{ "name": "conditions", "description": "The fifteen conditions of the charity system (the Diagnosis).", "license": "CC BY 4.0. Cite “Charitology (charitology.org)”.", "generated": "2026-10-26", "data": [ { "id": "fragmentation", "path": "/diagnosis/fragmentation/", "title": "The Fragmentation Problem", "number": 8, "summary": "Separate organizations can duplicate costs or miss chances to coordinate. The size of this problem, and when coordination helps, are open questions.", "evidence": "debated", "node": "channels", "upstream": "coordination", "flip": "Organizations working on the same problem share data, services and strategy, and coordinate like parts of one system.", "sources": [ { "title": "Exempt Organizations Business Master File Extract", "url": "https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organizations-business-master-file-extract-eo-bmf", "publisher": "Internal Revenue Service" }, { "title": "Systemic Altruism registry search, built from the IRS Business Master File", "url": "https://charities.systemicaltruism.com/", "publisher": "Systemic Altruism" }, { "title": "Humanity’s Checklist, item 2: Coordination", "url": "https://humanityschecklist.org/", "publisher": "Humanity’s Checklist", "year": 2026 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nThe IRS master file listed 1,975,975 tax-exempt organizations in October 2026. That count covers many kinds of exempt organization, not only 501(c)(3) charities. A registry can show how many organizations exist; it cannot show whether they duplicate useful work or coordinate well.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nOne possible mechanism is that separate funding and reporting systems make shared work harder. That is a hypothesis, not a conclusion about founders’ or donors’ motives. Humanity’s Checklist argues that coordination is a source shared by many problems: people who could work together may lack a way to find each other.\n\n## Why it’s debated\n\nThe count is documented. What it means is not. A plural sector has real strengths: many experiments, local knowledge and room for new ideas. Not every overlap is waste, and the registry count does not establish the right number of charities or when consolidation helps rather than hurts.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nThe question is whether shared services, networks or funding rules would help organizations coordinate. It does not require a judgment about anyone’s motives.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nIs the sector over-fragmented, and when do mergers, shared services or coordination layers improve outcomes? That is [Open Problem 11, the Fragmentation Question](/open-problems/the-fragmentation-question/)." }, { "id": "measurement-gap", "path": "/diagnosis/measurement-gap/", "title": "The Measurement Gap", "number": 7, "summary": "Counting activity does not establish what changed because of it. Measuring that change can require resources and methods beyond routine reporting.", "evidence": "debated", "node": "outcomes", "flip": "Measuring what changed is paid for as part of the work, and small charities share measurement instead of each building their own.", "sources": [ { "title": "The Prize in Economic Sciences 2019, press release", "url": "https://www.kva.se/en/news/ekonomipriset-2019-2/", "publisher": "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences", "year": 2019 }, { "title": "Understanding and misunderstanding randomized controlled trials", "url": "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.12.005", "publisher": "Angus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright, Social Science & Medicine 210", "year": 2018 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nA hypothetical charity reports 10,000 meals served, 500 students tutored and 2,000 nets handed out. Those are *outputs*. Whether anyone is healthier, better educated or less hungry a year later is a different and harder question. Those are *outcomes*.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nCounting activity can be simpler than estimating its effects. Establishing causal impact may require comparison groups, follow-up surveys or specialist help. Routine outcome monitoring does not always need a trial. The 2019 Nobel Prize in economics went to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for an experimental approach to measuring what anti-poverty programs really change. Their work shows how much careful measurement can reveal, and how much was unknown before.\n\n## Why it’s debated\n\nRigorous evaluation isn’t free, and not every program can or should run a randomized trial. Angus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright argue that trial results don’t carry over between places and populations as easily as people assume. Charitology takes both sides seriously: measure what matters, with methods proportionate to the decision being made. The sources here do not establish how large the measurement gap is across the sector.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nA small team may need partners or shared services to evaluate its work. Limited evaluation capacity does not establish negligence.