jemonjam
engineer + builder + leader
On charitable giving
December 10, 2024

Charitable giving is a powerful force for good in the world and giving well is a duty I take with a deep seriousness. I first learned about Effective Altruism in 2015 and was immediately enamored with the clear message: donate to the most effective charities, who can prove the value they provide per dollar, even if you will never see the personal impact of that money. Although I have not taken the Giving What We Can 10% Pledge, I began donating primarily towards effective charities - especially those focused on prevention of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. Though hard to comprehend on an emotional level, since I began donating in this way and based on GiveWell’s estimates, I have helped ~50 children currently living in sub-Saharan Africa who would have otherwise died from easily preventable disease.

Then in 2018, I read one of the the most important books I’ve encountered, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (see this blog post for a great, if dense, synopsis). Effective Altruism is an approach to bring legibility (in Scott’s terminology) to charitable giving; it builds and then evaluates against measurements, which advantages the quantities that are measurable. These are important quantities to be sure! For example, EA charity evaluators often use QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) saved as one axis measured. This is an attempt to quantify the number of quality years of life an intervention is reasonably expected to produce and helps bring legibility to the common sense idea that adding a few poor years to the end of the life of an elderly person is worth less than adding many great years to a child’s life.

However, there are a lot of qualities that are immeasurable, and Scott would caution us against believing the legibility we’ve artifically built actually quantifies the underlying territory (or whether we’re just making the charity version of Brasilia). It’s not necessarily that GiveWell’s numbers are inaccurate - averting malaria deaths is a real and extremely important thing to count. Instead it’s the instict that a legible plan can replace local, illegible knowledge that ensure complex systems work; something he calls metis. After reading Seeing Like a State, my belief began to grow that legible giving is not the only effective way to do charity (even if other ways are not as legible and are more grounded in metis).

Instead of attempting to unify these two opposing viewpoints into a grand theory of how to do the most good - I took the more expiditious route of explicitly splitting my charitable giving, which means balancing global impact through EA charities with local community support. Global/EA causes are chosen for their proven cost-effectiveness (often measured in lives saved per dollar), while local charities are chosen for their direct community impact and the value of my own local knowledge in addressing issues. By splitting funds between these, I aim to do the most good per dollar globally and also strengthen my local community, leveraging the insight that people closest to the ground often know best how to help their neighbors. Local giving also lets me see the effects first-hand and avoids some unintended consequences that can occur in top-down aid efforts. This is a hard-won compromise; every dollar I give to a local effort is a dollar not going to EA, which means potentially a dollar that doesn’t save a child from an ugly death. I often revisit this but also reaffirm that I can be guided by my own metis, even against problems that are illegible.

Updated 2025 List

Global Causes

Local Community Causes