{
  "name": "disagreements",
  "description": "The Disagreement Register.",
  "license": "CC BY 4.0. Cite “Charitology (charitology.org)”.",
  "generated": "2026-10-26",
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "are-donor-advised-funds-good-for-charity",
      "path": "/record/disagreements/are-donor-advised-funds-good-for-charity/",
      "title": "Are donor-advised funds good for charity?",
      "summary": "Donor-advised funds now hold hundreds of billions of dollars set aside for charity. Supporters see a vehicle that makes giving easier and pays out faster than foundations. Critics see tax breaks claimed today for money that may reach working charities years later.",
      "status": "open",
      "positions": [
        {
          "name": "They grow giving",
          "claim": "Donor-advised funds make giving simple and flexible, and the money in them is already under a charity’s legal control. They paid out $64.9 billion in 2024, and as a whole they pay out far faster than private foundations do."
        },
        {
          "name": "They park money",
          "claim": "Donors get an immediate tax break, but the rules on when the money must reach working charities are loose. Hundreds of billions of dollars sit in accounts while the needs they were meant for go unmet, and the public subsidizes the wait."
        },
        {
          "name": "The averages can’t settle it",
          "claim": "An aggregate payout rate mixes very active accounts with dormant ones, and many small accounts used for workplace giving inflate the count. What matters is how individual accounts behave and whether the money would have been given anyway, and aggregate sponsor-level data do not show either on their own."
        }
      ],
      "cruxes": [
        "How much money in donor-advised funds is new giving that wouldn’t otherwise have happened, and how much would have gone straight to charities.",
        "How payouts are spread across accounts, and whether active accounts hide many that rarely make grants.",
        "Whether payout deadlines would cut contributions, and by how much.",
        "How fast the problems themselves need money to move."
      ],
      "conditions": [
        "parked-money"
      ],
      "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": "Donor-advised funds",
          "url": "https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/donor-advised-funds",
          "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": "## The debate\n\nA donor-advised fund is an account held by a sponsoring charity. The IRS says the sponsor has legal control of the money once it is given, while the donor keeps advisory privileges over grants and investments.\n\nThe numbers are large. The DAF Research Collaborative’s annual report found that in 2024 donors contributed $89.6 billion to donor-advised funds, the funds granted $64.9 billion to charities, and assets reached $326 billion, up 27.5 percent from about $256 billion a year earlier. The aggregate payout rate was 25.3 percent.\n\nSupporters point to the volume of grants and the aggregate payout rate. Comparisons with foundation distributions need care: the legal foundation minimum and the report’s DAF payout rate are different measures. The DAF rate divides grants by prior-year assets; it does not describe every account.\n\nCritics see [parked money](/diagnosis/parked-money/). They argue that the funds give donors an immediate tax break while the rules on when the money must reach charity are loose, so the tax advantage may come without much public benefit.\n\nThe data cut both ways. Aggregate figures include outliers. The report distinguishes workplace and payment-processor accounts from other accounts; counting all of them together can hide important differences. And aggregate tax data can’t show why donors use the funds or what they would have given otherwise.\n\n## Where Charitology stands\n\nThe money in these funds is already under the legal control of charitable sponsors, so the dispute is about timing and about what would have happened otherwise. How fast charitable money should move is a value question, and Charitology doesn’t settle it. How fast it actually moves is an empirical question that public data only partly answer, because the report is built from tax returns that give aggregate figures, not account-by-account behavior. That gap is [the payout question](/open-problems/the-payout-question/). See also [donor-advised funds](/record/encyclopedia/donor-advised-funds/) and [private foundations](/record/encyclopedia/private-foundations/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "deworming-long-run-effects",
      "path": "/record/disagreements/deworming-long-run-effects/",
      "title": "Does deworming pay off decades later?",
      "summary": "One Kenyan program suggests that treating children for worms raised their earnings twenty years later, while systematic reviews of dozens of trials find little short-term benefit. Researchers and funders disagree about what to believe and what to do.",
      "status": "open",
      "positions": [
        {
          "name": "The long-run gains are real",
          "claim": "A randomized program in Kenya found that children who got more years of deworming had higher consumption and hourly earnings as adults. Trials that treat children one by one miss the spillover benefits of treating whole schools, and short trials measure too little, too soon, to see effects that build over a lifetime."