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nWhat share of headline impact findings replicate? See [Open Problem 10, the Replication Rate](/open-problems/the-replication-rate/), and for source-level work, which is hardest of all to measure, [Open Problem 3, Measuring the Source](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/)." }, { "id": "missing-feedback-loop", "path": "/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/", "title": "The Missing Feedback Loop", "number": 1, "summary": "When donors pay for services used by others, they may struggle to judge quality. Feedback and evaluation can help close that information gap.", "evidence": "documented", "node": "feedback", "upstream": "coordination", "flip": "Results travel back to givers as clearly as prices travel through a market, and the people served can send a signal that moves money.", "sources": [ { "title": "The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise", "url": "https://yalelawjournal.org/article/the-role-of-nonprofit-enterprise", "publisher": "Henry B. Hansmann, Yale Law Journal 89(5)", "year": 1980 }, { "title": "Feedback Labs", "url": "https://feedbacklabs.org/", "publisher": "Feedback Labs", "note": "A network working to make listening to the people served the norm in aid and philanthropy." } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nConsider a donor paying for a clinic they do not use. The people served may know about its accessibility and quality, while the donor relies on reports. If their experience and the measured outcomes do not reach funding decisions, a feedback loop is missing. This example illustrates a mechanism; it does not measure how often it occurs.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nIn many purchases, the buyer can use and assess the service. In donor-funded services, the payer and the person served can be different people. The legal scholar Henry Hansmann named the general version of this “contract failure”: the people paying can’t easily see what they are paying for. Charitology’s hypothesis is that this gap can make visible signals, such as stories or cost ratios, more influential than harder-to-observe results.\n\nCharitology treats this as a central mechanism in its Diagnosis. The claim that it causes the other conditions remains a hypothesis.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nThe question is how reporting, listening and funding rules work together. It is about the design of those rules, not anyone’s character.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nHow much money would move if results reached donors as clearly as prices reach shoppers? And what mechanism could let the people served send a signal that moves money? Those are [Open Problem 5, Closing the Feedback Loop](/open-problems/closing-the-feedback-loop/), and [Open Problem 4, the Counterfactual Problem](/open-problems/the-counterfactual-problem/)." }, { "id": "missing-profession", "path": "/diagnosis/missing-profession/", "title": "The Missing Profession", "number": 15, "summary": "Charitology proposes a shared craft for studying how generosity is aimed across causes and moral frameworks, building on existing philanthropy and evaluation professions.", "evidence": "hypothesis", "node": "field", "flip": "Charitology is a recognized craft. People train in it, practice it, check each other’s work and pass it on, the way medicine and engineering do.", "sources": [ { "title": "About the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy", "url": "https://philanthropy.indianapolis.iu.edu/about/index.html", "publisher": "Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy" } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nRocket science has a discipline. So does brain surgery, and so does mixing a cocktail. Philanthropy has scholars too: Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy describes itself as the first school dedicated solely to the study and teaching of philanthropy. There are evaluators, consultants and advisors.\n\nCharitology proposes a practical craft that compares giving across causes, methods and moral frameworks. Whether that adds something useful to existing fields is a question to test. The availability of a domain name is not evidence that a field or profession is absent.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nThe working concern is that knowledge spread across causes and professions may not be shared well enough. The [other fourteen conditions](/diagnosis/) suggest questions for such a craft; they do not prove that existing practitioners lack methods or training.\n\n## This is a hypothesis\n\nCharitology’s founding claim is that a profession would change where money goes, the way medicine changed how illness is treated. That hasn’t been tested. Testing it is [Open Problem 17, the Profession Question](/open-problems/the-profession-question/).\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nNaming a proposed craft is an invitation to learn and test it. It is not a verdict on existing professions." }, { "id": "missing-voice", "path": "/diagnosis/missing-voice/", "title": "The Missing Voice", "number": 11, "summary": "Funding decisions can leave the people served with little say. Listening and sharing decisions are documented responses; their effects depend on context.", "evidence": "documented", "node": "feedback", "upstream": "gatekeepers", "flip": "The people closest to a problem help decide how money is spent, and their feedback is collected, published and acted on.", "sources": [ { "title": "Feedback Labs", "url": "https://feedbacklabs.org/", "publisher": "Feedback Labs" }, { "title": "Fund for Shared Insight", "url": "https://fundforsharedinsight.org/", "publisher": "Fund for Shared Insight", "note": "The collaborative concluded in 2026; its website is an archive." }, { "title": "Humanity’s Checklist", "url": "https://humanityschecklist.org/", "publisher": "Humanity’s Checklist", "year": 2026 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nA funding process can set priorities before the people affected have a say. Listening and participatory grantmaking initiatives document attempts to change that pattern. The sources here do not measure how often it occurs across charity.