What is the average charity? I don’t have a good intuition for what it looks like, is, how big it is, what it works on etc.[1] I think pinning this down will help make the comparison clearer. Will, how do you think about this?
Sidenote: At least in the US, I would be open to the argument that the average charity—defined as being the midpoint of some multidimensional array of size, cause area, staffing, location, etc. -- produces literally zero charitable benefit on net, and might even be doing harm. You might not share this intuition, but we have a long list of mostly null effects for pro-social interventions once they’re evaluated rigorously (enterprise zones in California, medicaid enrollment in oregon, head start, etc. -- any of which you might take issue with but I think the broader point is defensible that on average, interventions don’t work.) If the average social utility gain of a given nonprofit America is zero, then I don’t know how we’re going to say some other cause is X or Y times “better” than that. The seeing eye dog vs curing blindness comparison is a lot more coherent, I think.
I think for the purposes of this comparison, non-profit and charity are probably not interchangeable, in the sense that a marginal donor with 5K to spend is almost certainly not going to donate that to Kaiser Permanente (although $1M does get you naming rights at a smaller chain!). So I guess whatever we’re defining the average charity as, the distribution should probably exclude these big institutions that are nonprofit for a bunch of tax code reasons but in reality are just providing goods and services to clients in exchange for money.
Perhaps taking a list of registered charities, and weighting their cost effectiveness by their donation revenue would be the most apt way to measure the average cost effectiveness? But I also think that we can only aptly measure the effectiveness of charities that are designed to have measurable effectiveness using RCTs. For charities with no good counterfactual or small sample sizes, quantifying effectiveness becomes impossible. Try measuring the effectiveness of Oxfam as a whole, for example.
What is the average charity? I don’t have a good intuition for what it looks like, is, how big it is, what it works on etc.[1] I think pinning this down will help make the comparison clearer. Will, how do you think about this?
Sidenote: At least in the US, I would be open to the argument that the average charity—defined as being the midpoint of some multidimensional array of size, cause area, staffing, location, etc. -- produces literally zero charitable benefit on net, and might even be doing harm. You might not share this intuition, but we have a long list of mostly null effects for pro-social interventions once they’re evaluated rigorously (enterprise zones in California, medicaid enrollment in oregon, head start, etc. -- any of which you might take issue with but I think the broader point is defensible that on average, interventions don’t work.) If the average social utility gain of a given nonprofit America is zero, then I don’t know how we’re going to say some other cause is X or Y times “better” than that. The seeing eye dog vs curing blindness comparison is a lot more coherent, I think.
Most nonprofit revenue isn’t from charitable giving (think healthcare, education, etc):
https://taxfoundation.org/blog/501c3-nonprofit-revenue/
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/search
Most American charitable giving was across hundreds of thousands of religious organizations:
https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazine/less-god-less-giving/
But these organizations receive the most donations:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BpEt8DqrcAhKJbtfJ/america-s-100-charities-receiving-most-donations
I think for the purposes of this comparison, non-profit and charity are probably not interchangeable, in the sense that a marginal donor with 5K to spend is almost certainly not going to donate that to Kaiser Permanente (although $1M does get you naming rights at a smaller chain!). So I guess whatever we’re defining the average charity as, the distribution should probably exclude these big institutions that are nonprofit for a bunch of tax code reasons but in reality are just providing goods and services to clients in exchange for money.
(colleges are an edge case here)
Perhaps taking a list of registered charities, and weighting their cost effectiveness by their donation revenue would be the most apt way to measure the average cost effectiveness? But I also think that we can only aptly measure the effectiveness of charities that are designed to have measurable effectiveness using RCTs. For charities with no good counterfactual or small sample sizes, quantifying effectiveness becomes impossible. Try measuring the effectiveness of Oxfam as a whole, for example.