As a side note, I’m personally more interested in the inputs into the Progress out of Poverty Index than in the index itself. I.e., I would like to know whether a charity’s clients have running water, electricity, healthy diets, etc. and find this disaggregated info more helpful than the final single number that comes out of it. (The case is somewhat analogous to that of the DALY metric, although I believe the Progress out of Poverty Index is more meaningful and less opaque than the DALY.)

Jonah:

• There are currently about 15 Seattle staff (Americans).
• There are currently 2 major local staff, plus a translator/IT consultant.
• The planned expansion will involve hiring one more local staff per province, to train Field Coordinators.
• In each province VillageReach expects about 10-20k additional immunizations per year (details forthcoming). At about 15 immunizations per life saved (the approximation we use), that’s 700-1500 lives saved per province per year.
• Expansion will also involve other reallocation of government workers to roles as Field Coordinators, as I discussed with Leah.

I’m not sure how much light all of this sheds on anything. I imagine that people vary extremely widely in the “expected good they would do otherwise” and that we have very little way of quantifying this. It does seem to me that VillageReach is more “lightweight” than most charities in terms of how many top-tier local staff they are employing, since most of what they are doing is trying to reorganize the public health system rather than put in new services from scratch.

Jason, it sounds like the main reason you are considering giving to your alma mater is out of a sense of “debt repayment.” (Maybe a better way to put it is “equity repayment,” since your alma mater gets nothing back from many of its alumni, and has to get huge returns from the successful alumni to “break even.”) I think this is a valid reason to give, but:

• It still seems like a good idea to examine your alma mater’s financial situation and what the actual impact of your gift would be. If they turn out to have much more funding than they need/will use for scholarships, I imagine you’d reconsider.
• I would put the gift in a different mental bucket from “philanthropy.”.

I’m speaking here only about how to think of your own position - obviously from there you’ll have to negotiate/compromise with your wife if she sees things differently.

A friend of mine working on a project in Uganda found a particular piece of appropriate technology that was reliably paying great returns for farmers who used it to shell their coffee (he did a robust economic analysis to prove this), but when he spoke with several local leaders about getting a manufacturing facility set-up and focusing it on coffee, they declined, saying that NGOs were only interested in peanuts. It’s only one story, but it seems similar to your experience.

On the standard of living… it strikes me that it’d be pretty easy to train a group of college students to “ask the right questions” for standard of living and send them over to a part of the world, pay for their travel and have them survey a number of communities… heck, if you framed it correctly, you may even be able to get them to pay you to do it. Even if charities didn’t publicize this information, it’d be really helpful for them to know if they were raising an areas standard of living (assuming one charity has that power, which I doubt they do).

Very true, but that’s the case with every “selfish giving” donation we’re talking about, right? Wikipedia, one’s alma mater, and a church all benefit other people (which is why “selfish giving” is kind of a harsh term, it’s much less selfish than, say, buying a Lexus). I think the issue is intentionally choosing a charity that one knows to be cost-ineffective for personal reasons.

I think a much worse example of selfish giving would be a multimillion dollar gift to a university to have them build a building and name it after you. Once again, more selfless than buying a yacht, but there’s always a big element of ego implicit in such a donation.

Fair enough….except that the $$$ you give doesn’t get earmarked solely to serve your needs. Others personally benefit from that Church as well, so I would absolutely consider it philanthropy.

Thanks for traveling to Africa to look into these matters - I’ve been reading your posts with interest. It’s discouraging to hear that diversion of skilled labor looks to be a serious concern. What does the ratio (number of lives saved by VillageReach’s vaccination efforts)/(number of local Village reach employees) look like?

Jason, my own feeling is that donations to your alma mater are most likely to be dwarfed by comparison with VillageReach in cost effectiveness and so that Holden’s approximation is valid in this case and you should conceptualize donations to your alma mater as satisfying a personal need rather than pushing toward a better world, and so not classify them as philanthropy.

However:

(1) it’s possible that I’m wrong in my judgment, not knowing your college’s financial situation and how well they use money (you would know more about this than I would) though I suspect not in light of the issue raised here http://blog.givewell.net/2010/01/28/can-choosing-the-right-charity-double-your-impact/ ,

(2) you and/or your wife may have a different conception of what an ideal society would look like than I do

(3) maintaining a happy marriage has value too, both intrinsic and instrumental.