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nWhen funding authority sits with donors or grant committees, the people served may lack formal decision rights. This is the [Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) seen from the other side: even when the people served know what works, their knowledge may have no reliable route into funding decisions. Humanity’s Checklist calls this a gatekeeper problem. The hypothesis is that concentrated decision rights can exclude useful ideas.\n\nA growing movement is working on the fix. Feedback Labs supports listening, and Fund for Shared Insight worked on that goal until it concluded in 2026. Its website is now an archive. Participatory grantmaking also gives community members a role in decisions about grants.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nThe issue is how decision rights are shared and whose knowledge reaches a decision. Motives cannot be inferred from a funding structure.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nDo community-led programs outperform top-down ones on the same outcome, and by how much? That is [Open Problem 14, the Agency Premium](/open-problems/the-agency-premium/)." }, { "id": "overhead-myth", "path": "/diagnosis/overhead-myth/", "title": "The Overhead Myth", "number": 2, "summary": "Donors judge charities by how little they spend on staff, systems and fundraising, which starves organizations of what good work depends on.", "evidence": "established", "node": "signals", "flip": "Donors judge a charity by what it achieves per dollar, and fund the staff, systems and evaluation that results depend on.", "sources": [ { "title": "The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle", "url": "https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_nonprofit_starvation_cycle", "publisher": "Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard, Stanford Social Innovation Review", "year": 2009 }, { "title": "3 Major Charity Groups Ask Donors to Stop Focusing on Overhead Costs", "url": "https://www.philanthropy.com/news/3-major-charity-groups-ask-donors-to-stop-focusing-on-overhead-costs/", "publisher": "The Chronicle of Philanthropy", "year": 2013 }, { "title": "The overhead myth: crash course to fundraising transparency", "url": "https://candid.org/blogs/the-overhead-myth-crash-course-to-fundraising-transparency/", "publisher": "Candid", "year": 2022 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nA familiar question about a gift is how much goes “to the cause.” A low overhead ratio became a badge of virtue and a high one a warning sign. In 2013 the leaders of GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, three sources of charity information, published an open letter telling donors that overhead is a poor measure of a charity’s performance and asking them to look at transparency, governance, leadership and results instead.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nOverhead is printed on a tax form. A cost ratio does not report impact. Gregory and Howard describe a pattern in which expectations of low overhead put pressure on organizations to underinvest in infrastructure and underreport costs. Their evidence does not show that every charity responds this way. Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard called this loop “the nonprofit starvation cycle.”\n\nA ratio of costs does not by itself establish results. A charity can spend almost nothing on overhead and achieve nothing. Another can invest heavily in good systems and change thousands of lives.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nAsking where your money goes is a responsible instinct. The measure people reach for just can’t answer the question they are asking.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nWhat simple public measure could replace the overhead ratio as the default way donors judge a charity, without being gamed? That is [Open Problem 6, the Overhead Replacement](/open-problems/the-overhead-replacement/). The data to start from already exists: [Charity Impact Media](https://theguysaccount.github.io/charity-impact-media/) publishes sourced Form 990 spending, with no ratings attached." }, { "id": "parked-money", "path": "/diagnosis/parked-money/", "title": "Parked Money", "number": 9, "summary": "Donor-advised funds hold assets already under charitable control. How quickly those assets should reach operating work is debated.", "evidence": "debated", "node": "channels", "flip": "Money set aside for charity moves at the pace the problems demand, and long-term holding is a deliberate strategy rather than a default.", "sources": [ { "title": "DAF Assets Soar 30% to $326 Billion", "url": "https://www.philanthropy.com/news/daf-assets-soar-30-to-326-billion/", "publisher": "The Chronicle of Philanthropy, reporting the Annual DAF Report 2025 by the DAF Research Collaborative", "year": 2025 }, { "title": "The Annual DAF Report 2025", "url": "https://johnsoncenter.org/resource/report-annual-daf-report-2025/", "publisher": "Johnson Center