making this accounting explicit. Its user-entered scenarios are not a global census.\n\n## Tests that could reject the method\n\nA useful test could find that coders cannot apply the definitions consistently, that activities span levels too often for the categories to be informative or that a different set of categories captures mechanisms more clearly. A further study could test whether depth adds predictive information beyond context, evidence quality and program design. A null result belongs in the Record.\n\nBefore any named-charity recommendation uses depth, the method requires public red-team review, a defensible unit of analysis, transparent uncertainty and independent source checks. This draft has not met those conditions.\n\n## Reproduction packet\n\nPublish the sampling frame, inclusion and exclusion rules, source retrieval dates, coding manual, coder assignments, uncoded records, adjudications and analysis code. Use the [Replication Program](/programs/replication-program/) to preregister the question and the [Evidence Reviews desk](/programs/evidence-reviews/) to track sources. Report descriptive results even when they fail to support the founding hypothesis.\n"},{"byteLength":3013,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"83d2c271a31aa63c9cf43cca769840148cda5da6e809ae1b62f5633cf3e8e5d9","id":"source:current-journal-ten-dollars","path":"src/content/journal/ten-dollars.md","sha256":"51c37101479c8357fd2d69e9e14483fa31dbd7d8661aa3f4e1fde2b32d0130df","text":"---\ntitle: Ten Dollars\nauthor: Charitology\ndate: 2026-10-25\nsummary: The founding poem uses a ten-dollar domain registration as an image for Charitology’s invitation to study how generosity is aimed.\nvolume: 0\nissue: 1\n---\n\n*Editorial note: This manifesto is a poem, not a history of philanthropy. The ten-dollar image is the author’s account of a domain registration. Existing philanthropy, ethics and evaluation fields have long studied giving; the poem’s invitation is to develop and test Charitology’s proposed shared craft.*\n\nIn 2026, we bought a word for ten dollars.\n\nNot a rare word. Not a clever one.\\\nThe most obvious word there is.\\\nIt was just lying there,\\\nunregistered, unclaimed, unbuilt,\\\nlike a key nobody had picked up\\\nbecause nobody knew there was a door.\n\n*Charitology.*\n\nWe have a word for the study of bells.\\\nCampanology.\\\nWe have a word for the study of flags.\\\nVexillology.\\\nWe have a word for the science of mixing a cocktail.\\\nMixology.\n\nBut for the science of doing the most good\\\na human being can do,\\\nthere was nothing.\\\nNo word. No field. No craft.\\\nNot even a name to argue about.\n\nThink about what that means.\\\nRocket science gets a whole discipline,\\\nand rockets only have to obey physics.\\\nPhysics doesn’t change its mind.\\\nGravity doesn’t have a culture.\\\nThrust doesn’t ask whose child gets saved first.\n\nDoing good is harder.\\\nIt is the hardest problem we have:\\\nwhich suffering, which cure,\\\nwhich country, which century,\\\nnow or later, them or us,\\\nthe person in front of you\\\nor the millions you’ll never meet.\\\nNo equation hands you the answer.\\\nAnd we’ve been working on it\\\nwithout ever admitting it needed solving.\n\nHere’s the part nobody says out loud:\\\nthe money is already here.\\\nHundreds of billions of dollars, every single year,\\\ngiven freely,\\\ngiven with love,\\\ngiven by people who meant every cent.\n\nThe generosity was never missing.\\\nThe aim was.\n\nAnd that is not your fault.\\\nYou gave with your whole heart.\\\nNobody handed you a map.\\\nNobody trained the mapmakers.\\\nNobody even named the territory.\n\nYou can’t master a craft that doesn’t exist.\\\nYou can’t get better at something\\\nno one has agreed is a thing to get better at.\\\nWithout a field, without the people who live in it,\\\nwithout that honest, stubborn, careful search for what actually works,\\\nwe’re all just trying\\\nwith the lights off.\n\nSo we’re turning them on.\n\n*Charitology.*\\\nThe science of doing the most good.\\\nNot one cause. Every cause.\\\nNot one method. Every method.\\\nNot one answer handed down,\\\nbut the endless, humble, rigorous work\\\nof finding the best of all ways.\n\nWe’re not here to tell you you’ve been giving wrong.\\\nWe’re here to tell you it’s worth getting right.\n\nSo study it. Question it. Test it. Teach it.\\\nArgue about it at dinner.\\\nProve us wrong and make it better.\\\nBecome what this world has never had a name for:\n\n*a charitologist.*\n\nIt cost us ten dollars to claim the word.\\\nIt will take the rest of our lives to deserve it.\n"},{"byteLength":4881,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"dbc24d7f0a662fcf69c1f6929361daa20e7d810605990c48c2dfc1cf99cc40b4","id":"source:current-journal-the-feedback-contract","path":"src/content/journal/the-feedback-contract.md","sha256":"2431a4375165a1dd5905b6922bff0bf5ed8f2b018631af554fc47323bb8540d6","text":"---\ntitle: \"The feedback contract: designing a giving decision people can correct\"\nauthor: \"Charitology editorial project (AI-assisted draft)\"\ndate: 2026-10-25\nsummary: \"A proposed reporting contract linking a giving decision to outcomes, uncertainty, affected communities and a public revision rule.\"\nvolume: 0\nissue: 3\nreview: draft\n---\n\n**Article type: design proposal. Peer review: not completed.** The contract below is an editorial method for testing, not an established intervention or a claim about what most charities do.\n\n## Start with a decision\n\nA report becomes useful when it can change a decision. Specify who will decide, what options they can choose, when they must choose and what they will do if the evidence changes. “We will learn about impact” leaves all four questions open.\n\nA small organization might decide whether to continue a weekly service, change its delivery schedule or test a referral partnership. A donor might decide whether to renew an unrestricted grant. A community group might decide whether a promised benefit matches what participants actually value. The decision belongs to the people with the authority to act, but the reporting process must also hear those affected by it.\n\n## Seven linked records\n\n1. **Resources:** what money, time and equipment went in, in which period and currency.\n2. **Activity:** what was actually delivered and the public evidence for that record.\n3. **Reach:** who could access it and who was excluded. Avoid publishing personal records.\n4. **Outcome:** what changed, including a unit, observation date and a defensible denominator.\n5. **Counterfactual:** what might have happened without the activity and why that comparison is credible.\n6. **Experience and harm:** what participants say mattered, how dissent can be raised safely and what unintended effects were observed.\n7. **Revision:** the threshold, review date and named organizational role responsible for changing the decision.\n\nMissing links stay missing. A count of services delivered is not automatically a causal effect. A testimonial can supply information about experience without estimating a population average. A model can clarify assumptions without becoming an observation.\n\n## A worked, fictional example\n\nSuppose a community learning program can fund one more term. Its team records sessions delivered and attendance, then learns that the existing timetable excludes caregivers. A simple continuation decision based only on attendance would miss that access question. The group therefore considers a changed schedule alongside continuation and closure.\n\nBefore choosing, it defines what it needs to know: whether the alternative time is acceptable, what participation would cost caregivers, whether learning outcomes differ and what other services may be displaced. A pilot could be appropriate, but a small pilot would not by itself establish a durable population effect.\n\nNo numerical benefit is invented here. The example demonstrates how the contract can expose an omitted decision dimension. Whether it improves real decisions is an open empirical question.\n\n## Publish the revision rule first\n\nA rule might say: review the program after one term; consult participants through a specified, accessible process; compare outcomes with the predeclared baseline; document harms and missing data; then record why the organization continued, adapted or stopped. The appropriate thresholds depend on context and should not be copied from this example as universal standards.\n\nChanges to the rule belong in a dated log. Distinguish a justified amendment from an outcome selected after seeing the result. Publishing the original plan lets another contributor reconstruct that difference.\n\n## Depth and values remain separate\n\nThe contract asks both where work acts and what different moral lenses consider important. A rights concern may create a constraint rather than an extra point in an average. Care may require attending to relationships that a cost model misses. Future generations may change the time horizon. These questions belong in the decision record, not behind a single hidden score.\n\n## Use and test\n\nThe [Impact Measurement Toolkit](/tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/) can turn the mechanism into an observation plan. [Charity OS](/tools/charity-os/) can retain local project, budget and evidence records. The [Moral Frameworks desk](/programs/moral-frameworks-program/) can record disagreements, while the [Failure Lab](/programs/failure-lab/) can document what changed after an unexpected result.\n\nA field test should compare decisions made with and without the contract, define what improvement means before analysis, track burden on staff and communities and publish failures as well as successes. No such test is claimed here. The contract earns its place only if evidence shows that its benefits justify its costs.\n"},{"byteLength":931,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"5761e671ec07cc818ec519de3485c8da41ab458ab27ea7bd16a8c249cdc3220a","id":"source:current-problems-closing-the-feedback-loop","path":"src/content/problems/closing-the-feedback-loop.md","sha256":"1182bbbf5061f57cc331c7ff4935f2068f7f4e6db8cca434a2ba066717a198c1","text":"---\ntitle: \"Closing the Feedback Loop\"\nnumber: 5\nstatement: \"What mechanism lets the people a charity serves send a signal that moves money, the way prices do in markets?\"\nprogress: \"A working mechanism in which feedback from the people served measurably changes funding, tested against a comparison group.\"\nconditions: [\"missing-feedback-loop\", \"missing-voice\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThis is the root condition of the [Diagnosis](/diagnosis/). Charitology hypothesizes that improving this loop could also change other conditions.\n\n## Where to start\n\nBeneficiary feedback surveys, participatory grantmaking and cash transfers (where recipients choose what to buy) are three existing mechanisms that give the people served some say. The open question is which of them, if any, can be scaled into a signal donors actually follow.\n"},{"byteLength":1039,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"34349fffa110e200ff515406d2ebb736ab9fe815ebcdf3e09f458f5f24e5b192","id":"source:current-problems-discounting-the-future","path":"src/content/problems/discounting-the-future.md","sha256":"4b9551d130ff277314a85627e8820186ada78cb98f975c5fb6eb47595e91e4e8","text":"---\ntitle: \"Discounting the Future\"\nnumber: 13\nstatement: \"How much should future people count, and how should giving weigh present suffering against risks to the future?\"\nprogress: \"A clear map of the positions, what each implies for allocation, and which facts would change the answer.\"\nconditions: [\"short-horizon\", \"single-lens\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nIf humanity has a long future, vastly more people may live after us than are alive now. How much they count changes nearly every allocation decision. Short funding cycles may leave that choice implicit; see [the Short Horizon hypothesis](/diagnosis/short-horizon/).\n\n## Where to start\n\nPhilosophers distinguish pure time preference (valuing the future less simply because it is later) from uncertainty about whether help will arrive. Separating the two is the first step. The [Future generations](/tools/values-compass/) framework in the Values Compass is a rough starting point.\n"},{"byteLength":1136,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"052a349c6043511ce2a46081a37cd408a50284dfca22491468ce38b0e9357984","id":"source:current-problems-measuring-the-source","path":"src/content/problems/measuring-the-source.md","sha256":"3bc1d78ef440b8515c39bac0b635fb42a77f853b01f2958ee10db7bf19c27e9a","text":"---\ntitle: \"Measuring the Source\"\nnumber: 3\nstatement: \"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?\"\nprogress: \"A measurement approach validated on at least one historical source-level change, recovering an effect that independent historians agree took place.\"\nconditions: [\"symptom-trap\", \"measurement-gap\", \"short-horizon\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nIf funders require measurements that source work cannot provide, useful work may be missed. That is one possible mechanism behind the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/) hypothesis. Hard-to-measure is not the same as small.\n\n## Where to start\n\nWork backwards from changes everyone agrees happened, such as the spread of oral rehydration therapy or the end of smallpox (see [Historical Case Studies](/record/case-studies/)), and test which measures would have detected them early. Contribution analysis, process tracing and forecasting tournaments are candidate methods.\n"},{"byteLength":954,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"4601ea2c4cde4ad9a6f1b1d29465d02ec26a898d7e4d8b56389cf0075b2764ce","id":"source:current-problems-moral-parliament-in-practice","path":"src/content/problems/moral-parliament-in-practice.md","sha256":"3de010c62c628b331725792ff2e1d8aef4723f96d50ab1ac1eed6c647e90e6c3","text":"---\ntitle: \"Moral Parliament in Practice\"\nnumber: 16\nstatement: \"How should a real giver allocate money when unsure which moral framework is right, and do different methods give stable answers?\"\nprogress: \"A comparison of allocation methods, such as credence-weighted averaging, moral parliaments and maximizing expected choice-worthiness, on real portfolios, with their sensitivity reported.\"\nconditions: [\"single-lens\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) is the condition Charitology was founded to treat. Treating it means giving people a sound way to act on several frameworks at once.\n\n## Where to start\n\nThe [Portfolio Builder](/tools/portfolio-builder/) implements a simple credence-weighted method. The open problem is whether more sophisticated methods give meaningfully different, and more defensible, answers.\n"},{"byteLength":854,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"d939b22b74f30688f38363efcb8f7d316c7ba5e1b6e2a49278b7bab6400ea2bd","id":"source:current-problems-proximity-and-obligation","path":"src/content/problems/proximity-and-obligation.md","sha256":"9de684744bef07921258225750feab5695f0122451e71fb09d01e9b43de936fa","text":"---\ntitle: \"Proximity and Obligation\"\nnumber: 18\nstatement: \"How should distance weigh in giving, and what do givers choose when they see honest comparisons?\"\nprogress: \"Experimental evidence on how givers allocate with and without comparisons, alongside a clear account of the moral positions.\"\nconditions: [\"proximity-pull\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/) is partly a moral question and partly an information gap. The information gap can be closed, and then we can see what people choose.\n\n## Where to start\n\nA scoped survey experiment could test how comparisons across distance affect choices, with its cost and limits stated. The moral side is mapped in the [Disagreement Register](/record/disagreements/).\n"},{"byteLength":1006,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"c8696266d78a31d3e777c750cd5d7ed1be74d6a15b9e2feed65ab7a1f577a073","id":"source:current-problems-story-without-bias","path":"src/content/problems/story-without-bias.md","sha256":"6912f5a60f9f72ca4240daef83d41e67c45b6d85d03594e2c87f89eb48130766","text":"---\ntitle: \"Story Without Bias\"\nnumber: 7\nstatement: \"Can a story make people feel the scale of a problem rather than one face, and does it move money toward larger needs?\"\nprogress: \"A replicated experiment in which a storytelling format shifts giving toward larger needs without lowering total giving.\"\nconditions: [\"story-bias\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/) draws on attention research, including findings whose strength and replication remain debated. In the classic study, explaining the bias did not increase donations to statistical appeals. The fix has to work with human attention, not against it.\n\n## Where to start\n\nExisting research on identifiable victims and psychic numbing gives the baseline effects to beat. Formats to test include stories of communities rather than individuals, visualizations of scale and stories about sources rather than symptoms.\n"},{"byteLength":804,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"e611a90a6294dc00e7f14aeb4dcd7458985e781667cbfc0293617fc822f3bd6c","id":"source:current-problems-the-agency-premium","path":"src/content/problems/the-agency-premium.md","sha256":"eb7a7580620d136085fdf598005d92c3918416a273dda98bec1eba2670339d27","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Agency Premium\"\nnumber: 14\nstatement: \"Do community-led programs outperform top-down ones on the same outcome, and by how much?\"\nprogress: \"Head-to-head comparisons of community-led and expert-led versions of the same intervention, in several contexts.\"\nconditions: [\"missing-voice\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe case for [listening to the people served](/diagnosis/missing-voice/) is strong in principle. A measured premium would make it impossible to ignore, and a measured cost would show where expertise should lead.\n\n## Where to start\n\nLook for interventions that have been delivered both ways, such as community-driven development programs evaluated against centrally planned ones.\n"},{"byteLength":943,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"f4b4375dd42cb78b9afad7822cfa9baf94c4379e14d73814e3b17b27fe86909f","id":"source:current-problems-the-counterfactual-problem","path":"src/content/problems/the-counterfactual-problem.md","sha256":"e0c962520906ceb2921e9874f34675620b64d71c96571e6ce44678e83f1d97da","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Counterfactual Problem\"\nnumber: 4\nstatement: \"How can a giver estimate what would have happened without their gift, cheaply and at scale?\"\nprogress: \"A method that produces counterfactual estimates for ordinary gifts, with error ranges, at a cost small relative to the gift.\"\nconditions: [\"missing-feedback-loop\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe real effect of a gift is the difference between the world with it and the world without it. Most givers never see that difference, which is part of why the [feedback loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) is missing.\n\n## Where to start\n\nFunding-gap disclosures (how much a charity could productively absorb), matched comparisons between funded and unfunded applicants, and published “room for more funding” analyses are partial answers. The open problem is making them routine.\n"},{"byteLength":1453,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"b8e7f2cf3712f4b7b0780f5454bfda005a14d4ee5962b745b4d1595f879f5d7f","id":"source:current-problems-the-depth-census","path":"src/content/problems/the-depth-census.md","sha256":"ebd0d4239ba1e1fabc871238a4436d82e1eacc0401bd61a78cdb2952cd8b7a9e","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Depth Census\"\nnumber: 1\nstatement: \"What share of the world’s charitable money goes to relief, repair, prevention, structure and source work?\"\nprogress: \"A public, reproducible estimate of the depth mix for at least one country’s giving, with a method others can rerun and a stated error range.\"\nconditions: [\"symptom-trap\", \"measurement-gap\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nCharitology’s founding hypothesis, [the Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), says the charity system is weighted toward symptoms. Charitology has not established the current mix. If the hypothesis is wrong, the field should be the first to say so. The census would supply a descriptive baseline. Deciding whether a mix is appropriate also requires an explicit standard tied to the goals being considered.\n\n## Where to start\n\nDraw a random sample of organizations from a public registry and code each one on the [depth scale](/method/#depth), weighting by spending. Program descriptions from Form 990 filings, published openly by [Charity Impact Media](https://theguysaccount.github.io/charity-impact-media/), and the foundation grants in [WHOFUNDS](https://theguysaccount.github.io/whofunds-open-grant-graph/) are open starting points. How often two independent coders agree is itself a finding: if people can’t agree on depth, the scale needs work first.\n"},{"byteLength":1126,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"9ac7235032a9edead414c63c41af22f0ebcb019eb259e5292fd12a36adbcf863","id":"source:current-problems-the-enough-question","path":"src/content/problems/the-enough-question.md","sha256":"94503785ecbea8a2160f8c5eed1be625d321caed30ab811736c7148830da20cf","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Enough Question\"\nnumber: 22\nstatement: \"How much money would it take to fix a specific problem at its source, and is it true that money isn’t the bottleneck?\"\nprogress: \"Costed source-level plans for specific problems, judged by independent experts, and a record of what happened when such plans were funded.\"\nconditions: [\"symptom-trap\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\nsources:\n  - {\"title\": \"Humanity’s Checklist\", \"publisher\": \"Humanity’s Checklist\", \"year\": 2026, \"url\": \"https://humanityschecklist.org/\"}\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nHumanity’s Checklist points out that hundreds of billions of dollars go to charity every year, and asks what would happen if $5 million, spent correctly, were enough to go after the six sources upstream of every world problem. Charitology treats that as a hypothesis to test, not a slogan. If money really isn’t the bottleneck, the field should find out what is.\n\n## Where to start\n\nPick one problem, write the source-level plan, cost it, fund it and publish what happens, including if it fails.\n"},{"byteLength":1077,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"d0edf1ee42be1ae81d1701fdc2e8ece79638c482f06d032ff0fb65bd9be566c7","id":"source:current-problems-the-exchange-rate-problem","path":"src/content/problems/the-exchange-rate-problem.md","sha256":"b3bf172a5019234137ea551bd64ef68461b9d40943ba7960ba7378948e8cd623","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Exchange Rate Problem\"\nnumber: 2\nstatement: \"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?\"\nprogress: \"A comparison method that people holding different moral frameworks accept as fair for at least some pairs of causes, with the pairs it can’t compare stated openly.\"\nconditions: [\"single-lens\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nEvery choice between two causes is an exchange rate, whether or not anyone writes it down. Writing it down lets people argue about it.\n\n## Where to start\n\nHealth economics already compares treatments with quality- and disability-adjusted life years. Wellbeing research proposes life-satisfaction measures. Each scale carries a moral framework inside it. The work is to map which scales each framework accepts and where every scale breaks down. Charitology’s [frameworks data](/tools/public-api/) is a place to begin.\n"},{"byteLength":919,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"ec0c660856744d7213cf196ec023ad2db3d42174bb8f07363d92d77634798f6e","id":"source:current-problems-the-failure-commons","path":"src/content/problems/the-failure-commons.md","sha256":"6ae394c3b93dc59d7e16009878b01073808c578a6d25d754b6ac9ac29cd13454","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Failure Commons\"\nnumber: 9\nstatement: \"What incentives would get charities to publish their failures, and what happens to their funding when they do?\"\nprogress: \"A shared failure registry with a meaningful sample of participating organizations, and data on their funding before and after disclosure.\"\nconditions: [\"silence-about-failure\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe [Silence About Failure](/diagnosis/silence-about-failure/) costs the field its most valuable data. If disclosure turns out to be rewarded, the incentive problem is smaller than people fear. If it’s punished, funders need to see that.\n\n## Where to start\n\nCharitology’s [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/) is the commons in seed form. Pair it with a funder pledge not to penalize honest disclosure, and measure what happens.\n"},{"byteLength":809,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"70d1ad39a84fe41ec6a45f8ddc17ceb27770194bde0a6396a0dc43f16767fe2d","id":"source:current-problems-the-fragmentation-question","path":"src/content/problems/the-fragmentation-question.md","sha256":"e9237ccf43fe26c9b017ec3c4fbbe5ae9eb4e01fab64d1e59d8ad939a3034c08","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Fragmentation Question\"\nnumber: 11\nstatement: \"Is the charity sector over-fragmented, and when do mergers, shared services or coordination layers improve outcomes?\"\nprogress: \"Comparative evidence on outcomes before and after consolidation or coordination, across several fields.\"\nconditions: [\"fragmentation\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\n[Fragmentation](/diagnosis/fragmentation/) is easy to see and hard to judge. A plural sector experiments more. A fragmented one may waste more. The answer probably depends on the field.\n\n## Where to start\n\nNonprofit mergers, shared back-office services and collective-impact coalitions all leave records. Outcome data before and after is the missing piece.\n"},{"byteLength":863,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"a519a69ce0b7cb3aa34c675f5f4449af1a9bd5c54f0ec9d5987bbe3c4a7f9067","id":"source:current-problems-the-government-question","path":"src/content/problems/the-government-question.md","sha256":"c08c4ce1c6d035f654ec91a843838774fee3027682cc26c8e4b9fa4d481ced48","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Government Question\"\nnumber: 21\nstatement: \"When does philanthropy add to public spending, when does it replace it, and when does it shape public policy without public accountability?\"\nprogress: \"Evidence on whether private giving crowds public budgets in or out, and shared norms for when private money should shape public policy.\"\nconditions: [\"missing-voice\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nPrivate giving and public spending interact. A gift can unlock government money, replace it or steer it. Each has different consequences for the people served and for democracy.\n\n## Where to start\n\nEconomists have studied crowding-in and crowding-out for decades, with mixed results. The open problem is turning that literature into guidance a giver can use.\n"},{"byteLength":819,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"f268a141495582ac4a7ffdc5fa2589954a6945415a24a4a6354e75d2544f8d42","id":"source:current-problems-the-money-time-exchange","path":"src/content/problems/the-money-time-exchange.md","sha256":"a9adb58f3df6bde65cd037dfa790f2bd71c18c1e1886bbabc4d076a2165001e1","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Money-Time Exchange\"\nnumber: 19\nstatement: \"When is an hour of volunteering worth more than giving an hour’s wages?\"\nprogress: \"A framework that estimates the value of volunteer time by role and skill, checked against organizations’ own assessments.\"\nconditions: []\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nVolunteer time can help in different ways and also takes coordination. The proposed study would compare the value of roles with the cost of supporting them; it does not assume those answers are already known.\n\n## Where to start\n\nAsk organizations what an hour of each kind of volunteer help is worth to them, and compare that with the volunteer’s wage. See [Time Charitology](/programs/time-charitology/).\n"},{"byteLength":844,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"b2ba44826c6bbc3b74ed151b93049f6b2d574e4653710c8bf06d27035adee8f8","id":"source:current-problems-the-optimal-restriction","path":"src/content/problems/the-optimal-restriction.md","sha256":"9c537a2f0738d0366c9d5e0ebafdc56657803d65f9fdaabbc9cb3d3835822c23","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Optimal Restriction\"\nnumber: 8\nstatement: \"When does restricting a gift help, and when does it harm?\"\nprogress: \"Evidence from natural experiments or trials on how restriction affects outcomes, including the conditions under which each kind of funding works better.\"\nconditions: [\"restriction-reflex\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe case for unrestricted funding is strong but mostly built on surveys of what charities prefer. A science of giving needs outcome evidence, including any cases where restriction does better.\n\n## Where to start\n\nLarge shifts toward unrestricted giving, such as funders that relaxed restrictions in 2020, are natural experiments. Comparing grantee outcomes before and after is a feasible first study.\n"},{"byteLength":1032,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"8f0f6a085f3effcd1aacf705102af23603f3c0a0345ac4b2ede05d835430fe2c","id":"source:current-problems-the-overhead-replacement","path":"src/content/problems/the-overhead-replacement.md","sha256":"ebcad093d801391f16fbd58006cd99a6ef3eedc2ad6526e5b4a59e2ddab70319","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Overhead Replacement\"\nnumber: 6\nstatement: \"What simple public measure could replace overhead ratios as the default way donors judge a charity, without being easy to game?\"\nprogress: \"A measure computable from public data for most large charities, shown to track independently assessed effectiveness better than overhead does.\"\nconditions: [\"overhead-myth\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nTelling donors to stop using overhead has been tried. The [Overhead Myth](/diagnosis/overhead-myth/) persists partly because nothing equally simple replaced it.\n\n## Where to start\n\nCandidate measures include published outcome data, the presence of independent evaluations, transparency about failures and feedback from the people served. Each has to be tested for whether it can be gamed. Open Form 990 data from [Charity Impact Media](https://theguysaccount.github.io/charity-impact-media/) provides source-linked spending records.\n"},{"byteLength":929,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"7eb533ba348d22d6f4d0b251cef131bc9938675da17c2a1ebece7eb624c29132","id":"source:current-problems-the-payout-question","path":"src/content/problems/the-payout-question.md","sha256":"060632cbd6a1961d40ac06a002c672f4da2310ea95bfd73e2bb0ebfe30cb288d","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Payout Question\"\nnumber: 12\nstatement: \"What is the best rate to spend philanthropic money now versus later?\"\nprogress: \"A model that ties the payout rate to measurable inputs, such as investment returns, how fast the best opportunities are used up and discount rates, and gives ranges a funder can act on.\"\nconditions: [\"parked-money\", \"short-horizon\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe Annual DAF Report 2025 estimated about $326 billion in donor-advised fund assets in 2024. Whether assets should be spent sooner is a substantial allocation question; the asset total alone cannot answer it. See [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/).\n\n## Where to start\n\nEconomists have written “give now or give later” models. The open problem is grounding them in real data on how the cost of doing good changes over time.\n"},{"byteLength":922,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"718c04ee143aa57b60b0ef747759695d17ee9292578a6e73ac4f63f77edb93a9","id":"source:current-problems-the-profession-question","path":"src/content/problems/the-profession-question.md","sha256":"9d13e45b0d9b11ccbb4ca999b3d3aa6e71d977e0956011aac7a095dbcd6dac82","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Profession Question\"\nnumber: 17\nstatement: \"What should a charitologist be trained in, and does training change where money goes?\"\nprogress: \"A curriculum, and evidence comparing the decisions of trained and untrained advisors or donors on the same choices.\"\nconditions: [\"missing-profession\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nCharitology’s founding claim is that a profession would improve where money goes, as medicine improved how illness is treated. That claim can be tested, so it should be. See [the Missing Profession](/diagnosis/missing-profession/).\n\n## Where to start\n\nThe [Principles of Charitology](/record/principles/) textbook and the [Certified Charitologist](/programs/certified-charitologist/) program are draft curricula. A randomized study of a short training course is a feasible first test.\n"},{"byteLength":762,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"e48b581018b552035334fd8043de44159372dc6a3d9c5a6a81eccf73e982ce35","id":"source:current-problems-the-question-of-questions","path":"src/content/problems/the-question-of-questions.md","sha256":"ede500c280d2fdcab428a47393cdc21f76ab6091e74b272662d3c30344e4b931","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Question of Questions\"\nnumber: 23\nstatement: \"How should the field decide which open problem to work on first?\"\nprogress: \"A published value-of-information estimate for each open problem, updated as problems are solved.\"\nconditions: [\"missing-profession\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nResearch money is limited too. The first problems solved should be the ones whose answers would change the most decisions.\n\n## Where to start\n\nFor each problem, estimate how much money would move if it were solved and how likely a solution is in the next five years. Publish the estimates and let the [Forecasting Platform](/tools/forecasting-platform/) test them.\n"},{"byteLength":952,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"da386288a19a5b99058d18849c40da26767f365f0e969a482c78c1a01d8cc1ec","id":"source:current-problems-the-replication-rate","path":"src/content/problems/the-replication-rate.md","sha256":"e46fec9bd6fff1100c98b794e314750ed30b1d1c1d67de0c5d620b99e754a663","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Replication Rate\"\nnumber: 10\nstatement: \"What share of headline charity impact findings replicate when they are tested again?\"\nprogress: \"A systematic replication project covering a defined set of influential findings, publishing the rate with confidence bounds.\"\nconditions: [\"silence-about-failure\", \"measurement-gap\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe [Replication Program](/programs/replication-program/) describes published checks in psychology and deworming research. Charitology has not established an equivalent sector-wide rate for charity impact findings. Donors deserve to know how much to trust a headline.\n\n## Where to start\n\nChoose a fixed list of widely cited findings, pre-register the replication plan and publish everything, including findings that replicate. See the [Replication Program](/programs/replication-program/).\n"},{"byteLength":1049,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"3bd9ade3f465587b11e10c376a5e2abc8ea8a8c16b3784c7594bab58b4624172","id":"source:current-problems-the-status-flip","path":"src/content/problems/the-status-flip.md","sha256":"ccd5bf36080d4d320b1de719a486dd6a85ad36da52c76b44dd79d3fa75b1af43","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Status Flip\"\nnumber: 15\nstatement: \"Can generosity become a stronger status signal than consumption, and what would that unlock?\"\nprogress: \"Field evidence that a status mechanism tied to what gifts achieve changes giving behavior at scale.\"\nconditions: [\"prestige-economy\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\nsources:\n  - {\"title\": \"Humanity’s Checklist\", \"publisher\": \"Humanity’s Checklist\", \"year\": 2026, \"url\": \"https://humanityschecklist.org/\"}\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nHumanity’s Checklist proposes directing status toward generosity. Whether that would increase giving or improve its results is a hypothesis to test. See [the Prestige Economy](/diagnosis/prestige-economy/).\n\n## Where to start\n\nHumanity’s Checklist proposes charity designer goods, where the coolest thing you can wear shows how much you gave. Testing that proposal, and others like Charitology’s shareable [Wrapped](/tools/charitology-wrapped/) card, is a concrete first experiment.\n"},{"byteLength":832,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"f71dcdfb253692f79051d4be8e33d93728bd49e1f6650506e9600f16aeb7f03f","id":"source:current-problems-when-charity-harms","path":"src/content/problems/when-charity-harms.md","sha256":"6991d2c355b79a85177fe8bd6c8268b75813acf9f1942a54ad3deddbeb6943b4","text":"---\ntitle: \"When Charity Harms\"\nnumber: 20\nstatement: \"When does charity cause harm, through dependency, crowding out local markets or governments, or delaying reform?\"\nprogress: \"A catalog of documented harm mechanisms, with the conditions under which each appears, drawn from real cases.\"\nconditions: [\"symptom-trap\", \"silence-about-failure\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nGood intentions are not good outcomes. Some programs have made things worse, and others may have delayed the structural fixes that would have helped more. A science of giving has to study harm as carefully as help.\n\n## Where to start\n\nThe [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/) collects documented cases. The work is to find the patterns that connect them.\n"},{"byteLength":2640,"commit":"8df2d0ddbc6d91b9841c6bbb94dbde1fc7c00137","hash":"db6c5de6153ae6805cbdcd8266fd1c8a353f9c508a91c97627e8e1dce9bfcacc","id":"source:current-record-methodology","path":"src/content/record/methodology.md","sha256":"ae757a933ab2c75ec5b6737f0177aa9d7a07c71ad3517f2c20bbfeb6bab3dccc","text":"---\ntitle: \"Methodology Handbook\"\ngroup: \"Thought and teaching\"\norder: 6\nsummary: \"Exactly how Charitology labels evidence, classifies depth, reviews pages and handles corrections.\"\nstatus: live\nconditions: [\"silence-about-failure\", \"missing-profession\"]\nhelp:\n  - \"Propose a change to the method in an issue labeled methodology.\"\n  - \"Red-team a rule below.\"\nrelated: [\"/method/\", \"/contribute/\", \"/programs/red-team/\"]\n---\n\n## Evidence labels\n\nClaims about the charity system carry one of four labels:\n\n- **Established** means strong published evidence from several independent sources.\n- **Documented** means credible sources report it; the size of the effect is less certain.\n- **Debated** means credible people disagree. Both sides are shown.\n- **Hypothesis** means Charitology’s own working claim, untested, and testing it is the work.\n\nInterventions carry an evidence grade: *strong*, *moderate*, *mixed*, *weak* or *unknown*. The grade applies to the specific outcome claimed.\n\n## Depth classification\n\nWork is classified by where it acts, using the five levels in [the Method](/method/#depth): relief, repair, prevention, structure, source. Classify by the primary mechanism of the work, not its aspirations. When work spans levels, classify by where most of the money goes and note the rest. Depth classifications of named organizations are hypotheses and cite the organization’s own description of its work.\n\n## Sources\n\nEvery factual claim has a source the writer has read. Primary sources come first. Paywalled sources get a free alternative where one exists. If no source can be found, the claim is removed.\n\n## Review\n\nNew pages start as **drafts**. A page becomes **reviewed** when a second contributor has checked every source and the framing against [the Standard](https://github.com/theguysaccount/charitology/blob/main/STYLE.md). Reviews happen in public pull requests.\n\n## Corrections and red-teaming\n\nEvery page links to a prefilled issue for corrections and one for challenges. Corrections are fixed in public. Significant corrections are noted in the pull request that makes them. A red-team challenge stays open until it is answered with evidence, either by changing the page or by explaining why it stands.\n\n## AI assistance\n\nAI tools may help draft pages. Their use is disclosed in the pull request, and a human contributor is responsible for checking every claim. Edition 0 was drafted with AI assistance and is being reviewed in public.\n\n## Ratings\n\nCharitology publishes no ratings of named organizations. That changes only after a rating method has been published and has survived public red-team review.\n"},{"byteLength":3994,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"7ef8c4a90927056b8bdc70f96cf8fdee9b4e82d4dec463f67af2384957735b15","id":"source:encyclopedia-beneficiary-feedback-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/beneficiary-feedback.md","sha256":"a5b15f7c9dca883ebac4e16fee63aabe0635c5c8de69bc60fafb7466185a0e71","text":"---\ntitle: Beneficiary feedback\nsummary: Systematically asking the people a program serves what they think of it, and acting on what they say. It is the most direct way to restore part of the feedback loop that charity is missing.\naliases: [constituent feedback, constituent voice, client feedback, listening to the people served]\nconditions: [missing-feedback-loop, missing-voice]\nrelated: [/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/, /open-problems/closing-the-feedback-loop/, /record/encyclopedia/participatory-grantmaking/, /record/principles/08-feedback-and-voice/, /record/lexicon/#feedback-loop]\nsources:\n  - title: Listening to Those Who Matter Most, the Beneficiaries\n    publisher: Fay Twersky, Phil Buchanan and Valerie Threlfall, Stanford Social Innovation Review\n    year: 2013\n    url: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/listening_to_those_who_matter_most_the_beneficiaries\n  - title: Feedback Labs\n    publisher: Feedback Labs\n    url: https://feedbacklabs.org/\n  - title: Fund for Shared Insight\n    publisher: Fund for Shared Insight\n    year: 2026\n    url: https://fundforsharedinsight.org/\n    note: The collaborative concluded in 2026 after 12 years. Its site is now an archive.\n  - title: Six Practices of Trust-Based Grantmaking\n    publisher: Trust-Based Philanthropy Project\n    url: https://www.trustbasedphilanthropy.org/practices\n---\n\nA business that ignores its customers soon finds out: sales fall. A charity that ignores the people it serves may never find out, because those people are not the ones paying. **Beneficiary feedback** is the practice of asking them anyway, in a systematic way, and changing the work in response.\n\n## Why the signal is missing\n\nIn a 2013 article, Fay Twersky, Phil Buchanan and Valerie Threlfall argued that funders and nonprofits consult experts and crowds but rarely ask the people they serve. They pointed to the reasons: the people served often have few alternatives, funders rather than beneficiaries pay the provider, and incentives favor the funder’s view. So a flawed program can continue for years. This is the [Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) seen from the ground.\n\n## What listening can show\n\nThe authors drew on fields that already listen. In health care, they cited research in which patients’ perceptions of their care, especially nursing care, predicted clinical quality and lower inpatient death rates for heart attack patients. In education, the YouthTruth initiative had gathered feedback from about 142,000 students, and 98 percent of participating school leaders said they used or planned to use the results. Their broader point was that the views of the people served can be a leading indicator, showing a problem before it shows up in outcomes.\n\nThey were also clear about the limits. Feedback is expensive to collect. People with low incomes or low literacy are hard to survey well, and people may fear that criticism will cost them help. Feedback works best alongside other evidence, not instead of it.\n\n## Who is building it\n\nFeedback Labs supports funders and nonprofits to listen to people and act on what they hear. Fund for Shared Insight, a national funder collaborative that ran for 12 years before concluding in 2026, launched Listen4Good, a program offering nonprofits tools and coaching to collect and use feedback. The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project counts “solicit and act on feedback” among its six practices, applied to the relationship between funders and grantees.\n\n## The open question\n\nFeedback that is collected but never moves money only half closes the loop. What would let the people served send a signal that changes where money goes, the way prices do in a market? That is [Open Problem 5, Closing the Feedback Loop](/open-problems/closing-the-feedback-loop/). [Participatory grantmaking](/record/encyclopedia/participatory-grantmaking/) and [cash transfers](/record/interventions/cash-transfers/), where recipients choose what to buy, are two partial answers.\n"},{"byteLength":5380,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"01c69026e51cf622e954092f56aa2e990f76368b67bd80ef59b7223a460e1de5","id":"source:encyclopedia-charity-as-a-system-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/charity-as-a-system.md","sha256":"745ceef079ce9163fa1ce2b2cddfd9011cf339c4ccdb965434eb1abedf5e6594","text":"---\ntitle: Charity as a system\nsummary: Charitology’s model of giving as one connected system. Givers respond to signals, money moves through channels to the work, the work produces outcomes, and feedback can carry results back. The size of any gap is an open empirical question.\naliases: [the charity system, the system map, giving system]\nconditions: [missing-feedback-loop, missing-profession, fragmentation]\nrelated: [/diagnosis/, /record/principles/02-the-charity-system/, /record/encyclopedia/source-depth/, /open-problems/closing-the-feedback-loop/, /tools/giving-dashboard/]\nsources:\n  - title: 'Giving USA: $617.2B Was Given To Nonprofits During 2025'\n    publisher: The NonProfit Times, reporting Giving USA 2026\n    year: 2026\n    url: https://thenonprofittimes.com/npt_articles/giving-usa-617-2-b-was-given-to-nonprofits-during-2025/\n  - title: Exempt Organizations Business Master File Extract\n    publisher: Internal Revenue Service\n    year: 2026\n    url: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organizations-business-master-file-extract-eo-bmf\n    note: The page listed a record count of 1,975,975 organizations when checked in October 2026. The file covers every kind of tax-exempt organization, not only charities.\n  - title: DAF Assets Soar 30% to $326 Billion\n    publisher: The Chronicle of Philanthropy, reporting the Annual DAF Report 2025 by the DAF Research Collaborative\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://www.philanthropy.com/news/daf-assets-soar-30-to-326-billion/\n  - title: The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise\n    publisher: Henry B. Hansmann, Yale Law Journal 89\n    year: 1980\n    url: https://yalelawjournal.org/article/the-role-of-nonprofit-enterprise\n  - title: Annual DAF Report 2025, full report\n    publisher: Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative, Indiana University repository\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://scholarworks.indianapolis.iu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8f309b9f-da38-433e-8c33-bc1b3d1f9a1a/content\n---\n\nCharitology studies the **system** that connects them all. Like any system, it produces the results it is built to produce, so to change the results you have to understand the structure.\n\n## Five stages\n\n1. **Givers.** The people and institutions who give. In the United States, Giving USA estimates that $617.2 billion was given in 2025. Individuals gave 64 percent of it, foundations 19 percent, bequests 10 percent and corporations 7 percent.\n2. **Signals.** What givers see when they decide: stories and faces, overhead ratios, rankings, prestige and tax breaks.\n3. **Channels.** Where money is held and routed: charities, foundations, donor-advised funds and giving platforms. The IRS master file of tax-exempt organizations of every kind listed nearly two million records in October 2026, and donor-advised funds alone held about $326 billion in 2024.\n4. **The work.** What the money pays for, described by where it acts on the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/), from relief to source.\n5. **Outcomes.** What changes in people’s lives, in institutions and in the future.\n\n## The missing loop\n\nIn a market, the person who pays is usually the person who benefits, and prices and reviews carry information back. In charity, the payer and the person served are usually different people. The legal scholar Henry Hansmann called the general version of this *contract failure*: the people paying for a service cannot easily judge its quality. This can make results harder for donors to assess. The frequency and allocation effects of the gap are not measured by Hansmann’s theory. That is [the Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/), and Charitology treats it as the root of the [Diagnosis](/diagnosis/).\n\n## The field around it\n\nAround all five stages is the field: the knowledge, methods and people that could steer the system as a whole. Researchers, evaluators, advisors and philanthropy educators already study parts of this system. Charitology proposes a shared craft connecting their work across causes and frameworks. That is [the Missing Profession](/diagnosis/missing-profession/).\n\n## Where the conditions sit\n\nEach condition in the Diagnosis acts at one point in the system:\n\n- **Givers:** [Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/), [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/)\n- **Signals:** [Overhead Myth](/diagnosis/overhead-myth/), [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/), [Prestige Economy](/diagnosis/prestige-economy/)\n- **Channels:** [Restriction Reflex](/diagnosis/restriction-reflex/), [Fragmentation](/diagnosis/fragmentation/), [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/)\n- **The work:** [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/)\n- **Outcomes:** [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/), [Silence About Failure](/diagnosis/silence-about-failure/)\n- **Feedback:** [Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/), [Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/)\n\nThe map is a model, not a measurement. Its value is that it shows how a problem at one stage shows up at another. Signals that reward what is visible shape what channels fund, and short, restricted grants favor work with quick, countable outputs. Charitology’s working hypothesis is that fixing one stage while the loop stays open changes little. See [Principles, Chapter 2](/record/principles/02-the-charity-system/) for the full account.\n"},{"byteLength":4473,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"d597e3bc2ec7154bdb4a91451a7380d46a649c9aec659a60617b7a3e5d794776","id":"source:encyclopedia-cost-effectiveness-analysis-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/cost-effectiveness-analysis.md","sha256":"3c76330dac88b4a6887d92b925c2b38830ef2da32cca2b01aad1eb6819aa8042","text":"---\ntitle: Cost-effectiveness analysis\nsummary: Estimating how much good a program produces per dollar, so that options can be compared. The estimates are rough, and the differences they reveal can be enormous.\naliases: [CEA, cost per outcome, cost per DALY, cost per life saved]\nconditions: [overhead-myth, measurement-gap]\nrelated: [/tools/cost-effectiveness-model-kit/, /tools/impact-calculator/, /record/encyclopedia/expected-value/, /open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/, /record/lexicon/#cost-effectiveness]\nsources:\n  - title: The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health\n    publisher: Toby Ord, Center for Global Development\n    year: 2013\n    url: https://cgdev.org/sites/default/files/1427016_file_moral_imperative_cost_effectiveness.pdf\n  - title: Cost-Effectiveness\n    publisher: GiveWell\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness\n  - title: How Much Does It Cost to Save a Life?