I think you got it quite well :). Depending on the system and your particular situation, you could indeed use tax relief on future income/âcapital gains for donations you would make âfrom income in earlier yearsâ (as money is fungible), and this could account for a large proportion of the relief you would get on it now.
Sjir Hoeijmakersđ¸
Karma: 2,774
Four claims about the role of effecÂtive givÂing in the EA community
Thanks for raising this question!
One consideration Iâd add that I donât yet see reflected in your post or in the comments is that it could very well be that there will still be some sort of tax relief when you give later (and that it could even be larger at that point!), so tax relief may inform the giving now vs giving later question less than it may seem at first sight.
Itâs possible there is reasonable case to be made that tax relief on money donated later is going to be (much) lower in expectation than on money donated now (e.g. perhaps the current system priviliges small yearly donations over large single ones, or perhaps there are longer-term downward trends in policy around tax relief), but that case needs to be made in order to make the claim that current tax relief systems push (strongly) in the direction of giving now.
(I donât know much about this at all, but FWIW my best guess would be tax relief for an individual giving later will be slightly lower in expectation than for an individual giving now, which would push slightlyâbut only slightly! - in the direction of giving now)
Thanks for asking these in-depth questions, Stan!
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The donation distribution statistics do not exclude our top 10 donors (neither on the pledge nor on the non-pledge side), so our takeaways from those arenât influenced. I should also clarify that we do not exclude all top 10 donors (on either the pledge or non-pledge side) from all of our donation estimates that influence the giving multiplier: we only exclude all top 10 pledge donors from our estimates of the value of the pledge (for more detail on how we treated large donors differently and why, see this appendix). Please also note that we havenât (yet) made any decisions on which groups to target more or less on the basis of these results: our takeaways will inform our organisation-wide strategic discussions going forwards but we havenât had any of those yetâas we have only just finished this evaluationâandâas we also emphasize in the reportâthe takeaways provide updates on our views but not our all-things-considered views.
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This is a great question and I think points at the importance of considering the difference between marginal and average cost-effectiveness when interpreting our findings: as you say, many people might have still donated âhad GWWC existed from 2020 in a very minimal formâ, i.e. the first few dollars spent on GWWC may be worth a lot more than the last few dollars spent on it. As we note in the plans for future evaluations section, we are interested in making further estimates like the one you suggest (i.e. considering only a part of our activities) and will consider doing so in the future; we just didnât get to doing this in this evaluation and chose to make an estimate of our total impact (i.e. considering us not existing as the counterfactual) first.
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We explain how we deal with this in this appendix. In short, we use two approaches, one of which counts all the impact of a pledge in the year the pledge is taken and the other in the years donations are made against that pledge. We take a weighted average of these two approaches to avoid double-counting our impact across different years.
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ďGWWCâs 2020â2022 ImÂpact evalÂuÂaÂtion (exÂecÂuÂtive sumÂmary)
I like that one!
Hi Luis, thank you for writing this up! I think itâs a well-written forum post that clarifies important distinctions and makes valuable points, and on a topic that AFAIK is being considered and discussed by many people in the community currently.
I agree with most of your points. In fact, Iâve come around on one that we previously disagreed on, namely on defining âlocal priorities researchâ more restrictively than how many people are currently using it: I now see more of the value of having âlocalâ in LPR clearly refer to the altruistic scope rather than the resources being prioritised, consistent and contrasting with the âglobalâ in GPR referring to the global altruistic scope.
There are two further comments/âsuggestions Iâd like to make:
Consider using a different name than âcontextualization researchâ
I think adding new terminology that isnât immediately clear should be avoided whenever possible, and CR isnât self-explanatory nor does defining this new term look unavoidable to me. I think using something like âresource-specific GPRâ or âtargeted GPRââthough a mouthfulâis much clearer than CR, because (1) the terms themselves are more self-explanatory (including by using the word âprioritiesâ) and (2) itâs immediately clear that they refer to a subset of GPR.