for Philanthropy", "year": 2025 }, { "title": "Taxes on failure to distribute income, private foundations", "url": "https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/taxes-on-failure-to-distribute-income-private-foundations", "publisher": "Internal Revenue Service" }, { "title": "Annual DAF Report 2025, full report", "url": "https://scholarworks.indianapolis.iu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8f309b9f-da38-433e-8c33-bc1b3d1f9a1a/content", "publisher": "Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative, Indiana University repository", "year": 2025 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nDonor-advised funds held about **$326 billion** in 2024, according to the Annual DAF Report 2025. A contribution may qualify for a tax deduction when made, subject to applicable rules, even though the money may reach a working charity years later. Private non-operating foundations generally have an annual distribution requirement based on 5 percent of net investment assets not used for charitable purposes, with adjustments. Qualifying distributions are not limited to grants.\n\n## Why it’s debated\n\nBoth sides have numbers. Defenders point out that donor-advised funds granted $64.9 billion to charities in 2024, an aggregate payout rate of 25.3 percent, calculated using prior-year assets. That is not directly comparable to a foundation’s legal minimum. Critics point to the size of the pool and to accounts that rarely grant at all. Foundations argue that holding assets lets them give forever. Critics argue that today’s problems compound while endowments wait, and that the 5 percent floor often works as a ceiling.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nSaving to give later can be wise, especially if better opportunities are coming. The question is whether the timing serves the charitable purpose. This page does not establish that waiting reflects convenience or that every account waits too long.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nWhat is the best rate to spend philanthropic money now versus later? That is [Open Problem 12, the Payout Question](/open-problems/the-payout-question/)." }, { "id": "prestige-economy", "path": "/diagnosis/prestige-economy/", "title": "The Prestige Economy", "number": 12, "summary": "Charitology hypothesizes that public recognition can favor a gift’s size and visibility over its results. The size of that effect is not established here.", "evidence": "hypothesis", "node": "signals", "upstream": "status", "flip": "Generosity becomes a status symbol for what it achieved, and the most admired gift is the one that worked.", "sources": [ { "title": "Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving", "url": "https://doi.org/10.2307/2234133", "publisher": "James Andreoni, The Economic Journal 100(401)", "year": 1990 }, { "title": "Humanity’s Checklist, item 5: Status", "url": "https://humanityschecklist.org/", "publisher": "Humanity’s Checklist", "year": 2026 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nA naming right or public honor can recognize a visible gift without reporting its later results. This illustrates the proposed mechanism; it does not show how common it is or what it does to giving.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nPeople give for many reasons, and feeling good about giving is one of them. The economist James Andreoni called this the “warm glow,” in a model of giving. Warm glow concerns satisfaction from giving itself; it does not by itself establish a preference for large or public gifts. Humanity’s Checklist proposes redirecting status toward generosity. Whether that would improve giving is a hypothesis.\n\n## This is a hypothesis\n\nCharitology’s claim is that prestige pulls money toward visible, nameable gifts and away from effective ones. The warm-glow model is published. The sources here do not establish whether prestige systematically shifts money away from effective opportunities or by how much.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nWanting to be recognized for generosity is human, and recognition encourages more giving. The fix isn’t to remove the glow. It’s to point it at results.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nCan generosity become a stronger status signal than consumption, and what would it unlock? That is [Open Problem 15, the Status Flip](/open-problems/the-status-flip/)." }, { "id": "proximity-pull", "path": "/diagnosis/proximity-pull/", "title": "The Proximity Pull", "number": 14, "summary": "Local ties and distant needs can point giving in different directions. Comparing them requires evidence about outcomes and an account of special obligations.", "evidence": "debated", "node": "givers", "flip": "Givers see honest comparisons across distance and choose with their eyes open, whether they give near or far.", "sources": [ { "title": "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", "url": "https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265052", "publisher": "Peter Singer, Philosophy & Public Affairs 1(3)", "year": 1972 }, { "title": "How Much Does It Cost to Save a Life?", "url": "https://www.givewell.org/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-a-life", "publisher": "GiveWell", "year": 2024 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nA giver may support local institutions as well as work abroad. GiveWell’s April 2024 explanation reported typical modeled costs of $3,000 to $5,500 per life saved for grants to its top charities. These were estimates for particular grants, not a general price for saving a life or a comparison with all local giving.