Equipped with tools to measure our calories, steps, working hours, wasted hours, water intake and sleep cycles, we have now been exhorted to measure our charitable impact, too. Books, podcasts, TikToks and digital guides implore us to donate our money cautiously, rationally, to the charities that promise to make a dollar go the furthest it can. Holiday season giving can start to feel a little like sports betting: It doesn't matter if you're loyal to a scrappy local team -- the data can tell you exactly where your money should go.
This is not how I thought about charity when I was growing up. I remember my childhood neighbor declaring that when he rode the subway he sometimes found himself spending more than he would on a cab, because he did not believe in toughening his heart toward people asking for change. This seemed like an approach that made up for impracticality with grace: When someone in front of you says they need help, do not look away.
What is the right way to give away money, anyway? The debate has been fomented partly by a group of billionaires -- most prominently the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna -- whose approach to charity argues, essentially, that you do not get to feel good for having done anything at all. People should give wherever their money is most needed and most likely to yield the biggest effects.
Mr. Moskowitz and Ms. Tuna are among the Silicon Valley billionaires who have embraced the philosophical movement known as effective altruism, a worldview that focuses on optimizing good. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, said effective altruist thinking closely aligned with his views. The co-founder of Skype, Jaan Tallinn, also supported the movement, and former board members of OpenAI had ties to it as well.
For billionaires who made their money by crunching numbers, effective altruism extends that into the way they give away their money, too. It is a data-loving engineer's mode of do-gooding, for the first generation of ultra wealth created by engineers.It's an approach that can give people moral permission to keep amassing more wealth -- as long as they give some of it away. E.A. fits comfortably into an era of widening inequality, as the fortunes of the world's richest have grown, and so has their ability to shape ideas for the rest of us.
E.A. applied the sheen of good will (altruism) to a brand of thinking (optimization) that had already taken over the way we eat and exercise, work and live. And just as health optimization began as a tech-world obsession that trickled down to the rest of us, something similar has happened in recent years with the ethos of effective altruism and Americans' sensibility around charitable giving.
Our debates over altruism come amid a real crisis for small, local charities. A report this year, from nearly 200 philanthropic leaders, noted that as 20 million households dropped out of giving, from 2010 to 2016, the organizations that have suffered most are community-based groups whose existence depends on small-dollar donors rather than on mega-philanthropists, and those that "provide the backbone of civic life."
There is nothing wrong, of course, with wanting to do the most good possible. But it's also worth asking if some charity should be reserved for causes outside optimization -- extending the deepest sources of meaning in our own lives toward others and strengthening the communities we are part of. We may consider whether there's really a one-size-fits-all template to answer a question that's as old as scripture and as ever-shifting as global news. Surrounded by problems that need attention, how should a person try to do good?
Efficient Philanthropy
Before effective altruism became the dominant way to think about charity, it was something more modest: an essay. The philosopher Peter Singer, in 1972, published "Famine, Affluence and Morality," which rocked readers with a simple plea: If there's anything a person can do to alleviate the suffering of someone on the other side of the globe, Mr. Singer argued, you have a responsibility to help.
In the decades since Mr. Singer's landmark essay, effective altruism went from being a philosophical idea to a movement to a multibillion-dollar philanthropy. Mr. Moskovitz and Ms. Tuna pledged billions of dollars of their Facebook money to the movement, through Open Philanthropy, a funder based in the Bay Area that uses empirical research to guide charitable spending.
Open Philanthropy's chief executive, Alexander Berger -- who at age 21 donated a kidney to a stranger, the most effective donation he could make -- described what rational giving looked like in practice. His staff holds "strategic cause selection" meetings, dissecting issues by their scale, tractability and how neglected they are. Reducing lead exposure in low-income countries is one example of a cause that the group has strategically selected, and allocated $104 million toward.
For all the affluent people who have taken up the E.A. mantle, criticisms of the movement have also multiplied. Skeptics point out that it frays people's already threadbare ties to local charities like soup kitchens and shelters, worsening civic isolation. A billionaire pledging to do "the most good" with his or her fortune can also provide a justification for having that fortune to begin with, no matter how it was acquired. And channeling money only toward causes with measurable impact can undermine funding for squishier sources of good.
"Effective altruists reduce value to anything that can be quantified, but you very often cannot quantify the things we value the most," said Amy Schiller, the author of "The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong -- and How to Fix It." She rattled off some examples of things whose value was hard to price: museums, libraries, parks.
Critics of hyper-rational giving saw an opening for airing their concerns two years ago when the effective altruism movement found itself in crisis.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was a true celebrity member of the effective altruism movement. He jetted around the world wearing a raggedy shirt with the movement's symbol. Mr. Bankman-Fried embraced a strategy called "earning to give," meaning he only made billions for the purpose of giving them away. When it turned out that he had made those billions in a fraudulent scheme, some grappled with the question of whether the "earning to give" mentality had allowed Mr. Bankman-Fried to justify swindling customers.
His downfall raised the questions: What were the limits of effective altruism? What are other ways of thinking about how to do good? As it turned out, there are alternative schools of thought.
Magnificent Giving
When Notre Dame caught on fire in 2019, affluent people in France rushed to donate to repair the cathedral, a beloved national landmark. Mr. Singer wrote an essay questioning the donations, asking: How many lives could have been saved with the charitable funds devoted to repairing this landmark?
This was when a critique of effective altruism crystallized for Ms. Schiller. "He's asking the wrong question," she recalled thinking at the time. She wanted to know: How could anyone put a numerical value on a holy space?