\n    publisher: GiveWell\n    year: 2024\n    url: https://www.givewell.org/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-a-life\n  - title: Errors in DCP2 cost-effectiveness estimate for deworming\n    publisher: The GiveWell Blog\n    year: 2011\n    url: https://blog.givewell.org/2011/09/29/errors-in-dcp2-cost-effectiveness-estimate-for-deworming/\n  - title: Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased)\n    publisher: Holden Karnofsky, The GiveWell Blog\n    year: 2011\n    url: https://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expected-value-estimates-literally-even-when-theyre-unbiased/\n---\n\n**Cost-effectiveness analysis** estimates the cost of producing one unit of a result: a life saved, a case of blindness cured, a year of healthy life added or a year of extra income. It answers the question in the [Giver’s Checklist](/method/#checklist): is this the cheapest way to get this result?\n\n## Why it matters\n\nBecause the differences can be huge. In a 2013 essay for the Center for Global Development, the philosopher Toby Ord looked at 108 health interventions costed in *Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries*, a standard reference. Their estimated cost-effectiveness ranged from 0.02 to 300 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per $1,000, with a median of 5. Moving money from the least to the most cost-effective would produce about 15,000 times the benefit, and moving it from the median to the best about 60 times. Ord noted that real differences may be smaller than the estimates, and argued that even a much smaller spread would still matter morally.\n\nA **DALY** counts the years of life lost to a condition plus the years lived with a disability, weighted by how severe the disability is.\n\n## How it is used\n\nGiveWell calls cost-effectiveness the single most important input in its evaluations, but says it does not judge programs on it alone. Strength of evidence and track record also carry weight. Its April 2024 explanation reported typical modeled costs of $3,000 to $5,500 per life saved for grants to its top charities, while cautioning that future costs could rise. This is a dated model range, not a universal or current guaranteed price.\n\n## How it goes wrong\n\n- **Errors.** In 2011 GiveWell found five errors in the spreadsheet behind the same reference’s estimate for deworming. Together they overstated its cost-effectiveness by a factor of about 100.\n- **Guessed inputs.** An estimate built from many rough guesses can be far off even when no single guess is biased. Holden Karnofsky argued that such estimates should be adjusted toward what similar programs usually achieve, more so the less certain they are. See [expected value](/record/encyclopedia/expected-value/).\n- **Hidden values.** Every model has to say how much one outcome is worth against another, such as income against a death averted. GiveWell calls these *moral weights* and says donors may disagree with its choices.\n\n## The limits\n\nCost-effectiveness works best when options share a unit. Comparing a life saved with a law changed or a species protected needs an exchange rate, and each candidate rate carries a moral framework. That is [Open Problem 2](/open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/). Source-level work is hardest of all to cost, because its effects are diffuse and slow. That is [Open Problem 3](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/). To build your own model, start with the [Cost-Effectiveness Model Kit](/tools/cost-effectiveness-model-kit/).\n"},{"byteLength":4126,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"b16907899b64cb9648cc7cabec34705ff72de56a99fe9162cbb1e2b9b8122e48","id":"source:encyclopedia-counterfactual-impact-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact.md","sha256":"ee5ad176ac8a699b61ecb21287e5838f32679933e3920607b36a4ca85e55fd63","text":"---\ntitle: Counterfactual impact\nsummary: The real effect of a gift is the difference between what happens with it and what would have happened without it. Estimating that difference is one of the hardest and most important problems in giving.\naliases: [counterfactual, additionality, replaceability, funging]\nconditions: [missing-feedback-loop, measurement-gap]\nrelated: [/open-problems/the-counterfactual-problem/, /record/encyclopedia/neglectedness/, /record/principles/05-counterfactuals-and-neglect/, /record/lexicon/#counterfactual, /tools/impact-calculator/]\nsources:\n  - title: Counterfactuals and how they change our view of what does good\n    publisher: Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours\n    year: 2021\n    url: https://80000hours.org/articles/counterfactuals/\n  - title: 'Doing good together: how to coordinate effectively and avoid single-player thinking'\n    publisher: Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours\n    year: 2018\n    url: https://80000hours.org/articles/coordination/\n  - title: Revisiting leverage\n    publisher: James Snowden, The GiveWell Blog\n    year: 2018\n    url: https://blog.givewell.org/2018/02/13/revisiting-leverage/\n  - title: Our Criteria\n    publisher: GiveWell\n    url: https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/criteria\n  - title: '“Scared Straight” and other juvenile awareness programs for preventing juvenile delinquency'\n    publisher: Anthony Petrosino and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews\n    year: 2022\n    url: https://www.cochrane.org/evidence/CD002796_scared-straight-and-other-juvenile-awareness-programs-preventing-juvenile-delinquency\n---\n\nA **counterfactual** is what would have happened otherwise. The counterfactual impact of a gift is the difference between the world with the gift and the world without it. A program’s results and a gift’s results are not the same thing. If the program would have been funded anyway, the gift’s real effect lands somewhere else.\n\n## Three ways the counterfactual changes the picture\n\n**Funding gaps get filled.** Benjamin Todd of 80,000 Hours warns against treating a charity’s funding gap as if you were the only donor. If other donors would have filled it, your gift does less than it seems. The opposite mistake is also possible: assuming your gift does nothing because others would give. Filling the gap frees those donors for other work and saves the charity fundraising time, so the honest answer depends on what everyone else does.\n\n**Other funders respond.** GiveWell uses two words for this. *Leverage* is a charity’s influence on how others, such as governments, allocate their money. *Funging* is when spending on a program crowds out money that would have come from somewhere else. Since late 2017 GiveWell has estimated both for each charity it recommends, and it says the estimates involve substantial guesswork. Its test of “room for more funding” asks the same question from the charity’s side: what would extra money achieve, beyond what the charity would raise anyway?\n\n**The comparison group decides.** A program can look like a success until you see what happened to similar people without it. A Cochrane review of nine trials of “Scared Straight” programs, which organize prison visits for young people at risk of offending, found that they increased offending compared with doing nothing at all. See [the case study](/record/case-studies/scared-straight/).\n\n## Shared credit\n\nMost outcomes have many causes. Todd points out that when two groups are each necessary for a result, both can be counterfactually responsible for all of it, so claimed impacts can add up to more than 100 percent. That is not a logical error. The practical risk is that funders, each counting the whole result, collectively pay more than it is worth.\n\n## Why it is hard\n\nThe counterfactual is never observed. Randomized trials estimate it for the people in a study. Ordinary gifts get no estimate at all, which is part of why the [feedback loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) is missing. Producing counterfactual estimates cheaply and at scale is [Open Problem 4](/open-problems/the-counterfactual-problem/).\n"},{"byteLength":4072,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"6df06c567b7075581b1b72fc0dbb7e2b22574d71ef637427d461bfc4cc2b6349","id":"source:encyclopedia-discounting-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/discounting.md","sha256":"2fb6c14a92eee4b12d85245f5c8fbc35ee8a74dc336c4324636071aac6926c64","text":"---\ntitle: Discounting\nsummary: Giving less weight to benefits and costs the further in the future they fall. Some reasons for discounting are about uncertainty and growth. One, pure time preference, is the moral claim that later wellbeing matters less just because it is later.\naliases: [discount rate, time discounting, pure time preference, social discount rate]\nconditions: [short-horizon]\nrelated: [/open-problems/discounting-the-future/, /open-problems/the-payout-question/, /record/principles/07-time/, /tools/legacy-planner/, /record/lexicon/#pure-time-preference]\nsources:\n  - title: Ramsey and Intergenerational Welfare Economics\n    publisher: Partha Dasgupta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy\n    year: 2019\n    url: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ramsey-economics/\n    note: First published in 2019 and revised in 2023. Quotes Frank Ramsey’s “A Mathematical Theory of Saving” (1928).\n  - title: A review of GiveWell’s discount rate\n    publisher: Jenny Kudymowa, James Hu, Melanie Basnak and Tom Hird, Rethink Priorities\n    year: 2023\n    url: https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/a-review-of-givewells-discount-rate/\n  - title: The “Stern Review” on the Economics of Climate Change\n    publisher: William D. Nordhaus, NBER Working Paper 12741\n    year: 2006\n    url: https://nber.org/papers/w12741\n---\n\nA **discount rate** shrinks future benefits and costs by a percentage for each year they lie ahead. At 4 percent a year, a benefit 18 years from now counts for about half as much as the same benefit today. The choice of rate can decide whether a long-term program looks brilliant or pointless, so it is worth asking what the rate stands for.\n\n## Three reasons to discount\n\n**Uncertainty.** A benefit promised for the future may never arrive. The program may fail, or the world may change in ways that make it irrelevant. In the extreme, a risk that humanity does not survive acts like a discount rate on all expected future wellbeing.\n\n**Growth.** If people in the future are richer, an extra dollar does less for them than it does for someone poor today. Economists combine this with a time discount rate in what is called the Ramsey rule, after the philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey.\n\n**Pure time preference.** Valuing later wellbeing less only because it comes later. Ramsey himself rejected it. In 1928 he wrote that discounting later well-being is “ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.”\n\nThe first two reasons are about facts: what will happen and how much it will help. The third is a moral claim about whether time itself makes a life count less.\n\n## An example\n\nA 2023 review by Rethink Priorities described GiveWell’s then-current 4 percent rate for future income and consumption gains, with a lower rate for health benefits. It broke the 4 percent into parts: 0 percent for pure time preference, 1.4 percent for temporal uncertainty, 1.7 percent for improving circumstances as people get richer, and 0.9 percent for benefits that compound over time. Every part except the first is a claim about the world that evidence can improve.\n\n## Why it is contested\n\nThe rate can settle large questions on its own. William Nordhaus argued in 2006 that the Stern Review’s call for urgent, deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions depended decisively on its use of a near-zero social discount rate, and would not survive rates consistent with market interest rates. Disagreements like this mix facts, such as how fast economies will grow, with values, such as whether time itself matters. Separating the two is the first step to settling them.\n\nIn Charitology’s terms, the [Future generations](/tools/values-compass/) framework treats the claims of people not yet born as central. The [Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/) condition is the hypothesis that the charity system’s timescale, set by annual budgets and reports, is shorter than the timescale of its problems. How much the future should count is [Open Problem 13](/open-problems/discounting-the-future/).\n"},{"byteLength":3927,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"da1484f1755801e6f2cd8a1caaf2710a06d150d49628b6a7effd140e0500c395","id":"source:encyclopedia-donor-advised-funds-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/donor-advised-funds.md","sha256":"b57630a007e419c86598c225cc1d0df655baf3f6de5e13d23522f82a81aab440","text":"---\ntitle: Donor-advised funds\nsummary: Charitable accounts held by a sponsoring public charity, which the donor advises on grants and investments. They held about $326 billion in 2024, and how fast that money should reach working charities is one of the live debates in philanthropy.\naliases: [DAFs, DAF, donor-advised fund]\nconditions: [parked-money, short-horizon]\nrelated: [/diagnosis/parked-money/, /open-problems/the-payout-question/, /record/encyclopedia/private-foundations/, /record/lexicon/#donor-advised-fund, /record/lexicon/#payout-rate]\nsources:\n  - title: Donor-advised funds\n    publisher: Internal Revenue Service\n    url: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/donor-advised-funds\n  - title: DAF Assets Soar 30% to $326 Billion\n    publisher: The Chronicle of Philanthropy, reporting the Annual DAF Report 2025 by the DAF Research Collaborative\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://www.philanthropy.com/news/daf-assets-soar-30-to-326-billion/\n  - title: The Annual DAF Report 2025\n    publisher: Johnson Center for Philanthropy\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://johnsoncenter.org/resource/report-annual-daf-report-2025/\n  - title: Annual DAF Report 2025, full report\n    publisher: Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative, Indiana University repository\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://scholarworks.indianapolis.iu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8f309b9f-da38-433e-8c33-bc1b3d1f9a1a/content\n---\n\nA **donor-advised fund** (DAF) is an account for charitable giving. The IRS describes three features. It is a separately identified fund or account made up of a donor’s contributions. It is maintained by a 501(c)(3) organization, called the sponsoring organization, which has legal control of the money once the donor contributes. And the donor keeps advisory privileges over how the money is granted and invested. The donor recommends grants, and the sponsor makes them.\n\n## How big they are\n\nThe Annual DAF Report 2025, produced for the first time by the DAF Research Collaborative after the National Philanthropic Trust compiled it for nearly two decades, found that in 2024:\n\n- DAFs held about **$326 billion** in assets, up from about $256 billion in 2023.\n- Donors contributed **$89.6 billion**, the highest of the past five years.\n- DAFs granted **$64.9 billion** to charities.\n- The aggregate payout rate was **25.3 percent**, calculated as grants divided by prior-year assets.\n\nThe payout rate is not the share of every account spent that year. The report uses prior-year assets as its denominator and aggregates across sponsors.\n\n## Where they sit in the system\n\nOn the [system map](/record/encyclopedia/charity-as-a-system/), a DAF is a channel. It sits between the giver and the work and holds money until the donor decides where it should go. That can be useful. A donor can give when they have money and decide carefully later, and one account can handle many gifts. It also means the money can wait.\n\n## The debate\n\nThis is [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/), and both sides have numbers. Defenders point to the aggregate payout rate. It is higher than the roughly 5 percent legal distribution requirement for many [private foundations](/record/encyclopedia/private-foundations/), but those measures use different denominators and are not a direct comparison. Critics point to the size of the pool, and note that an aggregate rate can hide accounts that rarely grant at all. The figures above describe DAFs as a whole, so they cannot settle how money moves through individual accounts.\n\n## What we don’t know\n\nIs that aggregate rate fast or slow? The answer depends on how quickly the best giving opportunities are being used up, how much invested money grows while it waits and how much the future should count. That is [Open Problem 12, the Payout Question](/open-problems/the-payout-question/), and [discounting](/record/encyclopedia/discounting/) is part of it.\n"},{"byteLength":5805,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"7458dd3988eeeca152bd5dfb348f1aa5db9c97e8664726f05934cf940b402ea7","id":"source:encyclopedia-effective-altruism-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/effective-altruism.md","sha256":"7a6cbd900352d67a974df78c4d112911bebb1ca6f251e9cd627b9ec067daf816","text":"---\ntitle: Effective altruism\nsummary: A philosophy and social movement that uses evidence and careful reasoning to find the ways of helping others that do the most good. Charitology shares its rigor and starts from a different place.\naliases: [EA]\nconditions: [single-lens, proximity-pull]\nrelated: [/record/encyclopedia/scale-neglectedness-tractability/, /record/encyclopedia/moral-uncertainty/, /record/disagreements/near-or-far/, /record/principles/01-what-charitology-is/, /record/encyclopedia/systemic-change/]\nsources:\n  - title: Famine, Affluence, and Morality\n    publisher: Peter Singer, Philosophy & Public Affairs 1(3)\n    year: 1972\n    url: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265052\n  - title: About GiveWell\n    publisher: GiveWell\n    url: https://www.givewell.org/about\n  - title: Our history\n    publisher: Giving What We Can\n    url: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/history\n  - title: The history of the term ‘effective altruism’\n    publisher: William MacAskill, Effective Altruism Forum\n    year: 2014\n    url: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9a7xMXoSiQs3EYPA2/the-history-of-the-term-effective-altruism\n  - title: Open Philanthropy Is Now Coefficient Giving\n    publisher: Effective Altruism Forum\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vkvtu6xbvfkHPhJkC/open-philanthropy-is-now-coefficient-giving\n  - title: What are the most pressing world problems?\n    publisher: 80,000 Hours\n    url: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/\n  - title: FTX bankruptcy also endangers founder’s philanthropic gifts\n    publisher: Thalia Beaty and Glenn Gamboa, Associated Press\n    year: 2022\n    url: https://www.news4jax.com/business/2022/11/13/ftx-bankruptcy-also-endangers-founders-philanthropic-gifts/\n  - title: Effective Altruism and Its Critics\n    publisher: Iason Gabriel, Journal of Applied Philosophy 34(4)\n    year: 2017\n    url: https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12176\n  - title: 'Stop the Robot Apocalypse: The New Utilitarians'\n    publisher: Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books 37(18)\n    year: 2015\n    url: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n18/amia-srinivasan/stop-the-robot-apocalypse\n---\n\n**Effective altruism** asks a simple question and tries to answer it rigorously: how can I do the most good with the time and money I have? It answers with evidence, cost-effectiveness and comparisons across causes, and it asks people to act on the answers.\n\n## A short history\n\nThe movement drew on Peter Singer’s 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” which argued that distance makes no moral difference to the duty to help. GiveWell began as research by a group of friends working in finance, and in 2007 two of them left their jobs to run it full time. Giving What We Can was launched in November 2009 by the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord, working with Will MacAskill, around a pledge to give 10 percent of income. 80,000 Hours, which advises people on high-impact careers, soft-launched in 2011.\n\nThe name came late. When Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours needed an umbrella organization, their directors held a vote, and on 5 December 2011 “Centre for Effective Altruism” won. GiveWell’s research arm, GiveWell Labs, grew into the Open Philanthropy Project, later known as Open Philanthropy, which renamed itself Coefficient Giving in 2025.\n\n## Ideas and priorities\n\nThe movement’s tools include [scale, neglectedness and tractability](/record/encyclopedia/scale-neglectedness-tractability/), [cost-effectiveness analysis](/record/encyclopedia/cost-effectiveness-analysis/), [counterfactual](/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/) reasoning and [expected value](/record/encyclopedia/expected-value/). Its priorities have widened from global health and poverty. 80,000 Hours’ problem list includes risks from advanced artificial intelligence and engineered pandemics among its priorities, alongside factory farming and global health.\n\nIn November 2022 the cryptocurrency exchange FTX went bankrupt. Its founder had been a prominent backer of the movement, and the leaders of the FTX Future Fund resigned, warning that many committed grants would not be paid. The collapse prompted a period of public self-examination among the movement’s leaders.\n\n## Critiques\n\nPhilosophers and activists have pressed several objections. Iason Gabriel grouped them under three headings: that the movement neglects justice, including equality, urgency and rights; that its methods are biased toward what can be measured; and that it is poorly placed to bring about systemic change. Amia Srinivasan argued that it works within the existing order rather than asking what produces global misery. Gabriel’s paper also sets out the responses to each objection, and the debate continues. See [systemic change](/record/encyclopedia/systemic-change/).\n\n## Charitology and effective altruism\n\nCharitology shares the movement’s rigor: its insistence on evidence, counterfactuals, honest uncertainty and comparisons across causes. Charitology makes explicit editorial commitments to eight frameworks (welfare, rights, justice, care, faith and tradition, future generations, all life and flourishing), and reports where they agree and part. Effective altruism also contains debates about moral uncertainty and values; it is not one uniform moral theory. And its subject is the charity system itself: the signals, channels, incentives and feedback that decide where all generosity goes, read through the [symptom and source](/record/encyclopedia/symptoms-and-sources/) lens. Charitology does not judge the movement or the people in it. It treats effective altruism as a tradition to learn from, and as one lens among several. The [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) condition is a warning against using any one lens alone.\n"},{"byteLength":3965,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"1275e569bcc67f35215c127ef2e2fc13c08cee6ef642d17f03911a7ee72078fc","id":"source:encyclopedia-expected-value-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/expected-value.md","sha256":"0135a972bf31a82a8cd50c79b7624f816a35bd97b3d41a2a0325b249eb38e476","text":"---\ntitle: Expected value\nsummary: The probability-weighted average of an action’s possible results. It is the standard way to compare a sure thing with a long shot, and it misleads when the probabilities are guesses.\naliases: [EV, expected impact, probability-weighted value]\nconditions: [measurement-gap, short-horizon]\nrelated: [/record/encyclopedia/moral-uncertainty/, /record/encyclopedia/cost-effectiveness-analysis/, /tools/forecasting-platform/, /programs/forecasting-tournaments/, /record/lexicon/#expected-value]\nsources:\n  - title: Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased)\n    publisher: Holden Karnofsky, The GiveWell Blog\n    year: 2011\n    url: https://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expected-value-estimates-literally-even-when-theyre-unbiased/\n  - title: Moral Uncertainty\n    publisher: William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord, Oxford University Press\n    year: 2020\n    url: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198722274.001.0001\n  - title: 'Stop the Robot Apocalypse: The New Utilitarians'\n    publisher: Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books 37(18)\n    year: 2015\n    url: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n18/amia-srinivasan/stop-the-robot-apocalypse\n  - title: A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact\n    publisher: Robert Wiblin, 80,000 Hours\n    year: 2016\n    url: https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/\n---\n\nThe **expected value** of an action is what you get if you multiply each possible result by its probability and add them up. A program that has a 10 percent chance of helping 10,000 people has an expected value of helping 1,000 people, the same as a program certain to help 1,000. Expected value lets a giver compare a sure thing with a long shot on one scale.\n\n## Why it matters for giving\n\nMuch of the most ambitious work in charity is a long shot: research that may find nothing, advocacy that may lose, a campaign to change a norm that may take decades or fail. Without some way to weigh probability against size, a giver can only choose between “certain” and “hopeful.” Expected value turns that into a question with numbers in it.\n\n## Three cautions\n\n**The inputs are often guesses.** Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell argued in 2011 that an explicit expected-value estimate, built from many rough inputs, should not be taken literally even when its errors are not biased in either direction. It should be combined with a prior view of what similar actions usually achieve. The less certain the estimate, the more it should be pulled toward that prior, so a dramatic but weakly supported claim counts for little.\n\n**Tiny chances of huge stakes can take over.** If a result is large enough, even a very small probability can dominate the sum. Philosophers call the extreme version of this *fanaticism*, and MacAskill, Bykvist and Ord treat it as a central problem for anyone deciding under [moral uncertainty](/record/encyclopedia/moral-uncertainty/). The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has argued that expected-value reasoning about speculative risks can end up justifying whatever its users already favored.\n\n**It ignores attitudes to risk.** Maximizing expected value treats a sure good and a gamble with the same average as equal. 80,000 Hours calls ignoring risk aversion a reasonable approximation for its own purposes. Many givers reasonably prefer some certainty. A portfolio can hold both.\n\n## Getting the probabilities right\n\nExpected value is only as good as its probabilities. Forecasters can be scored, for example with a [Brier score](/record/lexicon/#brier-score), and a forecaster whose 70 percent predictions come true about 70 percent of the time is [calibrated](/record/lexicon/#calibration). Charitology’s [Forecasting Platform](/tools/forecasting-platform/) and [Forecasting Tournaments](/programs/forecasting-tournaments/) are meant to make the probabilities in giving decisions testable.\n"},{"byteLength":4849,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"7cd5c204c685d1059dad910eea8a765b67d68ffb9440939557b1e94d6603e992","id":"source:encyclopedia-identifiable-victim-effect-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/identifiable-victim-effect.md","sha256":"4781799e8099a2c89e894803822cf3543a19d62626910b1e3b004fd747035f04","text":"---\ntitle: Identifiable victim effect\nsummary: The tendency to give more to help one specific, identified person than to help many people described by statistics. It is one of the best-known findings about giving, and recent replications have questioned how large and reliable it is.\naliases: [identified victim effect, singularity effect, statistical victims]\nconditions: [story-bias, proximity-pull]\nrelated: [/diagnosis/story-bias/, /open-problems/story-without-bias/, /record/encyclopedia/psychic-numbing/, /record/lexicon/#identifiable-victim-effect, /open-problems/the-replication-rate/]\nsources:\n  - title: 'Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims'\n    publisher: Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 102(2)\n    year: 2007\n    url: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.01.005\n    note: Freely readable at https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Sympathy_and_callousness.pdf\n  - title: 'The identifiable victim effect: a meta-analytic review'\n    publisher: Seyoung Lee and Thomas Hugh Feeley, Social Influence 11(3)\n    year: 2016\n    url: https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2016.1216891\n  - title: 'Revisiting and Rethinking the Identifiable Victim Effect: Replication and Extension of Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic (2007)'\n    publisher: 'Maximilian Maier, Yik Chun Wong and Gilad Feldman, Collabra: Psychology 9(1)'\n    year: 2024\n    url: https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.90203\n    note: Open manuscript and publication record at https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/201115/\n  - title: FLoRA Replication Atlas entry for Small, Loewenstein and Slovic (2007)\n    publisher: FORRT\n    url: https://forrt.org/flora-replication-atlas/doi/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.01.005/\n---\n\nThe **identifiable victim effect** is the finding that people give more to help one specific person, with a name and a face, than to help a larger number of people described by statistics. It is a central part of the [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/).\n\n## The classic study\n\nIn experiments published in 2007, Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic paid participants $5 for an unrelated survey and then gave them a chance to donate some of it to Save the Children. Some saw an appeal about one child with a photograph. Others read statistics about food shortages affecting millions of people in southern and eastern Africa.\n\nIn the first study, people who saw the individual appeal and received no other information gave an average of $2.83. People who saw only the statistics gave $1.17. In a later study, adding the statistics to the individual story *reduced* giving to $1.43, compared with $2.38 for her story alone. And when people were taught about the identifiable victim effect before deciding, they gave less to the individual appeal but no more to the statistical victims. The authors concluded that deliberate thinking dampened sympathy for the identified victim without creating sympathy for the many.\n\n## How big is it?\n\nA 2016 meta-analysis by Seyoung Lee and Thomas Feeley pooled 41 studies and found an effect that was statistically significant but modest. It looked most reliable in particular conditions: a single victim, a photographed child in poverty, a victim who bore little responsibility for their need and a request for money.\n\nIn 2024 Maximilian Maier, Yik Chun Wong and Gilad Feldman published a pre-registered replication of the 2007 studies, using hypothetical donations. They found no support for the effect. They also reanalyzed the earlier meta-analysis, found signs of publication bias and suggested that the pattern may be better described as insensitivity to scale. The [replication record](https://forrt.org/flora-replication-atlas/doi/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.01.005/) now lists the 2007 paper’s replication as failed.\n\nThe finding is now debated. One difference between the studies is that the 2007 donations were real money and the 2024 donations were hypothetical, and the replication’s authors themselves call for large studies with real donations. Those would go a long way to settling it.\n\n## Why it matters for the system\n\nEven at its most modest, the pattern points the same way as a wider body of research on [psychic numbing](/record/encyclopedia/psychic-numbing/): concern does not grow in proportion to the number of people in need. Charitology hypothesizes that a system relying on faces and stories may favor needs that are easier to portray. The studies here do not measure that system-wide allocation effect. Whether a story can carry scale instead of hiding it is [Open Problem 7, Story Without Bias](/open-problems/story-without-bias/). How often findings like this one hold up is [Open Problem 10](/open-problems/the-replication-rate/).\n"},{"byteLength":4247,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"4ab386dc22c8d753d7b8511c04d4a53e8d67224641ce9084b92d2b42430254f5","id":"source:encyclopedia-impact-investing-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/impact-investing.md","sha256":"fde8b773e6a380792101cfe157fb56cd1a3cc0fdc63b59dcf104ce576505cabc","text":"---\ntitle: Impact investing\nsummary: Investing with the intention of producing measurable social or environmental good alongside a financial return. It brings investment capital, not only gifts, to bear on social problems, and it raises a sharp counterfactual question.\naliases: [social investing, mission-related investing, program-related investments]\nconditions: [measurement-gap, parked-money]\nrelated: [/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/, /record/encyclopedia/private-foundations/, /record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/, /tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/]\nsources:\n  - title: What you need to know about impact investing\n    publisher: Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN)\n    url: https://thegiin.org/publication/post/about-impact-investing/\n  - title: Sizing the Impact Investing Market 2024\n    publisher: Dean Hand, Maddie Ulanow, Hongyu Pan and Kelly Xiao, Global Impact Investing Network\n    year: 2024\n    url: https://thegiin.org/publication/research/sizing-the-impact-investing-market-2024/\n  - title: The State of Impact Investing\n    publisher: Jem Hudson, Wharton Magazine\n    year: 2014\n    url: https://magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/digital/the-state-of-impact-investing/\n  - title: Many Paths to One Mountaintop – Antony Bugg-Levine on Building Movements That Shift Systems\n    publisher: The Rockefeller Foundation\n    url: https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/bellagio-breakthroughs/many-paths-to-one-mountaintop-antony-bugg-levine-on-building-movements-that-shift-systems/\n  - title: Program-related investments\n    publisher: Internal Revenue Service\n    url: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/program-related-investments\n---\n\n**Impact investing** puts capital into companies, funds or projects with the aim of doing good as well as earning a return. The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) defines impact investments as those made to generate positive, measurable social or environmental impact alongside a financial return. It names four core characteristics: an intention to contribute to measurable benefits, the use of evidence and impact data in designing investments, managing toward the impact intended, and sharing lessons so the field can grow.\n\n## Origins and size\n\nThe term was coined at a Rockefeller Foundation gathering at its Bellagio Center in Italy, which Wharton Magazine dates to 2007. The convening led to the Global Impact Investing Network, whose formation the foundation announced in 2009. In its 2024 market sizing, the GIIN estimated that more than 3,900 organizations managed about $1.57 trillion in impact investments worldwide.\n\n## Returns\n\nThe GIIN says impact investments can target anything from below-market to above-market financial returns. Some investors accept less money back in exchange for more good. Most of the investors the GIIN has surveyed target risk-adjusted, market-rate returns.\n\nFoundations have a tool of their own. A **program-related investment**, in IRS terms, is one made primarily for charitable purposes, where income is not a significant purpose. The IRS’s examples include low-interest loans to needy students and high-risk investments in nonprofit low-income housing.\n\n## The counterfactual question\n\nThe hardest question in impact investing is the one at the heart of [counterfactual impact](/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/): would the good have happened anyway? If an investment earns full market returns, an ordinary investor might have made it too, and the impact investor’s money changed little. If it accepts lower returns, or takes risks others won’t, it is more likely to have made a difference. Measured outcomes matter too: an investment that reports outputs, such as loans made, has not yet shown [outcomes](/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/), such as incomes raised.\n\n## In the charity system\n\nImpact investing sits beside the charity system rather than inside it, but it competes for the same intentions. A foundation choosing between a grant and an investment, or a donor between a gift and an impact fund, is making a depth and counterfactual decision. Charitology describes both kinds of capital with the same questions from the [Giver’s Checklist](/method/#checklist).\n"},{"byteLength":4322,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"29373481ddc294bb0d7ac9b08c4b0c8d1a35e36ebd386f265164b55642bce9a4","id":"source:encyclopedia-moral-uncertainty-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/moral-uncertainty.md","sha256":"edba8a6093bded7b4f4783f5fa2befc0be3be3a87915f403b7510a1664591177","text":"---\ntitle: Moral uncertainty\nsummary: Uncertainty about which moral view is right, as opposed to uncertainty about the facts. Philosophers have developed ways to act well under it, and Charitology’s method of looking through every framework depends on them.\naliases: [normative uncertainty, deciding under moral uncertainty]\nconditions: [single-lens]\nrelated: [/open-problems/moral-parliament-in-practice/, /tools/portfolio-builder/, /tools/values-compass/, /record/principles/06-comparing-the-incomparable/, /record/lexicon/#moral-parliament]\nsources:\n  - title: Moral Uncertainty\n    publisher: William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord, Oxford University Press\n    year: 2020\n    url: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198722274.001.0001\n    note: Open access under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0); freely readable at https://www.moraluncertainty.com/s/Moral-Uncertainty.pdf\n  - title: Moral uncertainty – towards a solution?\n    publisher: Nick Bostrom, Overcoming Bias\n    year: 2009\n    url: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solutionhtml\n  - title: The parliamentary approach to moral uncertainty\n    publisher: Toby Newberry and Toby Ord, Future of Humanity Institute Technical Report 2021-2\n    year: 2021\n    url: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b6b3bc2e-ba48-41d2-af7e-83f07c1fe141\n---\n\nYou can be sure of every fact about a gift and still not know what to do. A donation might save a child’s life or protect a forest for a century, and you might know both outcomes exactly while being unsure how to weigh them. That second kind of doubt is **moral uncertainty**: uncertainty about moral and evaluative questions rather than descriptive ones. In their 2020 book *Moral Uncertainty*, William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord argue that, given how hard ethics is and how widely people disagree about it, moral uncertainty is the normal condition rather than the exception.\n\n## Ways to decide\n\n**Follow your favorite theory.** Act on whichever moral view you find most plausible. MacAskill, Bykvist and Ord call this *My Favorite Theory* and argue that, simple as it is, it has major problems, starting with what to do when you are split between views.\n\n**Maximize expected choiceworthiness.** Weight each theory’s verdict by how much credence you give it, the way you would weight outcomes by their probability. This works only when theories can be compared on a common scale.\n\n**Borrow from voting.** Some theories only rank options, and some give amounts that cannot be compared with other theories’ amounts. For those cases the book draws an analogy with social choice, the study of how groups vote, and adapts voting rules such as the Borda rule.\n\n**Convene a moral parliament.** In 2009 Nick Bostrom proposed imagining that each theory you take seriously sends delegates to a parliament, in proportion to your credence in it. The delegates bargain and vote, and you act on the result. A theory with few seats can still win on the issues it cares about most by giving way on others. Bostrom developed the idea with Toby Ord, and in 2021 Toby Newberry and Ord argued for a version based on proportional chances voting. They also showed that other approaches to moral uncertainty can be read as parliaments with different rules.\n\n## Hard cases\n\nThe book names two problems any approach must face. *Fanaticism* is the worry that a theory you barely believe could dominate your choices if it says the stakes are enormous. *Infectious incomparability* is the worry that giving any credence to a view on which options cannot be compared spreads that incomparability to every decision you make.\n\n## In Charitology\n\nCharitology’s answer to the [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) is to look at every gift through eight moral frameworks at once: welfare, rights and duties, justice, care, faith and tradition, future generations, all life and flourishing. The [Values Compass](/tools/values-compass/) asks how strongly you agree with a statement from each one, and the [Portfolio Builder](/tools/portfolio-builder/) uses a simple credence-weighted method to turn weights like these into an allocation. Whether more sophisticated methods give different, and more defensible, answers is [Open Problem 16](/open-problems/moral-parliament-in-practice/).\n"},{"byteLength":3916,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"ba9cfdb7aa8a540ca010dc1dc5c065ffbfd89abee311af396f099c3d67e2b5e8","id":"source:encyclopedia-mutual-aid-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/mutual-aid.md","sha256":"e79efdde8b1981e48de5a9f31edc48ec6e46196ade86101bc4135030cebfe91d","text":"---\ntitle: Mutual aid\nsummary: People in a community pooling time, money and skills to meet one another’s needs directly, without a charity standing between giver and receiver. Its structure can differ from giving through a separate service provider.\naliases: [solidarity networks, community self-help]\nconditions: [missing-feedback-loop, missing-voice, proximity-pull]\nrelated: [/record/encyclopedia/charity-as-a-system/, /record/encyclopedia/beneficiary-feedback/, /record/traditions/, /programs/local-charitology/, /record/lexicon/#mutual-aid]\nsources:\n  - title: 'Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution'\n    publisher: Peter Kropotkin (Project Gutenberg edition)\n    year: 1902\n    url: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4341\n  - title: 'We Keep Each Other Safe: Mutual Aid for Survival and Solidarity'\n    publisher: Barnard Center for Research on Women, conversation with Dean Spade, Mariame Kaba and Ejeris Dixon\n    year: 2021\n    url: https://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/we-keep-each-other-safe-mutual-aid-for-survival-and-solidarity\n---\n\nIn **mutual aid**, the people who help and the people who are helped belong to the same community, and often trade places. Neighbors run a grocery delivery list, a congregation keeps a fund for funerals, a tenants’ group covers a member’s rent this month and someone else’s next month. Giving and receiving can overlap, rather than being fixed roles.\n\n## Roots\n\nThe idea is old, and so is its name. In *Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution*, published in 1902, Peter Kropotkin argued against the view that competition is the main force in nature and society. Drawing on observations of animals and of human societies, from indigenous communities to medieval guilds, he held that cooperation is just as basic to survival.\n\nOrganizers use the term today too. Dean Spade, author of *Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)*, describes it as collective coordination to meet one another’s needs, usually because existing systems are not meeting them, and points out that those systems have often helped create the crisis in the first place.\n\n## How it differs on the system map\n\nOn the [system map](/record/encyclopedia/charity-as-a-system/), most charity runs one way: from givers through signals and channels to work done for someone else, with results rarely coming back. Mutual aid folds the stages together. The giver can see the need directly, the person helped often has a say in what help looks like, and the result is visible to everyone involved. In Charitology’s terms, direct contact may support a [feedback loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) and [voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/). That is a feature to examine, not a guarantee that every network shares power well.\n\nThe costs mirror the strengths. Mutual aid reaches the people inside a network, so people outside it can be missed. It runs on volunteer time, which can run out. And because it is close to home, it carries the [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/) by design. Under the care framework that is the point; under the welfare framework it is a trade-off worth seeing clearly.\n\n## Depth\n\nMutual aid can provide relief: food, rent and rides this week. But the networks it builds can outlast the crisis that formed them. Humanity’s Checklist names coordination, whether the people who could solve a problem together ever meet, as one of the six sources upstream of world problems. Whether mutual aid networks change coordination in a lasting way is a question the sources here do not settle.\n\n## What we don’t know\n\nMuch mutual aid never passes through a registered organization, so it is largely invisible to the data the rest of the system uses. This entry does not establish its total scale or compare its results with formal charity working on the same needs. The [Giving Traditions Library](/record/traditions/) records older forms of the same practice.\n"},{"byteLength":3692,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"2e6179d01e585ca0e87f6a952fbf41398fd7d97a22b7e59427fab0aa0c9e192d","id":"source:encyclopedia-neglectedness-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/neglectedness.md","sha256":"47342eadac8ee8b585cce479a54a08447ba2ac3a839f8545a756955451a84bcc","text":"---\ntitle: Neglectedness\nsummary: How few resources already go to a problem relative to its size. Other things equal, an extra dollar tends to do more where few other dollars go, because the best opportunities there have not yet been taken.\naliases: [crowdedness, uncrowdedness, diminishing returns]\nconditions: [story-bias, proximity-pull, symptom-trap, single-lens]\nrelated: [/record/encyclopedia/scale-neglectedness-tractability/, /record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/, /record/lexicon/#neglectedness, /open-problems/the-depth-census/, /tools/compare-tool/]\nsources:\n  - title: A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact\n    publisher: Robert Wiblin, 80,000 Hours\n    year: 2016\n    url: https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/\n    note: First published in 2016 and last updated in December 2025.\n  - title: The Important/Neglected/Tractable framework needs to be applied with care\n    publisher: Robert Wiblin, Effective Altruism Forum\n    year: 2016\n    url: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/74oJS32C6CZRC4Zp5/the-important-neglected-tractable-framework-needs-to-be\n  - title: Narrowing down U.S. policy areas\n    publisher: Holden Karnofsky, The GiveWell Blog\n    year: 2014\n    url: https://blog.givewell.org/2014/05/22/narrowing-down-u-s-policy-areas/\n---\n\nA problem is **neglected** when few people or dollars are working on it compared with how big it is. 80,000 Hours measures neglectedness simply: how many people, or how many dollars, are currently dedicated to solving the problem?\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe first resources that go into a problem usually go to its best opportunities. Later resources go to the next best, and so on. So returns diminish as a field fills up. 80,000 Hours argues that returns most likely diminish logarithmically, which means each doubling of resources buys roughly the same amount of progress. If that is right, a dollar added to a problem that gets a million dollars a year can matter far more than a dollar added to one that gets a billion.\n\nGiveWell Labs, the project that became the Open Philanthropy Project, made a similar point in 2014 with a different word. When it compared U.S. policy areas, it asked how *crowded* each one was: how much existing advocacy already pushed for the same goals, and where the gaps were.\n\n## Three cautions\n\n1. **Neglected for a reason.** Neglectedness is a good guide only when a problem is neglected for bad reasons. Some problems get little money because they are small or because nobody knows how to make progress on them.\n2. **The factors overlap.** Robert Wiblin of 80,000 Hours notes that a problem can stay important precisely because it is neglected. He suggests judging how important and how tractable a problem would be if nobody were working on it, so that one observation is not counted twice.\n3. **Boundaries move the answer.** A narrowly defined problem almost always looks more neglected than a broad one. How you draw the edges of a problem changes its score.\n\n## Neglect as a property of the system\n\nCharitology adds a system view. Neglect is not random. The [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/) predicts that problems without faces or headlines will be neglected. The [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/) predicts neglect of distant need, and the [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) predicts neglect of goods that the dominant moral frameworks cannot see.\n\nCharitology’s founding hypothesis, the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), is that work at the structure and source levels is neglected relative to relief. That hypothesis is untested. Testing it starts with [the Depth Census](/open-problems/the-depth-census/).\n"},{"byteLength":3585,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"c931efc2b627c1b68746334b472bdb5824eb70327844851ac1f1997dbf0ce5af","id":"source:encyclopedia-outputs-and-outcomes-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes.md","sha256":"2a08f67e8203aeb9038c69ff9646e11c8fc5937fbc8ef87d07d317d407e12791","text":"---\ntitle: Outputs and outcomes\nsummary: Outputs are what a program does or delivers. Outcomes are what changes for people as a result. Counting outputs alone does not establish outcomes.\naliases: [outputs, outcomes, impact, results chain, logic model]\nconditions: [measurement-gap, overhead-myth]\nrelated: [/diagnosis/measurement-gap/, /record/encyclopedia/theory-of-change/, /tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/, /method/, /record/lexicon/#outcomes]\nsources:\n  - title: Logic Model Development Guide\n    publisher: W.K. Kellogg Foundation\n    year: 2004\n    url: https://www.naccho.org/uploads/downloadable-resources/Programs/Public-Health-Infrastructure/KelloggLogicModelGuide_161122_162808.pdf\n  - title: Insecticide-treated nets for preventing malaria (Cochrane systematic review)\n    publisher: Joseph Pryce, Marty Richardson and Christian Lengeler, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews\n    year: 2018\n    url: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6418392/\n---\n\nEvery program can be described as a chain: resources pay for **activities**, activities produce **outputs**, and outputs may or may not lead to **outcomes**. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s *Logic Model Development Guide* defines the links this way:\n\n- **Outputs** are the direct products of a program’s activities, usually counted by size and scope: classes taught, meetings held, materials distributed, people served.\n- **Outcomes** are specific changes in participants’ behavior, knowledge, skills, status and level of functioning. The guide expects short-term outcomes within one to three years and longer-term outcomes within four to six.\n- **Impact** is the fundamental change, intended or not, in organizations, communities or systems, which the guide places seven to ten years out, often after the grant has ended.\n\n## An example\n\nImagine a bed-net program distributing 10,000 nets. That is an output. Families sleeping under the nets is an early outcome. Fewer children dying of malaria is the outcome that matters. In the trials pooled by a 2018 Cochrane review, insecticide-treated nets cut child deaths from all causes by about 17 percent compared with no nets. A program that only counts nets handed out cannot say whether it achieved anything like that.