GiveWell is great, and I seriously considered making "give to GiveWell recommended charities" the recommendation of the article. However, I think it's even better to give to the Open Philanthropy Project (a collaboration between GiveWell and Good Ventures) or to give to GiveWell itself, rather than their recommended charities (which has the effect of increasing OpenPhil's funds). It depends on the extent to which you share GiveWell's values though.
This would be the most optimal use of $20k IMHO - giving to an organization that guides donations to more honest, better operated charities means more people effectively helped. $20k could be used to cover hosting and operations costs so that people like you and I have a resource to show us what will give the most bang for our collective buck.
Billions of dollars go to charities annually but high administrative costs and poor management means only a fraction reaches the intended target.
What are the benefits to giving to Open Philanthropy Project / GiveWell / Giving What We Can Trust over donating directly to the charities they recommend?
The recommended charities don't change often, so it wouldn't be much of a time saving. And it puts a lot of power into the trusts' hands.
OpenPhil is planning to give to substantially different charities from GiveWell recommended charities:
http://www.open-philanthropy.org/
Giving to GiveWell or Giving What We Can means your money is spent on research and advocacy, probably resulting in a greater total impact:
https://80000hours.org/2015/06/donating-to-giving-what-we-ca...
Giving to GiveWell also has the effect of increasing the funds available to OpenPhil, since OpenPhil (to some extent) makes up the short fall in GiveWell's funding.
The Giving What We Can Trust is just a convenient way to have a Donor Advised Fund. The money goes to whichever charities you like.
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/trust
It's only 20 grand. As I tried to mention below, aim higher. You've got the nerds running around in the weeds here on HN.
This other story on HN is not gaining any traction but it's interesting because a 33 year old Malayasian billionaire is financing using Watson to assist with cancer treatment.
"Jho Low, the 33-year-old billionaire who is bankrolling the $50 million MD Anderson project with Watson, said the effort grew out of his grandfather’s treatment for leukemia in Malaysia. Low said that he felt fortunate to be able to connect his grandfather’s doctors remotely with MD Anderson specialists to devise the best treatment plan. He believes everyone, rich or poor, should have the same access to that kind of expertise."
It's probably not gaining traction because much of Jho Low's wealth comes from (allegedly) the embezzlement and misappropriation of money from a state-funded Malaysian investment fund. Just google Jho Low and 1MDB. The case currently threatens to destabilize the Malaysian government.
If you're a young personal at the start of your career, then I agree it could easily make more sense to invest it in yourself (e.g. education, trying out a startup, graduate school).
Whole-heartedly agreed. Until you have more money than you know what to do with, the expected social returns from just about everywhere you put your money would be far dwarfed by the returns you'd get from investing in yourself and giving back once you've got enough piled up to where it doesn't matter one whit whether you have it or not.
That doesn't make sense to me. If you give money to poorer people, it allows them to invest in themselves at a higher rate of return than you can achieve.
No; ten people accruing compound interest (for example) on $100 is not nearly as good as one person accruing compound interest on $1000, and then distributing the dividends. Why? Because fixed costs eat away the interest gains of the ten much more than the one.
Every system has friction. You have to concentrate power to overcome friction and get things done. We'd be knocking off the world's problems a lot faster if we could "focus fire" on them. Ten diseases that might each take a decade to cure with 1/10th the donation could be solved half the time or less if each disease got a year of all the donations. But charity is more about signalling your clever pet cause than global optimization of future world-states, so nobody will let go of their second-best (or, realistically, 897th-best) charity.
If it is indeed socially optimal to concentrate wealth, then we should advocate a regressive tax policy and encourage the poor to donate to the upper middle class.
Do you know of published research that supports this conclusion? I'm honestly curious.