Ms. Schiller had first become uncomfortable with effective altruism while working as a fund-raising consultant. She encountered donors who told her, effectively, "I'm looking for the best bang for my buck." They just wanted to know their money was well spent. That made sense, though Ms. Schiller couldn't help but feel there was something missing in this approach. It turned the search for a charitable cause into an exercise of bargain hunting.
The school of philanthropy that Ms. Schiller now proposes focuses on "magnificence." In studying the literal meaning of philanthropy -- "love of humanity" in Greek -- she decided we need charitable causes that make people's lives feel meaningful, radiant, sacred. Think nature conservancies, cultural centers and places of worship. These are institutions that lend life its texture and color, and not just bare bones existence.
Even the chief executive of the Center for Effective Altruism, Zachary Robinson, said in an interview that optimization did not dictate all his ways of doing good. He gives to effective altruist causes -- but he also donates locally, supporting YIMBY Action because he is concerned about the housing crisis in his own community, San Francisco.
"We don't need to be dogmatic," Mr. Robinson said. "I don't think this should be the entire part of someone's life or altruistic portfolio."
In her book, Ms. Schiller ties her criticism of effective altruism to broader questions about optimization, writing: "At a time when we are under enormous pressure to optimize our time, be maximally productive, hustle and stay healthy (so we can keep hustling), we need philanthropy to make pleasure, splendor and abundance available for everyone."
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Singer vociferously disagrees with some of her thinking. In an interview, he suggested that it might have been interesting to leave Notre Dame in a state of some disrepair, as a reminder of the many impoverished people in the world who need the money that might have been spent fixing it. He does not want to give his money to museums in affluent countries, he added, impishly noting the Museum of Modern Art's recent $450 million expansion: "MoMA was a perfectly good museum before it did that."
Putting aside debates about magnificence, there's a more fundamental critique of effective altruism, especially the notion of "earning to give." On top of being a philanthropic approach, it's also, sneakily, a moral claim. The giving justifies the earning; it's a permission slip for the accumulation of vast sums of wealth.
There's a growing itch among some philanthropists to approach charitable giving with the goal of alleviating not just poverty but also inequality. Their school of philanthropy, in other words, is focused on justice.
One model is the Good Ancestor Movement, which is based in Britain. Its founder, Stephanie Brobbey, used to work as a private wealth lawyer. She had a crisis of conscience when she realized she had been spending her time helping clients shield themselves from having to pay taxes -- even though she knew that public institutions, like the schools she had attended, needed those taxes.
She quit and started a course that brought donors together to study economic history and discuss how their money could be used to change economic policy. These are mega-philanthropists trying to make their own field obsolete. "We want to work toward being in a place where we don't have to rely on the benevolence of wealthy people to deal with serious problems in the world," Ms. Brobbey said.
In the United States, there is Solidaire, which grew out of Occupy Wall Street. A group of protesters who were sitting in the Lower Manhattan tents in 2011, surrounded by chants of "We are the 99 percent," looked at one another and wondered: Why was it so difficult to get philanthropists to donate to movements like Occupy? (Obviously, it is rare to find a 1 percenter who wants to support groups founded in opposition to the 1 percent. Still, the question was motivating.) They founded a philanthropy network that gave specifically to social justice movements. Solidaire has donated to racial justice groups, climate justice groups and transgender protection groups. It directs its charitable giving based on what recipients say they need -- their voices and opinions, not just data about their lives.
If number crunching tends to reduce friction and uncertainty, what this last school of philanthropy emphasizes is facing the tensions and hurtling toward the hardest questions: Should we have all this money to donate in the first place?
More Than Optimized Giving
I've been talking here mostly about mega philanthropists: Facebook billionaires and 1 percenters. But this conversation matters for the rest of us, too.
With teenagers forming Luddite clubs to get off their phones, gurus publishing antiproductivity books and best-selling manifestoes teaching "How to Do Nothing," many of us have an obvious itch to free ourselves of data: The de-optimized life is still worth living.
There's something especially raw about the impulse to disentangle optimization and charitable giving. Because unlike the calories we eat and expend, or the hours we sleep and work, charitable giving gets at what we choose to let into our hearts, what fires up our empathy and then churns it into impact. Deciding where to give means deciding what crises move us.
It's also a confounding choice when our attention is being pulled, like putty, in different directions by alerts about wars, wildfires and floods, disasters that can paralyze us with their scale. Naturally, we want answers on who needs our help most. But outsourcing our choices about charitable giving to empirical guides does not cut through the numbness. It may sit, conveniently, alongside it. It can even short circuit the painful process of paying attention.
What effective altruism -- or any particular school of philanthropy -- offers is a set of questions. It's a prompt to ask why we're drawn to certain causes, why some issues elicit our sympathy and others do not, whether the groups we'd like to support are actually having any effect. It's possible to take those questions and steer charitable choices in different directions, some optimized to save the maximum number of years of healthy life, some driven by a desire for a fairer economy or a more beautiful world.
"Effective altruism brings to the surface the rationales behind giving that often were unexamined and unarticulated and often kept private," said Benjamin Soskis, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute. "Like lots of ideologies and modes of thinking, it's possible to find some value within it and not live your entire life devoted to those principles."
There's nothing wrong with the desire to measure the value of our giving. But there's also nothing wrong with thinking expansively about that value, or the tools for measuring it. Maybe a neighbor giving to another neighbor is what one fractured street needs. Maybe making someone else's life magnificent is hard to price.