There may be cases in which âpureâ LPR is worth doing for local groups
I expect there are cases in which it will be worth doing LPR (according to your new restricted definition) as a local group from the perspective of doing the most good impartially even when it doesnât overlap with CR/âresource-specific GPR. In other words, I expect there to be cases where doing âpureâ LPR would be a recommendation coming out of doing resource-specific GPR for a local group.
Take your Latin American example: my guess is it will often be valuable to do the type of research you link to there even if you expect not to find anything close to competitive to GW top charities, and even if there isnât a large pot of restricted funds that may be influenced by it.
A few reasons for doing LPR in such a case could be:
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showing one cares and is knowledgeable about local problems before making the claim one should focus on other geographies or cause areas
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substantiating and better being able to communicate the claim that donations go further in those other countries or cause areas
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using this as a training opportunity for charity researchers who could later move on to charity evaluation that would qualify as GPR
As weâve discussed elsewhere there are clear trade-offs and risks for engaging in LPR at a local group level (e.g. opportunity costs, risk of motivated reasoning or value drift) - so I share your caution in recommending this as an activity. However, I donât think a blanket recommendation against doing (well-considered and careful) LPR at a local group level is justified either, for the above reasons.
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Ok, sounds good, Iâve added you to the list; looking forward to what CEARCH will come up with!
Thanks Joel, happy to add CEARCH; just a quick check: are you planning/âaiming to publish funding opportunity recommendations this year? (the aim for this list is to really be about publicly available funding opportunities; e.g. it doesnât include Rethink Priorities even though they do related/ârelevant research)
Thanks David!
CN is currently omitted on purposeâdoesnât fit definition of (self-identified) EA-inspired research or fundraising - but I could see a case for them being included in the near term (had a really good chat with them this week about their plans and potential collaborations with GWWC, coincidentally). Iâm happy to be challenged on this of course.
Iâll add Charity Elections as a separate project.
Thanks for the suggestions Nicole!
Iâll add a country column
Would be happy for the sheet to be embedded on Forum but donât immediately know how to do it and donât think itâs a high priority, so if someone wants to do this please lmk :)
Overview of effecÂtive givÂing organisations
Thanks for pointing at this! Weâll make sure to ask GW about this at our next point of contact -i.e. whether they think we should recommend SCI/âdeworming charities given our different bar and their cost-effectiveness analysisâand this may lead us to change the status of these charities.
Hi Jeff, thanks for another helpful suggestion! (previous one) In this case, I agree there is room for improvement, and weâll aim to update our inclusion criteria throughout 2023 and to provide more details where we can. The reasons this particular thing isnât in there yet are (1) we simply havenât prioritised writing this out yet, as it is quite detailed/âapplies to just one of the four âcause areasâ we cover and to just one evaluator (FP) and it would require quite a bit of extra context to explain to the broad audience we try to reach (e.g. laying out what we mean by these ratings, what is measured, limitations etc.) which was beyond the scope we were able to set for this giving season (during which we already had a lot of things to update with a small team) (2) this relies on FPâs internal ratings and Iâm not sure whether FP would want these to be public, e.g. given how rough they are/âhow much context they need/âto avoid over-updating, but Iâll leave it to them to respond on that point.
On SCI specifically, my recollection is that GiveWellâs November 2021 analysis is no longer current/âthat SCI has made significant changes to its programme since that evaluation was done, though Iâm not 100% sure. In any case, for the deworming charities more generally we decided to stick closely with our inclusion criteria, which meant not recommending them as top-rated (because they donât clear GWâs nor FPâs current bar at this moment/âthey werenât recommended to us by either) and listing until we receive FPâs updated estimates. This seemed the better option in particular because we know FP will have updated estimates relatively soon, and IIRC they donât expect all deworming charities to necessarily clear the 3x bar (though again referring to them here for a response, if they are willing to comment before finalizing the evaluation). Hope that clarifies!