\n\n## Why outputs win\n\nOutputs are cheap to count and can be counted in-house. Monitoring outcomes may need follow-up and time. Attributing changes to a program also needs a credible comparison, which does not always require randomization. The risk is that a count such as “10,000 meals served” is read as evidence of a later change without that change being checked. That is the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/). The [Overhead Myth](/diagnosis/overhead-myth/) makes it worse, because measuring outcomes takes staff and systems that donors often see as overhead.\n\n## Outcomes can be negative\n\nThe Kellogg definition of impact includes unintended change. Some programs produce outcomes opposite to the ones intended, which only a comparison shows. See [Scared Straight](/record/case-studies/scared-straight/).\n\n## Outcomes and depth\n\nSome work at the structure and source levels of the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) has outcomes far from its activities or takes a long time to show them. Depth does not determine timing by itself. A campaign to change a law has outputs within months and outcomes over years. That is part of why source-level work is so hard to judge. See [theory of change](/record/encyclopedia/theory-of-change/) and the [Impact Measurement Toolkit](/tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/).\n"},{"byteLength":4102,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"ffd71c453d504cae75e896d79412bd694a026c539a4bfc0024af8c9f3d18b307","id":"source:encyclopedia-overhead-ratio-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/overhead-ratio.md","sha256":"cf4eaeafe7759589b73e9ec5260d81ce25b9a48ae747c6a385dc151b4a5d3f5e","text":"---\ntitle: Overhead ratio\nsummary: The share of a charity’s spending that goes to management and fundraising rather than to programs. It is easy to find and widely used, but it does not establish what a charity achieves.\naliases: [overhead, program expense ratio, administrative costs, fundraising ratio]\nconditions: [overhead-myth, measurement-gap]\nrelated: [/diagnosis/overhead-myth/, /record/myths/, /open-problems/the-overhead-replacement/, /tools/charity-lookup/, /record/lexicon/#overhead-ratio]\nsources:\n  - title: Instructions for Form 990, Part IX, Statement of Functional Expenses\n    publisher: Internal Revenue Service\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i990\n  - title: The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle\n    publisher: Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard, Stanford Social Innovation Review\n    year: 2009\n    url: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_nonprofit_starvation_cycle\n  - title: 3 Major Charity Groups Ask Donors to Stop Focusing on Overhead Costs\n    publisher: The Chronicle of Philanthropy\n    year: 2013\n    url: https://www.philanthropy.com/news/3-major-charity-groups-ask-donors-to-stop-focusing-on-overhead-costs/\n  - title: Charity Impact Media\n    publisher: Charity Impact Media\n    url: https://theguysaccount.github.io/charity-impact-media/\n  - title: \"The overhead myth: crash course to fundraising transparency\"\n    publisher: Candid\n    year: 2022\n    url: https://candid.org/blogs/the-overhead-myth-crash-course-to-fundraising-transparency/\n---\n\nU.S. charities that file the full IRS Form 990 report their expenses in Part IX, the Statement of Functional Expenses, which sorts them into three columns: program services, management and general, and fundraising. The **overhead ratio** is the share that falls in the second and third columns. A charity that spends $100 with $15 on management and fundraising has an overhead ratio of 15 percent.\n\n## Why it became the default\n\nIt is printed on a public form, and it seems to answer the question donors most want answered: how much of my gift reaches the cause? Part IX does not itself measure results.\n\n## What it can’t tell you\n\nThe ratio says how costs are split, not what they buy. Some costs of running an organization well land in those columns, while shared costs must be allocated by function under the IRS instructions, and they are often what make a program work. A charity can spend almost nothing on overhead and achieve nothing, and another can invest heavily in systems and change thousands of lives.\n\nThe ratio also shapes behavior. Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard described a *nonprofit starvation cycle*: funders expect low overhead, charities feel pressure to meet the expectation, so they underspend on infrastructure and underreport what they do spend, which keeps expectations low. They cited a study in which more than a third of organizations reported no fundraising costs at all, and a 2001 survey by the Better Business Bureau in which more than half of American adults said overhead should be 20 percent or less.\n\n## An open letter\n\nIn June 2013 the leaders of GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, three organizations that donors turn to for information about charities, published an open letter calling the overhead percentage a poor measure of a charity’s performance. They asked donors to look instead at transparency, governance, leadership and results. They also said that very high overhead can still be a sign of fraud or poor management, so the ratio can prompt further questions without being a verdict on its own.\n\n## What could replace it\n\nFinding a simple public measure that tracks results without being easy to game is [Open Problem 6, the Overhead Replacement](/open-problems/the-overhead-replacement/). The raw material exists: [Charity Impact Media](https://theguysaccount.github.io/charity-impact-media/) publishes Form 990 spending breakdowns, with every number linked to its filing and no ratings attached. See also the [Myth-Busting Series](/record/myths/) on the claim that a low overhead ratio means a good charity.\n"},{"byteLength":3678,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"e943e1886bda23a23620f91b5f350f3d8c2500cf00abc6c81cd11a8b9063f125","id":"source:encyclopedia-participatory-grantmaking-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/participatory-grantmaking.md","sha256":"02190ba248fb11f888684ebbb9ac793af2c9f2477f59d7caa4bc9214268ac79f","text":"---\ntitle: Participatory grantmaking\nsummary: Grantmaking in which funders hand some or all of the decisions about money, including strategy and criteria, to the communities the money is meant to serve.\naliases: [participatory philanthropy, community-led grantmaking, shifting power]\nconditions: [missing-voice, missing-feedback-loop]\nrelated: [/diagnosis/missing-voice/, /open-problems/the-agency-premium/, /record/encyclopedia/beneficiary-feedback/, /record/lexicon/#participatory-grantmaking, /record/lexicon/#trust-based-philanthropy]\nsources:\n  - title: New report on how funders can engage in participatory grantmaking\n    publisher: Alliance magazine, on Cynthia Gibson’s GrantCraft guide “Deciding Together”\n    year: 2018\n    url: https://www.alliancemagazine.org/blog/new-report-on-how-funders-can-engage-in-participatory-grantmaking/\n  - title: 'Humanity’s Checklist: six things to fix so we can fix everything else'\n    publisher: Humanity’s Checklist\n    year: 2026\n    url: https://humanityschecklist.org/\n  - title: \"Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking\"\n    publisher: Cynthia Gibson, GrantCraft, Foundation Center\n    year: 2018\n    url: https://learningforfunders.candid.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/12/DecidingTogether_Final_20181002.pdf\n---\n\nIn a conventional grant process, donors, foundation staff or boards decide where money goes. **Participatory grantmaking** moves some of those decisions to the people who will live with the results. In the version described by Cynthia Gibson’s 2018 guide for GrantCraft, *Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking*, funders cede decision-making power about funding to the communities they aim to serve.\n\n## What it looks like\n\nParticipation runs along a spectrum. At one end, community members advise a funder that still decides. Further along, they sit on the panels that review applications, set the criteria or choose the strategy. At the far end, a community-led group controls the money outright. Gibson’s guide, which Alliance magazine described as the first focused entirely on participatory grantmaking, drew on examples from many participatory funders, many of them smaller foundations focused on human rights. The Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations supported the work.\n\n## The case for it\n\nCommunity members can bring knowledge about needs, risks and trusted organizations that a funder may lack. A process that lets them decide also changes who holds power, which some practitioners see as part of the result rather than a means to it. Humanity’s Checklist names gatekeepers as one of the six sources upstream of world problems: concentrated decision rights may exclude useful ideas. Participatory grantmaking applies the same idea to philanthropy.\n\n## The questions it raises\n\nWho speaks for a community, and how are they chosen? What does it cost in time and money to run a fair process, and who pays participants for their time? How does a funder handle conflicts of interest when panelists know the applicants? Practitioners answer these in different ways, and the answers shape the results.\n\n## What we don’t know\n\nThe guide presents principles and practitioners’ experience. It does not establish a general causal estimate of the effect on final outcomes. Do community-decided grants achieve more than expert-decided ones on the same outcome, and in which settings? That is [Open Problem 14, the Agency Premium](/open-problems/the-agency-premium/). See also [the Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/) and [beneficiary feedback](/record/encyclopedia/beneficiary-feedback/).\n"},{"byteLength":4986,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"2d0bcd050283c7147f9c34bc7cc64ba97d967063c59971bb493f9b3ce9628400","id":"source:encyclopedia-private-foundations-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/private-foundations.md","sha256":"dc93c291bfcfa7e8523affd3bbac95fc105720eb7f3cf4baf1b98770654e170f","text":"---\ntitle: Private foundations\nsummary: In U.S. law, charities that do not qualify as public charities, usually because they lack broad public support. They must generally spend an amount tied to 5 percent of their investment assets on charitable purposes each year.\naliases: [foundations, grantmaking foundations, the 5 percent rule, minimum distribution requirement]\nconditions: [parked-money, short-horizon]\nrelated: [/diagnosis/parked-money/, /open-problems/the-payout-question/, /record/encyclopedia/donor-advised-funds/, /record/lexicon/#private-foundation, /record/lexicon/#payout-rate]\nsources:\n  - title: Private foundations\n    publisher: Internal Revenue Service\n    url: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/private-foundations\n  - title: Minimum investment return\n    publisher: Internal Revenue Service\n    url: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/minimum-investment-return\n  - title: Taxes on failure to distribute income, private foundations\n    publisher: Internal Revenue Service\n    url: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/taxes-on-failure-to-distribute-income-private-foundations\n  - title: Program-related investments\n    publisher: Internal Revenue Service\n    url: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/program-related-investments\n  - title: Key takeaways from Giving USA’s 2026 report on philanthropy\n    publisher: Foundation Source\n    year: 2026\n    url: https://foundationsource.com/blog/key-takeaways-from-giving-usas-2026-report-on-philanthropy/\n  - title: The 5 Percent Foundation Payout Requirement May Be a Floor, but the Ceiling Is Awfully Low\n    publisher: Helen Flannery, Inequality.org (Institute for Policy Studies)\n    year: 2023\n    url: https://inequality.org/article/foundation-payout/\n  - title: Gates to give away $200 billon and shutter foundation in 2045\n    publisher: Alliance magazine\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://www.alliancemagazine.org/blog/gates-to-give-away-200-billon-and-shutter-foundation-in-2045/\n  - title: Phil Trammell on how becoming a ‘patient philanthropist’ might allow you to do far more good\n    publisher: 80,000 Hours Podcast\n    year: 2020\n    url: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/phil-trammell-patient-philanthropy/\n---\n\nUnder U.S. tax law, every 501(c)(3) organization is a **private foundation** unless it falls into an excluded category, such as hospitals, universities and organizations with broad public support. Giving USA estimates that foundations gave about $117 billion in 2025, roughly a fifth of all U.S. giving.\n\n## The 5 percent rule\n\nPrivate non-operating foundations generally must make qualifying distributions each year; operating foundations have different rules. The amount is tied to what the IRS calls a foundation’s *minimum investment return*: 5 percent of the value of its assets that are not used for charitable purposes, less debt incurred to buy them. A foundation that falls short owes a 30 percent excise tax on the undistributed amount under Section 4942 of the tax code, and a 100 percent tax if it does not make up the shortfall within 90 days of being notified.\n\nFoundations can also invest for their mission. A **program-related investment**, in the IRS’s terms, is one whose primary purpose is charitable, where earning income is not a significant purpose and which is not used for lobbying or political campaigns. The IRS’s examples include low-interest loans to needy students and high-risk investments in nonprofit low-income housing.\n\n## Floor or ceiling?\n\nThe rule sets a minimum. Whether it works in practice as a maximum is debated. An analysis of IRS data by Helen Flannery of the Institute for Policy Studies found that the median payout rate of private non-operating foundations ranged from 5.2 to 5.6 percent between 2015 and 2021. For foundations with more than a billion dollars, it was usually 5.0 or 5.1 percent.\n\n## Forever or now?\n\nA foundation whose investments earn more than it pays out can, in principle, last forever. Some choose not to. In May 2025 Bill Gates announced that the Gates Foundation would spend about $200 billion over 20 years and close permanently on December 31, 2045, much sooner than its charter had planned.\n\nThere are serious arguments on the other side. The economist Philip Trammell argues that a truly patient funder can invest, let returns compound and give far more later, when people may also know more about how to do good. He also lists the risks: a fund can be lost to war or financial collapse, or drift from its founder’s goals.\n\nWhich approach does more good is not known. It depends on how fast good opportunities are being used up, how fast invested money grows and how much the future should count. That is [Open Problem 12, the Payout Question](/open-problems/the-payout-question/). See also [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/) and [discounting](/record/encyclopedia/discounting/).\n"},{"byteLength":3759,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"76c32673fe01898270880f735fee71766c02a979f61347b1cf2f07399014a978","id":"source:encyclopedia-psychic-numbing-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/psychic-numbing.md","sha256":"cb01abcbabd8e740729445ef12d6a9c1514c8ca0288ea02116ac6b5fb9404f24","text":"---\ntitle: Psychic numbing\nsummary: The way concern for people in danger fails to grow with their number, and can even shrink, so that a single person in need moves us more than a mass tragedy. The psychologist Paul Slovic has used it to explain how people respond to suffering on a large scale.\naliases: [compassion fade, compassion collapse, scope insensitivity]\nconditions: [story-bias, symptom-trap]\nrelated: [/diagnosis/story-bias/, /record/encyclopedia/identifiable-victim-effect/, /open-problems/story-without-bias/, /record/lexicon/#psychic-numbing]\nsources:\n  - title: '“If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide'\n    publisher: Paul Slovic, Judgment and Decision Making 2(2)\n    year: 2007\n    url: https://journal.sjdm.org/7303a/jdm7303a.htm\n  - title: 'Compassion Fade: Affect and Charity Are Greatest for a Single Child in Need'\n    publisher: Daniel Västfjäll, Paul Slovic, Marcus Mayorga and Ellen Peters, PLoS ONE 9(6)\n    year: 2014\n    url: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4062481/\n---\n\nIf every life counts equally, saving a hundred lives should matter a hundred times as much as saving one. Feelings don’t work that way. **Psychic numbing** is the name for the gap: concern fails to keep pace with the number of people suffering, and past a point it can fall.\n\n## The idea\n\nRobert J. Lifton coined the term for the turning off of feeling that let rescue workers keep functioning after Hiroshima. In a 2007 paper the psychologist Paul Slovic used it more broadly, for the pattern in which emotional response shrinks as the number of victims grows, leading to apathy. The paper takes its title from a line attributed to Mother Teresa: “If I look at the mass I will never act.”\n\nSlovic argued that people value lives along a psychophysical curve, the way they perceive other quantities: each additional life registers less than the one before. Few people would feel any difference between saving 87 lives and saving 88. Applied to atrocities, he argued, the pattern helps explain why the world largely stood by as about 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in roughly 100 days. Statistics about mass killing, however large, fail to produce the feeling that drives action.\n\n## Compassion fade\n\nThe effect may start very early. In studies published in 2014, Daniel Västfjäll, Paul Slovic, Marcus Mayorga and Ellen Peters found that feelings of compassion, and in some studies donations, were greatest for a single child in need and began to decline with the second endangered life. The decline reversed when several people were presented as one unit, such as a family. Some of the studies used real money and some used hypothetical choices.\n\nRelated findings, such as the [identifiable victim effect](/record/encyclopedia/identifiable-victim-effect/), are now being tested again, and at least one prominent replication found no effect. How strong and reliable each finding is remains an open research question.\n\n## Why it matters for the system\n\nA charity system that moves money through human attention inherits the limits of human attention. If concern falls as need grows, the largest problems will draw the least feeling per person affected, and the deepest ones, which are often abstract and statistical, the least of all. This is part of the [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/), and a reason the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/) is plausible.\n\nKnowing about the bias does not switch it off. Can a story make people feel the size of a problem rather than one face? Formats worth testing include stories of whole communities, visualizations of scale and stories about sources rather than symptoms. That is [Open Problem 7, Story Without Bias](/open-problems/story-without-bias/).\n"},{"byteLength":4660,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"cab180de9d8a65ef9029bb61ea07b4ac7ff370a9779d17e44726e4a9603d0e9f","id":"source:encyclopedia-randomized-controlled-trials-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/randomized-controlled-trials.md","sha256":"2c92d8301d48429d7f40ec37fe6d45f8dba632769e5a53022bf487ab7db4255d","text":"---\ntitle: Randomized controlled trials\nsummary: Experiments that assign people or communities to a program or to a comparison group by chance, so that differences in outcomes can be credited to the program. They reshaped development economics, and their limits are still debated.\naliases: [RCTs, randomized evaluations, field experiments]\nconditions: [measurement-gap]\nrelated: [/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/, /record/principles/04-evidence-and-its-grades/, /programs/evidence-reviews/, /programs/replication-program/, /open-problems/the-replication-rate/]\nsources:\n  - title: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2019\n    publisher: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences\n    year: 2019\n    url: https://www.kva.se/en/news/ekonomipriset-2019-2/\n  - title: About us\n    publisher: Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)\n    url: https://www.povertyactionlab.org/about-us\n  - title: Understanding and misunderstanding randomized controlled trials\n    publisher: Angus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright, Social Science & Medicine 210\n    year: 2018\n    url: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.12.005\n    note: Freely readable at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6019115/\n  - title: Insecticide-treated nets for preventing malaria (Cochrane systematic review)\n    publisher: Joseph Pryce, Marty Richardson and Christian Lengeler, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews\n    year: 2018\n    url: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6418392/\n  - title: '“Scared Straight” and other juvenile awareness programs for preventing juvenile delinquency'\n    publisher: Anthony Petrosino and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews\n    year: 2022\n    url: https://www.cochrane.org/evidence/CD002796_scared-straight-and-other-juvenile-awareness-programs-preventing-juvenile-delinquency\n---\n\nA **randomized controlled trial** (RCT) assigns people, villages or schools to receive a program or not by chance, like a coin flip. Because chance decides, the groups are expected to be alike in everything except the program. The difference in their outcomes then estimates the program’s effect. A trial is a way of seeing the [counterfactual](/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/): what would have happened without the program.\n\n## In development economics\n\nIn 2019 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of MIT and Michael Kremer of Harvard “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” The Academy said they split poverty into smaller, more precise questions, often best answered by carefully designed experiments among the people most affected. It credited one of their studies with leading to remedial tutoring programs that have reached more than five million children in India. J-PAL, the research center Banerjee and Duflo founded at MIT in 2003 with Sendhil Mullainathan, says its network has led more than 2,700 randomized evaluations.\n\n## What trials can show\n\nTrials can confirm that something works and show how much. A Cochrane review of five trials with about 200,000 participants found that insecticide-treated nets cut child deaths from all causes by about 17 percent, and rated that evidence high-certainty.\n\nThey can also show that something does harm. A Cochrane review of nine trials of “Scared Straight” programs found that they increased offending compared with doing nothing.\n\n## The critique\n\nAngus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright argue that the public, and sometimes researchers, put too much trust in RCTs compared with other methods. Randomization does not guarantee that the groups in any one trial are equal in everything but the treatment. At best a trial gives an unbiased estimate, which they say is of limited practical value on its own. Its result applies to the people in the trial, and carrying it to a new place or population needs a further argument about why the program worked. They see trials as useful inside a cumulative program of research that combines them with other methods.\n\n## Where trials stop\n\nMany of the questions Charitology cares most about cannot be randomized. Some national laws and cultural changes cannot feasibly be assigned at random, though policy rollout or components can sometimes be randomized. Charitology hypothesizes that limits on trial evidence can affect funding for structure and [source](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) work. Finding other ways to measure it is [Open Problem 3](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/). How often trial findings hold up when repeated is [Open Problem 10](/open-problems/the-replication-rate/).\n"},{"byteLength":4525,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"7d293a44071557b9ea27d546e1c2f2780a3de25b2a436651d1e04bea0888807c","id":"source:encyclopedia-restricted-and-unrestricted-funding-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/restricted-and-unrestricted-funding.md","sha256":"962efe3d7797c65d4ce7decf0fa3c76805ce09216797933b4287b3843557dee0","text":"---\ntitle: Restricted and unrestricted funding\nsummary: Restricted gifts must be spent on a purpose the funder names. Unrestricted gifts, also called general operating support, let the organization decide. The balance between them shapes what charities can learn, fix and attempt.\naliases: [general operating support, flexible funding, project funding, multiyear funding]\nconditions: [restriction-reflex, overhead-myth, short-horizon]\nrelated: [/diagnosis/restriction-reflex/, /open-problems/the-optimal-restriction/, /record/lexicon/#general-operating-support, /record/lexicon/#trust-based-philanthropy, /tools/grant-evaluator/]\nsources:\n  - title: 'New Attitudes, Old Practices: The Provision of Multiyear General Operating Support'\n    publisher: Center for Effective Philanthropy, via the National Center for Family Philanthropy\n    year: 2020\n    url: https://www.ncfp.org/download/new-attitudes-old-practices-cep-2020-0\n  - title: Top Foundations Pledge Flexible Funding to Grantees in Wake of COVID-19 Crisis\n    publisher: Ford Foundation\n    year: 2020\n    url: https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/news-and-press/news/top-foundations-pledge-flexible-funding-to-grantees-in-wake-of-covid-19-crisis/\n  - title: 'A Call to Action: Philanthropy’s Commitment During COVID-19'\n    publisher: Council on Foundations\n    url: https://www.cof.org/news/call-action-philanthropys-commitment-during-covid-19\n  - title: Six Practices of Trust-Based Grantmaking\n    publisher: Trust-Based Philanthropy Project\n    url: https://www.trustbasedphilanthropy.org/practices\n  - title: The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle\n    publisher: Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard, Stanford Social Innovation Review\n    year: 2009\n    url: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_nonprofit_starvation_cycle\n---\n\nA **restricted** gift comes with conditions: it must pay for a named project, often within a set time and budget. An **unrestricted** gift, or **general operating support**, can be spent on whatever the organization judges most useful, including salaries, systems and evaluation. When unrestricted support is promised for several years at a time, it is called multiyear general operating support.\n\n## The case for each\n\nRestriction feels like accountability. A funder can see exactly what its money bought, and it can be sure the gift serves the goal it cares about. That instinct is responsible.\n\nThe case for flexibility is that organizations learn. A charity halfway through a project may find a better approach, or discover that its accounting system is about to fail. A restriction may require the charity to seek the funder’s agreement before changing how the money is used. A grant that does not cover its share of running costs leaves those costs to be funded elsewhere. Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard found that foundation allowances for indirect costs averaged 10 to 15 percent of each grant. In four youth-serving nonprofits they studied, actual overhead ran from 17 to 35 percent. They called the result the nonprofit starvation cycle.\n\n## Attitudes and practice\n\nIn a 2020 report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy, 58 percent of foundation CEOs said their foundations gave some multiyear general operating support, usually to only a few grantees. Among the 58 percent that provided it, 11 percent gave it to more than half their grantees. The survey covered foundations giving at least $5 million a year, not all funders.\n\nThen came a natural experiment. In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, a pledge led by the Ford Foundation with the Council on Foundations, and informed by the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, asked funders to loosen or eliminate restrictions on current grants, make new grants as unrestricted as possible and cut reporting demands. The Council published the signatories to the pledge. The first of the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project’s six practices is to give multi-year, unrestricted funding.\n\n## What we don’t know\n\nThe case for unrestricted funding is strong, but most of it rests on what charities say they prefer, not on outcomes. Restriction may help in some situations, for example when a funder brings knowledge the grantee lacks. The sources here do not establish when each works better on final outcomes. The shift of 2020 makes comparison possible: what happened to grantees whose funding became flexible, compared with similar grantees whose funding did not? That is [Open Problem 8, the Optimal Restriction](/open-problems/the-optimal-restriction/).\n"},{"byteLength":4598,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"ec8547cbf4831810466b3154d495b97fea38192684c4873a911c0cc3a92c1e34","id":"source:encyclopedia-scale-neglectedness-tractability-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/scale-neglectedness-tractability.md","sha256":"c863ab303084e4d7ff28ab5e7c6f35f89f2a2f56288e33163c56451f3215f857","text":"---\ntitle: Scale, neglectedness and tractability\nsummary: A framework for comparing problems by how big they are, how few resources already go to them and how much extra effort would achieve. It grew out of GiveWell Labs and 80,000 Hours and is widely used in effective altruism.\naliases: [SNT framework, ITN framework, 'importance, neglectedness and tractability', 'scale, neglectedness and solvability']\nconditions: [single-lens, symptom-trap]\nrelated: [/record/encyclopedia/neglectedness/, /record/encyclopedia/effective-altruism/, /open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/, /tools/values-compass/, /record/lexicon/#tractability]\nsources:\n  - title: A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact\n    publisher: Robert Wiblin, 80,000 Hours\n    year: 2016\n    url: https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/\n    note: First published in 2016 and last updated in December 2025.\n  - title: A framework for strategically selecting a cause\n    publisher: Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours\n    year: 2013\n    url: https://80000hours.org/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/\n  - title: Narrowing down U.S. policy areas\n    publisher: Holden Karnofsky, The GiveWell Blog\n    year: 2014\n    url: https://blog.givewell.org/2014/05/22/narrowing-down-u-s-policy-areas/\n  - title: The Important/Neglected/Tractable framework needs to be applied with care\n    publisher: Robert Wiblin, Effective Altruism Forum\n    year: 2016\n    url: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/74oJS32C6CZRC4Zp5/the-important-neglected-tractable-framework-needs-to-be\n  - title: Open Philanthropy Is Now Coefficient Giving\n    publisher: Effective Altruism Forum\n    year: 2025\n    url: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vkvtu6xbvfkHPhJkC/open-philanthropy-is-now-coefficient-giving\n---\n\nThe **scale, neglectedness and tractability** framework asks three questions about a problem before asking which charity to fund. In the version 80,000 Hours publishes:\n\n- **Scale:** If we solved the problem, how good would it be?\n- **Neglectedness:** How many people, or dollars, are currently working on it? See [neglectedness](/record/encyclopedia/neglectedness/).\n- **Solvability**, often called **tractability:** If we doubled the effort going into it, what fraction of what remains would we expect to solve?\n\nMultiplied together, the three give an estimate of how much good an extra unit of money or work would do. Because the scores are logarithmic, 80,000 Hours adds them instead of multiplying.\n\n## Where it came from\n\nGiveWell Labs, the project that became the Open Philanthropy Project (later Open Philanthropy, and since 2025 Coefficient Giving), compared causes by importance, tractability and how crowded they were. A 2014 post used those three criteria to narrow down U.S. policy areas. In December 2013 Benjamin Todd of 80,000 Hours proposed a cause-selection framework of importance, tractability and uncrowdedness, crediting GiveWell Labs for the names. Robert Wiblin’s 2016 article for 80,000 Hours turned it into the formal version still in use.\n\n## Cautions from its own authors\n\n80,000 Hours lists the limits plainly. The scores are imprecise, and adding them adds uncertainty. Narrowly defined problems tend to score better than broad ones. Trade-offs between the yardsticks rest on contested value judgments. Solvability is the hardest factor to score, and the true differences between problems are probably smaller than the scores suggest. Wiblin also warns that the factors overlap: a problem can stay important because it is neglected, so the same fact can be counted twice.\n\n## How Charitology uses it\n\nCharitology treats the framework as a good tool that needs one more input: a moral framework. *Scale* needs a unit, such as lives, wellbeing, rights secured or species protected, and choosing the unit is a moral choice. A problem can rank first under one lens and last under another. So Charitology asks the questions once per framework. Its frameworks data, used by the [Values Compass](/tools/values-compass/), sketches how each framework tends to rank causes, so a giver can see where the rankings agree. Where they cannot be put on one scale at all is [Open Problem 2, the Exchange Rate Problem](/open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/).\n\nThe framework scores problems, not the depth of the work. A problem can be crowded at the relief level and neglected at the source level. Charitology’s working hypothesis is that this pattern is common, which is the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/). This project has not established that pattern.\n"},{"byteLength":3898,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"88f5af36621e816118ad487b5b4e95d734615aa8c8c4485e1adca00fece8683b","id":"source:encyclopedia-source-depth-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/source-depth.md","sha256":"0550b04e73b15de0c2e19c9a9ae59b6cc32fda82fe339769208a9e889c20f699","text":"---\ntitle: Source depth\nsummary: Charitology’s five-level scale for where a piece of work acts on the chain from symptom to source, from relief through repair, prevention and structure to source. It describes the work. It never grades it.\naliases: [depth scale, depth, relief to source]\nconditions: [symptom-trap, measurement-gap]\nrelated: [/method/, /record/encyclopedia/symptoms-and-sources/, /record/principles/03-depth-from-relief-to-source/, /open-problems/the-depth-census/, /open-problems/measuring-the-source/]\nsources:\n  - title: 'Humanity’s Checklist: six things to fix so we can fix everything else'\n    publisher: Humanity’s Checklist\n    year: 2026\n    url: https://humanityschecklist.org/\n---\n\n**Source depth** says where on the chain from [symptom to source](/record/encyclopedia/symptoms-and-sources/) a piece of work acts. Charitology uses a five-level scale, numbered 0 to 4, set out in [the Method](/method/#depth). Every gift, program and organization can be described with it.\n\n## The five levels\n\n| Level | Name | What it does | Examples |\n| --- | --- | --- | --- |\n| 0 | Relief | Meets the need today | A meal at a food bank, emergency surgery, a disaster shelter |\n| 1 | Repair | Restores what was lost | Rebuilding a home, rehabilitation after an injury, a job after a layoff |\n| 2 | Prevention | Stops it happening to these people | Bed nets, vaccines, clean water for a village |\n| 3 | Structure | Changes the rules that produce it | A lead-paint ban, a new public health system, a corporate standard |\n| 4 | Source | Changes what feeds many problems at once | The story a society tells itself, how people coordinate, what a culture rewards |\n\nEach level has a test question. Relief asks whether someone is fed, sheltered or treated right now. Repair asks whether someone is back where they were before the harm. Prevention asks whether these people will avoid the harm altogether. Structure asks whether a law, institution, market or norm changed so the harm stops being produced. Source asks whether something upstream of a whole family of problems changed.\n\n## Depth describes. It never grades.\n\nEvery level is needed. Immediate food matters to a hungry person tonight, and a change at the source can take a generation to arrive. A deeper level is not a better level, and nothing in the scale says a food bank matters less than a policy campaign. The scale exists so that a giver knows what they are paying for, and so the field can ask whether the system’s overall mix is right. That is the question behind the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/).\n\n## How to place a piece of work\n\n- **Classify the activity, not the cause.** One cause has work at every depth. Homelessness has emergency shelters (relief), rehousing (repair), eviction prevention (prevention) and zoning reform (structure).\n- **Classify what the money does, not the mission statement.** One organization can work at several depths. Weight each activity by what it spends.\n- **Say when it is hard to call.** Boundaries between levels are fuzzy. How often two independent people place the same work at the same level is itself worth measuring.\n\n## The top of the scale\n\nLevel 4 comes from Humanity’s Checklist, which argues that world problems grow from six shared sources: the story we tell, how we coordinate, what we can picture, what our feeds reward, what we admire and who gets to build. Charitology treats the claim that changing them would help everything downstream as a hypothesis to test.\n\n## What this project has not established\n\nCharitology has not produced a public estimate of the world’s giving by depth and has not established the current mix. Measuring it is [Open Problem 1, the Depth Census](/open-problems/the-depth-census/). Measuring the effect of source-level work, which is diffuse, shared and slow, is [Open Problem 3](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/).\n"},{"byteLength":2386,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"361a42ac1b6f0217c41ae04dd3e5e6c103ec9629669a97fe15ccc90f306c2e04","id":"source:encyclopedia-symptoms-and-sources-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/symptoms-and-sources.md","sha256":"69bedd08365ec9f0c1fc970d1b9aab51fec1ccd5a57fd4d0b54e1e7cacab9297","text":"---\ntitle: Symptoms and sources\nsummary: The core distinction of charitology. A symptom is a problem as it shows up in people’s lives. A source is what keeps producing it upstream.\naliases: [root causes, upstream causes]\nconditions: [symptom-trap]\nrelated: [/method/, /record/encyclopedia/source-depth/, /record/cause-atlas/]\nsources:\n  - title: 'Humanity’s Checklist: six things to fix so we can fix everything else'\n    publisher: Humanity’s Checklist\n    year: 2026\n    url: https://humanityschecklist.org/\n---\n\nA **symptom** is a problem as it shows up in someone’s life: hunger tonight, an untreated fever, a flooded home. A **source** is something upstream that keeps producing problems, often many at once.\n\n## Why the distinction matters\n\nSymptoms are urgent, visible and real, and helping with them is good. Some needs recur because the conditions producing them persist. A food bank feeds people tonight, and tomorrow there is a line again. Charitology asks every gift where it acts on the chain from symptom to source, and asks the system as a whole whether its mix is right. That is the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/).\n\n## The six sources\n\nHumanity’s Checklist argues that the world’s problems grow from a few shared sources inside humanity’s collective life:\n\n- **Story**: the story we tell ourselves about what is possible\n- **Coordination**: whether the people who could solve a problem together ever meet\n- **Vision**: whether we can picture the future we want to build\n- **Attention**: what our feeds and media reward\n- **Status**: what a culture admires\n- **Gatekeepers**: who gets to build and be seen\n\nFixing a source, the checklist argues, stops it feeding the problems below it and starts it feeding the cure. Charitology adopts these six as the top of its [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) and treats the claim that fixing them would help everything downstream as a hypothesis to test.\n\n## Between symptom and source\n\nMost work sits in between. Charitology’s depth scale has five levels: relief, repair, prevention, structure and source. Bed nets are prevention: they stop malaria for the people who sleep under them. A ban on lead paint is structure: it changes the rules that produced the harm. The scale describes where the work acts. It does not say which level is better. A healthy system funds all five on purpose.\n"},{"byteLength":4325,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"99c9f18334bb40d2562de1df4767f4e0fbf3e9edf5ef33a20699663d8ab95b5c","id":"source:encyclopedia-systemic-change-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/systemic-change.md","sha256":"06dc833b513b6fd0efcdc6a1c4fd40d33e4c59d7a96562b49e481ba86a7e0df9","text":"---\ntitle: Systemic change\nsummary: Change to the structures that produce outcomes, such as laws, markets, institutions, relationships and beliefs, rather than to outcomes one case at a time. On Charitology’s depth scale it is the work of the structure and source levels.\naliases: [systems change, structural change, root-cause change]\nconditions: [symptom-trap, short-horizon, measurement-gap]\nrelated: [/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/, /record/encyclopedia/symptoms-and-sources/, /open-problems/measuring-the-source/, /open-problems/when-charity-harms/, /record/lexicon/#leverage]\nsources:\n  - title: 'Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System'\n    publisher: Donella Meadows, The Sustainability Institute\n    year: 1999\n    url: https://www.donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/\n  - title: The Water of Systems Change\n    publisher: John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge, FSG\n    year: 2018\n    url: https://www.fsg.org/blog/new-article-water-systems-change/\n  - title: Six Conditions for Systems Change\n    publisher: Complex Systems Frameworks Collection\n    url: https://www.complexsystemsframeworks.ca/framework/six-conditions-for-systems-change/\n  - title: Effective Altruism and Its Critics\n    publisher: Iason Gabriel, Journal of Applied Philosophy 34(4)\n    year: 2017\n    url: https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12176\n---\n\n**Systemic change** aims at the structures that keep producing those outcomes: the rules, markets, institutions, relationships and beliefs underneath. On the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) it is the work of level 3, structure, and level 4, source.\n\n## Where to push\n\nThe systems thinker Donella Meadows described *leverage points* as places in a complex system where a small shift can produce big changes. In a 1999 essay she ranked twelve of them, from least to most effective. At the bottom are constants and numbers, such as subsidies, taxes and standards. Further up come feedback loops, the structure of information flows, the rules of the system, its power to reorganize itself, its goals and the mindset it grows from. At the top is the power to transcend paradigms altogether. She observed that almost all attention goes to the numbers, where there is little leverage.\n\nIn 2018 John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge, writing for FSG, described six interdependent conditions that hold social and environmental problems in place: policies, practices and resource flows, which are the most visible; relationships and connections, and power dynamics; and, deepest, mental models, the beliefs people take for granted.\n\nBoth maps inform Charitology’s scale. They are frameworks for reasoning about change, not evidence that a deeper intervention always achieves more.\n\n## The debate\n\nWhether giving should aim at systems is a live argument. Iason Gabriel summarized a critique of effective altruism along these lines: that its language of charity can hide the structural causes of poverty, and that a movement which changes its priorities as the evidence changes may lack the constancy of purpose that movements such as abolitionism and civil rights relied on. He also noted that effective altruists were increasingly interested in systemic change, and argued for a division of labor and partnerships with committed advocacy groups.\n\nThe case for caution is just as real. Systemic bets are slow, their credit is shared and they can fail. Some do harm: a reform can backfire, and charity can crowd out or delay the public action that would have helped more. That is [Open Problem 20, When Charity Harms](/open-problems/when-charity-harms/).\n\n## How Charitology sees it\n\nCharitology does not treat systemic change as better than direct help. It treats the line between them as a scale rather than a wall, and every level as needed. Its working hypothesis, the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), is that the system as a whole underfunds the deep end of the scale, partly because systemic change is so hard to measure. Measuring it is [Open Problem 3](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/). The eradication of smallpox is a useful case of a lasting change. Its proposed source-depth classification is Charitology’s hypothesis, open to challenge: see [the case study](/record/case-studies/smallpox-eradication/).\n"},{"byteLength":3722,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"84ef27fb6b1902ac517a3027df998a96339a6479877dd8ecab4deccf9bb9ab85","id":"source:encyclopedia-theory-of-change-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/theory-of-change.md","sha256":"27fd7e0844b2b4d1b7beb28754792e3fa6db71da081b3ec867a1e7dd772bc716","text":"---\ntitle: Theory of change\nsummary: A written account of how and why a program’s activities are expected to lead to its long-term goal, step by step, with the assumptions that link each step to the next.\naliases: [ToC, causal pathway, change model]\nconditions: [measurement-gap, symptom-trap]\nrelated: [/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/, /record/encyclopedia/source-depth/, /tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/, /tools/grant-evaluator/, /record/lexicon/#theory-of-change]\nsources:\n  - title: What is Theory of Change?\n    publisher: Center for Theory of Change\n    url: https://www.theoryofchange.org/what-is-theory-of-change/\n  - title: TOC Origins\n    publisher: Center for Theory of Change\n    url: https://www.theoryofchange.org/what-is-theory-of-change/toc-background/toc-origins/\n  - title: Logic Model Development Guide\n    publisher: W.K. Kellogg Foundation\n    year: 2004\n    url: https://www.naccho.org/uploads/downloadable-resources/Programs/Public-Health-Infrastructure/KelloggLogicModelGuide_161122_162808.pdf\n---\n\nA **theory of change** explains how a program expects to get from what it does to what it is trying to achieve. The Center for Theory of Change describes it as an account of how and why a desired change is expected to happen in a particular context. It fills in the “missing middle” between activities and long-term goals. The usual method works backward: start from the goal, then name the outcomes that must be in place for it to happen and how each one causes the next.\n\n## Where it came from\n\nCarol Weiss popularized the term in 1995. She sat on the evaluation steering committee of the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change, and her essay on theory-based evaluation appeared in the Roundtable’s book *New Approaches to Evaluating Comprehensive Community Initiatives*. Weiss argued that complex community programs were hard to evaluate because the assumptions behind them were poorly spelled out. People were unclear about how change would unfold, so they paid little attention to the early and middle steps a long-term goal depends on.\n\n## Theory of change and logic models\n\nA logic model lays out the chain of resources, activities, outputs, outcomes and impact (see [outputs and outcomes](/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/)). The Kellogg Foundation’s guide notes that outcome-focused models are built with a theory of change in mind, though it is usually not spelled out, and it describes a “theory approach” model that puts the planners’ assumptions up front. A theory of change makes the *why* explicit: each arrow in the chain is a claim that can be checked.\n\n## How to read one\n\nA good theory of change lets a giver ask sharp questions:\n\n- **Which link is weakest?** A chain is only as strong as its least supported step.\n- **What evidence backs each link?** Some steps have trial evidence. Others are hopes.\n- **Where does the goal sit on the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/)?** Ask how many uncertain links connect the activity to the goal; depth alone does not determine that number.\n- **What would show it is wrong?** A theory that no result could contradict is not doing any work.\n\n## Why it matters for source work\n\nSome structure and source goals involve long chains and many assumptions. A campaign to change a norm may need a dozen links to hold, over many years, with credit shared among many actors. A written theory of change does not make that work easier to measure, but it shows which links to watch. Measuring them is [Open Problem 3](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/). See also the [Grant Evaluator](/tools/grant-evaluator/) and the [Impact Measurement Toolkit](/tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/).\n"},{"byteLength":3696,"commit":"d9aeb7a81c74b3c33bb5489e701d58fcc9f28bc5","hash":"0549011da3b2ddac50540543587c260c6979e7937e9a317ba3e9947c2e1f24a3","id":"source:encyclopedia-warm-glow-giving-v1","path":"src/content/encyclopedia/warm-glow-giving.md","sha256":"c6a75c563fa0124d6d8f15fee0a1902f04b2b0fb1a16b455c95a413cec8cc066","text":"---\ntitle: Warm-glow giving\nsummary: The satisfaction people get from the act of giving itself, apart from what the gift achieves. The economist James Andreoni built it into a theory of giving in 1990, It is one possible input to Charitology’s hypotheses about giving signals.\naliases: [warm glow, impure altruism, joy of giving]\nconditions: [prestige-economy, missing-feedback-loop, story-bias]\nrelated: [/diagnosis/prestige-economy/, /open-problems/the-status-flip/, /record/encyclopedia/identifiable-victim-effect/, /record/lexicon/#warm-glow, /tools/charitology-wrapped/]\nsources:\n  - title: 'Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving?'\n    publisher: James Andreoni, The Economic Journal 100(401)\n    year: 1990\n    url: https://doi.org/10.2307/2234133\n  - title: Paying Taxes, According To The Brain, Can Bring Satisfaction\n    publisher: University of Oregon, via EurekAlert, on William Harbaugh, Ulrich Mayr and Dan Burghart in Science\n    year: 2007\n    url: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/465670\n---\n\nWhy do people give? One answer is that they care about the result: fewer hungry children, a cleaner river. Another is that giving feels good, whatever the result. The economist James Andreoni called the second motive the **warm glow** and built it into a formal theory in 1990.\n\n## Pure and impure altruism\n\nEconomists had often modeled donors as *pure altruists*, who care only about how much of a public good exists, no matter who provides it. Andreoni’s model of *impure altruism* adds the satisfaction of giving itself, along with motives such as social pressure, guilt and sympathy. He argued that it fits observed patterns of giving better than the pure model, and that it changes the answers to policy questions such as how private giving responds when government funds the same cause and how giving should be taxed.\n\n## Evidence from the brain\n\nIn a 2007 study published in *Science*, William Harbaugh, Ulrich Mayr and Dan Burghart gave 19 women $100 each and scanned their brains while they watched money go to a food bank. Reward areas of the brain responded even when the transfer was mandatory, like a tax, which fits pure altruism. They responded more when the women chose to give, which fits the warm glow.