\n\n## Why it’s debated\n\nThis is a moral question as much as an empirical one, and serious people disagree. Peter Singer argued in 1972 that distance makes no moral difference: if you could save a drowning child in front of you at small cost, you should save a child far away at the same cost. Care ethicists and many religious traditions answer that we have special duties to the people close to us, and that local giving builds the trust and community a good society needs.\n\nCharitology doesn’t settle this for anyone. It treats the *information gap* as the condition: comparisons should make their outcome measures, uncertainty and value judgments visible. This page does not establish how many donors lack such information.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nCaring for your own community is a virtue. The condition is only that givers should be able to see the alternatives and their limits.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nHow should distance weigh in giving, and what do donors choose when they get honest comparisons? That is [Open Problem 18, Proximity and Obligation](/open-problems/proximity-and-obligation/)." }, { "id": "restriction-reflex", "path": "/diagnosis/restriction-reflex/", "title": "The Restriction Reflex", "number": 5, "summary": "Project restrictions and short grants can limit flexibility. Survey evidence documents the concern; the effects of different grant designs need comparison.", "evidence": "documented", "node": "channels", "flip": "Funders who trust an organization’s judgment give flexible, multi-year support and hold it accountable for results rather than line items.", "sources": [ { "title": "New Attitudes, Old Practices: The Provision of Multiyear General Operating Support", "url": "https://www.ncfp.org/download/new-attitudes-old-practices-cep-2020-0", "publisher": "Center for Effective Philanthropy, via the National Center for Family Philanthropy", "year": 2020 }, { "title": "Trust-Based Philanthropy Project", "url": "https://www.trustbasedphilanthropy.org/", "publisher": "Trust-Based Philanthropy Project" } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nImagine a grant for one project, for one year, with a budget the charity can’t change. Halfway through, the charity learns a different approach would work better, but it can’t switch. Its accounting system breaks, and there is no money to fix it, because the grant does not cover accounting systems.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nRestrictions feel like accountability: the funder can see exactly what its money bought. Many restrictions can make planning, adaptation and shared costs harder to fund. Some restricted grants retain flexibility, so the terms matter. Attitudes are shifting faster than practice. In a 2020 study by the Center for Effective Philanthropy, about 58 percent of foundation CEOs said they provide some multi-year general operating support, but only 11 percent of those gave it to more than half their grantees.\n\nRestriction also feeds the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/). A short, fixed grant is easiest to justify for work with quick, countable outputs, and sources rarely produce those.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nFunders restrict gifts because they want to be responsible stewards. Whether a restriction helps depends on the purpose, the terms and the evidence.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nWhen does a restriction help, and when does it harm? That is [Open Problem 8, the Optimal Restriction](/open-problems/the-optimal-restriction/)." }, { "id": "short-horizon", "path": "/diagnosis/short-horizon/", "title": "The Short Horizon", "number": 10, "summary": "Charitology hypothesizes that short funding and reporting cycles can work against goals whose benefits take much longer to appear.", "evidence": "hypothesis", "node": "givers", "upstream": "vision", "flip": "The system funds work on the timescale of the problem, and future people’s interests get a voice when money is allocated.", "sources": [ { "title": "Humanity’s Checklist, item 3: Vision", "url": "https://humanityschecklist.org/", "publisher": "Humanity’s Checklist", "year": 2026 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nImagine a twenty-year effort funded one year at a time. An annual report may need to show useful progress without pretending the final outcome has already arrived. This is an illustration of the time mismatch, not an estimate of typical grant length.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nShort funding and reporting cycles may favor results that arrive sooner. Whether they systematically do so is the hypothesis to test. Future people can’t donate, vote or write a thank-you letter. Humanity’s Checklist adds that we can’t build a future we can’t see: without a shared, compelling picture of where we are going, nothing pulls money toward the long game.\n\n## This is a hypothesis\n\nCharitology’s working claim is that the system’s timescale is shorter than the timescale of its problems. This page does not provide a sector-wide test of that claim. And how much the future *should* count is a real moral question, taken up in [Open Problem 13, Discounting the Future](/open-problems/discounting-the-future/).