Thanks again for this suggestion Jeff! However, for reasons mostly outlined in my comment here (under (4)) GWWCâs position remains that we should not restrict charity recommendations only to those who have a recent public evaluation available. Iâd be interested in any more arguments coming out of this discussion that would update our view though, and these could feed into a revision of our inclusion criteria later this year.
Thereâs one thing Iâd like to addâbased on the emphasis of your new post: as you mention, there are multiple reasons why people choose to donate to charities over funds, even while we generally think that donating to funds will be the higher-impact option. I think I have lower credence than you seem to have in ânot trusting fundsâ being the most prominent one, but even if it is, I donât think the current situation is problematic for donors for whom this is the main reason: those donors can easily see whether a particular top-rated charity has a recent public evaluation available (e.g. this will be highlighted on its charity page on the GWWC website), and adjust their decisions accordingly. By keeping the current policy, the âtop-ratedâ label remains representative of where we expect money will actually do the most good, rather than it being adjusted for a subgroup of donors who have a lower trust in funds.
(As an aside, I donât see why the other reasons you mention for giving to charities (e.g. tax deductibility) would be more characteristic of âsophisticated and committedâ donors than having a view on whether or not to trust particular evaluators/âfunds)
Yeah agreed. And another one could be as a way of getting involved more closely with a particularly charity when one wants to provide other types of support (advice, connections) in addition to funding. E.g. even though I donât think this should help a lot, Iâve anecdotally found it helpful to fund individual charities that I advise, because putting my personal donation money on the line motivates me to think even more critically about how the charity could best use its limited resources.
Thanks again for engaging in this discussion so thoughtfully Jeff! These types of comments and suggestions are generally very helpful for us (even if I donât agree with these particular ones).
I think trust is one of the reasons why a donor may or may not decide to give to a fund over a charity, but there are others as well, e.g. a preference for supporting more specific causes or projects. I expect donors with these other reasons (who trust evaluators/âfund managers but would still prefer to give to individual charities (as well)) will value charity recommendations in areas for which there are no public and up-to-date evaluations available.
I think what Iâd like to see is funds saying something like, if you want to support our work the best thing is to give to the fund, but the second best is to support orgs X, Y, Z. This recommendation wouldnât be based on a public evaluation, but just on your trust in them as a funder.
Note that this is basically equivalent to the current situation: we recommend funds over charities but highlight supporting charities as the second-best thing, based on recommendations of evaluators (who are often also fund managers in their area).
FWIW Iâm not asking for immediate action, but a reconsideration of the criteria for endorsing a recommendation from a trusted evaluator.
I wasnât suggesting you were, but Simon certainly was. Sorry if that wasnât clear.
In cases where a field has only non-public or stale evaluations then fund managers are still in a position to consider non-public information and the general state of the field, check in with evaluators about what kind of stale the current evaluations are at, etc. And in these cases I think the best you can do is say that this is a field where GWWC currently doesnât have any recommendations for specific charities, and only recommends giving via funds.
As GWWC gets its recommendations and information directly from evaluators (and aims to update its recommendations regularly), I donât see a meaningful difference here between funds vs charities in fields where there are public up-to-date evaluations and where there arenât: in both cases, GWWC would recommend giving to funds over charities, and in both cases we can also highlight the charities that seem to be the most cost-effective donation opportunities based on the latest views of evaluators. GWWC provides a value-add to donors here, given some of these recommendations wouldnât be available to them otherwise (and many donors probably still prefer to donate to charities over donating to funds /â might not donate otherwise).
Thanks for the suggestion Jason, though I hope the longer comment I just posted will clarify why I think this wouldnât be worth doing.
Hi Maxim, thanks for your question. Just a very quick note that (1) Iasonâs claim is unlikely to be true, at least in many cases (see e.g. GiveWell on the funding opportunities they expect to find in the coming few years and the extent to which they expect them to be filled here), (2) his claim seems to stem from 2016 (so Iâm not sure whether he would still support it).