Charitology
About

An open science of doing the most good

Charitology studies charity as a system: where generosity flows, why it flows there, and how to route it from the symptoms of the world’s problems to their sources.

What it is

Charitology is a field, not a charity. It doesn’t run programs on the ground, rate organizations or ask for money. It publishes a diagnosis of the charity system, a method anyone can use, open problems for researchers, free tools for givers and organizations, and a growing Record of what is known and what isn’t.

Why now

In October 2026 the obvious name for the science of doing the most good was available to register for about ten dollars. Read the founding manifesto, “Ten Dollars”.

How it stays honest

  • No judgment of the good being done. The subject is the system, not the people in it.
  • Every claim is sourced and labeled established, documented, debated or hypothesis.
  • No ratings of named charities until a rating method has survived public red-team review.
  • Corrections and challenges are public. Every page links to both.
  • Edition 0 was drafted with AI assistance and is being reviewed in public. Pages say whether a second contributor has reviewed them yet.

The open instruments it builds on

Charitology links independent open projects that already measure parts of the system. Each keeps its own method and license.

  • Humanity’s Checklist: Six root causes that sit upstream of every world problem, each with one beachhead project. Charitology’s source level comes from here.
  • Systemic Altruism: A beta tracker of charities working on structural change, with inspectable judgments, uncertainty ranges and a searchable IRS registry.
  • Charity Impact Media: Sourced Form 990 spending breakdowns for about 25,000 U.S. charities with $10 million or more in revenue. No ratings.
  • WHOFUNDS: The open grant graph of U.S. private foundations, built from Form 990-PF filings, with its own miss rate on the page.

Privacy

No cookies, analytics, ads or accounts. The tools run in your browser, and anything you save stays in your browser’s storage. The site is a set of static files hosted on GitHub Pages.

Licenses

Code is MIT-licensed. Content and data are CC BY 4.0: use them for anything, with credit to “Charitology (charitology.org)”. Sources quoted or cited keep their own rights.

Contact

Everything happens in the open on GitHub: issues for corrections and ideas, pull requests for changes, discussions for everything else.