\n\n## Why it matters for the system\n\nThe warm glow is not a flaw. It is part of what makes people generous at all, and Charitology has no interest in removing it. The question is what the glow attaches to. Charitology’s working claim is that today it attaches mainly to the act of giving and to its size, which donors can see, rather than to its results, which they usually cannot. That is one way the [Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) shapes behavior: if the reward arrives the moment the gift is made, nothing pulls the donor to find out what happened next.\n\nThe [Prestige Economy](/diagnosis/prestige-economy/) is the social version of the same pattern, and Charitology’s hypothesis is that it pulls money toward visible gifts rather than effective ones. The warm glow itself is well documented. The sources here do not establish whether visible giving shifts money away from better opportunities or by how much.\n\n## Pointing the glow at results\n\nIf the glow can attach to the act, it may be able to attach to the outcome. Ideas worth testing include showing donors what their gift achieved, celebrating results rather than amounts and making effective giving a status signal. Whether any of them work at scale is [Open Problem 15, the Status Flip](/open-problems/the-status-flip/). Charitology’s [Wrapped](/tools/charitology-wrapped/) card is one small experiment in that direction.\n"},{"byteLength":1453,"commit":"510320528e89f45caa9c42eb5a6eda3d6ad1bede","hash":"72c9ff3b4a1f522e8d836889b29e04735a03788c213f939dab4e57eb540917f4","id":"source:pr-3-after-depth-census","path":"src/content/problems/the-depth-census.md","sha256":"ebd0d4239ba1e1fabc871238a4436d82e1eacc0401bd61a78cdb2952cd8b7a9e","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Depth Census\"\nnumber: 1\nstatement: \"What share of the world’s charitable money goes to relief, repair, prevention, structure and source work?\"\nprogress: \"A public, reproducible estimate of the depth mix for at least one country’s giving, with a method others can rerun and a stated error range.\"\nconditions: [\"symptom-trap\", \"measurement-gap\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nCharitology’s founding hypothesis, [the Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), says the charity system is weighted toward symptoms. Charitology has not established the current mix. If the hypothesis is wrong, the field should be the first to say so. The census would supply a descriptive baseline. Deciding whether a mix is appropriate also requires an explicit standard tied to the goals being considered.\n\n## Where to start\n\nDraw a random sample of organizations from a public registry and code each one on the [depth scale](/method/#depth), weighting by spending. Program descriptions from Form 990 filings, published openly by [Charity Impact Media](https://theguysaccount.github.io/charity-impact-media/), and the foundation grants in [WHOFUNDS](https://theguysaccount.github.io/whofunds-open-grant-graph/) are open starting points. How often two independent coders agree is itself a finding: if people can’t agree on depth, the scale needs work first.\n"},{"byteLength":3013,"commit":"510320528e89f45caa9c42eb5a6eda3d6ad1bede","hash":"b0653a80fcbf82d19d3bb88a139a3f235adba93aa3a058add31773dcc8ea3b4c","id":"source:pr-3-after-ten-dollars","path":"src/content/journal/ten-dollars.md","sha256":"6fe57d6f550cf879a73c6fd0ba51f4e9e2b75fb3edbc2ee33d124ed335ac5aae","text":"---\ntitle: Ten Dollars\nauthor: Charitology\ndate: 2026-10-26\nsummary: The founding poem uses a ten-dollar domain registration as an image for Charitology’s invitation to study how generosity is aimed.\nvolume: 0\nissue: 1\n---\n\n*Editorial note: This manifesto is a poem, not a history of philanthropy. The ten-dollar image is the author’s account of a domain registration. Existing philanthropy, ethics and evaluation fields have long studied giving; the poem’s invitation is to develop and test Charitology’s proposed shared craft.*\n\nIn 2026, we bought a word for ten dollars.\n\nNot a rare word. Not a clever one.\\\nThe most obvious word there is.\\\nIt was just lying there,\\\nunregistered, unclaimed, unbuilt,\\\nlike a key nobody had picked up\\\nbecause nobody knew there was a door.\n\n*Charitology.*\n\nWe have a word for the study of bells.\\\nCampanology.\\\nWe have a word for the study of flags.\\\nVexillology.\\\nWe have a word for the science of mixing a cocktail.\\\nMixology.\n\nBut for the science of doing the most good\\\na human being can do,\\\nthere was nothing.\\\nNo word. No field. No craft.\\\nNot even a name to argue about.\n\nThink about what that means.\\\nRocket science gets a whole discipline,\\\nand rockets only have to obey physics.\\\nPhysics doesn’t change its mind.\\\nGravity doesn’t have a culture.\\\nThrust doesn’t ask whose child gets saved first.\n\nDoing good is harder.\\\nIt is the hardest problem we have:\\\nwhich suffering, which cure,\\\nwhich country, which century,\\\nnow or later, them or us,\\\nthe person in front of you\\\nor the millions you’ll never meet.\\\nNo equation hands you the answer.\\\nAnd we’ve been working on it\\\nwithout ever admitting it needed solving.\n\nHere’s the part nobody says out loud:\\\nthe money is already here.\\\nHundreds of billions of dollars, every single year,\\\ngiven freely,\\\ngiven with love,\\\ngiven by people who meant every cent.\n\nThe generosity was never missing.\\\nThe aim was.\n\nAnd that is not your fault.\\\nYou gave with your whole heart.\\\nNobody handed you a map.\\\nNobody trained the mapmakers.\\\nNobody even named the territory.\n\nYou can’t master a craft that doesn’t exist.\\\nYou can’t get better at something\\\nno one has agreed is a thing to get better at.\\\nWithout a field, without the people who live in it,\\\nwithout that honest, stubborn, careful search for what actually works,\\\nwe’re all just trying\\\nwith the lights off.\n\nSo we’re turning them on.\n\n*Charitology.*\\\nThe science of doing the most good.\\\nNot one cause. Every cause.\\\nNot one method. Every method.\\\nNot one answer handed down,\\\nbut the endless, humble, rigorous work\\\nof finding the best of all ways.\n\nWe’re not here to tell you you’ve been giving wrong.\\\nWe’re here to tell you it’s worth getting right.\n\nSo study it. Question it. Test it. Teach it.\\\nArgue about it at dinner.\\\nProve us wrong and make it better.\\\nBecome what this world has never had a name for:\n\n*a charitologist.*\n\nIt cost us ten dollars to claim the word.\\\nIt will take the rest of our lives to deserve it.\n"},{"byteLength":1340,"commit":"905bdd27bb5f16027c3b3ad3c0f5ee3fc18e3e45","hash":"3c37a0a52235feec6c13584ccd96f6cf50905dd7c438c989b25f69a0ab3602c6","id":"source:pr-3-before-depth-census","path":"src/content/problems/the-depth-census.md","sha256":"722a15f583ff361c70c6758503d12a7464746bd013d8276b9f1b896cf42654c0","text":"---\ntitle: \"The Depth Census\"\nnumber: 1\nstatement: \"What share of the world’s charitable money goes to relief, repair, prevention, structure and source work?\"\nprogress: \"A public, reproducible estimate of the depth mix for at least one country’s giving, with a method others can rerun and a stated error range.\"\nconditions: [\"symptom-trap\", \"measurement-gap\"]\nstatus: open\nbounty: \"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.\"\n---\n\n## Why it matters\n\nCharitology’s founding hypothesis, [the Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), says the charity system is weighted toward symptoms. Nobody has checked. If the hypothesis is wrong, the field should be the first to say so. If it’s right, the census gives every later effort a baseline to move.\n\n## Where to start\n\nDraw a random sample of organizations from a public registry and code each one on the [depth scale](/method/#depth), weighting by spending. Program descriptions from Form 990 filings, published openly by [Charity Impact Media](https://theguysaccount.github.io/charity-impact-media/), and the foundation grants in [WHOFUNDS](https://theguysaccount.github.io/whofunds-open-grant-graph/) are open starting points. How often two independent coders agree is itself a finding: if people can’t agree on depth, the scale needs work first.\n"},{"byteLength":2721,"commit":"905bdd27bb5f16027c3b3ad3c0f5ee3fc18e3e45","hash":"0ac6d17114c5ef5db5d0b3c1e7f7eb2948191422964efe6f24cdb8a7972a51ef","id":"source:pr-3-before-ten-dollars","path":"src/content/journal/ten-dollars.md","sha256":"1f407ef28ac61ca314088257f038e88df97e2f9910e2edfc1d077a0013c7ab91","text":"---\ntitle: Ten Dollars\nauthor: Charitology\ndate: 2026-10-26\nsummary: The founding manifesto. In 2026 the name for the science of doing the most good was available for about ten dollars. That says something about the field.\nvolume: 0\nissue: 1\n---\n\nIn 2026, we bought a word for ten dollars.\n\nNot a rare word. Not a clever one.\\\nThe most obvious word there is.\\\nIt was just lying there,\\\nunregistered, unclaimed, unbuilt,\\\nlike a key nobody had picked up\\\nbecause nobody knew there was a door.\n\n*Charitology.*\n\nWe have a word for the study of bells.\\\nCampanology.\\\nWe have a word for the study of flags.\\\nVexillology.\\\nWe have a word for the science of mixing a cocktail.\\\nMixology.\n\nBut for the science of doing the most good\\\na human being can do,\\\nthere was nothing.\\\nNo word. No field. No craft.\\\nNot even a name to argue about.\n\nThink about what that means.\\\nRocket science gets a whole discipline,\\\nand rockets only have to obey physics.\\\nPhysics doesn’t change its mind.\\\nGravity doesn’t have a culture.\\\nThrust doesn’t ask whose child gets saved first.\n\nDoing good is harder.\\\nIt is the hardest problem we have:\\\nwhich suffering, which cure,\\\nwhich country, which century,\\\nnow or later, them or us,\\\nthe person in front of you\\\nor the millions you’ll never meet.\\\nNo equation hands you the answer.\\\nAnd we’ve been working on it\\\nwithout ever admitting it needed solving.\n\nHere’s the part nobody says out loud:\\\nthe money is already here.\\\nHundreds of billions of dollars, every single year,\\\ngiven freely,\\\ngiven with love,\\\ngiven by people who meant every cent.\n\nThe generosity was never missing.\\\nThe aim was.\n\nAnd that is not your fault.\\\nYou gave with your whole heart.\\\nNobody handed you a map.\\\nNobody trained the mapmakers.\\\nNobody even named the territory.\n\nYou can’t master a craft that doesn’t exist.\\\nYou can’t get better at something\\\nno one has agreed is a thing to get better at.\\\nWithout a field, without the people who live in it,\\\nwithout that honest, stubborn, careful search for what actually works,\\\nwe’re all just trying\\\nwith the lights off.\n\nSo we’re turning them on.\n\n*Charitology.*\\\nThe science of doing the most good.\\\nNot one cause. Every cause.\\\nNot one method. Every method.\\\nNot one answer handed down,\\\nbut the endless, humble, rigorous work\\\nof finding the best of all ways.\n\nWe’re not here to tell you you’ve been giving wrong.\\\nWe’re here to tell you it’s worth getting right.\n\nSo study it. Question it. Test it. Teach it.\\\nArgue about it at dinner.\\\nProve us wrong and make it better.\\\nBecome what this world has never had a name for:\n\n*a charitologist.*\n\nIt cost us ten dollars to claim the word.\\\nIt will take the rest of our lives to deserve it.\n"}],"versions":[{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"cf913db297db6537ca2e2a4af8bd181ad9fda852eef04c275665f310b8ad10ad","id":"version:artifact-pr-3-editorial-framing-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"artifact:pr-3-editorial-framing","sources":[],"subject":{"conflicts":{"note":null,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"finding":"not-applicable","funding":{"note":null,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"kind":"editorial-correction","limitations":"This source-backed editorial change does not verify the underlying research claims, establish independent human review or solve an open problem. No challenge submission is asserted. Historical poem source files declare October 26; the separately captured current manuscript declares October 25, so the whole manuscripts are not byte-identical.","sources":[{"locator":null,"title":"PR #3: editorial scope and founding-poem framing correction","url":"https://github.com/theguysaccount/charitology/pull/3"},{"locator":null,"title":"PR #3 before: problems/the-depth-census","url":"https://github.com/theguysaccount/charitology/blob/905bdd27bb5f16027c3b3ad3c0f5ee3fc18e3e45/src/content/problems/the-depth-census.md"},{"locator":null,"title":"PR #3 after: problems/the-depth-census","url":"https://github.com/theguysaccount/charitology/blob/510320528e89f45caa9c42eb5a6eda3d6ad1bede/src/content/problems/the-depth-census.md"},{"locator":null,"title":"PR #3 before: journal/ten-dollars","url":"https://github.com/theguysaccount/charitology/blob/905bdd27bb5f16027c3b3ad3c0f5ee3fc18e3e45/src/content/journal/ten-dollars.md"},{"locator":null,"title":"PR #3 after: journal/ten-dollars","url":"https://github.com/theguysaccount/charitology/blob/510320528e89f45caa9c42eb5a6eda3d6ad1bede/src/content/journal/ten-dollars.md"}],"summary":"The Depth Census paragraph replaced a claim that nobody had checked with a statement about what Charitology has established. The founding poem received a narrower summary and an editorial note distinguishing literary framing from a history of philanthropy.","targets":[{"recordId":"claim:depth-census-knowledge","subjectHash":"6f3b6d06a2d61893e35d33ae513a3959f44f1321c2bd43d30ff95c54b25fe9a3","version":2},{"recordId":"claim:ten-dollars-framing","subjectHash":"d32dca610a5ca31c8a179497ebcc580f5d4ce05b80b88bfef2c8409ada1f7f59","version":2}],"title":"PR #3: bounded knowledge claim and founding-poem context","type":"artifact"},"subjectHash":"7936f7c866ab53a3fe65764cd65fff2857bbfd985ba8ffc1354a58da9267c1fe","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"3660edc4588a753ec8046c9aedad97be3d1279585a898e95694d0054619a3017","id":"version:case-carnegie-libraries-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:carnegie-libraries","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-carnegie-libraries"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nAndrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, made his first library gift in 1881, to Dunfermline in Scotland, where he was born. By the time the last grants for library buildings were made in 1917, he and the Carnegie Corporation of New York had given some $56 million for 2,509 public libraries. According to the corporation, 1,681 of those buildings went up in the United States, in 1,412 communities.\n\nThe grants came with conditions. A town had to show that it needed a library, provide the site, keep the library free to all and promise yearly support equal to 10 percent of the grant, paid for by local taxes. Carnegie wrote that a free library was the best gift, “provided the community will accept and maintain it as a public institution.” His secretary, James Bertram, ran the program through one standard application form, the “Schedule of Questions,” and steered towns toward model floor plans. Money was released in stages as the building went up.\n\nThe libraries lasted. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas reports that more than half were still operating in the 21st century. In a working paper, the researchers Enrico Berkes and Peter Nencka compared towns that got a Carnegie library with towns that were approved for one but never built it, and found that patenting rose in the library towns over the next 20 years.\n\nThe program also followed local custom. Matthew Griffis, who directs a research project on Carnegie’s segregated libraries, writes that in most Southern communities, white attitudes dismissed the need for any library service for Black residents. He counts only eleven communities in the whole country that opened libraries for African Americans through Carnegie’s program.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe buildings were bricks. The lasting change was a rule: towns taxed themselves to run a free public library. That is **structure** (level 3) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth). It is also a counterexample to the [Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/). Carnegie paid the one-time cost, and the gift was built to outlive him because the community took over the running costs.\n\nThe design gave towns a voice in a narrow sense. A library came only if local leaders asked for it and agreed to pay for it. But the people who decided were the people who held local power. Where Black residents were shut out of public life, the program worked within segregation, and the few libraries it funded for African Americans were separate ones. This is the [Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/) in a different form: a gift that answers to “the community” serves whoever the community’s gatekeepers count.\n\n## What carries over\n\nPair capital with a commitment to running costs, so the gift doesn’t die when the giver stops paying. Keep the terms simple enough to run at scale. And before relying on local consent, ask whose consent it is. Carnegie’s own philosophy of giving is in [The Gospel of Wealth](/record/traditions/the-gospel-of-wealth/).\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-voice"}],"depth":3,"era":"1881–1917","kind":"success","lessons":["A matching condition can turn a one-time gift into a permanent institution. Carnegie paid for the building, and the town promised to pay for the library every year after.","Simple, standard terms let a small office run thousands of grants. One application form set the same conditions for every town.","A program that defers to local power inherits local exclusions. Who counts as “the community” decides who a community gift serves."],"place":"United States, Scotland and other countries","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Carnegie Corporation of New York (renamed the Andrew Carnegie Foundation in 2026)","title":"Andrew Carnegie’s Library Legacy: A Timeline","url":"https://carnegie.org/article/andrew-carnegies-library-legacy/","year":2025},{"note":null,"publisher":"John Spurgeon, Encyclopedia of Arkansas","title":"Carnegie Libraries","url":"https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/carnegie-libraries-6466/","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Matthew R. Griffis, University of Southern Mississippi","title":"The Roots of Community: project overview","url":"https://aquila.usm.edu/rocpartners/","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Enrico Berkes and Peter Nencka, SSRN working paper","title":"Knowledge Access: The Effects of Carnegie Libraries on Innovation","url":"https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3629299","year":2020},{"note":null,"publisher":"EPFL Virtual Innovation Seminar","title":"Knowledge Access: The Effects of Carnegie Libraries on Innovation, seminar abstract","url":"https://memento.epfl.ch/event/knowledge-access-the-effects-of-carnegie-libraries","year":2020}],"summary":"Andrew Carnegie paid for more than 2,500 library buildings on one condition, that each town keep its library running with public money. The gift built the buildings, and the towns’ commitment made them last.","title":"Carnegie’s public libraries"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"bcda64a86f6e6e9778c118317fc74b56a726642cb21c834787515454e4ad30a3","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"812ffe7841b1bbb463aca172b3aae8c1c26a94d2f4c3065980ef5850993418b5","id":"version:case-dare-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:dare","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-dare"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nD.A.R.E., short for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, began in 1983 as a partnership between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Police officers taught a 17-lesson curriculum to elementary school students. A nonprofit, D.A.R.E. America, was founded in 1989 to oversee the program, and it spread quickly across the country and abroad. By 1994 it was the most widely used school-based drug prevention program in the United States.\n\nThe evaluations were consistent:\n\n- **1994.** Susan Ennett and colleagues pooled the results of eight rigorous evaluations, a method called meta-analysis, and found D.A.R.E.’s short-term effect on drug use was small, and smaller than that of interactive programs focused on social skills.\n- **1999.** Donald Lynam and colleagues followed 1,002 young people who had received either D.A.R.E. or standard drug education in sixth grade. At age 20 there were few differences in drug use or attitudes, and in no case did the D.A.R.E. group do better.\n- **2004.** A meta-analysis of 11 studies by Steven West and Keri O’Neal found an extremely small effect that was not statistically significant. They described D.A.R.E. as the country’s largest school-based prevention program in federal spending.\n\nThe program changed, slowly. The model was substantially revamped in 2001 with help from a $13.6 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. D.A.R.E. later adopted a different curriculum, keepin’ it REAL, built on interactive small-group learning instead of lectures, for middle schools in 2008 and elementary schools in 2013. D.A.R.E.’s own history page says independent evaluations of the original curriculum in the 1990s found “minimal long-term influence on drug use,” and that a later pilot curriculum did not show positive results.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe aim was **prevention** (level 2) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth). The lesson is about the system around it. The evidence was public by 1994, yet a decade later the program was still the country’s largest school-based prevention program in federal spending. Charitology’s reading is that the people closest to the program could see children engaged in class and a police officer in the school, while drug use years later stayed out of view. That is the [Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/): the signal that mattered never reached the people choosing what to fund.\n\nThe ending runs against the [Silence About Failure](/diagnosis/silence-about-failure/). D.A.R.E. now says in public what didn’t work, including a curriculum of its own that failed a pilot. That kind of candor is what the [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/) hopes to make normal.\n\n## What carries over\n\nFund evaluation early, and decide in advance what result would change the plan. When a well-loved program turns out not to work, keep the relationships and the delivery system, and change the content. Whether the new curriculum works as delivered is a question for the same kind of evaluation.\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-feedback-loop"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"silence-about-failure"}],"depth":2,"era":"1983–2013","kind":"failure","lessons":["Popularity and evidence can run on separate tracks for decades. The program stayed dominant while rigorous studies found small or no effects.","How a lesson is taught can matter as much as what it says. In a 1994 comparison, interactive programs that built social skills did better than D.A.R.E.’s officer-led lessons.","An evaluation changes nothing until it reaches the people who decide what gets funded.","An organization can change course on evidence and say so. D.A.R.E. now states on its own history page that the original curriculum had little long-term effect."],"place":"United States","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Susan T. Ennett, Nancy S. Tobler, Christopher L. Ringwalt and Robert L. Flewelling, American Journal of Public Health 84(9)","title":"How effective is drug abuse resistance education? A meta-analysis of Project DARE outcome evaluations","url":"https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.84.9.1394","year":1994},{"note":null,"publisher":"Donald R. Lynam and colleagues, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 67(4)","title":"Project DARE: no effects at 10-year follow-up","url":"https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.67.4.590","year":1999},{"note":null,"publisher":"Steven L. West and Keri K. O’Neal, American Journal of Public Health 94(6)","title":"Project D.A.R.E. Outcome Effectiveness Revisited","url":"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1448384/","year":2004},{"note":null,"publisher":"D.A.R.E. America","title":"History","url":"https://dare.org/history/","year":null}],"summary":"Police officers teaching children to resist drugs became the most widely used school drug prevention program in the United States. Rigorous evaluations of the original curriculum found little or no effect on drug use, and the program eventually replaced it.","title":"D.A.R.E.’s original curriculum"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"3126fb425edb00a4ea9488673672e1e18c4130c1c4158c917963ef23280d0352","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"fe6be194a55f60c8f4789bd923e05c2688de02772dca164f5d88e7fe753b1ed8","id":"version:case-green-revolution-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:green-revolution","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-green-revolution"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nIn 1943 the Rockefeller Foundation began a farm research program with Mexico’s government. Mexico supplied the research station, and the foundation paid the scientists. One of them, the plant pathologist Norman Borlaug, bred dwarf wheat suited to Mexican conditions, and by 1956 Mexico was self-sufficient in wheat. In the mid-1960s he brought dwarf wheat to India and Pakistan, where production rose sharply. The Rockefeller and Ford foundations also built the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, which opened in 1960 and bred the high-yield rice IR-8. A 1968 speech called the movement a “Green Revolution,” and in 1970 Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize.\n\nThe scale of the result is hard to overstate. In a 2012 review, Prabhu Pingali of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reports that cereal production in the developing world tripled over about 50 years, while the population more than doubled and farmland grew by only about 30 percent. The review cites estimates that without the new crop varieties, food production in developing countries would have been almost 20 percent lower and world food and feed prices 35 to 65 percent higher. In Asia, each 1 percent rise in crop productivity has been estimated to cut the number of poor people by 0.48 percent.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nOn the [depth scale](/method/#depth) this is **structure** (level 3). The work changed the institutions that produce food. The early research centers in Mexico and the Philippines grew into a permanent international network for crop research.\n\nIt is mixed because the ledger has more than one column, and Pingali’s own review documents the other columns. The gains were concentrated in irrigated, high-rainfall areas. Poorer rain-fed regions and women farmers gained less. By 1998 modern varieties covered 82 percent of the planted area in Asia but only 27 percent in Africa. Diets gained calories but often lost variety. Overuse of fertilizer, pesticides and water degraded soils and polluted water, harms Pingali attributes mostly to subsidies and price policies rather than to the seeds themselves. In northern India, a satellite study found groundwater falling fast between 2002 and 2008, mainly because of pumping for irrigation.\n\nSeen through one lens, yield, this is among the great successes in history. Seen through others, such as the environment, future generations or fairness, the picture is more complicated. That gap is the [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/). The costs that came due decades later are the [Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/).\n\n## What carries over\n\nPaying for public research, and for the institutions that keep it going, can change a whole system. The same reach means the side effects are system-sized too. Count every column of the ledger before calling the result, and keep counting after the headlines move on. How much harms to future people should weigh against gains today is [Open Problem 13, Discounting the Future](/open-problems/discounting-the-future/).\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"single-lens"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"}],"depth":3,"era":"1943–2000","kind":"mixed","lessons":["Research that every farmer can use is a public good. Funding the institutions that keep producing it can change a whole food system, not one farm at a time.","Measuring success in one unit, tons of grain, hid costs that were counted in other units, such as water, soil, diets and who was left out.","Many of the harms grew from the rules around the technology, such as subsidies that encouraged overuse of inputs. The same tool does more or less damage depending on the policies it arrives with.","Costs that arrive decades later are easy to leave out of a success story. Long-horizon work needs long-horizon accounting."],"place":"Mexico, South and Southeast Asia, and other developing regions","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Prabhu L. Pingali, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(31)","title":"Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead","url":"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3411969/","year":2012},{"note":null,"publisher":"Liesel Vink, Rockefeller Archive Center","title":"Photo Essay: Mexico and the Launch of the Green Revolution","url":"https://resource.rockarch.org/story/photo-essay-mexico-and-the-launch-of-the-green-revolution/","year":2019},{"note":null,"publisher":"NobelPrize.org","title":"Norman Borlaug, Facts","url":"https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1970/borlaug/facts/","year":null},{"note":"Reports a satellite study finding that northern India lost more than 109 cubic kilometers of groundwater between 2002 and 2008, mainly to irrigation pumping.","publisher":"University of California, Irvine, on Rodell, Velicogna and Famiglietti in Nature 460","title":"India groundwater","url":"https://news.uci.edu/2009/08/12/india-groundwater","year":2009}],"summary":"Foundation-funded crop research gave farmers high-yield wheat and rice, and cereal harvests in the developing world roughly tripled. The gains were uneven, and some of the costs, from falling water tables to narrower diets, showed up decades later.","title":"The Green Revolution"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"1404e48632c4609f31213b0a4a6e41434b2c1960341512c42d50ffeb984b8a3b","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"b7b26745141377f493fa9a973349e8ec5d20a4698755b56467ce39b2b78a834a","id":"version:case-haiti-earthquake-reconstruction-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:haiti-earthquake-reconstruction","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-haiti-earthquake-reconstruction"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nThe earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 drew a wave of giving. Americans gave an estimated $43 million by text message alone. In a Pew survey of those text donors, most had heard about the appeal on television, and half gave the moment they heard. By 2012, the Center for Global Development counted almost $6 billion in official aid disbursed and an estimated $3 billion more in private donations to charities.\n\nThe American Red Cross raised nearly half a billion dollars. In June 2015 ProPublica and NPR reported that it had built six permanent homes in all of Haiti. The Red Cross said it had provided homes to more than 130,000 people. The reporters found that count included people who got short-term rental aid, temporary shelters or construction training. A housing project in the Campeche neighborhood, for which an internal proposal estimated about 700 homes, built none. The Red Cross said it could not secure land rights. The reporters also described internal documents on staffing problems and, for one $5.4 million shelter project, layers of overhead that left about 60 percent for the work itself.\n\nThe Red Cross published a response the same day. It said donors’ money had built and run eight hospitals and clinics, helped stem a cholera outbreak, provided clean water and sanitation, and moved more than 100,000 people out of tents into safer housing. When land for new homes wasn’t available, it said, it paid for rental subsidies, repairs and retrofits. It said 90 percent of its Haiti staff were Haitian and criticized what it called the reporting’s “lack of balance, context and accuracy.”\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nRebuilding homes is **repair** (level 1) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth). The lessons are about the channels the money took, and they reach far beyond one organization.\n\n- **Attention.** The money followed the headlines ([Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/)). In a 2012 Pew survey of text donors, 58 percent were following the rebuilding “not too closely” or not at all.\n- **Restriction.** Money given for Haiti was, in effect, committed to Haiti and to the group that raised it, even where land disputes and government delays, the obstacles the Red Cross itself cited, made building slow ([the Restriction Reflex](/diagnosis/restriction-reflex/)).\n- **Local voice.** About 99 percent of relief aid after the quake went to international agencies, the Red Cross movement and international charities and contractors, according to the UN Special Envoy’s office, which urged donors to work through Haitian institutions instead ([the Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/)).\n- **Measurement.** The Center for Global Development found few evaluations of what aid in Haiti had delivered, and called for spending and results to be published ([the Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/)).\n\n## What carries over\n\nBefore giving after a disaster, ask who is already working there, how much of the money will reach local organizations and how results will be reported. See the [Disaster Response Guide](/tools/disaster-response-guide/) and [Open Problem 8, the Optimal Restriction](/open-problems/the-optimal-restriction/).\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"story-bias"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"restriction-reflex"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-voice"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"}],"depth":1,"era":"2010–2015","kind":"failure","lessons":["Giving that follows the news arrives in a burst, mostly without research, and attention fades long before rebuilding is done.","Money raised for one disaster is, in practice, tied to that place and to the group that raised it. When land titles, partners and government capacity take years to sort out, a large earmarked sum can outrun the ability to spend it well.","Aid that goes around local institutions leaves them no stronger. Almost all relief aid went to international agencies and organizations rather than through Haitian ones.","Counting people helped is not the same as measuring what changed. Without project-level spending and results, big claims can’t be checked by anyone."],"place":"Haiti","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Justin Elliott (ProPublica) and Laura Sullivan (NPR)","title":"How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti and Built Six Homes","url":"https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes","year":2015},{"note":null,"publisher":"American Red Cross","title":"American Red Cross Responds to Latest ProPublica and NPR Coverage","url":"https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-release/american-red-cross-responds-to-latest-propublica-and-npr-coverag.html","year":2015},{"note":null,"publisher":"UN News, on a report by the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Haiti","title":"Give aid directly to Haitian institutions to build back better, says UN report","url":"https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/06/379512","year":2011},{"note":null,"publisher":"Vijaya Ramachandran and Julie Walz, Center for Global Development","title":"Haiti: Where Has All the Money Gone?","url":"https://www.cgdev.org/publication/haiti-where-has-all-money-gone","year":2012},{"note":null,"publisher":"Aaron Smith, Pew Research Center","title":"Real Time Charitable Giving","url":"https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2012/01/12/real-time-charitable-giving/","year":2012}],"summary":"Billions of dollars poured into Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, almost all of the relief aid through international organizations. In 2015 ProPublica and NPR reported that the American Red Cross had raised nearly half a billion dollars and built six permanent homes. The Red Cross said it had helped millions of Haitians in other ways.","title":"Rebuilding Haiti after the 2010 earthquake"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"cda759498993af70a94cdf464eec144dc5e45ba645e72094d1b7aabc1c75d14e","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"c47fb0a8fab787f284de5e03d5008ae834127d78806d3e145cf5473c809bc99a","id":"version:case-hookworm-campaign-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:hookworm-campaign","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-hookworm-campaign"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nHookworm larvae live in soil polluted by human waste and burrow in through the skin, often through bare feet. Infected children are often listless, anemic and stunted. In 1909 John D. Rockefeller gave $1 million to create the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease, a five-year effort across eleven Southern states.\n\nThe commission started by measuring. It surveyed hundreds of counties and found that, on average, about 40 percent of school-age children were infected. Then it went to work: traveling dispensaries gave free treatment, lecturers and exhibits taught doctors, teachers and families to recognize the disease, and the campaign pushed for sanitary privies at schools and churches. It treated more than 400,000 people. In Arkansas, children were required to wear shoes to school, and meetings took on a carnival air, with testimonials, singing and refreshments.\n\nThe commission closed at the end of 1914. State governments had increased their own anti-hookworm spending as it wound down, and the newly founded Rockefeller Foundation carried the model abroad. Resurveys found infection had fallen by about 30 percentage points across the infected areas.\n\nHookworm was not eradicated. But the economist Hoyt Bleakley found that counties with more infection before the campaign saw bigger gains afterward in school enrollment, attendance and literacy. Following those children into adulthood, he found a substantial gain in income.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe campaign worked at several depths at once. Treatment was **repair** (level 1). Privies and shoes were **prevention** (level 2). Its lasting effect, the Rockefeller Archive Center notes, was to set a model for public health by building services into state and local government. That is **structure** (level 3) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth), and it is why a commission with a five-year life could have effects that lasted.\n\nIt is also an early answer to the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/). Because the commission surveyed before it treated, it knew where the problem was worst and could check its own progress. Nobody had to guess. And it avoided the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/) by pairing treatment with the sanitation that stops reinfection.\n\n## What carries over\n\nMeasure the problem before you treat it, and plan for who will carry on the work when you stop. A short-lived funder can leave behind a permanent public capacity if it builds through the institutions that will remain. Be careful with words like “eradication” unless eradication is really on the table.\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"}],"depth":3,"era":"1909–1914","kind":"success","lessons":["Measuring the problem first gave the campaign a baseline. County surveys before treatment, and resurveys after, showed whether the work was paying off.","A time-limited funder can leave something permanent by working through public agencies. State and local governments took over some of the work as the commission wound down.","Treating infected people repairs the damage, while privies and shoes stop new infections. Treatment alone lets a parasite come back.","A name can overpromise. The commission was for “eradication,” and hookworm was reduced, not eliminated."],"place":"Southern United States","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Hoyt Bleakley, Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(1)","title":"Disease and Development: Evidence from Hookworm Eradication in the American South","url":"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3800113/","year":2007},{"note":null,"publisher":"Liesel Vink, Rockefeller Archive Center","title":"Photo Essay: The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission and the American South","url":"https://resource.rockarch.org/story/the-rockefeller-sanitary-commission-and-the-south/","year":2019},{"note":null,"publisher":"Rebecca Haden, Encyclopedia of Arkansas","title":"Hookworm Eradication","url":"https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/hookworm-eradication-2233/","year":null}],"summary":"A five-year, $1 million Rockefeller commission surveyed hundreds of Southern counties, treated more than 400,000 people for hookworm and pushed for sanitary privies. Hookworm was not eradicated, but school enrollment and literacy rose most where infection had been worst.","title":"The hookworm campaign in the American South"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"6a45a22def2f400bd29ad3ea4dddd03466c55ef2b7405c3e82cecbbf5573cfaf","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"8358d3d19c1d135b1704683b95d309f750646105aeaffb9a427b4feac7ca5ae1","id":"version:case-ice-bucket-challenge-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:ice-bucket-challenge","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-ice-bucket-challenge"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nIn the summer of 2014, people around the world filmed themselves dumping buckets of ice water over their heads and challenged their friends to do the same and give to the fight against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also called Lou Gehrig’s disease. The ALS Association credits Anthony Senerchia, Pete Frates and Pat Quinn with launching the movement. It says 17 million people took part and the challenge raised $115 million for the association.\n\nA 10-year evaluation by RTI International, published by the association in 2024, describes where the money went. From 2013 to 2024 the association awarded $154.7 million in 560 research grants. Grantees reported new genes, biomarkers and treatment targets, and close to 80 percent of those who answered a survey said the funding let them expand their ALS research. The association says the number of multidisciplinary ALS clinics has more than doubled since 2014, from 100 to more than 220. Federal research money grew too: NIH funding for ALS research nearly tripled between 2011–2013 and 2021–2023, adjusted for inflation, while the NIH budget as a whole grew about 21 percent. The evaluators say that attributing this growth specifically to the association is beyond the scope of their study.\n\n## Why it’s mixed\n\nThe money was real and so was the research. But the way it arrived is not a model for how giving should choose causes. ALS got a viral moment that most diseases never get, and nothing in the challenge compared ALS with other needs. The windfall came once. RTI calls it a “once-in-a-generation phenomenon.”\n\nThe evidence on impact is also thinner than the totals suggest. The grantee survey had a 27 percent response rate, a limitation the report itself flags. And most care for people living with ALS is still palliative, the evaluators note.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe money worked at several depths. Clinic care is relief, research aims at treatments, which on the [depth scale](/method/#depth) is **repair** (level 1), and advocacy for federal funding works on structure. The way the money was raised is a clear case of [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/): a fun, social, shareable act, attached to one cause. The way its impact is reported shows the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/), where outputs such as grants, papers and clinics are counted, while the outcome that matters most, years of life for people with ALS, is much harder to measure.\n\n## What carries over\n\nWhen attention brings a windfall, put it into capacity that lasts and commission evaluation that doesn’t rely on the people funded. And ask the question no campaign total answers: did this money add to the world’s giving or move it from somewhere else? That is [Open Problem 4, the Counterfactual Problem](/open-problems/the-counterfactual-problem/).\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"story-bias"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"}],"depth":1,"era":"2014–2024","kind":"mixed","lessons":["Attention can raise a fortune in a single summer, but it chooses causes by what spreads, not by the size or neglect of the need.","A windfall does the most good when it is turned into things that keep working, such as research teams, clinics and trained people.","Self-reported impact needs independent checks. The 10-year evaluation leaned on a grantee survey that only about a quarter of grantees answered.","A campaign total can’t say whether the money was new giving or giving moved from other causes. That counterfactual is the question that matters most and is the hardest to answer."],"place":"United States and online worldwide","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"The ALS Association","title":"The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge","url":"https://www.als.org/ibc","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Joshua Schnell and colleagues, RTI International","title":"ALS Association Ice Bucket Challenge Impact Evaluation Report","url":"https://www.als.org/sites/default/files/2024-08/ALS_IBC10_Impact_Report.pdf","year":2024}],"summary":"In the summer of 2014 a viral video challenge raised $115 million for the ALS Association, which turned the money into research grants, clinics and advocacy. It is a case of attention-driven giving that funded lasting work, and a reminder that attention picks causes by what spreads, not by need.","title":"The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"820b323d149fa9a22f34cb549c344707e350fa7218826babbac8ffa747df0fcd","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"b14ee2ec2906d9fa259a6ff86eba73d030d63b9d767c3da2db803f600947753a","id":"version:case-one-laptop-per-child-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:one-laptop-per-child","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-one-laptop-per-child"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nIn November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan unveiled the first working prototype of a “$100 laptop,” alongside Nicholas Negroponte, cofounder of the MIT Media Lab. The machine came from One Laptop per Child, a nonprofit created by Media Lab faculty to give schoolchildren and their teachers a personal, connected computer. It was rugged, ran on very little power and could share one internet connection across many machines. Governments would buy the laptops, and schools would hand them out, one per child.\n\nGovernments did buy. Peru ran the largest deployment, with a commonly reported 902,000 laptops. Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal was, according to the economists who studied it, the only deployment to cover a whole country.\n\nThen came the evaluations. In Peru, a team led by researchers at the Inter-American Development Bank ran a randomized evaluation in 318 rural primary schools. After 15 months, treatment schools had gone from about one computer for every eight students to more than one each, and children used computers far more at school and at home. But the study found no effect on math or language test scores, and only inconclusive evidence of gains in general thinking skills. In Uruguay, economists found the program had no effect on math or reading scores in its first two years, possibly because students mainly used the laptops in class to search the internet.\n\nReactions split on what the results meant. Michael Trucano of the World Bank called the habit of handing out hardware first “classic worst practice,” and also asked whether standardized tests were measuring the right things.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe program aimed at **structure** (level 3) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth): changing what every school gives every child. But a new input changes the structure of learning only if it changes what produces learning, such as what children do in class and how teachers teach. The evaluations suggest that, on its own, it didn’t.\n\nThis is the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/) in its classic form: [outputs and outcomes](/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/) are different things. Laptops delivered were the output. Learning was the outcome. A bold, simple promise, unveiled at a world summit, made the output easy to sell ([Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/)). The randomized evaluation during Peru’s rollout is the reason anyone knows the difference.\n\n## What carries over\n\nWrite down the [theory of change](/record/encyclopedia/theory-of-change/), the chain from what you deliver to the change you want, and test its weakest link at small scale before buying for a whole country. Decide in advance which outcomes count, so a disappointing result can’t be explained away and a promising one isn’t missed.\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"story-bias"}],"depth":3,"era":"2005–2014","kind":"mixed","lessons":["Delivering a thing is not the same as delivering what the thing is for. The laptops reached children, and better test scores did not follow.","Test the theory of change before scaling it. The big evaluations reported after governments had already bought laptops for whole school systems.","What you measure shapes what you learn. Peru’s evaluation found no effect on test scores and inconclusive gains in general thinking skills, and observers disagreed about which outcomes mattered most.","Randomizing during a national rollout is what made these lessons knowable. That choice deserves as much attention as the results."],"place":"Peru, Uruguay and other countries","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"MIT News","title":"Annan presents prototype $100 laptop at World Summit on Information Society","url":"https://news.mit.edu/2005/laptop-1116","year":2005},{"note":null,"publisher":"Julian Cristia, Pablo Ibarrarán, Santiago Cueto, Ana Santiago and Eugenio Severín, American Economic Journal, Applied Economics 9(3)","title":"Technology and Child Development: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program","url":"https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20150385","year":2017},{"note":null,"publisher":"Gioia De Melo, Alina Machado and Alfonso Miranda, IZA Discussion Paper 8489","title":"The Impact of a One Laptop per Child Program on Learning: Evidence from Uruguay","url":"https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/8489/the-impact-of-a-one-laptop-per-child-program-on-learning-evidence-from-uruguay","year":2014},{"note":null,"publisher":"Michael Trucano, World Bank Blogs","title":"Evaluating One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) in Peru","url":"https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/olpc-peru2","year":2012}],"summary":"A nonprofit started by MIT Media Lab faculty set out to give schoolchildren around the world low-cost laptops of their own, and governments bought hundreds of thousands. In Peru children used computers far more but did no better in math or language, and in Uruguay reading and math scores did not improve.","title":"One Laptop per Child"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"0febc7d1c97487b03a32ae2c77138f38672b84c4a34b62202947d488cd6e6d45","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"cd55f1fb3e94ba4475ae3110090ebb06467f926fcff62d8d9aa531eb1e169066","id":"version:case-oral-rehydration-therapy-spread-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:oral-rehydration-therapy-spread","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-oral-rehydration-therapy-spread"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nFor most of history, diarrhea killed mainly through dehydration, draining the body of water and salts. Oral rehydration salts, a mix of clean water, sugar and salt, are absorbed in the small intestine and replace what is lost. A treatment costs a few cents.