Hello
My name is Jack Sands. I am a student at the University of Tasmania. I have found that a really good way of getting people interested in effective altruism is to point out how overrated the worlds most famous charities are (e.g. Oxfam, Red Cross etc.). For instance, Angus Deaton wrote in his book ‘The Great Escape’ that 70% of aid donations from the UN are government-to-government transactions. Those of you who know a little about international politics will know that the vast majority of the global south live in poverty mostly because of their corrupt governments (Magatte Wade has done a TED talk on this, to give but one example, which is worth watching if this is news to you), which essentially means that 70% of aid donations to the UN are funding the extension to Robert Mugabe’s Blue Roof mansion whilst millions of Zimbabweans starve to death. This is but one example. I am exaggerating of course, but I suspect there are similar stories amongst other famous charities, of which I would greatly appreciate somebody providing links to reliable sources to examples of these charities so I can use them as practical examples when discussing the subject (reliable meaning I can cite it in as evidence in a debate, and the person trying to tear down my position cannot say “this is just a blog post therefore it’s unreliable” or something along those lines. There are a lot of top sources saying that [insert program] works, even though they work at a fraction of the efficiency of the worlds top charities, and that is enough for people to dismiss my view if I cannot prove I am standing on a rock). My email is notfranic@gmail.com (I spelt Francis wrong. I know I’m an idiot. That’s my middle/other name if anyones curious, but my preferred name is Jack) if you have a serious example, as I rarely respond on forums (This is not my main email, so I may be slow to respond, but this is my first post, so I need to make sure I am not spammed with emails or anything like that before giving away my main).
I think it’s fairly rare for a charity to continue operating when its program has been completely debunked. More common is to continue operating the program with no evidence that it is working, and without trying to collect high quality evidence.
Some charities that could conceivably be what you’re looking for include:
Peter Popoff Ministries, technically a church but really an enterprise designed to enrich its namesake.
Central Asian Institute, which earnestly ran an altruistic program of unknown effectiveness but whose programs also served to enrich its founder.
Playpumps, a discredited and yet award winning charitable intervention.
Hello
Thank you for the reply. I would personally disagree that there are not significant corruptions within top charities (look up the scandals in Oxfam and UN for examples, alongside the ones in Deaton’s book), however even if the big names are not corrupt with a capital C, or at least not fundamentally corrupt, even just examples of how they are not as good as top charities would be awesome. This is supposed to help me give examples of why people should stop donating to relatively average charities (which is virtually all of the big names) and instead do the limited research to start giving to top charities instead. They are also useful debate points. I have my own, but I need more.
Cheers
Jack