        },
        {
          "name": "The evidence is too thin to rely on",
          "claim": "Dozens of trials, pooled in Cochrane and Campbell reviews, find that mass deworming does little for growth, cognition, school performance or survival. A large economic effect with no measurable health effect needs an explanation, and it rests mostly on one program whose reanalysis weakened some of its findings."
        },
        {
          "name": "Act on expected value",
          "claim": "Deworming may well do little, but it costs about 50 cents to a dollar per child treated. A modest chance of large lifelong gains can still make it a good bet, as long as the estimate is discounted heavily for the doubt."
        }
      ],
      "cruxes": [
        "Whether large economic gains can exist when short-term health gains are too small to detect.",
        "Whether results from heavily infected children in Busia in 1998 carry over to the lighter infections common today.",
        "Whether new long-run studies in other places would find what the Kenya studies found.",
        "How much weight a funder should give a small chance of a large benefit compared with a near-certain small one."
      ],
      "conditions": [
        "measurement-gap",
        "silence-about-failure"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "Twenty-year economic impacts of deworming",
          "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8040658/",
          "publisher": "Hamory, Miguel, Walker, Kremer and Baird, PNAS 118(14)",
          "year": 2021
        },
        {
          "title": "Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities",
          "url": "https://www.econometricsociety.org/publications/econometrica/2004/01/01/worms-identifying-impacts-education-and-health-presence",
          "publisher": "Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer, Econometrica 72(1)",
          "year": 2004
        },
        {
          "title": "Public health deworming programmes for soil-transmitted helminths in children living in endemic areas (Cochrane systematic review)",
          "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6737502/",
          "publisher": "Taylor-Robinson, Maayan, Donegan, Chaplin and Garner, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews",
          "year": 2019
        },
        {
          "title": "Mass deworming to improve developmental health and wellbeing of children in low-income and middle-income countries: a systematic review and network meta-analysis",
          "url": "https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(16)30242-X",
          "publisher": "Welch and colleagues, The Lancet Global Health 5(1)",
          "year": 2017
        },
        {
          "title": "Re-analysis of health and educational impacts of a school-based deworming programme in western Kenya: a pure replication",
          "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4681107/",
          "publisher": "Aiken, Davey, Hargreaves and Hayes, International Journal of Epidemiology 44(5)",
          "year": 2015
        },
        {
          "title": "Re-analysis of health and educational impacts of a school-based deworming programme in western Kenya: a statistical replication of a cluster quasi-randomized stepped-wedge trial",
          "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4681108/",
          "publisher": "Davey, Aiken, Hayes and Hargreaves, International Journal of Epidemiology 44(5)",
          "year": 2015
        },
        {
          "title": "Commentary: Deworming externalities and schooling impacts in Kenya: a comment on Aiken et al. (2015) and Davey et al. (2015)",
          "url": "https://academic.oup.com/ije/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/ije/dyv129",
          "publisher": "Hicks, Kremer and Miguel, International Journal of Epidemiology 44(5)",
          "year": 2015
        },
        {
          "title": "Deworming might have huge impact, but might have close to zero impact",
          "url": "https://blog.givewell.org/2016/07/26/deworming-might-huge-impact-might-close-zero-impact/",
          "publisher": "GiveWell Blog",
          "year": 2016
        },
        {
          "title": "Why I mostly believe in Worms",
          "url": "https://blog.givewell.org/2016/12/06/why-i-mostly-believe-in-worms/",
          "publisher": "David Roodman, GiveWell Blog",
          "year": 2016
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## The debate\n\nIn 2004 Miguel and Kremer reported that a school deworming program in Busia, Kenya, cut absenteeism in treated schools by about a quarter and helped untreated children nearby, though it did not raise test scores. Later follow-ups estimated about 14 percent higher consumption, pooling the 15- and 20-year surveys, and 13 percent higher hourly earnings, pooling the 10-, 15- and 20-year surveys, among people assigned two to three additional years of treatment. Both estimates meet the 10 percent significance threshold, but not the conventional 5 percent threshold.\n\nSystematic reviews read the wider evidence differently. A 2019 Cochrane review of 51 trials concluded that mass deworming does not appear to improve height, hemoglobin, cognition, school performance or mortality, and it cautioned against basing programs on two older studies that found large weight gains. A 2017 review found little to no effect on weight, height, cognition, attendance or mortality, and judged the long-run evidence too weak to draw conclusions.