\n\nThe formula came out of years of studies in Kolkata and Dhaka. In 1971, during a cholera outbreak among refugees from what is now Bangladesh, Dilip Mahalanabis of the Johns Hopkins center in Kolkata treated patients at Bangaon, India, with the solution, dispensed from drums. He and Dhiman Barua of the World Health Organization had to persuade a skeptical medical profession that people with little training could give it. In 1978 Barua set up WHO’s program to control diarrheal diseases. After oral rehydration therapy was introduced in 1979, it quickly became the cornerstone of diarrhea control programs. The Lancet called it “potentially the most important medical advance” of the century.\n\nIn Bangladesh, the nonprofit BRAC took it door to door. Between 1980 and 1990 it taught more than 12 million mothers to make the solution at home with common salt and unrefined brown sugar. In 1993 researchers revisited more than 9,000 households and tested solutions made by a sample of mothers. More than 70 percent of mothers could make one that was chemically safe and effective, and many of them had been very young during the campaign. The solution was used in 60 percent of recent bouts of diarrhea.\n\nWorldwide, deaths of children under five from diarrhea fell from an estimated 4.6 million in 1980 to about 1.5 million by 2000. Oral rehydration played a significant part, though not the only one.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nOn the [depth scale](/method/#depth) this is **relief** (level 0). It treats the illness in front of you and does not stop diarrhea from happening. That is the point of the case: depth describes, it doesn’t grade, and relief delivered everywhere saved millions of lives.\n\nThe spread is a counterexample to the [Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/). The breakthrough was trusting families, not only doctors, to deliver care. And it shows the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/) from both sides. Researchers in Bangladesh tested what mothers could actually do, while a 2000 review of the global record found that patchy data and differing definitions of the therapy made trends hard to track.\n\n## What carries over\n\nSimple, cheap, taught at home and checked: that combination carried a relief treatment to millions of families. Relief does not end the need, though. Diarrhea still kills around 443,832 children under five a year, according to WHO, and preventing it takes safe water, sanitation, handwashing and rotavirus vaccines. See the [Intervention Database entry](/record/interventions/oral-rehydration-therapy/).\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-voice"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"}],"depth":0,"era":"1971–2000","kind":"success","lessons":["The cheapest fix can be one of the biggest. Oral rehydration salts cost a few cents per treatment.","Putting treatment in families’ hands, not only in clinics, is what let it reach millions. That meant convincing doctors that people with little training could give it.","Checking whether people can really do what they were taught is part of the intervention. Years after BRAC’s campaign, researchers tested the solutions mothers made at home.","Relief at scale is not a lesser good. A treatment that meets the need today, everywhere, can save more lives than far more ambitious programs."],"place":"Bangladesh, India and worldwide","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Cesar G. Victora, Jennifer Bryce, Olivier Fontaine and Roeland Monasch, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 78(10)","title":"Reducing deaths from diarrhoea through oral rehydration therapy","url":"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2560623/","year":2000},{"note":null,"publisher":"Bulletin of the World Health Organization 87(2)","title":"Miracle cure for an old scourge","url":"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2636196/","year":2009},{"note":null,"publisher":"A. Mushtaque R. Chowdhury, Fazlul Karim, Sanjit K. Sarkar, Richard A. Cash and Abbas Bhuiya, Health Policy and Planning 12(1)","title":"The status of ORT (oral rehydration therapy) in Bangladesh: how widely is it used?","url":"https://doi.org/10.1093/heapol/12.1.58","year":1997},{"note":null,"publisher":"World Health Organization","title":"Diarrhoeal disease, fact sheet","url":"https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/diarrhoeal-disease","year":2024}],"summary":"A drink of clean water, sugar and salt can save a child from dying of diarrhea. After it was used to treat refugees during a 1971 cholera outbreak, it spread through health programs and door-to-door teaching, while child deaths from diarrhea fell from an estimated 4.6 million a year in 1980 to about 1.5 million by 2000.","title":"How oral rehydration therapy spread"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"1cbc32aa6561c34f73efd94e4c9828c89bb0c9edba46b2b893ff3711be268a27","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"6427b73777bdf42f97b1f27446268b177aa0fa21b95657eac0ec61df8cf6aa2d","id":"version:case-playpumps-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:playpumps","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-playpumps"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nThe PlayPump was a children’s merry-go-round attached to a water pump. As children spun it, it pumped groundwater into a storage tower, and advertising on the tower was meant to pay for upkeep. Its founder, Trevor Field, had installed hundreds across South Africa and its neighbors, and in 2000 the World Bank recognized the technology for innovation. FRONTLINE/World profiled it in 2005, and the story helped build enthusiasm among donors.\n\nIn September 2006, at the Clinton Global Initiative, Laura Bush, Bill Clinton and the philanthropists Jean and Steve Case announced $16.4 million to install PlayPumps across sub-Saharan Africa: $10 million from the U.S. government, $5 million from the Case Foundation and $1.4 million from the MCJ Foundation. A new nonprofit, PlayPumps International, set out to install 4,000 pumps by 2010, and celebrities joined the fundraising.\n\nTrouble showed up in the field. Save the Children, a partner, heard on site visits that pumps were breaking down and that some communities were rejecting them. By late 2009, only 42 of its 80 planned pumps in Mozambique had been installed, and 13 of those were working properly. A 2007 UNICEF assessment in South Africa, Mozambique and Zambia raised concerns about safety, maintenance and effectiveness and recommended installing PlayPumps only at schools, but the report was not released publicly. A 2008 report for Mozambique’s government noted the technology’s merits but found installation and maintenance problems. No advertisers had come forward in rural areas to pay for upkeep, and the pumps delivered less water per hour than the hand pumps they had often replaced.\n\nIn September 2009 PlayPumps International acknowledged “challenges” and temporarily suspended new installations. It gave its remaining pumps to the charity Water for People, and in 2010 it stopped raising money for the technology. Jean Case published a personal letter on the Case Foundation’s website about what the foundation had learned. FRONTLINE/World, whose first story had helped make the pump famous, broadcast its own follow-up investigation in June 2010.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nClean water for a village is **prevention** (level 2) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth). What failed was not the goal but the system around it. A vivid image drew money faster than evidence could ([Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/)). Problems seen in the field took years to reach donors ([the Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/)). Some communities rejected the pumps, and some lost hand pumps that had worked better, a sign that the people who would use the water were not the ones deciding what to install ([the Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/)). And a critical assessment stayed internal while fundraising went on ([the Silence About Failure](/diagnosis/silence-about-failure/)).\n\n## What carries over\n\nPilot and measure before scaling, ask users before installing, and treat early warnings from field partners as data. The public admission at the end is the behavior a healthy system should reward, and the [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/) exists to make such admissions normal and early. What would make it so is [Open Problem 9, the Failure Commons](/open-problems/the-failure-commons/).\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"story-bias"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-feedback-loop"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-voice"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"silence-about-failure"}],"depth":2,"era":"2005–2010","kind":"failure","lessons":["A story can outrun the evidence. The picture of children playing while water flowed raised millions and a 4,000-pump target before independent field assessments came in.","Bad news traveled slowly. Field partners saw breakdowns early and a 2007 UNICEF assessment raised concerns, but the report stayed internal, and the first public acknowledgment came in 2009.","When the people who will use a technology don’t choose it, mismatches follow. In some places a PlayPump replaced a hand pump that delivered more water per hour.","Stopping a program and explaining why, in public, is how the field learns. It works best when it happens early."],"place":"Southern Africa","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Amy Costello, FRONTLINE/World, PBS","title":"Southern Africa: Troubled Water","url":"https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/southernafrica904/","year":2010},{"note":"Summarizes the 2007 UNICEF assessment, the 2008 report for Mozambique’s government, PlayPumps International’s 2009 letters and Jean Case’s 2010 letter.","publisher":"FRONTLINE/World, PBS","title":"Timeline: The PlayPump Trail","url":"https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/southernafrica904/timeline_tw.html","year":2010},{"note":null,"publisher":"Daniel Stellar, State of the Planet, Columbia Climate School","title":"The PlayPump: What Went Wrong?","url":"https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-what-went-wrong/","year":2010}],"summary":"A merry-go-round that pumped water as children played drew $16.4 million in pledges and wide celebrity support. Field reports later found many pumps broken, unused or slower than the hand pumps they replaced, and the backers stopped the rollout and said so publicly.","title":"PlayPumps"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"88662c2c0b2104a1a7f774fdfbbfa34fd27358c3479dceb4f5f0daab8c5e5feb","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"6c2d6a03e0eff72057294299fd6aff4bf25588e11e9242c3a41bd53e8ee90713","id":"version:case-polio-eradication-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:polio-eradication","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-polio-eradication"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nIn 1985 Rotary International launched PolioPlus, its program to end polio. In May 1988 the World Health Assembly committed the World Health Organization to eradicating polio by the year 2000, which launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. That year there were an estimated 350,000 cases in more than 125 countries where the virus was endemic. The partnership grew to include WHO, Rotary, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation and Gavi, among others. Rotary members alone have contributed more than $2.7 billion, and more than a million of them have volunteered.\n\nThe results are enormous. Wild polio cases have fallen by more than 99 percent. Wild poliovirus type 2 was declared eradicated in 2015 and type 3 in 2019. Every WHO region except the Eastern Mediterranean has been certified free of wild polio, Africa most recently, in 2020.\n\n## Why it’s mixed\n\nThe year-2000 deadline passed long ago. Wild poliovirus type 1 still circulates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which had reported 39 cases for 2025 by the end of the year, down from 99 in 2024, with a backlog of samples still untested. A second problem comes from the oral vaccine itself. Its weakened virus can regain the ability to cause paralysis and spread where too few children are vaccinated. There were 202 such vaccine-derived cases in 2025, down from 463 in 2024. WHO links them to insecurity, displacement and large numbers of unvaccinated children. A newer oral vaccine is much less likely to revert.\n\nMeasurement has been hard too. In late 2025 an independent audit in Karachi found that the program’s data did not give an accurate picture of campaign quality, that coverage was being overestimated and that more children were being missed than the data showed. Funding has tightened, and the partnership adopted a leaner plan for 2026.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nEradication removes a disease for good, which makes it **source** work (level 4) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth), like the eradication of [smallpox](/record/case-studies/smallpox-eradication/). Until the last virus is gone, though, every vaccination round is prevention that has to be repeated.\n\nThe campaign is also a working answer to [Fragmentation](/diagnosis/fragmentation/). Very different organizations share one target and one scoreboard. The Karachi audit shows the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/) inside even a data-rich program, and four decades of work is a long test of funders’ patience against the [Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/).\n\n## What carries over\n\nA shared, measurable goal can hold a coalition together for a generation. The last steps of an eradication campaign happen in the hardest places, so funders need patience, flexible money and outside checks on the numbers. A program that is 99 percent finished is not finished.\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"fragmentation"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"}],"depth":4,"era":"1985–present","kind":"mixed","lessons":["A precise goal with a shared scoreboard, zero cases, has held governments, agencies and a volunteer movement together for decades.","A civic network can be funder, fundraiser and advocate at once. Rotary helped start the effort, and its members have contributed more than $2.7 billion.","The last 1 percent can be harder than the first 99. A deadline set at the start rarely survives the hardest places.","Program data can look better than reality. Independent audits are how a campaign finds out what its own numbers miss."],"place":"Worldwide","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"World Health Assembly","title":"Global eradication of poliomyelitis by the year 2000 (resolution WHA41.28)","url":"https://www.archive.polioeradication.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/19880513_resolution-2.pdf","year":1988},{"note":null,"publisher":"World Health Organization","title":"Poliomyelitis, fact sheet","url":"https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/poliomyelitis","year":2025},{"note":null,"publisher":"Global Polio Eradication Initiative","title":"History of Polio: Key Milestones & Global Eradication","url":"https://polioeradication.org/about-polio/history-of-polio/","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Global Polio Eradication Initiative","title":"Partners","url":"https://polioeradication.org/who-we-are/partners/","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"World Health Organization, report by the Director-General","title":"Update on the ongoing public health emergencies of international concern: poliomyelitis (EB/SCHEPPR/8/2)","url":"https://apps.who.int/gb/scheppr/pdf_files/SCHEPPR8/EB_SCHEPPR8_2-en.pdf","year":2026}],"summary":"Since 1988 a global partnership has cut wild polio cases by more than 99 percent and eradicated two of the three wild strains. The original deadline was the year 2000, and the last stretch has proved the hardest.","title":"The campaign to eradicate polio"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"09ec8c9bb0654ef47795c7c9f7088aeabfd81fea2f64082d85a71e5ae0697831","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"d739af73e55bb9b275b53dce00b578081191b1e181d196c74208693a78018cae","id":"version:case-rosenwald-schools-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:rosenwald-schools","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-rosenwald-schools"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nIn the early 1900s, schools for Black children in the rural South were badly underfunded by white-run county boards. In 1930 the average county still spent 39 cents per person on salaries in Black schools for every dollar it spent in white schools. Booker T. Washington, the principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, sought Northern donors to build better schools, and Julius Rosenwald, the Chicago businessman who built Sears, Roebuck, agreed to help. After six pilot schools near Tuskegee around 1913 and 1914, the program spread across the South. Between 1912 and 1932 it helped build 5,357 schools and related buildings, such as teachers’ homes and workshops, in 15 states.\n\nThe fund’s rule, as the economists Daniel Aaronson and Bhashkar Mazumder summarize it, was to help “only where help was wanted.” Rosenwald money came only if Black residents and local governments put in money too, and together they paid most of the cost. The fund set standards for light, ventilation and sanitation, and it required desks, blackboards and books. It concentrated on physical things that county boards could not easily shift to white schools.\n\nIt worked. Aaronson and Mazumder found that rural Black students with access to a Rosenwald school completed more than a full extra year of schooling, with gains in literacy and test scores too. They estimate the schools explain close to 40 percent of the narrowing of the Black-white education gap in the South for children born between 1910 and 1925. The gains were largest in the most disadvantaged counties.\n\nThe building program ended in 1932, the year Rosenwald died. He had required his fund to spend all its money within 25 years of his death, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund dissolved in 1948.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nOn the [depth scale](/method/#depth) this is **structure** (level 3). Each school was a building, but the deal changed what county school systems built and paid for, because public money and upkeep were part of the match. Requiring local demand and contributions also put the community, not the donor, at the start of every project, the opposite of the [Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/).\n\nIn a 1929 essay Rosenwald wrote, “I am opposed to gifts in perpetuity for any purpose.” His fund is an early answer to what Charitology calls [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/).\n\nThe program worked inside segregation rather than against it. Washington’s strategy of putting education and economic progress first brought deep conflict with W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP. The schools show what building within the system achieved, not whether challenging it directly would have achieved more.\n\n## What carries over\n\nMatching can multiply money and build ownership, but it can also screen out the poorest places, so a match needs a plan for those who can’t meet it. A fund with an end date has to spend where it can do good now. How fast philanthropic money should be spent is [Open Problem 12, the Payout Question](/open-problems/the-payout-question/).\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"parked-money"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-voice"}],"depth":3,"era":"1912–1932","kind":"success","lessons":["Matching grants can multiply a gift and build ownership. Over time the fund’s share of a school’s cost fell from about a quarter to 10 to 15 percent, with local people and governments paying the rest.","In a system that tends to redirect money away from the people it is meant for, funding things that are hard to divert, like buildings, desks and books, protects the gift.","Matching has a cost too. Communities that could not raise their share could be turned down, so a match can favor the places that need help least.","A fund built to spend itself out can move fast and avoid outliving its purpose."],"place":"Rural South, United States","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Daniel Aaronson and Bhashkar Mazumder, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago working paper 2009-26, published in the Journal of Political Economy 119(5)","title":"The Impact of Rosenwald Schools on Black Achievement","url":"https://www.chicagofed.org/-/media/publications/working-papers/2009/wp2009-26-pdf.pdf","year":2011},{"note":null,"publisher":"U.S. Congress","title":"Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Schools Act of 2020 (Public Law 116-336)","url":"https://www.congress.gov/116/plaws/publ336/PLAW-116publ336.htm","year":2021},{"note":null,"publisher":"Holly Roose, BlackPast.org","title":"Rosenwald Fund Schools (1912-1932)","url":"https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/rosenwald-fund-schools-1912-1932/","year":2011},{"note":"The author is Rosenwald’s grandson and biographer.","publisher":"Peter M. Ascoli, Philanthropy magazine (Philanthropy Roundtable)","title":"Julius Rosenwald’s Crusade","url":"https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazine/julius-rosenwalds-crusade/","year":2006}],"summary":"A Black educator and a Chicago businessman started a program that built nearly 5,000 schools for Black children in the segregated rural South, with local communities and governments paying most of the cost. Economists later found the schools explain a large share of that era’s gains in Black education.","title":"The Rosenwald schools"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"32f334ba8b0fe49a7905e2fe2fa411983ff9bdcc6a1e54ff7a8db5ba1ddf24e4","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"9e39e0e4c64d8e2d2d5487aac2b2048681d668b2926328c7e538ac9068abc4d3","id":"version:case-scared-straight-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:scared-straight","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-scared-straight"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nIn the 1970s, inmates serving life sentences at a New Jersey prison started a program to scare at-risk and delinquent teenagers away from crime. The teenagers visited the prison and sat through aggressive presentations about prison life, often with exaggerated stories of violence. A television documentary that aired in 1978 reported that 16 of the 17 teenagers it followed stayed law-abiding for three months afterward, a 94 percent success rate. There was no comparison group. The program was copied in more than 30 jurisdictions, and Congress held hearings on it.\n\nIt is easy to see why it spread. The idea is deterrence, which matches a common intuition about how to stop crime. It was cheap, too: one Maryland version cost less than a dollar per participant.\n\nThen the evidence came in. A randomized trial of the New Jersey program, published in 1982, reported that participants were more likely to be arrested than similar teenagers who didn’t take part. In 2013 a Campbell Collaboration review led by Anthony Petrosino pooled the results of randomized trials run over 25 years in eight jurisdictions. Across them, the programs made later offending more likely: the odds rose by a factor of about 1.6 to 1.7. “Doing nothing would have been better than exposing juveniles to the program,” the authors wrote.\n\nThe programs didn’t stop. The review notes that when a California version produced negative results, the response was to end the evaluation, not the program. A 2011 television series, *Beyond Scared Straight*, revived interest. That year two senior U.S. Justice Department officials wrote publicly that the department did not support such programs, and Maryland and California suspended theirs. The department’s juvenile justice office added that bringing court-involved youth into contact with adult inmates could violate federal law.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nThe aim was **prevention** (level 2) on the [depth scale](/method/#depth): stopping crime before it happened. Its failure is a lesson about the system’s signals. A documentary carried the story further than any data could ([Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/)). The people who saw the program in action, such as inmates, staff, parents and viewers, saw what happened in the room, not arrest records a year later ([the Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/)). And before-and-after counts without a comparison group looked like evidence when they weren’t ([the Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/)).\n\n## What carries over\n\nGood intentions and a plausible theory are not evidence. A [randomized controlled trial](/record/encyclopedia/randomized-controlled-trials/) was the only thing that showed this program was doing harm. See the myth [If a program sounds logical, it works](/record/myths/if-a-program-sounds-logical-it-works/), and for the wider question of when help hurts, [Open Problem 20, When Charity Harms](/open-problems/when-charity-harms/).\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"story-bias"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-feedback-loop"}],"depth":2,"era":"1970s–2010s","kind":"failure","lessons":["Success stories without a comparison group can’t show that a program works. The original documentary reported that 16 of 17 teenagers stayed out of trouble for three months, and compared them with no one.","A program can feel right, cost almost nothing and still cause harm. Only randomized comparisons revealed it.","Evidence of harm does not stop a program by itself. In one case, negative results ended the evaluation instead of the program.","The more dramatic, cheap and intuitive a program is, the faster it spreads, so those are the programs most in need of testing."],"place":"United States and other countries","sources":[{"note":"A free copy is held by the University of Tübingen repository at https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/64695","publisher":"Anthony Petrosino, Carolyn Turpin-Petrosino, Meghan E. Hollis-Peel and Julia G. Lavenberg, Campbell Systematic Reviews 2013:5","title":"Scared Straight and Other Juvenile Awareness Programs for Preventing Juvenile Delinquency, a systematic review","url":"https://doi.org/10.4073/csr.2013.5","year":2013},{"note":null,"publisher":"Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, OJJDP News @ a Glance","title":"Justice Department Discourages the Use of “Scared Straight” Programs","url":"https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/sites/ojjdp/files/pubs/news_at_glance/234084/topstory.html","year":2011}],"summary":"Programs that brought at-risk teenagers into prisons to be confronted by inmates spread across the United States on the strength of a documentary. Randomized trials found they increased later offending, yet versions of the programs carried on for decades.","title":"Scared Straight"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"5990f287523474ab76d71a7c9aad34c283b714a2e395de27a42216c74f5b2454","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"064cd5213c91f54024045c31f0f86eb57ce5443019bcca9957e9e547e0788ca5","id":"version:case-smallpox-eradication-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"case:smallpox-eradication","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-cases-smallpox-eradication"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## What happened\n\nEfforts to eliminate smallpox go back to the 1950s, and in 1967 the World Health Organization launched an intensified eradication program. Alongside widespread vaccination, teams increasingly found each case and vaccinated the people around it, an approach called surveillance and containment. The last naturally occurring case was recorded in Somalia in 1977. On 8 May 1980 the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated.\n\n## Why it’s a source-level case\n\nEradication ended naturally occurring smallpox. WHO still oversees laboratory stocks, research on vaccines and treatments, and emergency preparedness, so the disease has not disappeared from public health budgets. On the depth scale Charitology describes the end of natural transmission as a **source** (level 4) outcome for one disease. The campaign was a feat of [coordination](/diagnosis/fragmentation/) as much as of medicine.\n\n## What carries over\n\nFew problems can be eradicated the way a virus with no animal host can. But the campaign shows what a precise shared goal, honest measurement and a willingness to change methods mid-course can do.\n","collection":"cases","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"fragmentation"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"}],"depth":4,"era":"1967–1980","kind":"success","lessons":["A precise, shared goal (zero cases) let thousands of organizations and governments coordinate around one measurable target.","Surveillance and ring vaccination, which meant finding cases and vaccinating everyone around them, beat trying to vaccinate everyone everywhere. Learning which approach worked mattered as much as the money.","Eradication can end recurring disease and treatment, while preparedness and safe handling of laboratory stocks still need support."],"place":"Worldwide","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"World Health Organization","title":"Smallpox","url":"https://www.who.int/health-topics/smallpox","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"U.S. National Library of Medicine","title":"Smallpox: A Great and Terrible Scourge, “Success”","url":"https://nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/smallpox/sp_success.html","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Origins, Ohio State University","title":"The WHO and the Eradication of Smallpox","url":"https://origins.osu.edu/read/who-and-eradication-smallpox","year":null}],"summary":"A coordinated global campaign ended a disease that had killed people for thousands of years. It remains the only human disease ever eradicated.","title":"The eradication of smallpox"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"826756971a4d7fccc34860688b8b7178512fd675477661b8f3a2cd84a5d1af63","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"78292a918c91a6f6b80b3148da6531f9fab51aedcc3d1206fe833de7fd92843e","id":"version:claim-depth-census-knowledge-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"claim:depth-census-knowledge","sources":[{"selector":{"adapter":"depth-census-knowledge-v1","bodyExcerpt":"Charitology’s founding hypothesis, [the Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), says the charity system is weighted toward symptoms. Nobody has checked. If the hypothesis is wrong, the field should be the first to say so. If it’s right, the census gives every later effort a baseline to move.","frontmatterKeys":[],"kind":"claim"},"sourceId":"source:pr-3-before-depth-census"}],"subject":{"context":"Why it matters","evidence":"not-applicable","parentId":"problem:the-depth-census","sources":[],"statement":"Charitology’s founding hypothesis, [the Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), says the charity system is weighted toward symptoms. Nobody has checked. If the hypothesis is wrong, the field should be the first to say so. If it’s right, the census gives every later effort a baseline to move.","title":"Scope of the Depth Census knowledge claim","type":"claim"},"subjectHash":"9792de6050cabd1ef2715b6145183702a6a1e5f448563b7474d82c066fd64b4e","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"41cecbcc688f19234fe1b5ee880b1465722a4e9c5cbd1fc7e7b3d64fedfe12e2","id":"version:claim-depth-census-knowledge-v2","previousId":"version:claim-depth-census-knowledge-v1","recordId":"claim:depth-census-knowledge","sources":[{"selector":{"adapter":"depth-census-knowledge-v1","bodyExcerpt":"Charitology’s founding hypothesis, [the Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), says the charity system is weighted toward symptoms. Charitology has not established the current mix. If the hypothesis is wrong, the field should be the first to say so. The census would supply a descriptive baseline. Deciding whether a mix is appropriate also requires an explicit standard tied to the goals being considered.","frontmatterKeys":[],"kind":"claim"},"sourceId":"source:pr-3-after-depth-census"}],"subject":{"context":"Why it matters","evidence":"not-applicable","parentId":"problem:the-depth-census","sources":[],"statement":"Charitology’s founding hypothesis, [the Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), says the charity system is weighted toward symptoms. Charitology has not established the current mix. If the hypothesis is wrong, the field should be the first to say so. The census would supply a descriptive baseline. Deciding whether a mix is appropriate also requires an explicit standard tied to the goals being considered.","title":"Scope of the Depth Census knowledge claim","type":"claim"},"subjectHash":"6f3b6d06a2d61893e35d33ae513a3959f44f1321c2bd43d30ff95c54b25fe9a3","version":2},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"a7cb59a7e58e02f20264a29d086c7eda6bf28d4eb299d07268c196e7ace10c81","id":"version:claim-ten-dollars-framing-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"claim:ten-dollars-framing","sources":[{"selector":{"adapter":"ten-dollars-framing-v1","bodyExcerpt":null,"frontmatterKeys":["summary"],"kind":"claim"},"sourceId":"source:pr-3-before-ten-dollars"}],"subject":{"context":null,"evidence":"not-applicable","parentId":"manuscript:ten-dollars","sources":[],"statement":"The founding manifesto. In 2026 the name for the science of doing the most good was available for about ten dollars. That says something about the field.","title":"Framing of the founding poem","type":"claim"},"subjectHash":"38c02e1fa76b1065d922ad738ba9b5e71afb266b0b8b5296a2b17d251d3ecfa8","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"c24286c0d07f975e2104f4962705ec529e6c4c13d13aacf67cf74a15c5cdad59","id":"version:claim-ten-dollars-framing-v2","previousId":"version:claim-ten-dollars-framing-v1","recordId":"claim:ten-dollars-framing","sources":[{"selector":{"adapter":"ten-dollars-framing-v1","bodyExcerpt":"*Editorial note: This manifesto is a poem, not a history of philanthropy. The ten-dollar image is the author’s account of a domain registration. Existing philanthropy, ethics and evaluation fields have long studied giving; the poem’s invitation is to develop and test Charitology’s proposed shared craft.*","frontmatterKeys":["summary"],"kind":"claim"},"sourceId":"source:pr-3-after-ten-dollars"}],"subject":{"context":"*Editorial note: This manifesto is a poem, not a history of philanthropy. The ten-dollar image is the author’s account of a domain registration. Existing philanthropy, ethics and evaluation fields have long studied giving; the poem’s invitation is to develop and test Charitology’s proposed shared craft.*","evidence":"not-applicable","parentId":"manuscript:ten-dollars","sources":[],"statement":"The founding poem uses a ten-dollar domain registration as an image for Charitology’s invitation to study how generosity is aimed.","title":"Framing of the founding poem","type":"claim"},"subjectHash":"d32dca610a5ca31c8a179497ebcc580f5d4ce05b80b88bfef2c8409ada1f7f59","version":2},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"d11018b21b367e8ece9c5ba56e2a2d36fa3249f41a7536159fdb3f3bdde63492","id":"version:concept-beneficiary-feedback-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:beneficiary-feedback","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-beneficiary-feedback-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nA business that ignores its customers soon finds out: sales fall. A charity that ignores the people it serves may never find out, because those people are not the ones paying. **Beneficiary feedback** is the practice of asking them anyway, in a systematic way, and changing the work in response.\n\n## Why the signal is missing\n\nIn a 2013 article, Fay Twersky, Phil Buchanan and Valerie Threlfall argued that funders and nonprofits consult experts and crowds but rarely ask the people they serve. They pointed to the reasons: the people served often have few alternatives, funders rather than beneficiaries pay the provider, and incentives favor the funder’s view. So a flawed program can continue for years. This is the [Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) seen from the ground.\n\n## What listening can show\n\nThe authors drew on fields that already listen. In health care, they cited research in which patients’ perceptions of their care, especially nursing care, predicted clinical quality and lower inpatient death rates for heart attack patients. In education, the YouthTruth initiative had gathered feedback from about 142,000 students, and 98 percent of participating school leaders said they used or planned to use the results. Their broader point was that the views of the people served can be a leading indicator, showing a problem before it shows up in outcomes.\n\nThey were also clear about the limits. Feedback is expensive to collect. People with low incomes or low literacy are hard to survey well, and people may fear that criticism will cost them help. Feedback works best alongside other evidence, not instead of it.\n\n## Who is building it\n\nFeedback Labs supports funders and nonprofits to listen to people and act on what they hear. Fund for Shared Insight, a national funder collaborative that ran for 12 years before concluding in 2026, launched Listen4Good, a program offering nonprofits tools and coaching to collect and use feedback. The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project counts “solicit and act on feedback” among its six practices, applied to the relationship between funders and grantees.\n\n## The open question\n\nFeedback that is collected but never moves money only half closes the loop. What would let the people served send a signal that changes where money goes, the way prices do in a market? That is [Open Problem 5, Closing the Feedback Loop](/open-problems/closing-the-feedback-loop/). [Participatory grantmaking](/record/encyclopedia/participatory-grantmaking/) and [cash transfers](/record/interventions/cash-transfers/), where recipients choose what to buy, are two partial answers.\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["constituent feedback","constituent voice","client feedback","listening to the people served"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-feedback-loop"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-voice"}],"related":["/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/","/open-problems/closing-the-feedback-loop/","/record/encyclopedia/participatory-grantmaking/","/record/principles/08-feedback-and-voice/","/record/lexicon/#feedback-loop"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Fay Twersky, Phil Buchanan and Valerie Threlfall, Stanford Social Innovation Review","title":"Listening to Those Who Matter Most, the Beneficiaries","url":"https://ssir.org/articles/entry/listening_to_those_who_matter_most_the_beneficiaries","year":2013},{"note":null,"publisher":"Feedback Labs","title":"Feedback Labs","url":"https://feedbacklabs.org/","year":null},{"note":"The collaborative concluded in 2026 after 12 years. Its site is now an archive.","publisher":"Fund for Shared Insight","title":"Fund for Shared Insight","url":"https://fundforsharedinsight.org/","year":2026},{"note":null,"publisher":"Trust-Based Philanthropy Project","title":"Six Practices of Trust-Based Grantmaking","url":"https://www.trustbasedphilanthropy.org/practices","year":null}],"summary":"Systematically asking the people a program serves what they think of it, and acting on what they say. It is the most direct way to restore part of the feedback loop that charity is missing.","title":"Beneficiary feedback"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"d3e8f3618c96c7eac9951727d06df62ad85c1a32006c896d73378dbc43994b39","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"d861bfe034e88aeb768f04d7e23d49ede1df5fc02435011423b592ff44baf489","id":"version:concept-charity-as-a-system-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:charity-as-a-system","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-charity-as-a-system-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nCharitology studies the **system** that connects them all. Like any system, it produces the results it is built to produce, so to change the results you have to understand the structure.\n\n## Five stages\n\n1. **Givers.** The people and institutions who give. In the United States, Giving USA estimates that $617.2 billion was given in 2025. Individuals gave 64 percent of it, foundations 19 percent, bequests 10 percent and corporations 7 percent.\n2. **Signals.** What givers see when they decide: stories and faces, overhead ratios, rankings, prestige and tax breaks.\n3. **Channels.** Where money is held and routed: charities, foundations, donor-advised funds and giving platforms. The IRS master file of tax-exempt organizations of every kind listed nearly two million records in October 2026, and donor-advised funds alone held about $326 billion in 2024.\n4. **The work.** What the money pays for, described by where it acts on the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/), from relief to source.\n5. **Outcomes.** What changes in people’s lives, in institutions and in the future.\n\n## The missing loop\n\nIn a market, the person who pays is usually the person who benefits, and prices and reviews carry information back. In charity, the payer and the person served are usually different people. The legal scholar Henry Hansmann called the general version of this *contract failure*: the people paying for a service cannot easily judge its quality. This can make results harder for donors to assess. The frequency and allocation effects of the gap are not measured by Hansmann’s theory. That is [the Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/), and Charitology treats it as the root of the [Diagnosis](/diagnosis/).\n\n## The field around it\n\nAround all five stages is the field: the knowledge, methods and people that could steer the system as a whole. Researchers, evaluators, advisors and philanthropy educators already study parts of this system. Charitology proposes a shared craft connecting their work across causes and frameworks. That is [the Missing Profession](/diagnosis/missing-profession/).\n\n## Where the conditions sit\n\nEach condition in the Diagnosis acts at one point in the system:\n\n- **Givers:** [Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/), [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/)\n- **Signals:** [Overhead Myth](/diagnosis/overhead-myth/), [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/), [Prestige Economy](/diagnosis/prestige-economy/)\n- **Channels:** [Restriction Reflex](/diagnosis/restriction-reflex/), [Fragmentation](/diagnosis/fragmentation/), [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/)\n- **The work:** [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/)\n- **Outcomes:** [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/), [Silence About Failure](/diagnosis/silence-about-failure/)\n- **Feedback:** [Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/), [Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/)\n\nThe map is a model, not a measurement. Its value is that it shows how a problem at one stage shows up at another. Signals that reward what is visible shape what channels fund, and short, restricted grants favor work with quick, countable outputs. Charitology’s working hypothesis is that fixing one stage while the loop stays open changes little. See [Principles, Chapter 2](/record/principles/02-the-charity-system/) for the full account.\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["the charity system","the system map","giving system"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-feedback-loop"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-profession"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"fragmentation"}],"related":["/diagnosis/","/record/principles/02-the-charity-system/","/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/","/open-problems/closing-the-feedback-loop/","/tools/giving-dashboard/"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"The NonProfit Times, reporting Giving USA 2026","title":"Giving USA: $617.2B Was Given To Nonprofits During 2025","url":"https://thenonprofittimes.com/npt_articles/giving-usa-617-2-b-was-given-to-nonprofits-during-2025/","year":2026},{"note":"The page listed a record count of 1,975,975 organizations when checked in October 2026. The file covers every kind of tax-exempt organization, not only charities.","publisher":"Internal Revenue Service","title":"Exempt Organizations Business Master File Extract","url":"https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organizations-business-master-file-extract-eo-bmf","year":2026},{"note":null,"publisher":"The Chronicle of Philanthropy, reporting the Annual DAF Report 2025 by the DAF Research Collaborative","title":"DAF Assets Soar 30% to $326 Billion","url":"https://www.philanthropy.com/news/daf-assets-soar-30-to-326-billion/","year":2025},{"note":null,"publisher":"Henry B. Hansmann, Yale Law Journal 89","title":"The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise","url":"https://yalelawjournal.org/article/the-role-of-nonprofit-enterprise","year":1980},{"note":null,"publisher":"Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative, Indiana University repository","title":"Annual DAF Report 2025, full report","url":"https://scholarworks.indianapolis.iu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8f309b9f-da38-433e-8c33-bc1b3d1f9a1a/content","year":2025}],"summary":"Charitology’s model of giving as one connected system. Givers respond to signals, money moves through channels to the work, the work produces outcomes, and feedback can carry results back. The size of any gap is an open empirical question.","title":"Charity as a system"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"8c6941ba589935b86c2a933c276772ca6b2e35e61166c4d076b17c07a14d5fbe","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"22cafdb2353978739182ebc1f62bdf48c695937bd8fa18f084103ac1c6fe569d","id":"version:concept-cost-effectiveness-analysis-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:cost-effectiveness-analysis","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-cost-effectiveness-analysis-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\n**Cost-effectiveness analysis** estimates the cost of producing one unit of a result: a life saved, a case of blindness cured, a year of healthy life added or a year of extra income. It answers the question in the [Giver’s Checklist](/method/#checklist): is this the cheapest way to get this result?\n\n## Why it matters\n\nBecause the differences can be huge. In a 2013 essay for the Center for Global Development, the philosopher Toby Ord looked at 108 health interventions costed in *Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries*, a standard reference. Their estimated cost-effectiveness ranged from 0.02 to 300 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per $1,000, with a median of 5. Moving money from the least to the most cost-effective would produce about 15,000 times the benefit, and moving it from the median to the best about 60 times. Ord noted that real differences may be smaller than the estimates, and argued that even a much smaller spread would still matter morally.\n\nA **DALY** counts the years of life lost to a condition plus the years lived with a disability, weighted by how severe the disability is.\n\n## How it is used\n\nGiveWell calls cost-effectiveness the single most important input in its evaluations, but says it does not judge programs on it alone. Strength of evidence and track record also carry weight. Its April 2024 explanation reported typical modeled costs of $3,000 to $5,500 per life saved for grants to its top charities, while cautioning that future costs could rise. This is a dated model range, not a universal or current guaranteed price.\n\n## How it goes wrong\n\n- **Errors.** In 2011 GiveWell found five errors in the spreadsheet behind the same reference’s estimate for deworming. Together they overstated its cost-effectiveness by a factor of about 100.\n- **Guessed inputs.** An estimate built from many rough guesses can be far off even when no single guess is biased. Holden Karnofsky argued that such estimates should be adjusted toward what similar programs usually achieve, more so the less certain they are. See [expected value](/record/encyclopedia/expected-value/).\n- **Hidden values.** Every model has to say how much one outcome is worth against another, such as income against a death averted. GiveWell calls these *moral weights* and says donors may disagree with its choices.\n\n## The limits\n\nCost-effectiveness works best when options share a unit. Comparing a life saved with a law changed or a species protected needs an exchange rate, and each candidate rate carries a moral framework. That is [Open Problem 2](/open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/). Source-level work is hardest of all to cost, because its effects are diffuse and slow. That is [Open Problem 3](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/). To build your own model, start with the [Cost-Effectiveness Model Kit](/tools/cost-effectiveness-model-kit/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["CEA","cost per outcome","cost per DALY","cost per life saved"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"overhead-myth"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"}],"related":["/tools/cost-effectiveness-model-kit/","/tools/impact-calculator/","/record/encyclopedia/expected-value/","/open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/","/record/lexicon/#cost-effectiveness"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Toby Ord, Center for Global Development","title":"The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health","url":"https://cgdev.org/sites/default/files/1427016_file_moral_imperative_cost_effectiveness.pdf","year":2013},{"note":null,"publisher":"GiveWell","title":"Cost-Effectiveness","url":"https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness","year":2025},{"note":null,"publisher":"GiveWell","title":"How Much Does It Cost to Save a Life?","url":"https://www.givewell.org/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-a-life","year":2024},{"note":null,"publisher":"The GiveWell Blog","title":"Errors in DCP2 cost-effectiveness estimate for deworming","url":"https://blog.givewell.org/2011/09/29/errors-in-dcp2-cost-effectiveness-estimate-for-deworming/","year":2011},{"note":null,"publisher":"Holden Karnofsky, The GiveWell Blog","title":"Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased)","url":"https://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expected-value-estimates-literally-even-when-theyre-unbiased/","year":2011}],"summary":"Estimating how much good a program produces per dollar, so that options can be compared. The estimates are rough, and the differences they reveal can be enormous.","title":"Cost-effectiveness analysis"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"7885e5e4e443db83ea713b8cafee7704eab60f2fbff17ed10820e4ff9b698d02","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"eec7fac2e5e67320558ffe4121312521997b552abe4cd3f61812bf97fc24b400","id":"version:concept-counterfactual-impact-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:counterfactual-impact","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-counterfactual-impact-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nA **counterfactual** is what would have happened otherwise. The counterfactual impact of a gift is the difference between the world with the gift and the world without it. A program’s results and a gift’s results are not the same thing. If the program would have been funded anyway, the gift’s real effect lands somewhere else.\n\n## Three ways the counterfactual changes the picture\n\n**Funding gaps get filled.