\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nWanting to see results is reasonable. It just shouldn’t be the only thing that decides what gets funded." }, { "id": "silence-about-failure", "path": "/diagnosis/silence-about-failure/", "title": "The Silence About Failure", "number": 6, "summary": "Charitology hypothesizes that fear of losing support discourages failure reporting. Published failure reports show a response, but do not measure the prevalence or funding cost of silence.", "evidence": "hypothesis", "node": "outcomes", "flip": "Failure reports are normal and rewarded. A charity that says what didn’t work is trusted more, and the field learns each lesson once.", "sources": [ { "title": "Admitting Failure", "url": "https://www.admittingfailure.org/", "publisher": "Engineers Without Borders Canada" } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nIf an unsuccessful program is reported without its lessons, another group may repeat the same mistakes. That is the proposed mechanism. The source below is an example of sharing failure, not a survey of what the sector leaves unpublished.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nPublishing an unsuccessful result can help later teams learn. Charitology’s hypothesis is that concern about funding can discourage such disclosure. The size and direction of any funding effect still need evidence; medicine also faces selective publication.\n\nA few organizations have pushed the other way. Engineers Without Borders Canada published failure reports and started Admitting Failure, a site where people in development share what went wrong. Charitology’s [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/) exists for the same reason.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nPublic disclosure can be difficult, especially when staff and services depend on continued support. The proposed incentive deserves testing without drawing conclusions about people’s motives.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nWhat incentives would get charities to publish failures, and what happens to their funding when they do? That is [Open Problem 9, the Failure Commons](/open-problems/the-failure-commons/)." }, { "id": "single-lens", "path": "/diagnosis/single-lens/", "title": "The Single Lens", "number": 13, "summary": "Charitology hypothesizes that considering several moral frameworks can reveal choices a single framework misses. It has not measured how many givers use only one.", "evidence": "hypothesis", "node": "work", "flip": "Givers see their choices through several moral frameworks at once and know where those frameworks agree and where they part.", "sources": [ { "title": "Moral Uncertainty", "url": "https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198722274.001.0001", "publisher": "William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord, Oxford University Press", "year": 2020 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nA giver might compare gifts only by lives saved, institutional fairness or obligations within a tradition. Each question can reveal something useful, and none exhausts the possible reasons to give. These are simplified examples; welfare, justice and religious traditions all contain diverse views.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nEvery moral framework makes some kinds of good easy to see and others hard to see. Organizations specialize in one way of thinking, and donors find the organizations that already agree with them. Comparing those frameworks is a task in moral philosophy as well as a proposed part of Charitology. Philosophers have a name for the problem of choosing well when you aren’t sure which framework is right: *moral uncertainty*. William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord wrote a book about how to reason under it.\n\nThis is the condition Charitology was founded to treat. Its whole method is to look at giving through all the lenses at once and report where they [agree and disagree](/record/disagreements/).\n\n## This is a hypothesis\n\nCharitology’s claim is that single-lens giving leaves large, valuable opportunities unfunded because none of the dominant lenses can see them. The sources here do not test that allocation claim.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nHaving a moral point of view isn’t a failing. It’s what makes giving matter. The point is to see the other views too.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nHow should a real donor allocate under moral uncertainty, and do different methods give stable answers? That is [Open Problem 16, Moral Parliament in Practice](/open-problems/moral-parliament-in-practice/). Try it yourself with the [Portfolio Builder](/tools/portfolio-builder/)." }, { "id": "story-bias", "path": "/diagnosis/story-bias/", "title": "The Story Bias", "number": 3, "summary": "Stories and news coverage can affect giving and relief decisions. How strong these effects are, and how well some classic findings replicate, remain debated.", "evidence": "debated", "node": "signals", "upstream": "attention", "flip": "Stories carry scale. People feel the size of a problem, not just one face, and money follows need instead of news.", "sources": [ { "title": "Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims", "url": "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.01.005", "publisher": "Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 102(2)", "year": 2007, "note": "Freely readable at