\n\nIn 2015 independent researchers published two reanalyses of the Kenya data, setting off what David Roodman, writing on GiveWell’s blog, later called the “great worm wars.” After coding errors were corrected, they found little evidence that attendance rose in neighboring schools, and evidence of better attendance in treated schools that depended on the method used and carried a high risk of bias. The original authors replied that the corrected data strongly support their findings on spillovers.\n\nGiveWell took the third position. In 2016 it wrote that most of its staff thought deworming more likely than not to have very little or no impact, but at $0.50 to $1 per person treated, it applied a 1 to 2 percent multiplier to the trial results and still found the expected value worth funding. Roodman judged the earnings result credible but was less sure it would hold in other times and places.\n\n## Where Charitology stands\n\nCharitology grades deworming’s long-run evidence **mixed**: rigorous studies disagree, and the strongest positive evidence comes from one program. How much to stake on an uncertain chance of a large benefit is a value question, and Charitology doesn’t settle it. The evidence gap is clearer: long-run results from other times and places are what would move the debate. See the [deworming entry](/record/interventions/deworming/), [the replication rate](/open-problems/the-replication-rate/) and [expected value](/record/encyclopedia/expected-value/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "does-microcredit-transform-lives",
      "path": "/record/disagreements/does-microcredit-transform-lives/",
      "title": "Does microcredit transform lives?",
      "summary": "Microcredit was honored with a Nobel Peace Prize as a path out of poverty. Randomized evaluations found average effects that were modest. The live debate is over what those averages hide and what microcredit should be judged on.",
      "status": "narrowing",
      "positions": [
        {
          "name": "It is a path out of poverty",
          "claim": "Credit lets people with ideas and energy but no collateral start and grow businesses, and proponents value the autonomy and self-reliance that credit can support. The Nobel committee honored it for building development from below."
        },
        {
          "name": "The averages are the answer",
          "claim": "Randomized evaluations on four continents found modest, not transformative, effects. Demand was lower than expected, profits rarely rose and average household income didn’t change. Money that could do more elsewhere shouldn’t follow the old story."
        },
        {
          "name": "Averages hide the people who gain",
          "claim": "Most borrowers see little change, but a minority who already run businesses gain a lot, and those gains can grow for years. The right question is who benefits, not whether the average borrower does."
        },
        {
          "name": "Judge it on flexibility, not income",
          "claim": "Poor households need ways to invest, smooth spending and handle shocks. Microcredit gives them more freedom to do that, and that freedom is a real benefit even when income doesn’t rise."
        }
      ],
      "cruxes": [
        "Whether effects that grow over many years, which most trials were too short to see, change the average picture.",
        "Whether lenders can find, in advance, the borrowers who will gain.",
        "How to value freedom and flexibility against income, consumption and schooling.",
        "What counterfactual to use, since cash transfers and other programs compete for the same money."
      ],
      "conditions": [
        "story-bias",
        "silence-about-failure"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "The Nobel Peace Prize 2006, press release",
          "url": "https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2006/press-release/",
          "publisher": "Norwegian Nobel Committee",
          "year": 2006
        },
        {
          "title": "Six Randomized Evaluations of Microcredit: Introduction and Further Steps",
          "url": "https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20140287",
          "publisher": "Banerjee, Karlan and Zinman, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7(1)",
          "year": 2015
        },
        {
          "title": "Where Credit Is Due (policy bulletin)",
          "url": "https://poverty-action.org/publication/where-credit-due",
          "publisher": "Angelucci, Banerjee, Crépon, Duflo, Glennerster, Karlan, Parienté and Zinman, Innovations for Poverty Action and J-PAL",
          "year": 2015
        },
        {
          "title": "Understanding the Average Impact of Microcredit Expansions: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of Seven Randomized Experiments",
          "url": "https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20170299",
          "publisher": "Rachael Meager, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11(1)",
          "year": 2019
        },
        {
          "title": "Can Microfinance Unlock a Poverty Trap for Some Entrepreneurs?",
          "url": "https://www.nber.org/papers/w26346",
          "publisher": "Banerjee, Breza, Duflo and Kinnan, NBER Working Paper 26346",
          "year": 2019,
          "note": "Revised July 2024; the six-year business-asset and revenue figures refer to that version."