** Benjamin Todd of 80,000 Hours warns against treating a charity’s funding gap as if you were the only donor. If other donors would have filled it, your gift does less than it seems. The opposite mistake is also possible: assuming your gift does nothing because others would give. Filling the gap frees those donors for other work and saves the charity fundraising time, so the honest answer depends on what everyone else does.\n\n**Other funders respond.** GiveWell uses two words for this. *Leverage* is a charity’s influence on how others, such as governments, allocate their money. *Funging* is when spending on a program crowds out money that would have come from somewhere else. Since late 2017 GiveWell has estimated both for each charity it recommends, and it says the estimates involve substantial guesswork. Its test of “room for more funding” asks the same question from the charity’s side: what would extra money achieve, beyond what the charity would raise anyway?\n\n**The comparison group decides.** A program can look like a success until you see what happened to similar people without it. A Cochrane review of nine trials of “Scared Straight” programs, which organize prison visits for young people at risk of offending, found that they increased offending compared with doing nothing at all. See [the case study](/record/case-studies/scared-straight/).\n\n## Shared credit\n\nMost outcomes have many causes. Todd points out that when two groups are each necessary for a result, both can be counterfactually responsible for all of it, so claimed impacts can add up to more than 100 percent. That is not a logical error. The practical risk is that funders, each counting the whole result, collectively pay more than it is worth.\n\n## Why it is hard\n\nThe counterfactual is never observed. Randomized trials estimate it for the people in a study. Ordinary gifts get no estimate at all, which is part of why the [feedback loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) is missing. Producing counterfactual estimates cheaply and at scale is [Open Problem 4](/open-problems/the-counterfactual-problem/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["counterfactual","additionality","replaceability","funging"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-feedback-loop"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"}],"related":["/open-problems/the-counterfactual-problem/","/record/encyclopedia/neglectedness/","/record/principles/05-counterfactuals-and-neglect/","/record/lexicon/#counterfactual","/tools/impact-calculator/"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours","title":"Counterfactuals and how they change our view of what does good","url":"https://80000hours.org/articles/counterfactuals/","year":2021},{"note":null,"publisher":"Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours","title":"Doing good together: how to coordinate effectively and avoid single-player thinking","url":"https://80000hours.org/articles/coordination/","year":2018},{"note":null,"publisher":"James Snowden, The GiveWell Blog","title":"Revisiting leverage","url":"https://blog.givewell.org/2018/02/13/revisiting-leverage/","year":2018},{"note":null,"publisher":"GiveWell","title":"Our Criteria","url":"https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/criteria","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Anthony Petrosino and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews","title":"“Scared Straight” and other juvenile awareness programs for preventing juvenile delinquency","url":"https://www.cochrane.org/evidence/CD002796_scared-straight-and-other-juvenile-awareness-programs-preventing-juvenile-delinquency","year":2022}],"summary":"The real effect of a gift is the difference between what happens with it and what would have happened without it. Estimating that difference is one of the hardest and most important problems in giving.","title":"Counterfactual impact"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"8c2e85325f2d4b5512fc2aa93c8f0a83158c6cd3785ccf7a21a8811f22a7a742","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"0343e46f7648bf8e4d668944ac31d39f22cee7fb861392b49e35dcc0384b35b4","id":"version:concept-discounting-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:discounting","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-discounting-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nA **discount rate** shrinks future benefits and costs by a percentage for each year they lie ahead. At 4 percent a year, a benefit 18 years from now counts for about half as much as the same benefit today. The choice of rate can decide whether a long-term program looks brilliant or pointless, so it is worth asking what the rate stands for.\n\n## Three reasons to discount\n\n**Uncertainty.** A benefit promised for the future may never arrive. The program may fail, or the world may change in ways that make it irrelevant. In the extreme, a risk that humanity does not survive acts like a discount rate on all expected future wellbeing.\n\n**Growth.** If people in the future are richer, an extra dollar does less for them than it does for someone poor today. Economists combine this with a time discount rate in what is called the Ramsey rule, after the philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey.\n\n**Pure time preference.** Valuing later wellbeing less only because it comes later. Ramsey himself rejected it. In 1928 he wrote that discounting later well-being is “ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.”\n\nThe first two reasons are about facts: what will happen and how much it will help. The third is a moral claim about whether time itself makes a life count less.\n\n## An example\n\nA 2023 review by Rethink Priorities described GiveWell’s then-current 4 percent rate for future income and consumption gains, with a lower rate for health benefits. It broke the 4 percent into parts: 0 percent for pure time preference, 1.4 percent for temporal uncertainty, 1.7 percent for improving circumstances as people get richer, and 0.9 percent for benefits that compound over time. Every part except the first is a claim about the world that evidence can improve.\n\n## Why it is contested\n\nThe rate can settle large questions on its own. William Nordhaus argued in 2006 that the Stern Review’s call for urgent, deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions depended decisively on its use of a near-zero social discount rate, and would not survive rates consistent with market interest rates. Disagreements like this mix facts, such as how fast economies will grow, with values, such as whether time itself matters. Separating the two is the first step to settling them.\n\nIn Charitology’s terms, the [Future generations](/tools/values-compass/) framework treats the claims of people not yet born as central. The [Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/) condition is the hypothesis that the charity system’s timescale, set by annual budgets and reports, is shorter than the timescale of its problems. How much the future should count is [Open Problem 13](/open-problems/discounting-the-future/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["discount rate","time discounting","pure time preference","social discount rate"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"}],"related":["/open-problems/discounting-the-future/","/open-problems/the-payout-question/","/record/principles/07-time/","/tools/legacy-planner/","/record/lexicon/#pure-time-preference"],"sources":[{"note":"First published in 2019 and revised in 2023. Quotes Frank Ramsey’s “A Mathematical Theory of Saving” (1928).","publisher":"Partha Dasgupta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy","title":"Ramsey and Intergenerational Welfare Economics","url":"https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ramsey-economics/","year":2019},{"note":null,"publisher":"Jenny Kudymowa, James Hu, Melanie Basnak and Tom Hird, Rethink Priorities","title":"A review of GiveWell’s discount rate","url":"https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/a-review-of-givewells-discount-rate/","year":2023},{"note":null,"publisher":"William D. Nordhaus, NBER Working Paper 12741","title":"The “Stern Review” on the Economics of Climate Change","url":"https://nber.org/papers/w12741","year":2006}],"summary":"Giving less weight to benefits and costs the further in the future they fall. Some reasons for discounting are about uncertainty and growth. One, pure time preference, is the moral claim that later wellbeing matters less just because it is later.","title":"Discounting"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"247b3f29965cd7fad1dbb7d45b4c6f46e5f17bfc0dec211b2b8d0efe902eec80","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"48721714d37067ced8117825c4e79c0999e80624c1b0213346eb7f5f3ec225c2","id":"version:concept-donor-advised-funds-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:donor-advised-funds","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-donor-advised-funds-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nA **donor-advised fund** (DAF) is an account for charitable giving. The IRS describes three features. It is a separately identified fund or account made up of a donor’s contributions. It is maintained by a 501(c)(3) organization, called the sponsoring organization, which has legal control of the money once the donor contributes. And the donor keeps advisory privileges over how the money is granted and invested. The donor recommends grants, and the sponsor makes them.\n\n## How big they are\n\nThe Annual DAF Report 2025, produced for the first time by the DAF Research Collaborative after the National Philanthropic Trust compiled it for nearly two decades, found that in 2024:\n\n- DAFs held about **$326 billion** in assets, up from about $256 billion in 2023.\n- Donors contributed **$89.6 billion**, the highest of the past five years.\n- DAFs granted **$64.9 billion** to charities.\n- The aggregate payout rate was **25.3 percent**, calculated as grants divided by prior-year assets.\n\nThe payout rate is not the share of every account spent that year. The report uses prior-year assets as its denominator and aggregates across sponsors.\n\n## Where they sit in the system\n\nOn the [system map](/record/encyclopedia/charity-as-a-system/), a DAF is a channel. It sits between the giver and the work and holds money until the donor decides where it should go. That can be useful. A donor can give when they have money and decide carefully later, and one account can handle many gifts. It also means the money can wait.\n\n## The debate\n\nThis is [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/), and both sides have numbers. Defenders point to the aggregate payout rate. It is higher than the roughly 5 percent legal distribution requirement for many [private foundations](/record/encyclopedia/private-foundations/), but those measures use different denominators and are not a direct comparison. Critics point to the size of the pool, and note that an aggregate rate can hide accounts that rarely grant at all. The figures above describe DAFs as a whole, so they cannot settle how money moves through individual accounts.\n\n## What we don’t know\n\nIs that aggregate rate fast or slow? The answer depends on how quickly the best giving opportunities are being used up, how much invested money grows while it waits and how much the future should count. That is [Open Problem 12, the Payout Question](/open-problems/the-payout-question/), and [discounting](/record/encyclopedia/discounting/) is part of it.\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["DAFs","DAF","donor-advised fund"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"parked-money"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"}],"related":["/diagnosis/parked-money/","/open-problems/the-payout-question/","/record/encyclopedia/private-foundations/","/record/lexicon/#donor-advised-fund","/record/lexicon/#payout-rate"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Internal Revenue Service","title":"Donor-advised funds","url":"https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/donor-advised-funds","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"The Chronicle of Philanthropy, reporting the Annual DAF Report 2025 by the DAF Research Collaborative","title":"DAF Assets Soar 30% to $326 Billion","url":"https://www.philanthropy.com/news/daf-assets-soar-30-to-326-billion/","year":2025},{"note":null,"publisher":"Johnson Center for Philanthropy","title":"The Annual DAF Report 2025","url":"https://johnsoncenter.org/resource/report-annual-daf-report-2025/","year":2025},{"note":null,"publisher":"Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative, Indiana University repository","title":"Annual DAF Report 2025, full report","url":"https://scholarworks.indianapolis.iu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8f309b9f-da38-433e-8c33-bc1b3d1f9a1a/content","year":2025}],"summary":"Charitable accounts held by a sponsoring public charity, which the donor advises on grants and investments. They held about $326 billion in 2024, and how fast that money should reach working charities is one of the live debates in philanthropy.","title":"Donor-advised funds"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"626f08b7d44f6c5572a82cc685da9075448b536a76c1a067115b88126c665ff1","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"0163193085cc73fdd55cb13815b7daaa143b784e7168d025bc2a7529d6975d0a","id":"version:concept-effective-altruism-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:effective-altruism","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-effective-altruism-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\n**Effective altruism** asks a simple question and tries to answer it rigorously: how can I do the most good with the time and money I have? It answers with evidence, cost-effectiveness and comparisons across causes, and it asks people to act on the answers.\n\n## A short history\n\nThe movement drew on Peter Singer’s 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” which argued that distance makes no moral difference to the duty to help. GiveWell began as research by a group of friends working in finance, and in 2007 two of them left their jobs to run it full time. Giving What We Can was launched in November 2009 by the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord, working with Will MacAskill, around a pledge to give 10 percent of income. 80,000 Hours, which advises people on high-impact careers, soft-launched in 2011.\n\nThe name came late. When Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours needed an umbrella organization, their directors held a vote, and on 5 December 2011 “Centre for Effective Altruism” won. GiveWell’s research arm, GiveWell Labs, grew into the Open Philanthropy Project, later known as Open Philanthropy, which renamed itself Coefficient Giving in 2025.\n\n## Ideas and priorities\n\nThe movement’s tools include [scale, neglectedness and tractability](/record/encyclopedia/scale-neglectedness-tractability/), [cost-effectiveness analysis](/record/encyclopedia/cost-effectiveness-analysis/), [counterfactual](/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/) reasoning and [expected value](/record/encyclopedia/expected-value/). Its priorities have widened from global health and poverty. 80,000 Hours’ problem list includes risks from advanced artificial intelligence and engineered pandemics among its priorities, alongside factory farming and global health.\n\nIn November 2022 the cryptocurrency exchange FTX went bankrupt. Its founder had been a prominent backer of the movement, and the leaders of the FTX Future Fund resigned, warning that many committed grants would not be paid. The collapse prompted a period of public self-examination among the movement’s leaders.\n\n## Critiques\n\nPhilosophers and activists have pressed several objections. Iason Gabriel grouped them under three headings: that the movement neglects justice, including equality, urgency and rights; that its methods are biased toward what can be measured; and that it is poorly placed to bring about systemic change. Amia Srinivasan argued that it works within the existing order rather than asking what produces global misery. Gabriel’s paper also sets out the responses to each objection, and the debate continues. See [systemic change](/record/encyclopedia/systemic-change/).\n\n## Charitology and effective altruism\n\nCharitology shares the movement’s rigor: its insistence on evidence, counterfactuals, honest uncertainty and comparisons across causes. Charitology makes explicit editorial commitments to eight frameworks (welfare, rights, justice, care, faith and tradition, future generations, all life and flourishing), and reports where they agree and part. Effective altruism also contains debates about moral uncertainty and values; it is not one uniform moral theory. And its subject is the charity system itself: the signals, channels, incentives and feedback that decide where all generosity goes, read through the [symptom and source](/record/encyclopedia/symptoms-and-sources/) lens. Charitology does not judge the movement or the people in it. It treats effective altruism as a tradition to learn from, and as one lens among several. The [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) condition is a warning against using any one lens alone.\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["EA"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"single-lens"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"proximity-pull"}],"related":["/record/encyclopedia/scale-neglectedness-tractability/","/record/encyclopedia/moral-uncertainty/","/record/disagreements/near-or-far/","/record/principles/01-what-charitology-is/","/record/encyclopedia/systemic-change/"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Peter Singer, Philosophy & Public Affairs 1(3)","title":"Famine, Affluence, and Morality","url":"https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265052","year":1972},{"note":null,"publisher":"GiveWell","title":"About GiveWell","url":"https://www.givewell.org/about","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Giving What We Can","title":"Our history","url":"https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/history","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"William MacAskill, Effective Altruism Forum","title":"The history of the term ‘effective altruism’","url":"https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9a7xMXoSiQs3EYPA2/the-history-of-the-term-effective-altruism","year":2014},{"note":null,"publisher":"Effective Altruism Forum","title":"Open Philanthropy Is Now Coefficient Giving","url":"https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vkvtu6xbvfkHPhJkC/open-philanthropy-is-now-coefficient-giving","year":2025},{"note":null,"publisher":"80,000 Hours","title":"What are the most pressing world problems?","url":"https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Thalia Beaty and Glenn Gamboa, Associated Press","title":"FTX bankruptcy also endangers founder’s philanthropic gifts","url":"https://www.news4jax.com/business/2022/11/13/ftx-bankruptcy-also-endangers-founders-philanthropic-gifts/","year":2022},{"note":null,"publisher":"Iason Gabriel, Journal of Applied Philosophy 34(4)","title":"Effective Altruism and Its Critics","url":"https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12176","year":2017},{"note":null,"publisher":"Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books 37(18)","title":"Stop the Robot Apocalypse: The New Utilitarians","url":"https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n18/amia-srinivasan/stop-the-robot-apocalypse","year":2015}],"summary":"A philosophy and social movement that uses evidence and careful reasoning to find the ways of helping others that do the most good. Charitology shares its rigor and starts from a different place.","title":"Effective altruism"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"35bd31bebc5eafd79096668878c60a7f54603f8b95ca781ada6ee48389064b94","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"d2840c83ee31e65f2019afd3cce940244cadf326e21fe6d16d05d63aa78c44fd","id":"version:concept-expected-value-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:expected-value","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-expected-value-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nThe **expected value** of an action is what you get if you multiply each possible result by its probability and add them up. A program that has a 10 percent chance of helping 10,000 people has an expected value of helping 1,000 people, the same as a program certain to help 1,000. Expected value lets a giver compare a sure thing with a long shot on one scale.\n\n## Why it matters for giving\n\nMuch of the most ambitious work in charity is a long shot: research that may find nothing, advocacy that may lose, a campaign to change a norm that may take decades or fail. Without some way to weigh probability against size, a giver can only choose between “certain” and “hopeful.” Expected value turns that into a question with numbers in it.\n\n## Three cautions\n\n**The inputs are often guesses.** Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell argued in 2011 that an explicit expected-value estimate, built from many rough inputs, should not be taken literally even when its errors are not biased in either direction. It should be combined with a prior view of what similar actions usually achieve. The less certain the estimate, the more it should be pulled toward that prior, so a dramatic but weakly supported claim counts for little.\n\n**Tiny chances of huge stakes can take over.** If a result is large enough, even a very small probability can dominate the sum. Philosophers call the extreme version of this *fanaticism*, and MacAskill, Bykvist and Ord treat it as a central problem for anyone deciding under [moral uncertainty](/record/encyclopedia/moral-uncertainty/). The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has argued that expected-value reasoning about speculative risks can end up justifying whatever its users already favored.\n\n**It ignores attitudes to risk.** Maximizing expected value treats a sure good and a gamble with the same average as equal. 80,000 Hours calls ignoring risk aversion a reasonable approximation for its own purposes. Many givers reasonably prefer some certainty. A portfolio can hold both.\n\n## Getting the probabilities right\n\nExpected value is only as good as its probabilities. Forecasters can be scored, for example with a [Brier score](/record/lexicon/#brier-score), and a forecaster whose 70 percent predictions come true about 70 percent of the time is [calibrated](/record/lexicon/#calibration). Charitology’s [Forecasting Platform](/tools/forecasting-platform/) and [Forecasting Tournaments](/programs/forecasting-tournaments/) are meant to make the probabilities in giving decisions testable.\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["EV","expected impact","probability-weighted value"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"}],"related":["/record/encyclopedia/moral-uncertainty/","/record/encyclopedia/cost-effectiveness-analysis/","/tools/forecasting-platform/","/programs/forecasting-tournaments/","/record/lexicon/#expected-value"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Holden Karnofsky, The GiveWell Blog","title":"Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased)","url":"https://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expected-value-estimates-literally-even-when-theyre-unbiased/","year":2011},{"note":null,"publisher":"William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord, Oxford University Press","title":"Moral Uncertainty","url":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198722274.001.0001","year":2020},{"note":null,"publisher":"Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books 37(18)","title":"Stop the Robot Apocalypse: The New Utilitarians","url":"https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n18/amia-srinivasan/stop-the-robot-apocalypse","year":2015},{"note":null,"publisher":"Robert Wiblin, 80,000 Hours","title":"A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact","url":"https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/","year":2016}],"summary":"The probability-weighted average of an action’s possible results. It is the standard way to compare a sure thing with a long shot, and it misleads when the probabilities are guesses.","title":"Expected value"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"8c90db33e17a07081a6e102d7db68096d8640830a327c0f3e517fe9cc8d72373","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"b22d84b48b70b6bdbbe91627dce2626f55d217bf167e95039cd5aca920155a81","id":"version:concept-identifiable-victim-effect-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:identifiable-victim-effect","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-identifiable-victim-effect-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nThe **identifiable victim effect** is the finding that people give more to help one specific person, with a name and a face, than to help a larger number of people described by statistics. It is a central part of the [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/).\n\n## The classic study\n\nIn experiments published in 2007, Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic paid participants $5 for an unrelated survey and then gave them a chance to donate some of it to Save the Children. Some saw an appeal about one child with a photograph. Others read statistics about food shortages affecting millions of people in southern and eastern Africa.\n\nIn the first study, people who saw the individual appeal and received no other information gave an average of $2.83. People who saw only the statistics gave $1.17. In a later study, adding the statistics to the individual story *reduced* giving to $1.43, compared with $2.38 for her story alone. And when people were taught about the identifiable victim effect before deciding, they gave less to the individual appeal but no more to the statistical victims. The authors concluded that deliberate thinking dampened sympathy for the identified victim without creating sympathy for the many.\n\n## How big is it?\n\nA 2016 meta-analysis by Seyoung Lee and Thomas Feeley pooled 41 studies and found an effect that was statistically significant but modest. It looked most reliable in particular conditions: a single victim, a photographed child in poverty, a victim who bore little responsibility for their need and a request for money.\n\nIn 2024 Maximilian Maier, Yik Chun Wong and Gilad Feldman published a pre-registered replication of the 2007 studies, using hypothetical donations. They found no support for the effect. They also reanalyzed the earlier meta-analysis, found signs of publication bias and suggested that the pattern may be better described as insensitivity to scale. The [replication record](https://forrt.org/flora-replication-atlas/doi/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.01.005/) now lists the 2007 paper’s replication as failed.\n\nThe finding is now debated. One difference between the studies is that the 2007 donations were real money and the 2024 donations were hypothetical, and the replication’s authors themselves call for large studies with real donations. Those would go a long way to settling it.\n\n## Why it matters for the system\n\nEven at its most modest, the pattern points the same way as a wider body of research on [psychic numbing](/record/encyclopedia/psychic-numbing/): concern does not grow in proportion to the number of people in need. Charitology hypothesizes that a system relying on faces and stories may favor needs that are easier to portray. The studies here do not measure that system-wide allocation effect. Whether a story can carry scale instead of hiding it is [Open Problem 7, Story Without Bias](/open-problems/story-without-bias/). How often findings like this one hold up is [Open Problem 10](/open-problems/the-replication-rate/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["identified victim effect","singularity effect","statistical victims"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"story-bias"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"proximity-pull"}],"related":["/diagnosis/story-bias/","/open-problems/story-without-bias/","/record/encyclopedia/psychic-numbing/","/record/lexicon/#identifiable-victim-effect","/open-problems/the-replication-rate/"],"sources":[{"note":"Freely readable at https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Sympathy_and_callousness.pdf","publisher":"Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 102(2)","title":"Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims","url":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.01.005","year":2007},{"note":null,"publisher":"Seyoung Lee and Thomas Hugh Feeley, Social Influence 11(3)","title":"The identifiable victim effect: a meta-analytic review","url":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2016.1216891","year":2016},{"note":"Open manuscript and publication record at https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/201115/","publisher":"Maximilian Maier, Yik Chun Wong and Gilad Feldman, Collabra: Psychology 9(1)","title":"Revisiting and Rethinking the Identifiable Victim Effect: Replication and Extension of Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic (2007)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.90203","year":2024},{"note":null,"publisher":"FORRT","title":"FLoRA Replication Atlas entry for Small, Loewenstein and Slovic (2007)","url":"https://forrt.org/flora-replication-atlas/doi/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.01.005/","year":null}],"summary":"The tendency to give more to help one specific, identified person than to help many people described by statistics. It is one of the best-known findings about giving, and recent replications have questioned how large and reliable it is.","title":"Identifiable victim effect"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"754d3f2c519651c914fa5c63e38dbe0ac00b741259e0a311c9b0751fea6562c3","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"24902199c2ae677ef04c867f9e760082d063fc69adac9e2ca2b2970d3c4724fc","id":"version:concept-impact-investing-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:impact-investing","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-impact-investing-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\n**Impact investing** puts capital into companies, funds or projects with the aim of doing good as well as earning a return. The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) defines impact investments as those made to generate positive, measurable social or environmental impact alongside a financial return. It names four core characteristics: an intention to contribute to measurable benefits, the use of evidence and impact data in designing investments, managing toward the impact intended, and sharing lessons so the field can grow.\n\n## Origins and size\n\nThe term was coined at a Rockefeller Foundation gathering at its Bellagio Center in Italy, which Wharton Magazine dates to 2007. The convening led to the Global Impact Investing Network, whose formation the foundation announced in 2009. In its 2024 market sizing, the GIIN estimated that more than 3,900 organizations managed about $1.57 trillion in impact investments worldwide.\n\n## Returns\n\nThe GIIN says impact investments can target anything from below-market to above-market financial returns. Some investors accept less money back in exchange for more good. Most of the investors the GIIN has surveyed target risk-adjusted, market-rate returns.\n\nFoundations have a tool of their own. A **program-related investment**, in IRS terms, is one made primarily for charitable purposes, where income is not a significant purpose. The IRS’s examples include low-interest loans to needy students and high-risk investments in nonprofit low-income housing.\n\n## The counterfactual question\n\nThe hardest question in impact investing is the one at the heart of [counterfactual impact](/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/): would the good have happened anyway? If an investment earns full market returns, an ordinary investor might have made it too, and the impact investor’s money changed little. If it accepts lower returns, or takes risks others won’t, it is more likely to have made a difference. Measured outcomes matter too: an investment that reports outputs, such as loans made, has not yet shown [outcomes](/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/), such as incomes raised.\n\n## In the charity system\n\nImpact investing sits beside the charity system rather than inside it, but it competes for the same intentions. A foundation choosing between a grant and an investment, or a donor between a gift and an impact fund, is making a depth and counterfactual decision. Charitology describes both kinds of capital with the same questions from the [Giver’s Checklist](/method/#checklist).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["social investing","mission-related investing","program-related investments"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"parked-money"}],"related":["/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/","/record/encyclopedia/private-foundations/","/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/","/tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN)","title":"What you need to know about impact investing","url":"https://thegiin.org/publication/post/about-impact-investing/","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Dean Hand, Maddie Ulanow, Hongyu Pan and Kelly Xiao, Global Impact Investing Network","title":"Sizing the Impact Investing Market 2024","url":"https://thegiin.org/publication/research/sizing-the-impact-investing-market-2024/","year":2024},{"note":null,"publisher":"Jem Hudson, Wharton Magazine","title":"The State of Impact Investing","url":"https://magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/digital/the-state-of-impact-investing/","year":2014},{"note":null,"publisher":"The Rockefeller Foundation","title":"Many Paths to One Mountaintop – Antony Bugg-Levine on Building Movements That Shift Systems","url":"https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/bellagio-breakthroughs/many-paths-to-one-mountaintop-antony-bugg-levine-on-building-movements-that-shift-systems/","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Internal Revenue Service","title":"Program-related investments","url":"https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/program-related-investments","year":null}],"summary":"Investing with the intention of producing measurable social or environmental good alongside a financial return. It brings investment capital, not only gifts, to bear on social problems, and it raises a sharp counterfactual question.","title":"Impact investing"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"542a73aff962ccd01835bdecea33b2ab92afc410e5d0e9ca40fe87ec14ea8fa1","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"55a183071dc600445b92554223cb84e77c7c981d0b10b3963197b855776fb141","id":"version:concept-moral-uncertainty-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:moral-uncertainty","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-moral-uncertainty-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nYou can be sure of every fact about a gift and still not know what to do. A donation might save a child’s life or protect a forest for a century, and you might know both outcomes exactly while being unsure how to weigh them. That second kind of doubt is **moral uncertainty**: uncertainty about moral and evaluative questions rather than descriptive ones. In their 2020 book *Moral Uncertainty*, William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord argue that, given how hard ethics is and how widely people disagree about it, moral uncertainty is the normal condition rather than the exception.\n\n## Ways to decide\n\n**Follow your favorite theory.** Act on whichever moral view you find most plausible. MacAskill, Bykvist and Ord call this *My Favorite Theory* and argue that, simple as it is, it has major problems, starting with what to do when you are split between views.\n\n**Maximize expected choiceworthiness.** Weight each theory’s verdict by how much credence you give it, the way you would weight outcomes by their probability. This works only when theories can be compared on a common scale.\n\n**Borrow from voting.** Some theories only rank options, and some give amounts that cannot be compared with other theories’ amounts. For those cases the book draws an analogy with social choice, the study of how groups vote, and adapts voting rules such as the Borda rule.\n\n**Convene a moral parliament.** In 2009 Nick Bostrom proposed imagining that each theory you take seriously sends delegates to a parliament, in proportion to your credence in it. The delegates bargain and vote, and you act on the result. A theory with few seats can still win on the issues it cares about most by giving way on others. Bostrom developed the idea with Toby Ord, and in 2021 Toby Newberry and Ord argued for a version based on proportional chances voting. They also showed that other approaches to moral uncertainty can be read as parliaments with different rules.\n\n## Hard cases\n\nThe book names two problems any approach must face. *Fanaticism* is the worry that a theory you barely believe could dominate your choices if it says the stakes are enormous. *Infectious incomparability* is the worry that giving any credence to a view on which options cannot be compared spreads that incomparability to every decision you make.\n\n## In Charitology\n\nCharitology’s answer to the [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) is to look at every gift through eight moral frameworks at once: welfare, rights and duties, justice, care, faith and tradition, future generations, all life and flourishing. The [Values Compass](/tools/values-compass/) asks how strongly you agree with a statement from each one, and the [Portfolio Builder](/tools/portfolio-builder/) uses a simple credence-weighted method to turn weights like these into an allocation. Whether more sophisticated methods give different, and more defensible, answers is [Open Problem 16](/open-problems/moral-parliament-in-practice/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["normative uncertainty","deciding under moral uncertainty"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"single-lens"}],"related":["/open-problems/moral-parliament-in-practice/","/tools/portfolio-builder/","/tools/values-compass/","/record/principles/06-comparing-the-incomparable/","/record/lexicon/#moral-parliament"],"sources":[{"note":"Open access under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0); freely readable at https://www.moraluncertainty.com/s/Moral-Uncertainty.pdf","publisher":"William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord, Oxford University Press","title":"Moral Uncertainty","url":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198722274.001.0001","year":2020},{"note":null,"publisher":"Nick Bostrom, Overcoming Bias","title":"Moral uncertainty – towards a solution?","url":"https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solutionhtml","year":2009},{"note":null,"publisher":"Toby Newberry and Toby Ord, Future of Humanity Institute Technical Report 2021-2","title":"The parliamentary approach to moral uncertainty","url":"https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b6b3bc2e-ba48-41d2-af7e-83f07c1fe141","year":2021}],"summary":"Uncertainty about which moral view is right, as opposed to uncertainty about the facts. Philosophers have developed ways to act well under it, and Charitology’s method of looking through every framework depends on them.","title":"Moral uncertainty"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"7888f0ef8045e5dc1e61444a47b6b75516df5ae0e8d8e0742065d781a5d517f2","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"321c6409789cad89b5d522d246cfc89e792cf52c1ec05a2b95b175df0f2e4500","id":"version:concept-mutual-aid-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:mutual-aid","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-mutual-aid-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nIn **mutual aid**, the people who help and the people who are helped belong to the same community, and often trade places. Neighbors run a grocery delivery list, a congregation keeps a fund for funerals, a tenants’ group covers a member’s rent this month and someone else’s next month. Giving and receiving can overlap, rather than being fixed roles.\n\n## Roots\n\nThe idea is old, and so is its name. In *Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution*, published in 1902, Peter Kropotkin argued against the view that competition is the main force in nature and society. Drawing on observations of animals and of human societies, from indigenous communities to medieval guilds, he held that cooperation is just as basic to survival.\n\nOrganizers use the term today too. Dean Spade, author of *Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)*, describes it as collective coordination to meet one another’s needs, usually because existing systems are not meeting them, and points out that those systems have often helped create the crisis in the first place.\n\n## How it differs on the system map\n\nOn the [system map](/record/encyclopedia/charity-as-a-system/), most charity runs one way: from givers through signals and channels to work done for someone else, with results rarely coming back. Mutual aid folds the stages together. The giver can see the need directly, the person helped often has a say in what help looks like, and the result is visible to everyone involved. In Charitology’s terms, direct contact may support a [feedback loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) and [voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/). That is a feature to examine, not a guarantee that every network shares power well.\n\nThe costs mirror the strengths. Mutual aid reaches the people inside a network, so people outside it can be missed. It runs on volunteer time, which can run out. And because it is close to home, it carries the [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/) by design. Under the care framework that is the point; under the welfare framework it is a trade-off worth seeing clearly.\n\n## Depth\n\nMutual aid can provide relief: food, rent and rides this week. But the networks it builds can outlast the crisis that formed them. Humanity’s Checklist names coordination, whether the people who could solve a problem together ever meet, as one of the six sources upstream of world problems. Whether mutual aid networks change coordination in a lasting way is a question the sources here do not settle.\n\n## What we don’t know\n\nMuch mutual aid never passes through a registered organization, so it is largely invisible to the data the rest of the system uses. This entry does not establish its total scale or compare its results with formal charity working on the same needs. The [Giving Traditions Library](/record/traditions/) records older forms of the same practice.\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["solidarity networks","community self-help"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-feedback-loop"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-voice"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"proximity-pull"}],"related":["/record/encyclopedia/charity-as-a-system/","/record/encyclopedia/beneficiary-feedback/","/record/traditions/","/programs/local-charitology/","/record/lexicon/#mutual-aid"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Peter Kropotkin (Project Gutenberg edition)","title":"Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution","url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4341","year":1902},{"note":null,"publisher":"Barnard Center for Research on Women, conversation with Dean Spade, Mariame Kaba and Ejeris Dixon","title":"We Keep Each Other Safe: Mutual Aid for Survival and Solidarity","url":"https://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/we-keep-each-other-safe-mutual-aid-for-survival-and-solidarity","year":2021}],"summary":"People in a community pooling time, money and skills to meet one another’s needs directly, without a charity standing between giver and receiver. Its structure can differ from giving through a separate service provider.","title":"Mutual aid"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"9958abef43604bf7032d01e5cf82e601e5e2c49b57fedb73c642707e598fea9c","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"bb94aad447fcf04258f69d0181384b67900a6cb40f9e64ffc8f3b99621655105","id":"version:concept-neglectedness-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:neglectedness","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-neglectedness-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nA problem is **neglected** when few people or dollars are working on it compared with how big it is. 80,000 Hours measures neglectedness simply: how many people, or how many dollars, are currently dedicated to solving the problem?\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe first resources that go into a problem usually go to its best opportunities. Later resources go to the next best, and so on. So returns diminish as a field fills up. 80,000 Hours argues that returns most likely diminish logarithmically, which means each doubling of resources buys roughly the same amount of progress. If that is right, a dollar added to a problem that gets a million dollars a year can matter far more than a dollar added to one that gets a billion.\n\nGiveWell Labs, the project that became the Open Philanthropy Project, made a similar point in 2014 with a different word. When it compared U.S. policy areas, it asked how *crowded* each one was: how much existing advocacy already pushed for the same goals, and where the gaps were.\n\n## Three cautions\n\n1. **Neglected for a reason.** Neglectedness is a good guide only when a problem is neglected for bad reasons. Some problems get little money because they are small or because nobody knows how to make progress on them.\n2. **The factors overlap.** Robert Wiblin of 80,000 Hours notes that a problem can stay important precisely because it is neglected. He suggests judging how important and how tractable a problem would be if nobody were working on it, so that one observation is not counted twice.\n3. **Boundaries move the answer.** A narrowly defined problem almost always looks more neglected than a broad one. How you draw the edges of a problem changes its score.\n\n## Neglect as a property of the system\n\nCharitology adds a system view. Neglect is not random. The [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/) predicts that problems without faces or headlines will be neglected. The [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/) predicts neglect of distant need, and the [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) predicts neglect of goods that the dominant moral frameworks cannot see.\n\nCharitology’s founding hypothesis, the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), is that work at the structure and source levels is neglected relative to relief. That hypothesis is untested. Testing it starts with [the Depth Census](/open-problems/the-depth-census/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["crowdedness","uncrowdedness","diminishing returns"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"story-bias"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"proximity-pull"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"single-lens"}],"related":["/record/encyclopedia/scale-neglectedness-tractability/","/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/","/record/lexicon/#neglectedness","/open-problems/the-depth-census/","/tools/compare-tool/"],"sources":[{"note":"First published in 2016 and last updated in December 2025.","publisher":"Robert Wiblin, 80,000 Hours","title":"A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact","url":"https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/","year":2016},{"note":null,"publisher":"Robert Wiblin, Effective Altruism Forum","title":"The Important/Neglected/Tractable framework needs to be applied with care","url":"https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/74oJS32C6CZRC4Zp5/the-important-neglected-tractable-framework-needs-to-be","year":2016},{"note":null,"publisher":"Holden Karnofsky, The GiveWell Blog","title":"Narrowing down U.S. policy areas","url":"https://blog.givewell.org/2014/05/22/narrowing-down-u-s-policy-areas/","year":2014}],"summary":"How few resources already go to a problem relative to its size. Other things equal, an extra dollar tends to do more where few other dollars go, because the best opportunities there have not yet been taken.","title":"Neglectedness"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"2135697ed1a306caceaddbfc3485cc0f9b5c59cfa86f5544ffa994e7f936281e","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"72763856a3fbffb7fa04dc289a421a2e2668a224ca449c845d43fb9d1ff8677e","id":"version:concept-outputs-and-outcomes-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:outputs-and-outcomes","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-outputs-and-outcomes-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nEvery program can be described as a chain: resources pay for **activities**, activities produce **outputs**, and outputs may or may not lead to **outcomes**. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s *Logic Model Development Guide* defines the links this way:\n\n- **Outputs** are the direct products of a program’s activities, usually counted by size and scope: classes taught, meetings held, materials distributed, people served.\n- **Outcomes** are specific changes in participants’ behavior, knowledge, skills, status and level of functioning. The guide expects short-term outcomes within one to three years and longer-term outcomes within four to six.\n- **Impact** is the fundamental change, intended or not, in organizations, communities or systems, which the guide places seven to ten years out, often after the grant has ended.\n\n## An example\n\nImagine a bed-net program distributing 10,000 nets. That is an output. Families sleeping under the nets is an early outcome. Fewer children dying of malaria is the outcome that matters. In the trials pooled by a 2018 Cochrane review, insecticide-treated nets cut child deaths from all causes by about 17 percent compared with no nets. A program that only counts nets handed out cannot say whether it achieved anything like that.\n\n## Why outputs win\n\nOutputs are cheap to count and can be counted in-house. Monitoring outcomes may need follow-up and time. Attributing changes to a program also needs a credible comparison, which does not always require randomization. The risk is that a count such as “10,000 meals served” is read as evidence of a later change without that change being checked. That is the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/). The [Overhead Myth](/diagnosis/overhead-myth/) makes it worse, because measuring outcomes takes staff and systems that donors often see as overhead.\n\n## Outcomes can be negative\n\nThe Kellogg definition of impact includes unintended change. Some programs produce outcomes opposite to the ones intended, which only a comparison shows. See [Scared Straight](/record/case-studies/scared-straight/).\n\n## Outcomes and depth\n\nSome work at the structure and source levels of the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) has outcomes far from its activities or takes a long time to show them. Depth does not determine timing by itself. A campaign to change a law has outputs within months and outcomes over years. That is part of why source-level work is so hard to judge. See [theory of change](/record/encyclopedia/theory-of-change/) and the [Impact Measurement Toolkit](/tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["outputs","outcomes","impact","results chain","logic model"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"overhead-myth"}],"related":["/diagnosis/measurement-gap/","/record/encyclopedia/theory-of-change/","/tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/","/method/","/record/lexicon/#outcomes"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"W.K. Kellogg Foundation","title":"Logic Model Development Guide","url":"https://www.naccho.org/uploads/downloadable-resources/Programs/Public-Health-Infrastructure/KelloggLogicModelGuide_161122_162808.pdf","year":2004},{"note":null,"publisher":"Joseph Pryce, Marty Richardson and Christian Lengeler, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews","title":"Insecticide-treated nets for preventing malaria (Cochrane systematic review)","url":"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6418392/","year":2018}],"summary":"Outputs are what a program does or delivers. Outcomes are what changes for people as a result. Counting outputs alone does not establish outcomes.","title":"Outputs and outcomes"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"3d16fcd04370ffc1948a4bb83f77568075aad09c1c1df66047b3069d4563e581","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"eb020977d52d7e66430715384edd373b4335951be331479141b04143dab9e006","id":"version:concept-overhead-ratio-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:overhead-ratio","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-overhead-ratio-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nU.S. charities that file the full IRS Form 990 report their expenses in Part IX, the Statement of Functional Expenses, which sorts them into three columns: program services, management and general, and fundraising. The **overhead ratio** is the share that falls in the second and third columns. A charity that spends $100 with $15 on management and fundraising has an overhead ratio of 15 percent.