https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Sympathy_and_callousness.pdf" }, { "title": "“If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide", "url": "https://journal.sjdm.org/7303a/jdm7303a.htm", "publisher": "Paul Slovic, Judgment and Decision Making 2(2)", "year": 2007 }, { "title": "News Droughts, News Floods, and U.S. Disaster Relief", "url": "https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.122.2.693", "publisher": "Thomas Eisensee and David Strömberg, Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(2)", "year": 2007 }, { "title": "Revisiting and Rethinking the Identifiable Victim Effect", "url": "https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/201115/", "publisher": "Maximilian Maier, Yik Chun Wong and Gilad Feldman, Collabra Psychology", "year": 2024 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nSome experiments find greater giving to an identified individual than to statistical appeals. News coverage has also been linked to U.S. government disaster relief decisions. These findings do not establish a rule for every appeal or for private disaster donations.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nPublished studies report several attention effects, with important limits. In experiments by Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic, people gave more to help one identified child than to help many children described with statistics, and adding the statistics to the child’s story *lowered* giving. Slovic calls the wider pattern “psychic numbing”: concern does not grow with the number of people suffering, and it can shrink. Outside the lab, Thomas Eisensee and David Strömberg studied U.S. government disaster relief and found that competing news affected coverage and relief decisions. Their outcome was government assistance, not private charitable gifts.\n\nA pre-registered replication published in 2024, using hypothetical donations, found no support for the classic identifiable-victim effect. The original studies used real donations, so more high-powered tests with real money would help. See the [evidence and replication limits](/record/encyclopedia/identifiable-victim-effect/).\n\nCharitology’s hypothesis is that attention effects can influence allocation across the charity system. The studies here do not measure that overall effect. Humanity’s Checklist names attention as one of the six sources upstream of every world problem.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nBeing moved by one person is not a flaw in anyone’s character. The question is which kinds of information help people make the decisions they value, and under what conditions.\n\n## What we don’t know yet\n\nCan a story be built to make people feel the scale of a problem, and does it change where money goes? That is [Open Problem 7, Story Without Bias](/open-problems/story-without-bias/)." }, { "id": "symptom-trap", "path": "/diagnosis/symptom-trap/", "title": "The Symptom Trap", "number": 4, "summary": "Money flows most easily to visible, immediate relief and least easily to the slow work on sources that would stop problems coming back.", "evidence": "hypothesis", "node": "work", "upstream": "story", "flip": "Every gift knows where it sits on the chain from symptom to source, and the system funds a deliberate mix of relief for today and source work so today’s needs stop coming back.", "sources": [ { "title": "Humanity’s Checklist: six things to fix so we can fix everything else", "url": "https://humanityschecklist.org/", "publisher": "Humanity’s Checklist", "year": 2026 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What it looks like\n\nA food bank can show you the meals it served tonight. An organization changing the policies that cause hunger can show you a draft bill, a coalition meeting and a decade of work ahead. The first is easy to fund. The second often isn’t.\n\n## Why it happens\n\nRelief is visible, immediate and easy to credit to a single gift. Work on sources is slow, shared and hard to measure. Most of the other conditions push the same way: [stories](/diagnosis/story-bias/) favor relief, [restricted grants](/diagnosis/restriction-reflex/) favor projects with countable outputs, and [short funding cycles](/diagnosis/short-horizon/) favor quick results.\n\nHumanity’s Checklist makes the larger argument plainly. Most of the world’s good work fights problems one at a time, while the problems grow from a few shared sources: the story we tell, how we coordinate, what we can picture, what our feeds reward, what we admire and who gets to build. Treating symptoms alone is “putting Band-Aids on an infection.”\n\n## This is a hypothesis\n\nCharitology’s founding hypothesis is that the charity system as a whole is weighted toward symptoms. **Charitology has not established the current mix.** The project has not produced a public dataset classifying the world’s giving by [source depth](/method/#depth): relief, repair, prevention, structure, source. Measuring it is [Open Problem 1, the Depth Census](/open-problems/the-depth-census/). A census can describe the mix. Deciding whether it is balanced also requires an explicit standard for what mix would serve the goals being considered. Evidence against the hypothesis should change or remove the condition.\n\n## No one is to blame\n\nRelief is not a lesser good. People need to eat tonight, and immediate help matters. The question is the mix. A system should also ask what would prevent recurring needs, without assuming every need can be eliminated." } ] }