\n\n## Why it became the default\n\nIt is printed on a public form, and it seems to answer the question donors most want answered: how much of my gift reaches the cause? Part IX does not itself measure results.\n\n## What it can’t tell you\n\nThe ratio says how costs are split, not what they buy. Some costs of running an organization well land in those columns, while shared costs must be allocated by function under the IRS instructions, and they are often what make a program work. A charity can spend almost nothing on overhead and achieve nothing, and another can invest heavily in systems and change thousands of lives.\n\nThe ratio also shapes behavior. Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard described a *nonprofit starvation cycle*: funders expect low overhead, charities feel pressure to meet the expectation, so they underspend on infrastructure and underreport what they do spend, which keeps expectations low. They cited a study in which more than a third of organizations reported no fundraising costs at all, and a 2001 survey by the Better Business Bureau in which more than half of American adults said overhead should be 20 percent or less.\n\n## An open letter\n\nIn June 2013 the leaders of GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, three organizations that donors turn to for information about charities, published an open letter calling the overhead percentage a poor measure of a charity’s performance. They asked donors to look instead at transparency, governance, leadership and results. They also said that very high overhead can still be a sign of fraud or poor management, so the ratio can prompt further questions without being a verdict on its own.\n\n## What could replace it\n\nFinding a simple public measure that tracks results without being easy to game is [Open Problem 6, the Overhead Replacement](/open-problems/the-overhead-replacement/). The raw material exists: [Charity Impact Media](https://theguysaccount.github.io/charity-impact-media/) publishes Form 990 spending breakdowns, with every number linked to its filing and no ratings attached. See also the [Myth-Busting Series](/record/myths/) on the claim that a low overhead ratio means a good charity.\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["overhead","program expense ratio","administrative costs","fundraising ratio"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"overhead-myth"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"}],"related":["/diagnosis/overhead-myth/","/record/myths/","/open-problems/the-overhead-replacement/","/tools/charity-lookup/","/record/lexicon/#overhead-ratio"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Internal Revenue Service","title":"Instructions for Form 990, Part IX, Statement of Functional Expenses","url":"https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i990","year":2025},{"note":null,"publisher":"Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard, Stanford Social Innovation Review","title":"The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle","url":"https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_nonprofit_starvation_cycle","year":2009},{"note":null,"publisher":"The Chronicle of Philanthropy","title":"3 Major Charity Groups Ask Donors to Stop Focusing on Overhead Costs","url":"https://www.philanthropy.com/news/3-major-charity-groups-ask-donors-to-stop-focusing-on-overhead-costs/","year":2013},{"note":null,"publisher":"Charity Impact Media","title":"Charity Impact Media","url":"https://theguysaccount.github.io/charity-impact-media/","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Candid","title":"The overhead myth: crash course to fundraising transparency","url":"https://candid.org/blogs/the-overhead-myth-crash-course-to-fundraising-transparency/","year":2022}],"summary":"The share of a charity’s spending that goes to management and fundraising rather than to programs. It is easy to find and widely used, but it does not establish what a charity achieves.","title":"Overhead ratio"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"f0753458bc7b3a0b30fe5d6957d639d5c878a37dddcd30bbd81d69ee3f563c10","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"39d945b7785e62c6e8c7e9854aefb7ec43d90470082fa85a8139ffc81a1ffb0f","id":"version:concept-participatory-grantmaking-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:participatory-grantmaking","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-participatory-grantmaking-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nIn a conventional grant process, donors, foundation staff or boards decide where money goes. **Participatory grantmaking** moves some of those decisions to the people who will live with the results. In the version described by Cynthia Gibson’s 2018 guide for GrantCraft, *Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking*, funders cede decision-making power about funding to the communities they aim to serve.\n\n## What it looks like\n\nParticipation runs along a spectrum. At one end, community members advise a funder that still decides. Further along, they sit on the panels that review applications, set the criteria or choose the strategy. At the far end, a community-led group controls the money outright. Gibson’s guide, which Alliance magazine described as the first focused entirely on participatory grantmaking, drew on examples from many participatory funders, many of them smaller foundations focused on human rights. The Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations supported the work.\n\n## The case for it\n\nCommunity members can bring knowledge about needs, risks and trusted organizations that a funder may lack. A process that lets them decide also changes who holds power, which some practitioners see as part of the result rather than a means to it. Humanity’s Checklist names gatekeepers as one of the six sources upstream of world problems: concentrated decision rights may exclude useful ideas. Participatory grantmaking applies the same idea to philanthropy.\n\n## The questions it raises\n\nWho speaks for a community, and how are they chosen? What does it cost in time and money to run a fair process, and who pays participants for their time? How does a funder handle conflicts of interest when panelists know the applicants? Practitioners answer these in different ways, and the answers shape the results.\n\n## What we don’t know\n\nThe guide presents principles and practitioners’ experience. It does not establish a general causal estimate of the effect on final outcomes. Do community-decided grants achieve more than expert-decided ones on the same outcome, and in which settings? That is [Open Problem 14, the Agency Premium](/open-problems/the-agency-premium/). See also [the Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/) and [beneficiary feedback](/record/encyclopedia/beneficiary-feedback/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["participatory philanthropy","community-led grantmaking","shifting power"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-voice"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-feedback-loop"}],"related":["/diagnosis/missing-voice/","/open-problems/the-agency-premium/","/record/encyclopedia/beneficiary-feedback/","/record/lexicon/#participatory-grantmaking","/record/lexicon/#trust-based-philanthropy"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Alliance magazine, on Cynthia Gibson’s GrantCraft guide “Deciding Together”","title":"New report on how funders can engage in participatory grantmaking","url":"https://www.alliancemagazine.org/blog/new-report-on-how-funders-can-engage-in-participatory-grantmaking/","year":2018},{"note":null,"publisher":"Humanity’s Checklist","title":"Humanity’s Checklist: six things to fix so we can fix everything else","url":"https://humanityschecklist.org/","year":2026},{"note":null,"publisher":"Cynthia Gibson, GrantCraft, Foundation Center","title":"Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking","url":"https://learningforfunders.candid.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/12/DecidingTogether_Final_20181002.pdf","year":2018}],"summary":"Grantmaking in which funders hand some or all of the decisions about money, including strategy and criteria, to the communities the money is meant to serve.","title":"Participatory grantmaking"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"022a9765c34f0f28c50f65579f45fcb61c7f7d663adc90504f1b2391d5ff5a0d","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"bda0b43e87fa0de84494f66c02215a252aaca798eace5cee8de06c5cb4a28abe","id":"version:concept-private-foundations-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:private-foundations","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-private-foundations-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nUnder U.S. tax law, every 501(c)(3) organization is a **private foundation** unless it falls into an excluded category, such as hospitals, universities and organizations with broad public support. Giving USA estimates that foundations gave about $117 billion in 2025, roughly a fifth of all U.S. giving.\n\n## The 5 percent rule\n\nPrivate non-operating foundations generally must make qualifying distributions each year; operating foundations have different rules. The amount is tied to what the IRS calls a foundation’s *minimum investment return*: 5 percent of the value of its assets that are not used for charitable purposes, less debt incurred to buy them. A foundation that falls short owes a 30 percent excise tax on the undistributed amount under Section 4942 of the tax code, and a 100 percent tax if it does not make up the shortfall within 90 days of being notified.\n\nFoundations can also invest for their mission. A **program-related investment**, in the IRS’s terms, is one whose primary purpose is charitable, where earning income is not a significant purpose and which is not used for lobbying or political campaigns. The IRS’s examples include low-interest loans to needy students and high-risk investments in nonprofit low-income housing.\n\n## Floor or ceiling?\n\nThe rule sets a minimum. Whether it works in practice as a maximum is debated. An analysis of IRS data by Helen Flannery of the Institute for Policy Studies found that the median payout rate of private non-operating foundations ranged from 5.2 to 5.6 percent between 2015 and 2021. For foundations with more than a billion dollars, it was usually 5.0 or 5.1 percent.\n\n## Forever or now?\n\nA foundation whose investments earn more than it pays out can, in principle, last forever. Some choose not to. In May 2025 Bill Gates announced that the Gates Foundation would spend about $200 billion over 20 years and close permanently on December 31, 2045, much sooner than its charter had planned.\n\nThere are serious arguments on the other side. The economist Philip Trammell argues that a truly patient funder can invest, let returns compound and give far more later, when people may also know more about how to do good. He also lists the risks: a fund can be lost to war or financial collapse, or drift from its founder’s goals.\n\nWhich approach does more good is not known. It depends on how fast good opportunities are being used up, how fast invested money grows and how much the future should count. That is [Open Problem 12, the Payout Question](/open-problems/the-payout-question/). See also [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/) and [discounting](/record/encyclopedia/discounting/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["foundations","grantmaking foundations","the 5 percent rule","minimum distribution requirement"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"parked-money"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"}],"related":["/diagnosis/parked-money/","/open-problems/the-payout-question/","/record/encyclopedia/donor-advised-funds/","/record/lexicon/#private-foundation","/record/lexicon/#payout-rate"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Internal Revenue Service","title":"Private foundations","url":"https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/private-foundations","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Internal Revenue Service","title":"Minimum investment return","url":"https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/minimum-investment-return","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Internal Revenue Service","title":"Taxes on failure to distribute income, private foundations","url":"https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/taxes-on-failure-to-distribute-income-private-foundations","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Internal Revenue Service","title":"Program-related investments","url":"https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/program-related-investments","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Foundation Source","title":"Key takeaways from Giving USA’s 2026 report on philanthropy","url":"https://foundationsource.com/blog/key-takeaways-from-giving-usas-2026-report-on-philanthropy/","year":2026},{"note":null,"publisher":"Helen Flannery, Inequality.org (Institute for Policy Studies)","title":"The 5 Percent Foundation Payout Requirement May Be a Floor, but the Ceiling Is Awfully Low","url":"https://inequality.org/article/foundation-payout/","year":2023},{"note":null,"publisher":"Alliance magazine","title":"Gates to give away $200 billon and shutter foundation in 2045","url":"https://www.alliancemagazine.org/blog/gates-to-give-away-200-billon-and-shutter-foundation-in-2045/","year":2025},{"note":null,"publisher":"80,000 Hours Podcast","title":"Phil Trammell on how becoming a ‘patient philanthropist’ might allow you to do far more good","url":"https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/phil-trammell-patient-philanthropy/","year":2020}],"summary":"In U.S. law, charities that do not qualify as public charities, usually because they lack broad public support. They must generally spend an amount tied to 5 percent of their investment assets on charitable purposes each year.","title":"Private foundations"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"d03c0cd83ce61442200dbe91c6e085f4cc14827966fe047fe13c7774536c85ef","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"5ebcb11ab4263f730e445a2df780daf12764a6b94d27e18f0a10b4146f5e9777","id":"version:concept-psychic-numbing-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:psychic-numbing","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-psychic-numbing-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nIf every life counts equally, saving a hundred lives should matter a hundred times as much as saving one. Feelings don’t work that way. **Psychic numbing** is the name for the gap: concern fails to keep pace with the number of people suffering, and past a point it can fall.\n\n## The idea\n\nRobert J. Lifton coined the term for the turning off of feeling that let rescue workers keep functioning after Hiroshima. In a 2007 paper the psychologist Paul Slovic used it more broadly, for the pattern in which emotional response shrinks as the number of victims grows, leading to apathy. The paper takes its title from a line attributed to Mother Teresa: “If I look at the mass I will never act.”\n\nSlovic argued that people value lives along a psychophysical curve, the way they perceive other quantities: each additional life registers less than the one before. Few people would feel any difference between saving 87 lives and saving 88. Applied to atrocities, he argued, the pattern helps explain why the world largely stood by as about 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in roughly 100 days. Statistics about mass killing, however large, fail to produce the feeling that drives action.\n\n## Compassion fade\n\nThe effect may start very early. In studies published in 2014, Daniel Västfjäll, Paul Slovic, Marcus Mayorga and Ellen Peters found that feelings of compassion, and in some studies donations, were greatest for a single child in need and began to decline with the second endangered life. The decline reversed when several people were presented as one unit, such as a family. Some of the studies used real money and some used hypothetical choices.\n\nRelated findings, such as the [identifiable victim effect](/record/encyclopedia/identifiable-victim-effect/), are now being tested again, and at least one prominent replication found no effect. How strong and reliable each finding is remains an open research question.\n\n## Why it matters for the system\n\nA charity system that moves money through human attention inherits the limits of human attention. If concern falls as need grows, the largest problems will draw the least feeling per person affected, and the deepest ones, which are often abstract and statistical, the least of all. This is part of the [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/), and a reason the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/) is plausible.\n\nKnowing about the bias does not switch it off. Can a story make people feel the size of a problem rather than one face? Formats worth testing include stories of whole communities, visualizations of scale and stories about sources rather than symptoms. That is [Open Problem 7, Story Without Bias](/open-problems/story-without-bias/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["compassion fade","compassion collapse","scope insensitivity"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"story-bias"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"}],"related":["/diagnosis/story-bias/","/record/encyclopedia/identifiable-victim-effect/","/open-problems/story-without-bias/","/record/lexicon/#psychic-numbing"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Paul Slovic, Judgment and Decision Making 2(2)","title":"“If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide","url":"https://journal.sjdm.org/7303a/jdm7303a.htm","year":2007},{"note":null,"publisher":"Daniel Västfjäll, Paul Slovic, Marcus Mayorga and Ellen Peters, PLoS ONE 9(6)","title":"Compassion Fade: Affect and Charity Are Greatest for a Single Child in Need","url":"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4062481/","year":2014}],"summary":"The way concern for people in danger fails to grow with their number, and can even shrink, so that a single person in need moves us more than a mass tragedy. The psychologist Paul Slovic has used it to explain how people respond to suffering on a large scale.","title":"Psychic numbing"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"2d5393dba77d8491177ec240fae9868218417e20925d846b15c9ec52f3af2462","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"40be57fbec79d5453394451a9b82f32704e1349fc5ef5608a83b5325ace5c7e1","id":"version:concept-randomized-controlled-trials-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:randomized-controlled-trials","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-randomized-controlled-trials-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nA **randomized controlled trial** (RCT) assigns people, villages or schools to receive a program or not by chance, like a coin flip. Because chance decides, the groups are expected to be alike in everything except the program. The difference in their outcomes then estimates the program’s effect. A trial is a way of seeing the [counterfactual](/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/): what would have happened without the program.\n\n## In development economics\n\nIn 2019 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of MIT and Michael Kremer of Harvard “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” The Academy said they split poverty into smaller, more precise questions, often best answered by carefully designed experiments among the people most affected. It credited one of their studies with leading to remedial tutoring programs that have reached more than five million children in India. J-PAL, the research center Banerjee and Duflo founded at MIT in 2003 with Sendhil Mullainathan, says its network has led more than 2,700 randomized evaluations.\n\n## What trials can show\n\nTrials can confirm that something works and show how much. A Cochrane review of five trials with about 200,000 participants found that insecticide-treated nets cut child deaths from all causes by about 17 percent, and rated that evidence high-certainty.\n\nThey can also show that something does harm. A Cochrane review of nine trials of “Scared Straight” programs found that they increased offending compared with doing nothing.\n\n## The critique\n\nAngus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright argue that the public, and sometimes researchers, put too much trust in RCTs compared with other methods. Randomization does not guarantee that the groups in any one trial are equal in everything but the treatment. At best a trial gives an unbiased estimate, which they say is of limited practical value on its own. Its result applies to the people in the trial, and carrying it to a new place or population needs a further argument about why the program worked. They see trials as useful inside a cumulative program of research that combines them with other methods.\n\n## Where trials stop\n\nMany of the questions Charitology cares most about cannot be randomized. Some national laws and cultural changes cannot feasibly be assigned at random, though policy rollout or components can sometimes be randomized. Charitology hypothesizes that limits on trial evidence can affect funding for structure and [source](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) work. Finding other ways to measure it is [Open Problem 3](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/). How often trial findings hold up when repeated is [Open Problem 10](/open-problems/the-replication-rate/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["RCTs","randomized evaluations","field experiments"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"}],"related":["/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/","/record/principles/04-evidence-and-its-grades/","/programs/evidence-reviews/","/programs/replication-program/","/open-problems/the-replication-rate/"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences","title":"The Prize in Economic Sciences 2019","url":"https://www.kva.se/en/news/ekonomipriset-2019-2/","year":2019},{"note":null,"publisher":"Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)","title":"About us","url":"https://www.povertyactionlab.org/about-us","year":null},{"note":"Freely readable at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6019115/","publisher":"Angus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright, Social Science & Medicine 210","title":"Understanding and misunderstanding randomized controlled trials","url":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.12.005","year":2018},{"note":null,"publisher":"Joseph Pryce, Marty Richardson and Christian Lengeler, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews","title":"Insecticide-treated nets for preventing malaria (Cochrane systematic review)","url":"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6418392/","year":2018},{"note":null,"publisher":"Anthony Petrosino and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews","title":"“Scared Straight” and other juvenile awareness programs for preventing juvenile delinquency","url":"https://www.cochrane.org/evidence/CD002796_scared-straight-and-other-juvenile-awareness-programs-preventing-juvenile-delinquency","year":2022}],"summary":"Experiments that assign people or communities to a program or to a comparison group by chance, so that differences in outcomes can be credited to the program. They reshaped development economics, and their limits are still debated.","title":"Randomized controlled trials"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"d6fdc38227c624e96c38e676691488ab366ba65b4ebd5ac2705fa1dc846fdf0f","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"3e252a6678130b4cbbbc4664d549451e2082183aaf2950ff7d2fa548ff2307c6","id":"version:concept-restricted-and-unrestricted-funding-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:restricted-and-unrestricted-funding","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-restricted-and-unrestricted-funding-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nA **restricted** gift comes with conditions: it must pay for a named project, often within a set time and budget. An **unrestricted** gift, or **general operating support**, can be spent on whatever the organization judges most useful, including salaries, systems and evaluation. When unrestricted support is promised for several years at a time, it is called multiyear general operating support.\n\n## The case for each\n\nRestriction feels like accountability. A funder can see exactly what its money bought, and it can be sure the gift serves the goal it cares about. That instinct is responsible.\n\nThe case for flexibility is that organizations learn. A charity halfway through a project may find a better approach, or discover that its accounting system is about to fail. A restriction may require the charity to seek the funder’s agreement before changing how the money is used. A grant that does not cover its share of running costs leaves those costs to be funded elsewhere. Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard found that foundation allowances for indirect costs averaged 10 to 15 percent of each grant. In four youth-serving nonprofits they studied, actual overhead ran from 17 to 35 percent. They called the result the nonprofit starvation cycle.\n\n## Attitudes and practice\n\nIn a 2020 report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy, 58 percent of foundation CEOs said their foundations gave some multiyear general operating support, usually to only a few grantees. Among the 58 percent that provided it, 11 percent gave it to more than half their grantees. The survey covered foundations giving at least $5 million a year, not all funders.\n\nThen came a natural experiment. In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, a pledge led by the Ford Foundation with the Council on Foundations, and informed by the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, asked funders to loosen or eliminate restrictions on current grants, make new grants as unrestricted as possible and cut reporting demands. The Council published the signatories to the pledge. The first of the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project’s six practices is to give multi-year, unrestricted funding.\n\n## What we don’t know\n\nThe case for unrestricted funding is strong, but most of it rests on what charities say they prefer, not on outcomes. Restriction may help in some situations, for example when a funder brings knowledge the grantee lacks. The sources here do not establish when each works better on final outcomes. The shift of 2020 makes comparison possible: what happened to grantees whose funding became flexible, compared with similar grantees whose funding did not? That is [Open Problem 8, the Optimal Restriction](/open-problems/the-optimal-restriction/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["general operating support","flexible funding","project funding","multiyear funding"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"restriction-reflex"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"overhead-myth"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"}],"related":["/diagnosis/restriction-reflex/","/open-problems/the-optimal-restriction/","/record/lexicon/#general-operating-support","/record/lexicon/#trust-based-philanthropy","/tools/grant-evaluator/"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Center for Effective Philanthropy, via the National Center for Family Philanthropy","title":"New Attitudes, Old Practices: The Provision of Multiyear General Operating Support","url":"https://www.ncfp.org/download/new-attitudes-old-practices-cep-2020-0","year":2020},{"note":null,"publisher":"Ford Foundation","title":"Top Foundations Pledge Flexible Funding to Grantees in Wake of COVID-19 Crisis","url":"https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/news-and-press/news/top-foundations-pledge-flexible-funding-to-grantees-in-wake-of-covid-19-crisis/","year":2020},{"note":null,"publisher":"Council on Foundations","title":"A Call to Action: Philanthropy’s Commitment During COVID-19","url":"https://www.cof.org/news/call-action-philanthropys-commitment-during-covid-19","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Trust-Based Philanthropy Project","title":"Six Practices of Trust-Based Grantmaking","url":"https://www.trustbasedphilanthropy.org/practices","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard, Stanford Social Innovation Review","title":"The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle","url":"https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_nonprofit_starvation_cycle","year":2009}],"summary":"Restricted gifts must be spent on a purpose the funder names. Unrestricted gifts, also called general operating support, let the organization decide. The balance between them shapes what charities can learn, fix and attempt.","title":"Restricted and unrestricted funding"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"b21d1616364ebc49787e9320734dfa7502dadf41ef5f494f8540e10c71beaaa3","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"d424a4007b06e0ea5dde0627ca8562cab42843e648bd9d4d2c6afac44cc1e87e","id":"version:concept-scale-neglectedness-tractability-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:scale-neglectedness-tractability","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-scale-neglectedness-tractability-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nThe **scale, neglectedness and tractability** framework asks three questions about a problem before asking which charity to fund. In the version 80,000 Hours publishes:\n\n- **Scale:** If we solved the problem, how good would it be?\n- **Neglectedness:** How many people, or dollars, are currently working on it? See [neglectedness](/record/encyclopedia/neglectedness/).\n- **Solvability**, often called **tractability:** If we doubled the effort going into it, what fraction of what remains would we expect to solve?\n\nMultiplied together, the three give an estimate of how much good an extra unit of money or work would do. Because the scores are logarithmic, 80,000 Hours adds them instead of multiplying.\n\n## Where it came from\n\nGiveWell Labs, the project that became the Open Philanthropy Project (later Open Philanthropy, and since 2025 Coefficient Giving), compared causes by importance, tractability and how crowded they were. A 2014 post used those three criteria to narrow down U.S. policy areas. In December 2013 Benjamin Todd of 80,000 Hours proposed a cause-selection framework of importance, tractability and uncrowdedness, crediting GiveWell Labs for the names. Robert Wiblin’s 2016 article for 80,000 Hours turned it into the formal version still in use.\n\n## Cautions from its own authors\n\n80,000 Hours lists the limits plainly. The scores are imprecise, and adding them adds uncertainty. Narrowly defined problems tend to score better than broad ones. Trade-offs between the yardsticks rest on contested value judgments. Solvability is the hardest factor to score, and the true differences between problems are probably smaller than the scores suggest. Wiblin also warns that the factors overlap: a problem can stay important because it is neglected, so the same fact can be counted twice.\n\n## How Charitology uses it\n\nCharitology treats the framework as a good tool that needs one more input: a moral framework. *Scale* needs a unit, such as lives, wellbeing, rights secured or species protected, and choosing the unit is a moral choice. A problem can rank first under one lens and last under another. So Charitology asks the questions once per framework. Its frameworks data, used by the [Values Compass](/tools/values-compass/), sketches how each framework tends to rank causes, so a giver can see where the rankings agree. Where they cannot be put on one scale at all is [Open Problem 2, the Exchange Rate Problem](/open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/).\n\nThe framework scores problems, not the depth of the work. A problem can be crowded at the relief level and neglected at the source level. Charitology’s working hypothesis is that this pattern is common, which is the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/). This project has not established that pattern.\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["SNT framework","ITN framework","importance, neglectedness and tractability","scale, neglectedness and solvability"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"single-lens"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"}],"related":["/record/encyclopedia/neglectedness/","/record/encyclopedia/effective-altruism/","/open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/","/tools/values-compass/","/record/lexicon/#tractability"],"sources":[{"note":"First published in 2016 and last updated in December 2025.","publisher":"Robert Wiblin, 80,000 Hours","title":"A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact","url":"https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/","year":2016},{"note":null,"publisher":"Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours","title":"A framework for strategically selecting a cause","url":"https://80000hours.org/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/","year":2013},{"note":null,"publisher":"Holden Karnofsky, The GiveWell Blog","title":"Narrowing down U.S. policy areas","url":"https://blog.givewell.org/2014/05/22/narrowing-down-u-s-policy-areas/","year":2014},{"note":null,"publisher":"Robert Wiblin, Effective Altruism Forum","title":"The Important/Neglected/Tractable framework needs to be applied with care","url":"https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/74oJS32C6CZRC4Zp5/the-important-neglected-tractable-framework-needs-to-be","year":2016},{"note":null,"publisher":"Effective Altruism Forum","title":"Open Philanthropy Is Now Coefficient Giving","url":"https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vkvtu6xbvfkHPhJkC/open-philanthropy-is-now-coefficient-giving","year":2025}],"summary":"A framework for comparing problems by how big they are, how few resources already go to them and how much extra effort would achieve. It grew out of GiveWell Labs and 80,000 Hours and is widely used in effective altruism.","title":"Scale, neglectedness and tractability"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"1207f518054314422f9a4b8af8d8d426bca8b69efe97bb262d0c1f25a53dc928","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"83bc8535cc196ebdfebbf206c6bdf18a138d688cca413322dd127a4462003c2f","id":"version:concept-source-depth-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:source-depth","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-source-depth-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\n**Source depth** says where on the chain from [symptom to source](/record/encyclopedia/symptoms-and-sources/) a piece of work acts. Charitology uses a five-level scale, numbered 0 to 4, set out in [the Method](/method/#depth). Every gift, program and organization can be described with it.\n\n## The five levels\n\n| Level | Name | What it does | Examples |\n| --- | --- | --- | --- |\n| 0 | Relief | Meets the need today | A meal at a food bank, emergency surgery, a disaster shelter |\n| 1 | Repair | Restores what was lost | Rebuilding a home, rehabilitation after an injury, a job after a layoff |\n| 2 | Prevention | Stops it happening to these people | Bed nets, vaccines, clean water for a village |\n| 3 | Structure | Changes the rules that produce it | A lead-paint ban, a new public health system, a corporate standard |\n| 4 | Source | Changes what feeds many problems at once | The story a society tells itself, how people coordinate, what a culture rewards |\n\nEach level has a test question. Relief asks whether someone is fed, sheltered or treated right now. Repair asks whether someone is back where they were before the harm. Prevention asks whether these people will avoid the harm altogether. Structure asks whether a law, institution, market or norm changed so the harm stops being produced. Source asks whether something upstream of a whole family of problems changed.\n\n## Depth describes. It never grades.\n\nEvery level is needed. Immediate food matters to a hungry person tonight, and a change at the source can take a generation to arrive. A deeper level is not a better level, and nothing in the scale says a food bank matters less than a policy campaign. The scale exists so that a giver knows what they are paying for, and so the field can ask whether the system’s overall mix is right. That is the question behind the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/).\n\n## How to place a piece of work\n\n- **Classify the activity, not the cause.** One cause has work at every depth. Homelessness has emergency shelters (relief), rehousing (repair), eviction prevention (prevention) and zoning reform (structure).\n- **Classify what the money does, not the mission statement.** One organization can work at several depths. Weight each activity by what it spends.\n- **Say when it is hard to call.** Boundaries between levels are fuzzy. How often two independent people place the same work at the same level is itself worth measuring.\n\n## The top of the scale\n\nLevel 4 comes from Humanity’s Checklist, which argues that world problems grow from six shared sources: the story we tell, how we coordinate, what we can picture, what our feeds reward, what we admire and who gets to build. Charitology treats the claim that changing them would help everything downstream as a hypothesis to test.\n\n## What this project has not established\n\nCharitology has not produced a public estimate of the world’s giving by depth and has not established the current mix. Measuring it is [Open Problem 1, the Depth Census](/open-problems/the-depth-census/). Measuring the effect of source-level work, which is diffuse, shared and slow, is [Open Problem 3](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["depth scale","depth","relief to source"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"}],"related":["/method/","/record/encyclopedia/symptoms-and-sources/","/record/principles/03-depth-from-relief-to-source/","/open-problems/the-depth-census/","/open-problems/measuring-the-source/"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Humanity’s Checklist","title":"Humanity’s Checklist: six things to fix so we can fix everything else","url":"https://humanityschecklist.org/","year":2026}],"summary":"Charitology’s five-level scale for where a piece of work acts on the chain from symptom to source, from relief through repair, prevention and structure to source. It describes the work. It never grades it.","title":"Source depth"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"5ba4e9376e58ad4ee4ced5479b0609d8a9dcc331db826a2dfac70f16c25e114e","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"47b6cbf43a3b0e2d73e2d86c51d202b9fbed21c1ae3981aa8b2d6e212e618dd8","id":"version:concept-symptoms-and-sources-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:symptoms-and-sources","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-symptoms-and-sources-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nA **symptom** is a problem as it shows up in someone’s life: hunger tonight, an untreated fever, a flooded home. A **source** is something upstream that keeps producing problems, often many at once.\n\n## Why the distinction matters\n\nSymptoms are urgent, visible and real, and helping with them is good. Some needs recur because the conditions producing them persist. A food bank feeds people tonight, and tomorrow there is a line again. Charitology asks every gift where it acts on the chain from symptom to source, and asks the system as a whole whether its mix is right. That is the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/).\n\n## The six sources\n\nHumanity’s Checklist argues that the world’s problems grow from a few shared sources inside humanity’s collective life:\n\n- **Story**: the story we tell ourselves about what is possible\n- **Coordination**: whether the people who could solve a problem together ever meet\n- **Vision**: whether we can picture the future we want to build\n- **Attention**: what our feeds and media reward\n- **Status**: what a culture admires\n- **Gatekeepers**: who gets to build and be seen\n\nFixing a source, the checklist argues, stops it feeding the problems below it and starts it feeding the cure. Charitology adopts these six as the top of its [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) and treats the claim that fixing them would help everything downstream as a hypothesis to test.\n\n## Between symptom and source\n\nMost work sits in between. Charitology’s depth scale has five levels: relief, repair, prevention, structure and source. Bed nets are prevention: they stop malaria for the people who sleep under them. A ban on lead paint is structure: it changes the rules that produced the harm. The scale describes where the work acts. It does not say which level is better. A healthy system funds all five on purpose.\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["root causes","upstream causes"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"}],"related":["/method/","/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/","/record/cause-atlas/"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Humanity’s Checklist","title":"Humanity’s Checklist: six things to fix so we can fix everything else","url":"https://humanityschecklist.org/","year":2026}],"summary":"The core distinction of charitology. A symptom is a problem as it shows up in people’s lives. A source is what keeps producing it upstream.","title":"Symptoms and sources"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"76c629ab8bb7eb283e720b7f64dc8a646ea7631a2a9bfbabd5ce5518cadcedbb","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"9e291722faf8da20589ab31db9b8029f154742f7920dd6f2e45612437b48ebaf","id":"version:concept-systemic-change-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:systemic-change","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-systemic-change-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\n**Systemic change** aims at the structures that keep producing those outcomes: the rules, markets, institutions, relationships and beliefs underneath. On the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) it is the work of level 3, structure, and level 4, source.\n\n## Where to push\n\nThe systems thinker Donella Meadows described *leverage points* as places in a complex system where a small shift can produce big changes. In a 1999 essay she ranked twelve of them, from least to most effective. At the bottom are constants and numbers, such as subsidies, taxes and standards. Further up come feedback loops, the structure of information flows, the rules of the system, its power to reorganize itself, its goals and the mindset it grows from. At the top is the power to transcend paradigms altogether. She observed that almost all attention goes to the numbers, where there is little leverage.\n\nIn 2018 John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge, writing for FSG, described six interdependent conditions that hold social and environmental problems in place: policies, practices and resource flows, which are the most visible; relationships and connections, and power dynamics; and, deepest, mental models, the beliefs people take for granted.\n\nBoth maps inform Charitology’s scale. They are frameworks for reasoning about change, not evidence that a deeper intervention always achieves more.\n\n## The debate\n\nWhether giving should aim at systems is a live argument. Iason Gabriel summarized a critique of effective altruism along these lines: that its language of charity can hide the structural causes of poverty, and that a movement which changes its priorities as the evidence changes may lack the constancy of purpose that movements such as abolitionism and civil rights relied on. He also noted that effective altruists were increasingly interested in systemic change, and argued for a division of labor and partnerships with committed advocacy groups.\n\nThe case for caution is just as real. Systemic bets are slow, their credit is shared and they can fail. Some do harm: a reform can backfire, and charity can crowd out or delay the public action that would have helped more. That is [Open Problem 20, When Charity Harms](/open-problems/when-charity-harms/).\n\n## How Charitology sees it\n\nCharitology does not treat systemic change as better than direct help. It treats the line between them as a scale rather than a wall, and every level as needed. Its working hypothesis, the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), is that the system as a whole underfunds the deep end of the scale, partly because systemic change is so hard to measure. Measuring it is [Open Problem 3](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/). The eradication of smallpox is a useful case of a lasting change. Its proposed source-depth classification is Charitology’s hypothesis, open to challenge: see [the case study](/record/case-studies/smallpox-eradication/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["systems change","structural change","root-cause change"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"}],"related":["/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/","/record/encyclopedia/symptoms-and-sources/","/open-problems/measuring-the-source/","/open-problems/when-charity-harms/","/record/lexicon/#leverage"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Donella Meadows, The Sustainability Institute","title":"Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System","url":"https://www.donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/","year":1999},{"note":null,"publisher":"John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge, FSG","title":"The Water of Systems Change","url":"https://www.fsg.org/blog/new-article-water-systems-change/","year":2018},{"note":null,"publisher":"Complex Systems Frameworks Collection","title":"Six Conditions for Systems Change","url":"https://www.complexsystemsframeworks.ca/framework/six-conditions-for-systems-change/","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Iason Gabriel, Journal of Applied Philosophy 34(4)","title":"Effective Altruism and Its Critics","url":"https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12176","year":2017}],"summary":"Change to the structures that produce outcomes, such as laws, markets, institutions, relationships and beliefs, rather than to outcomes one case at a time. On Charitology’s depth scale it is the work of the structure and source levels.","title":"Systemic change"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"bb3fb2ad47a978d745098b069846134f55e170b262e36bac0bfff53ff05ab14c","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"0725624124c946492e47efd996b766b51d8dd429d9b6f322521400992db80218","id":"version:concept-theory-of-change-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:theory-of-change","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-theory-of-change-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nA **theory of change** explains how a program expects to get from what it does to what it is trying to achieve. The Center for Theory of Change describes it as an account of how and why a desired change is expected to happen in a particular context. It fills in the “missing middle” between activities and long-term goals. The usual method works backward: start from the goal, then name the outcomes that must be in place for it to happen and how each one causes the next.\n\n## Where it came from\n\nCarol Weiss popularized the term in 1995. She sat on the evaluation steering committee of the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change, and her essay on theory-based evaluation appeared in the Roundtable’s book *New Approaches to Evaluating Comprehensive Community Initiatives*. Weiss argued that complex community programs were hard to evaluate because the assumptions behind them were poorly spelled out. People were unclear about how change would unfold, so they paid little attention to the early and middle steps a long-term goal depends on.\n\n## Theory of change and logic models\n\nA logic model lays out the chain of resources, activities, outputs, outcomes and impact (see [outputs and outcomes](/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/)). The Kellogg Foundation’s guide notes that outcome-focused models are built with a theory of change in mind, though it is usually not spelled out, and it describes a “theory approach” model that puts the planners’ assumptions up front. A theory of change makes the *why* explicit: each arrow in the chain is a claim that can be checked.\n\n## How to read one\n\nA good theory of change lets a giver ask sharp questions:\n\n- **Which link is weakest?** A chain is only as strong as its least supported step.\n- **What evidence backs each link?** Some steps have trial evidence. Others are hopes.\n- **Where does the goal sit on the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/)?** Ask how many uncertain links connect the activity to the goal; depth alone does not determine that number.\n- **What would show it is wrong?** A theory that no result could contradict is not doing any work.\n\n## Why it matters for source work\n\nSome structure and source goals involve long chains and many assumptions. A campaign to change a norm may need a dozen links to hold, over many years, with credit shared among many actors. A written theory of change does not make that work easier to measure, but it shows which links to watch. Measuring them is [Open Problem 3](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/). See also the [Grant Evaluator](/tools/grant-evaluator/) and the [Impact Measurement Toolkit](/tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/).\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["ToC","causal pathway","change model"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"}],"related":["/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/","/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/","/tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/","/tools/grant-evaluator/","/record/lexicon/#theory-of-change"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Center for Theory of Change","title":"What is Theory of Change?","url":"https://www.theoryofchange.org/what-is-theory-of-change/","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"Center for Theory of Change","title":"TOC Origins","url":"https://www.theoryofchange.org/what-is-theory-of-change/toc-background/toc-origins/","year":null},{"note":null,"publisher":"W.K. Kellogg Foundation","title":"Logic Model Development Guide","url":"https://www.naccho.org/uploads/downloadable-resources/Programs/Public-Health-Infrastructure/KelloggLogicModelGuide_161122_162808.pdf","year":2004}],"summary":"A written account of how and why a program’s activities are expected to lead to its long-term goal, step by step, with the assumptions that link each step to the next.","title":"Theory of change"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"14aa5468179e06206904daa00b7af1d632f6ebf216bd0899212cd62567bb0fba","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-encyclopedia-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"6b6c53c42b6e1df2aa59f2f6f5aacfbb9576f4aa2c30a1b7ba37b2a6ae3f1307","id":"version:concept-warm-glow-giving-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"concept:warm-glow-giving","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:encyclopedia-warm-glow-giving-v1"}],"subject":{"body":"\nWhy do people give? One answer is that they care about the result: fewer hungry children, a cleaner river. Another is that giving feels good, whatever the result. The economist James Andreoni called the second motive the **warm glow** and built it into a formal theory in 1990.\n\n## Pure and impure altruism\n\nEconomists had often modeled donors as *pure altruists*, who care only about how much of a public good exists, no matter who provides it. Andreoni’s model of *impure altruism* adds the satisfaction of giving itself, along with motives such as social pressure, guilt and sympathy. He argued that it fits observed patterns of giving better than the pure model, and that it changes the answers to policy questions such as how private giving responds when government funds the same cause and how giving should be taxed.\n\n## Evidence from the brain\n\nIn a 2007 study published in *Science*, William Harbaugh, Ulrich Mayr and Dan Burghart gave 19 women $100 each and scanned their brains while they watched money go to a food bank. Reward areas of the brain responded even when the transfer was mandatory, like a tax, which fits pure altruism. They responded more when the women chose to give, which fits the warm glow.\n\n## Why it matters for the system\n\nThe warm glow is not a flaw. It is part of what makes people generous at all, and Charitology has no interest in removing it. The question is what the glow attaches to. Charitology’s working claim is that today it attaches mainly to the act of giving and to its size, which donors can see, rather than to its results, which they usually cannot. That is one way the [Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) shapes behavior: if the reward arrives the moment the gift is made, nothing pulls the donor to find out what happened next.\n\nThe [Prestige Economy](/diagnosis/prestige-economy/) is the social version of the same pattern, and Charitology’s hypothesis is that it pulls money toward visible gifts rather than effective ones. The warm glow itself is well documented. The sources here do not establish whether visible giving shifts money away from better opportunities or by how much.\n\n## Pointing the glow at results\n\nIf the glow can attach to the act, it may be able to attach to the outcome. Ideas worth testing include showing donors what their gift achieved, celebrating results rather than amounts and making effective giving a status signal. Whether any of them work at scale is [Open Problem 15, the Status Flip](/open-problems/the-status-flip/). Charitology’s [Wrapped](/tools/charitology-wrapped/) card is one small experiment in that direction.\n","collection":"encyclopedia","frontmatter":{"aliases":["warm glow","impure altruism","joy of giving"],"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"prestige-economy"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-feedback-loop"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"story-bias"}],"related":["/diagnosis/prestige-economy/","/open-problems/the-status-flip/","/record/encyclopedia/identifiable-victim-effect/","/record/lexicon/#warm-glow","/tools/charitology-wrapped/"],"sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"James Andreoni, The Economic Journal 100(401)","title":"Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving?","url":"https://doi.org/10.2307/2234133","year":1990},{"note":null,"publisher":"University of Oregon, via EurekAlert, on William Harbaugh, Ulrich Mayr and Dan Burghart in Science","title":"Paying Taxes, According To The Brain, Can Bring Satisfaction","url":"https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/465670","year":2007}],"summary":"The satisfaction people get from the act of giving itself, apart from what the gift achieves. The economist James Andreoni built it into a theory of giving in 1990, It is one possible input to Charitology’s hypotheses about giving signals.","title":"Warm-glow giving"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"c4b17f7c1c4f5eab2d5111fe19cc1ef14c1b915218d7f232b665ece5a08c07c7","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"87126315e1511359bf56bb1de897628e92962bfad699acf8ce5ae3d2d22a275a","id":"version:manuscript-depth-without-a-ladder-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"manuscript:depth-without-a-ladder","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-journal-depth-without-a-ladder"}],"subject":{"body":"\n**Article type: proposed method. Peer review: not completed.** This paper makes no claim that the depth framework predicts impact. Its purpose is to make that hypothesis testable and its classifications reproducible.\n\n## The unit is an activity\n\nAn organization can operate a shelter, campaign for housing rules and convene a coordination network. Assigning one depth to the entire organization erases those differences. Begin with an activity, a period and a stated outcome. Keep its money and volunteer time in separate fields unless a defensible conversion is explicitly supplied.\n\nRecord a short mechanism: “If this activity happens, what changes, for whom, through which step?” A statement such as “addresses root causes” is not enough. Name the recurring mechanism being changed. The source categories proposed by [Humanity’s Checklist](https://humanityschecklist.org/) are hypotheses that may help generate questions; invoking one does not demonstrate causality.\n\n## A proposed coding rule\n\nUse **0 relief** when the activity reduces an immediate burden; **1 repair** when it restores a damaged capacity; **2 prevention** when it reduces recurrence or exposure; **3 structure** when it changes a durable rule, institution or allocation; and **4 source** when it tests a proposed upstream mechanism that feeds several problems. These are Charitology’s definitions. They are not ordinal grades of merit.\n\nAn activity can span levels. Record a primary level only when the evidence for its mechanism supports that choice. Otherwise use multiple labels or “unclassified.” Do not allocate equal percentages merely because several labels apply. Budget shares require a stated allocation rule and evidence.\n\n## An illustrative coding exercise\n\nConsider a fictional water program. Delivering emergency water is relief. Restoring a broken pump can be repair. Scheduled maintenance may prevent outages. A change to accountable utility governance can act on structure. A coordination experiment connecting previously disconnected maintainers may test a source hypothesis.\n\nThe example does not establish which intervention works, what it costs or which deserves funding. Emergency delivery could be essential while an institutional reform fails. The coding tells us what to investigate, not which activity wins.\n\n## Independent coding and disagreement\n\nGive two coders the same public materials, definitions and period. Each records the claimed mechanism, supporting source, depth label, uncertainty and alternative interpretation before seeing the other’s answer. Compare the raw assignments before resolving disagreements. Publish the original codes and the adjudication separately.\n\nDisagreements can reveal a vague definition, missing activity-level information or an actual causal dispute. Do not hide them by averaging labels. A project described as level 2 by one coder and level 4 by another is not thereby level 3.\n\n## Denominators and unknowns\n\nA census should publish total eligible activities, activities with usable records, money covered and money unclassified. An observed zero is different from an absent record. “No source work found in this sample” is different from “no source work exists.” Funding shares across different years, geographic scopes or accounting definitions cannot be added without reconciliation.\n\nThe [Gap Map](/record/gap-map/) provides a local worksheet for making this accounting explicit. Its user-entered scenarios are not a global census.\n\n## Tests that could reject the method\n\nA useful test could find that coders cannot apply the definitions consistently, that activities span levels too often for the categories to be informative or that a different set of categories captures mechanisms more clearly. A further study could test whether depth adds predictive information beyond context, evidence quality and program design. A null result belongs in the Record.\n\nBefore any named-charity recommendation uses depth, the method requires public red-team review, a defensible unit of analysis, transparent uncertainty and independent source checks. This draft has not met those conditions.\n\n## Reproduction packet\n\nPublish the sampling frame, inclusion and exclusion rules, source retrieval dates, coding manual, coder assignments, uncoded records, adjudications and analysis code. Use the [Replication Program](/programs/replication-program/) to preregister the question and the [Evidence Reviews desk](/programs/evidence-reviews/) to track sources. Report descriptive results even when they fail to support the founding hypothesis.\n","collection":"journal","frontmatter":{"author":"Charitology editorial project (AI-assisted draft)","date":"2026-10-25","issue":2,"sources":[{"note":"The proposed source framework cited in this draft, not established causal evidence.","publisher":null,"title":"Humanity's Checklist","url":"https://humanityschecklist.org/","year":null}],"summary":"A reproducible proposal for classifying activities across relief, repair, prevention, structure and source without turning description into a rating.","title":"Depth without a ladder: a protocol for describing where work acts","volume":0},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"6f9e81cf213139edc9a1f3c36a913ba5806793bf34f63e0cc2fc374740186708","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"e8157dd6f6b224b223bce4f6625b91e9e98b35dd3ff97f9ddd5d2e483e4781ba","id":"version:manuscript-ten-dollars-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"manuscript:ten-dollars","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-journal-ten-dollars"}],"subject":{"body":"\n*Editorial note: This manifesto is a poem, not a history of philanthropy. The ten-dollar image is the author’s account of a domain registration. Existing philanthropy, ethics and evaluation fields have long studied giving; the poem’s invitation is to develop and test Charitology’s proposed shared craft.*\n\nIn 2026, we bought a word for ten dollars.\n\nNot a rare word. Not a clever one.\\\nThe most obvious word there is.\\\nIt was just lying there,\\\nunregistered, unclaimed, unbuilt,\\\nlike a key nobody had picked up\\\nbecause nobody knew there was a door.\n\n*Charitology.*\n\nWe have a word for the study of bells.\\\nCampanology.\\\nWe have a word for the study of flags.\\\nVexillology.\\\nWe have a word for the science of mixing a cocktail.\\\nMixology.\n\nBut for the science of doing the most good\\\na human being can do,\\\nthere was nothing.\\\nNo word. No field. No craft.\\\nNot even a name to argue about.\n\nThink about what that means.\\\nRocket science gets a whole discipline,\\\nand rockets only have to obey physics.\\\nPhysics doesn’t change its mind.\\\nGravity doesn’t have a culture.\\\nThrust doesn’t ask whose child gets saved first.\n\nDoing good is harder.\\\nIt is the hardest problem we have:\\\nwhich suffering, which cure,\\\nwhich country, which century,\\\nnow or later, them or us,\\\nthe person in front of you\\\nor the millions you’ll never meet.\\\nNo equation hands you the answer.\\\nAnd we’ve been working on it\\\nwithout ever admitting it needed solving.\n\nHere’s the part nobody says out loud:\\\nthe money is already here.\\\nHundreds of billions of dollars, every single year,\\\ngiven freely,\\\ngiven with love,\\\ngiven by people who meant every cent.\n\nThe generosity was never missing.\\\nThe aim was.\n\nAnd that is not your fault.\\\nYou gave with your whole heart.\\\nNobody handed you a map.\\\nNobody trained the mapmakers.\\\nNobody even named the territory.\n\nYou can’t master a craft that doesn’t exist.\\\nYou can’t get better at something\\\nno one has agreed is a thing to get better at.\\\nWithout a field, without the people who live in it,\\\nwithout that honest, stubborn, careful search for what actually works,\\\nwe’re all just trying\\\nwith the lights off.\n\nSo we’re turning them on.\n\n*Charitology.*\\\nThe science of doing the most good.\\\nNot one cause. Every cause.\\\nNot one method. Every method.\\\nNot one answer handed down,\\\nbut the endless, humble, rigorous work\\\nof finding the best of all ways.\n\nWe’re not here to tell you you’ve been giving wrong.\\\nWe’re here to tell you it’s worth getting right.\n\nSo study it. Question it. Test it. Teach it.\\\nArgue about it at dinner.\\\nProve us wrong and make it better.\\\nBecome what this world has never had a name for:\n\n*a charitologist.*\n\nIt cost us ten dollars to claim the word.\\\nIt will take the rest of our lives to deserve it.\n","collection":"journal","frontmatter":{"author":"Charitology","date":"2026-10-25","issue":1,"sources":[],"summary":"The founding poem uses a ten-dollar domain registration as an image for Charitology’s invitation to study how generosity is aimed.","title":"Ten Dollars","volume":0},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"5b46f78f4ff3fbad153d4a2e2c902dc908d6a775ffd73f2d5426f1415595c836","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"d77cd44724fa64b2468ff24f67e36545f51f1b57859cf1ea867ec0f10a81cfe6","id":"version:manuscript-the-feedback-contract-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"manuscript:the-feedback-contract","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-journal-the-feedback-contract"}],"subject":{"body":"\n**Article type: design proposal. Peer review: not completed.** The contract below is an editorial method for testing, not an established intervention or a claim about what most charities do.\n\n## Start with a decision\n\nA report becomes useful when it can change a decision. Specify who will decide, what options they can choose, when they must choose and what they will do if the evidence changes. “We will learn about impact” leaves all four questions open.\n\nA small organization might decide whether to continue a weekly service, change its delivery schedule or test a referral partnership. A donor might decide whether to renew an unrestricted grant. A community group might decide whether a promised benefit matches what participants actually value. The decision belongs to the people with the authority to act, but the reporting process must also hear those affected by it.\n\n## Seven linked records\n\n1. **Resources:** what money, time and equipment went in, in which period and currency.\n2. **Activity:** what was actually delivered and the public evidence for that record.\n3. **Reach:** who could access it and who was excluded. Avoid publishing personal records.\n4. **Outcome:** what changed, including a unit, observation date and a defensible denominator.\n5. **Counterfactual:** what might have happened without the activity and why that comparison is credible.\n6. **Experience and harm:** what participants say mattered, how dissent can be raised safely and what unintended effects were observed.\n7. **Revision:** the threshold, review date and named organizational role responsible for changing the decision.\n\nMissing links stay missing. A count of services delivered is not automatically a causal effect. A testimonial can supply information about experience without estimating a population average. A model can clarify assumptions without becoming an observation.\n\n## A worked, fictional example\n\nSuppose a community learning program can fund one more term. Its team records sessions delivered and attendance, then learns that the existing timetable excludes caregivers. A simple continuation decision based only on attendance would miss that access question. The group therefore considers a changed schedule alongside continuation and closure.\n\nBefore choosing, it defines what it needs to know: whether the alternative time is acceptable, what participation would cost caregivers, whether learning outcomes differ and what other services may be displaced. A pilot could be appropriate, but a small pilot would not by itself establish a durable population effect.\n\nNo numerical benefit is invented here. The example demonstrates how the contract can expose an omitted decision dimension. Whether it improves real decisions is an open empirical question.\n\n## Publish the revision rule first\n\nA rule might say: review the program after one term; consult participants through a specified, accessible process; compare outcomes with the predeclared baseline; document harms and missing data; then record why the organization continued, adapted or stopped. The appropriate thresholds depend on context and should not be copied from this example as universal standards.\n\nChanges to the rule belong in a dated log. Distinguish a justified amendment from an outcome selected after seeing the result. Publishing the original plan lets another contributor reconstruct that difference.\n\n## Depth and values remain separate\n\nThe contract asks both where work acts and what different moral lenses consider important. A rights concern may create a constraint rather than an extra point in an average. Care may require attending to relationships that a cost model misses. Future generations may change the time horizon. These questions belong in the decision record, not behind a single hidden score.\n\n## Use and test\n\nThe [Impact Measurement Toolkit](/tools/impact-measurement-toolkit/) can turn the mechanism into an observation plan. [Charity OS](/tools/charity-os/) can retain local project, budget and evidence records. The [Moral Frameworks desk](/programs/moral-frameworks-program/) can record disagreements, while the [Failure Lab](/programs/failure-lab/) can document what changed after an unexpected result.\n\nA field test should compare decisions made with and without the contract, define what improvement means before analysis, track burden on staff and communities and publish failures as well as successes. No such test is claimed here. The contract earns its place only if evidence shows that its benefits justify its costs.\n","collection":"journal","frontmatter":{"author":"Charitology editorial project (AI-assisted draft)","date":"2026-10-25","issue":3,"sources":[],"summary":"A proposed reporting contract linking a giving decision to outcomes, uncertainty, affected communities and a public revision rule.","title":"The feedback contract: designing a giving decision people can correct","volume":0},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"40b575ce4271462dbf2ca4e6abff3f5c5cf15d9a2bf1e39a7d5241aedd56427e","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"49b063b25523519e0be5b457f7559079e2f42b3ddfd187bcec7c6d753bdc8a70","id":"version:method-methodology-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"method:methodology","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-record-methodology"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Evidence labels\n\nClaims about the charity system carry one of four labels:\n\n- **Established** means strong published evidence from several independent sources.\n- **Documented** means credible sources report it; the size of the effect is less certain.\n- **Debated** means credible people disagree. Both sides are shown.\n- **Hypothesis** means Charitology’s own working claim, untested, and testing it is the work.\n\nInterventions carry an evidence grade: *strong*, *moderate*, *mixed*, *weak* or *unknown*. The grade applies to the specific outcome claimed.\n\n## Depth classification\n\nWork is classified by where it acts, using the five levels in [the Method](/method/#depth): relief, repair, prevention, structure, source. Classify by the primary mechanism of the work, not its aspirations. When work spans levels, classify by where most of the money goes and note the rest. Depth classifications of named organizations are hypotheses and cite the organization’s own description of its work.\n\n## Sources\n\nEvery factual claim has a source the writer has read. Primary sources come first. Paywalled sources get a free alternative where one exists. If no source can be found, the claim is removed.\n\n## Review\n\nNew pages start as **drafts**. A page becomes **reviewed** when a second contributor has checked every source and the framing against [the Standard](https://github.com/theguysaccount/charitology/blob/main/STYLE.md). Reviews happen in public pull requests.\n\n## Corrections and red-teaming\n\nEvery page links to a prefilled issue for corrections and one for challenges. Corrections are fixed in public. Significant corrections are noted in the pull request that makes them. A red-team challenge stays open until it is answered with evidence, either by changing the page or by explaining why it stands.\n\n## AI assistance\n\nAI tools may help draft pages. Their use is disclosed in the pull request, and a human contributor is responsible for checking every claim. Edition 0 was drafted with AI assistance and is being reviewed in public.\n\n## Ratings\n\nCharitology publishes no ratings of named organizations. That changes only after a rating method has been published and has survived public red-team review.\n","collection":"record","frontmatter":{"conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"silence-about-failure"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-profession"}],"firstMilestone":null,"group":"Thought and teaching","help":["Propose a change to the method in an issue labeled methodology.","Red-team a rule below."],"order":6,"related":["/method/","/contribute/","/programs/red-team/"],"sources":[],"status":"live","statusNote":null,"summary":"Exactly how Charitology labels evidence, classifies depth, reviews pages and handles corrections.","title":"Methodology Handbook"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"4991dd8a98d678d2919340a34d9d559ad3cc65f08d1c3a9b4100b74a799516da","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"828a83f2edc3417a37d779e4d67464e519775ff845780d733a54199c55ac92d1","id":"version:problem-closing-the-feedback-loop-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:closing-the-feedback-loop","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-closing-the-feedback-loop"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nThis is the root condition of the [Diagnosis](/diagnosis/). Charitology hypothesizes that improving this loop could also change other conditions.\n\n## Where to start\n\nBeneficiary feedback surveys, participatory grantmaking and cash transfers (where recipients choose what to buy) are three existing mechanisms that give the people served some say. The open question is which of them, if any, can be scaled into a signal donors actually follow.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-feedback-loop"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-voice"}],"number":5,"progress":"A working mechanism in which feedback from the people served measurably changes funding, tested against a comparison group.","sources":[],"statement":"What mechanism lets the people a charity serves send a signal that moves money, the way prices do in markets?","title":"Closing the Feedback Loop"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"f9865c4a1ff827fc65bc2bc14226d063c41d5529fac674c14941e334aec8ecaa","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"695ce8da32651f4eb467db584c699374263d274b9ff92c7b82e0252ed42bb1f3","id":"version:problem-discounting-the-future-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:discounting-the-future","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-discounting-the-future"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nIf humanity has a long future, vastly more people may live after us than are alive now. How much they count changes nearly every allocation decision. Short funding cycles may leave that choice implicit; see [the Short Horizon hypothesis](/diagnosis/short-horizon/).\n\n## Where to start\n\nPhilosophers distinguish pure time preference (valuing the future less simply because it is later) from uncertainty about whether help will arrive. Separating the two is the first step. The [Future generations](/tools/values-compass/) framework in the Values Compass is a rough starting point.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"single-lens"}],"number":13,"progress":"A clear map of the positions, what each implies for allocation, and which facts would change the answer.","sources":[],"statement":"How much should future people count, and how should giving weigh present suffering against risks to the future?","title":"Discounting the Future"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"8e1d5aaf29db2c5927c4633b156c99a37928354332b9261756cb017a1517e9a5","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"84de722c6ad0d66750e2e2bae46ab0650e5f4f8da1ef4b55fc8b0221860da058","id":"version:problem-measuring-the-source-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:measuring-the-source","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-measuring-the-source"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nIf funders require measurements that source work cannot provide, useful work may be missed. That is one possible mechanism behind the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/) hypothesis. Hard-to-measure is not the same as small.\n\n## Where to start\n\nWork backwards from changes everyone agrees happened, such as the spread of oral rehydration therapy or the end of smallpox (see [Historical Case Studies](/record/case-studies/)), and test which measures would have detected them early. Contribution analysis, process tracing and forecasting tournaments are candidate methods.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"}],"number":3,"progress":"A measurement approach validated on at least one historical source-level change, recovering an effect that independent historians agree took place.","sources":[],"statement":"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?","title":"Measuring the Source"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"5998a2220b5dc20e4cab2a388a454b3fa554b674fe09a9affbf6afc495a22951","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"8436f32ecfedbe8b77e2d8dd2e967207dfcfcd603069e86076fb0cf77a43d31f","id":"version:problem-moral-parliament-in-practice-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:moral-parliament-in-practice","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-moral-parliament-in-practice"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nThe [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) is the condition Charitology was founded to treat. Treating it means giving people a sound way to act on several frameworks at once.\n\n## Where to start\n\nThe [Portfolio Builder](/tools/portfolio-builder/) implements a simple credence-weighted method. The open problem is whether more sophisticated methods give meaningfully different, and more defensible, answers.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"single-lens"}],"number":16,"progress":"A comparison of allocation methods, such as credence-weighted averaging, moral parliaments and maximizing expected choice-worthiness, on real portfolios, with their sensitivity reported.","sources":[],"statement":"How should a real giver allocate money when unsure which moral framework is right, and do different methods give stable answers?","title":"Moral Parliament in Practice"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"9db796c7b98733c7758349e182aba71107e5b6172d358fb2fec9865cf0da9547","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"9a108ac483faf3420bae567175b03e5acbb12983658e119dfe8b227ad07713f3","id":"version:problem-proximity-and-obligation-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:proximity-and-obligation","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-proximity-and-obligation"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nThe [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/) is partly a moral question and partly an information gap. The information gap can be closed, and then we can see what people choose.\n\n## Where to start\n\nA scoped survey experiment could test how comparisons across distance affect choices, with its cost and limits stated. The moral side is mapped in the [Disagreement Register](/record/disagreements/).\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"proximity-pull"}],"number":18,"progress":"Experimental evidence on how givers allocate with and without comparisons, alongside a clear account of the moral positions.","sources":[],"statement":"How should distance weigh in giving, and what do givers choose when they see honest comparisons?","title":"Proximity and Obligation"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"9cc43abf5a4e1b3eb75d6661951b1e87c24c8add90b1a5267538b10b7d7b1e86","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"300406bb03703b4ad91414e9ec3e8015773d903d1fd65352aabd1c67259112c7","id":"version:problem-story-without-bias-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:story-without-bias","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-story-without-bias"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nThe [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/) draws on attention research, including findings whose strength and replication remain debated. In the classic study, explaining the bias did not increase donations to statistical appeals. The fix has to work with human attention, not against it.\n\n## Where to start\n\nExisting research on identifiable victims and psychic numbing gives the baseline effects to beat. Formats to test include stories of communities rather than individuals, visualizations of scale and stories about sources rather than symptoms.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"story-bias"}],"number":7,"progress":"A replicated experiment in which a storytelling format shifts giving toward larger needs without lowering total giving.","sources":[],"statement":"Can a story make people feel the scale of a problem rather than one face, and does it move money toward larger needs?","title":"Story Without Bias"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"b3952a1ab1c983beeecb28cbf6f6a05bd2add49e61b6fd17ad724a406aead345","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"a4303c37c44cd3673cb390bb52b53f9cb50aa6b02c6278f488c0bf71a7f939ab","id":"version:problem-the-agency-premium-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-agency-premium","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-agency-premium"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nThe case for [listening to the people served](/diagnosis/missing-voice/) is strong in principle. A measured premium would make it impossible to ignore, and a measured cost would show where expertise should lead.\n\n## Where to start\n\nLook for interventions that have been delivered both ways, such as community-driven development programs evaluated against centrally planned ones.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-voice"}],"number":14,"progress":"Head-to-head comparisons of community-led and expert-led versions of the same intervention, in several contexts.","sources":[],"statement":"Do community-led programs outperform top-down ones on the same outcome, and by how much?","title":"The Agency Premium"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"4f818cd1f381dc4a159152c34731b185e1030d292eecd877f20c1a5fe904ee7d","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"ddf0093aebfea5ad127e016c4e888ce134eecc51ad5ace9a998798686a2a49db","id":"version:problem-the-counterfactual-problem-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-counterfactual-problem","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-counterfactual-problem"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nThe real effect of a gift is the difference between the world with it and the world without it. Most givers never see that difference, which is part of why the [feedback loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) is missing.\n\n## Where to start\n\nFunding-gap disclosures (how much a charity could productively absorb), matched comparisons between funded and unfunded applicants, and published “room for more funding” analyses are partial answers. The open problem is making them routine.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-feedback-loop"}],"number":4,"progress":"A method that produces counterfactual estimates for ordinary gifts, with error ranges, at a cost small relative to the gift.","sources":[],"statement":"How can a giver estimate what would have happened without their gift, cheaply and at scale?","title":"The Counterfactual Problem"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"4d5aaafd6bde299f0b51c8f64625b67706ba01e47e96d9a8a503587243b054a6","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"8bcaf70dfa2fd3a04e82f965317308a64b1c36c9de29d19fbc2daea2432457f5","id":"version:problem-the-depth-census-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-depth-census","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-depth-census"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nCharitology’s founding hypothesis, [the Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), says the charity system is weighted toward symptoms. Charitology has not established the current mix. If the hypothesis is wrong, the field should be the first to say so. The census would supply a descriptive baseline. Deciding whether a mix is appropriate also requires an explicit standard tied to the goals being considered.\n\n## Where to start\n\nDraw a random sample of organizations from a public registry and code each one on the [depth scale](/method/#depth), weighting by spending. Program descriptions from Form 990 filings, published openly by [Charity Impact Media](https://theguysaccount.github.io/charity-impact-media/), and the foundation grants in [WHOFUNDS](https://theguysaccount.github.io/whofunds-open-grant-graph/) are open starting points. How often two independent coders agree is itself a finding: if people can’t agree on depth, the scale needs work first.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"}],"number":1,"progress":"A public, reproducible estimate of the depth mix for at least one country’s giving, with a method others can rerun and a stated error range.","sources":[],"statement":"What share of the world’s charitable money goes to relief, repair, prevention, structure and source work?","title":"The Depth Census"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"7b530c516e616ae16488901f3ead08f98fdee50a723e15796b0d4c7b2e22949a","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"ee0cb55bef111457ab48793164827b68bb12326ba21d6073d26f8934db42bfb7","id":"version:problem-the-enough-question-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-enough-question","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-enough-question"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nHumanity’s Checklist points out that hundreds of billions of dollars go to charity every year, and asks what would happen if $5 million, spent correctly, were enough to go after the six sources upstream of every world problem. Charitology treats that as a hypothesis to test, not a slogan. If money really isn’t the bottleneck, the field should find out what is.\n\n## Where to start\n\nPick one problem, write the source-level plan, cost it, fund it and publish what happens, including if it fails.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"}],"number":22,"progress":"Costed source-level plans for specific problems, judged by independent experts, and a record of what happened when such plans were funded.","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Humanity’s Checklist","title":"Humanity’s Checklist","url":"https://humanityschecklist.org/","year":2026}],"statement":"How much money would it take to fix a specific problem at its source, and is it true that money isn’t the bottleneck?","title":"The Enough Question"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"fea194e60a4adb4fe7472553e3750c59a740bf70db6f7c76ad0ce796a671b781","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"b6f3a010d72147a3c25ac2ed22a74dd1044472f28b11b6a1aa1363baf29837ec","id":"version:problem-the-exchange-rate-problem-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-exchange-rate-problem","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-exchange-rate-problem"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nEvery choice between two causes is an exchange rate, whether or not anyone writes it down. Writing it down lets people argue about it.\n\n## Where to start\n\nHealth economics already compares treatments with quality- and disability-adjusted life years. Wellbeing research proposes life-satisfaction measures. Each scale carries a moral framework inside it. The work is to map which scales each framework accepts and where every scale breaks down. Charitology’s [frameworks data](/tools/public-api/) is a place to begin.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"single-lens"}],"number":2,"progress":"A comparison method that people holding different moral frameworks accept as fair for at least some pairs of causes, with the pairs it can’t compare stated openly.","sources":[],"statement":"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?","title":"The Exchange Rate Problem"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"1a4c4522a053129c8654668fade099456696dd6e732d57c68b13c2f0aa4ee83d","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"74d468fcd69f28994867c6c13478dadcf6454f0931b0e087ee4adb436c7a6142","id":"version:problem-the-failure-commons-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-failure-commons","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-failure-commons"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nThe [Silence About Failure](/diagnosis/silence-about-failure/) costs the field its most valuable data. If disclosure turns out to be rewarded, the incentive problem is smaller than people fear. If it’s punished, funders need to see that.\n\n## Where to start\n\nCharitology’s [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/) is the commons in seed form. Pair it with a funder pledge not to penalize honest disclosure, and measure what happens.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"silence-about-failure"}],"number":9,"progress":"A shared failure registry with a meaningful sample of participating organizations, and data on their funding before and after disclosure.","sources":[],"statement":"What incentives would get charities to publish their failures, and what happens to their funding when they do?","title":"The Failure Commons"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"8dbc79668c734967d9eb2b3da7bd48f91f712fd53723283f8e26a6b6bf535345","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"6bb02e84c032f1a50d6d636706208697c780bbb398ba039aea7b21e982cdc797","id":"version:problem-the-fragmentation-question-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-fragmentation-question","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-fragmentation-question"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\n[Fragmentation](/diagnosis/fragmentation/) is easy to see and hard to judge. A plural sector experiments more. A fragmented one may waste more. The answer probably depends on the field.\n\n## Where to start\n\nNonprofit mergers, shared back-office services and collective-impact coalitions all leave records. Outcome data before and after is the missing piece.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"fragmentation"}],"number":11,"progress":"Comparative evidence on outcomes before and after consolidation or coordination, across several fields.","sources":[],"statement":"Is the charity sector over-fragmented, and when do mergers, shared services or coordination layers improve outcomes?","title":"The Fragmentation Question"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"14c9ab14663ae82c7b050afb381b6285c95aed6a63d4c409c87957b3d018e515","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"4435a1ed85c3e03eaac5aafeec26e2f8a65e8aada2882e547442da9887e317e9","id":"version:problem-the-government-question-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-government-question","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-government-question"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nPrivate giving and public spending interact. A gift can unlock government money, replace it or steer it. Each has different consequences for the people served and for democracy.\n\n## Where to start\n\nEconomists have studied crowding-in and crowding-out for decades, with mixed results. The open problem is turning that literature into guidance a giver can use.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-voice"}],"number":21,"progress":"Evidence on whether private giving crowds public budgets in or out, and shared norms for when private money should shape public policy.","sources":[],"statement":"When does philanthropy add to public spending, when does it replace it, and when does it shape public policy without public accountability?","title":"The Government Question"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"86fd2dad2a84367a460d2f25e2481e686400141dd5e868e869fecaac4d437963","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"5880f503de480df3e10684c9716c5388504e10f50ca55d9c3ce53ea66f98a6c9","id":"version:problem-the-money-time-exchange-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-money-time-exchange","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-money-time-exchange"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nVolunteer time can help in different ways and also takes coordination. The proposed study would compare the value of roles with the cost of supporting them; it does not assume those answers are already known.\n\n## Where to start\n\nAsk organizations what an hour of each kind of volunteer help is worth to them, and compare that with the volunteer’s wage. See [Time Charitology](/programs/time-charitology/).\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[],"number":19,"progress":"A framework that estimates the value of volunteer time by role and skill, checked against organizations’ own assessments.","sources":[],"statement":"When is an hour of volunteering worth more than giving an hour’s wages?","title":"The Money-Time Exchange"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"edd3e19fd5350f9c0a79017f0cd4aeff0512b821ed50781667a475e9170c90d9","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"b8b0fe912ce8d386cedab983365342f07b52847fac4e57678322937971a1302a","id":"version:problem-the-optimal-restriction-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-optimal-restriction","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-optimal-restriction"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nThe case for unrestricted funding is strong but mostly built on surveys of what charities prefer. A science of giving needs outcome evidence, including any cases where restriction does better.\n\n## Where to start\n\nLarge shifts toward unrestricted giving, such as funders that relaxed restrictions in 2020, are natural experiments. Comparing grantee outcomes before and after is a feasible first study.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"restriction-reflex"}],"number":8,"progress":"Evidence from natural experiments or trials on how restriction affects outcomes, including the conditions under which each kind of funding works better.","sources":[],"statement":"When does restricting a gift help, and when does it harm?","title":"The Optimal Restriction"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"c4bc869f65f89b0a779459b13dd14f8ee97b0deb8ad61ab161c123e970559340","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"f75a1bd5800f5f15f100e23fe55c4a8b1465ca047ea3a312757208d8d1e1b493","id":"version:problem-the-overhead-replacement-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-overhead-replacement","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-overhead-replacement"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nTelling donors to stop using overhead has been tried. The [Overhead Myth](/diagnosis/overhead-myth/) persists partly because nothing equally simple replaced it.\n\n## Where to start\n\nCandidate measures include published outcome data, the presence of independent evaluations, transparency about failures and feedback from the people served. Each has to be tested for whether it can be gamed. Open Form 990 data from [Charity Impact Media](https://theguysaccount.github.io/charity-impact-media/) provides source-linked spending records.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"overhead-myth"}],"number":6,"progress":"A measure computable from public data for most large charities, shown to track independently assessed effectiveness better than overhead does.","sources":[],"statement":"What simple public measure could replace overhead ratios as the default way donors judge a charity, without being easy to game?","title":"The Overhead Replacement"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"8cba48ac86bd078af6d8d35c8080bf1cc8f8ad1cb279675e7c2d61b0ad70320d","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"3dadb33b9aba113332981d1b22b4fca82491c3c0310f42b10c71090d798a23f3","id":"version:problem-the-payout-question-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-payout-question","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-payout-question"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nThe Annual DAF Report 2025 estimated about $326 billion in donor-advised fund assets in 2024. Whether assets should be spent sooner is a substantial allocation question; the asset total alone cannot answer it. See [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/).\n\n## Where to start\n\nEconomists have written “give now or give later” models. The open problem is grounding them in real data on how the cost of doing good changes over time.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"parked-money"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"short-horizon"}],"number":12,"progress":"A model that ties the payout rate to measurable inputs, such as investment returns, how fast the best opportunities are used up and discount rates, and gives ranges a funder can act on.","sources":[],"statement":"What is the best rate to spend philanthropic money now versus later?","title":"The Payout Question"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"0953cea7cff9cb26de0438e2c6b807fea24bf5d0c7bb8ac3857cf38f2e08d32e","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"2ddbe19f97bffd2eb82714bbceb50f1178fc414409c07d0120c71be11b127d81","id":"version:problem-the-profession-question-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-profession-question","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-profession-question"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nCharitology’s founding claim is that a profession would improve where money goes, as medicine improved how illness is treated. That claim can be tested, so it should be. See [the Missing Profession](/diagnosis/missing-profession/).\n\n## Where to start\n\nThe [Principles of Charitology](/record/principles/) textbook and the [Certified Charitologist](/programs/certified-charitologist/) program are draft curricula. A randomized study of a short training course is a feasible first test.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-profession"}],"number":17,"progress":"A curriculum, and evidence comparing the decisions of trained and untrained advisors or donors on the same choices.","sources":[],"statement":"What should a charitologist be trained in, and does training change where money goes?","title":"The Profession Question"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"2e79ab989f3b58bf7000693a2940f8d3ff88c90b3431a599faa32ae539243f14","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"17b20e2d14c5ca44d2a48f55ed42f27359dba5be93e5b8ea214e1a09ff3aa682","id":"version:problem-the-question-of-questions-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-question-of-questions","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-question-of-questions"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nResearch money is limited too. The first problems solved should be the ones whose answers would change the most decisions.\n\n## Where to start\n\nFor each problem, estimate how much money would move if it were solved and how likely a solution is in the next five years. Publish the estimates and let the [Forecasting Platform](/tools/forecasting-platform/) test them.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"missing-profession"}],"number":23,"progress":"A published value-of-information estimate for each open problem, updated as problems are solved.","sources":[],"statement":"How should the field decide which open problem to work on first?","title":"The Question of Questions"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"04bc6511dbed2c14d6dfd2586007a3bfc2f2024f87250e04e252df17bff2b841","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"2bfd6c82b2e6d78ae4a82ab51968dc62eb01c45f6e93d3910a2d8289ce05e0cc","id":"version:problem-the-replication-rate-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-replication-rate","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-replication-rate"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nThe [Replication Program](/programs/replication-program/) describes published checks in psychology and deworming research. Charitology has not established an equivalent sector-wide rate for charity impact findings. Donors deserve to know how much to trust a headline.\n\n## Where to start\n\nChoose a fixed list of widely cited findings, pre-register the replication plan and publish everything, including findings that replicate. See the [Replication Program](/programs/replication-program/).\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"silence-about-failure"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"measurement-gap"}],"number":10,"progress":"A systematic replication project covering a defined set of influential findings, publishing the rate with confidence bounds.","sources":[],"statement":"What share of headline charity impact findings replicate when they are tested again?","title":"The Replication Rate"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"22e313fa3bf8aeb4c22448662a5fd4f76c09a4545fa0b6d0354e1234b2c0d669","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"683a64be553c9878f47ebbaf94c5c4713b4bc47a96be0875746c9d7ed7da8856","id":"version:problem-the-status-flip-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:the-status-flip","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-the-status-flip"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nHumanity’s Checklist proposes directing status toward generosity. Whether that would increase giving or improve its results is a hypothesis to test. See [the Prestige Economy](/diagnosis/prestige-economy/).\n\n## Where to start\n\nHumanity’s Checklist proposes charity designer goods, where the coolest thing you can wear shows how much you gave. Testing that proposal, and others like Charitology’s shareable [Wrapped](/tools/charitology-wrapped/) card, is a concrete first experiment.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"prestige-economy"}],"number":15,"progress":"Field evidence that a status mechanism tied to what gifts achieve changes giving behavior at scale.","sources":[{"note":null,"publisher":"Humanity’s Checklist","title":"Humanity’s Checklist","url":"https://humanityschecklist.org/","year":2026}],"statement":"Can generosity become a stronger status signal than consumption, and what would that unlock?","title":"The Status Flip"},"type":"entry"},"subjectHash":"75ccb73d8f4e616d91ac22f7effa791b89e8acb56ece25bd36882cd7fd240272","version":1},{"adapterVersion":"research-content-v1","authorship":{"actorIds":[],"complete":false,"refs":[],"state":"unknown"},"hash":"89a971058a7277952da4ef3b4d1c31726839f254358b12c7b907e9ef16d91c4a","id":"version:problem-when-charity-harms-v1","previousId":null,"recordId":"problem:when-charity-harms","sources":[{"selector":{"kind":"entry"},"sourceId":"source:current-problems-when-charity-harms"}],"subject":{"body":"\n## Why it matters\n\nGood intentions are not good outcomes. Some programs have made things worse, and others may have delayed the structural fixes that would have helped more. A science of giving has to study harm as carefully as help.\n\n## Where to start\n\nThe [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/) collects documented cases. The work is to find the patterns that connect them.\n","collection":"problems","frontmatter":{"bounty":"Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded.","conditions":[{"collection":"conditions","id":"symptom-trap"},{"collection":"conditions","id":"silence-about-failure"}],"number":20,"progress":"A catalog of documented harm mechanisms, with the conditions under which each appears, drawn from real cases.","sources":[],"statement":"When does charity cause harm, through dependency, crowding out local markets or governments, or delaying reform?","title":"When Charity 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