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## The debate\n\nIn 2006 Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded shared the Nobel Peace Prize. The committee praised their efforts to “create economic and social development from below” and linked lasting peace to large groups of people finding ways out of poverty.\n\nThen came the randomized evaluations. In 2015 six were published together, covering six countries on four continents. Banerjee, Karlan and Zinman described a consistent pattern of modestly positive effects that were not transformative. A policy bulletin on seven evaluations stated plainly that microcredit does not have a transformative impact on poverty. Take-up was 13 to 31 percent in four of the countries, none of the studies found a significant rise in average household income, and none found widespread harm. Six found that households gained more freedom in how they earned, spent, invested and managed risk. Meager (2019) pooled seven experiments and concluded that the average effect on business activity and consumption is probably small and may be negligible.\n\nThe averages are not the whole story. Meager found that households already running a business gained more, though less predictably. In Hyderabad, India, researchers followed households for six years after microfinance arrived. Households that had run businesses before microfinance arrived ended up with about 35 percent more business assets and roughly double the revenue of similar households in control areas, while other households showed almost no effect. The authors argue that credit can help some talented, low-wealth entrepreneurs escape a poverty trap.\n\n## Where Charitology stands\n\nOn the average effect, the debate has narrowed. Several rigorous studies agree that microcredit is not, on average, the transformation once hoped for. What remains open is partly empirical and partly about values. Whether gains for a minority justify a program for many, and how much flexibility is worth next to income, are value questions Charitology leaves to the giver. The history also bears on [the Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/). Microcredit won worldwide recognition in 2006, and the main set of randomized results was published together in 2015. Charitology treats that gap as a feature of the system, not a failing of the people involved. See the [microcredit entry](/record/interventions/microcredit/), [cash transfers](/record/interventions/cash-transfers/) for comparison, and [the exchange rate problem](/open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "how-much-do-animals-count",
      "path": "/record/disagreements/how-much-do-animals-count/",
      "title": "How much do animals count?",
      "summary": "Ethical traditions disagree about whether animals matter in their own right, how much their suffering weighs next to human suffering, and which animals can suffer at all. The answer changes where giving goes.",
      "status": "open",
      "positions": [
        {
          "name": "Equal interests count equally",
          "claim": "What matters morally is the capacity to suffer, not species, reason or language. Equal interests deserve equal weight whoever has them, so the suffering of farmed animals may be among the largest moral problems there is."
        },
        {
          "name": "Animals have rights",
          "claim": "Animals are subjects of a life with value of their own, not resources. Using them merely as means violates their rights, and those rights can’t be overridden simply because humans benefit."
        },
        {
          "name": "Count them by capacity for welfare",
          "claim": "Animals count, but how much depends on how much they can feel. Careful estimates of each species’ capacity for welfare, uncertain as they are, are better than ignoring animals or treating all species alike."
        },
        {
          "name": "Humans come first",
          "claim": "Only rational beings have moral worth in their own right. Duties to animals are real but indirect, because cruelty to them damages our own character and humanity. Where human and animal needs conflict, human needs come first."
        }
      ],
      "cruxes": [
        "Which animals are sentient, and how confident anyone can be.",
        "Whether experiences can be compared across species, and how.",
        "Whether moral status rests on the capacity to suffer, on rationality or on relationships.",
        "How to act when the evidence about animals’ inner lives is uncertain."
      ],
      "conditions": [
        "single-lens"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "The Moral Status of Animals",
          "url": "https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/",
          "publisher": "Lori Gruen and Susana Monsó, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy",
          "year": 2024
        },
        {
          "title": "The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness",
          "url": "https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration",
          "publisher": "New York University",
          "year": 2024
        },
        {
          "title": "Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022, section 5",
          "url": "https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/22/section/5",
          "publisher": "UK Parliament, legislation.gov.uk",
          "year": 2022
        },
        {
          "title": "Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range Estimates",
          "url": "https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-estimates/",
          "publisher": "Bob Fischer, Rethink Priorities",
          "year": 2023
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## The debate\n\nThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy maps the main positions. For Kant, only rational persons have intrinsic moral worth, and we owe animals duties only indirectly, because cruelty harms our humanity. Peter Singer, following Bentham, holds that the capacity to suffer is what counts and that equal interests deserve equal weight regardless of species, though he weighs interests case by case. Tom Regan argues that animals are subjects of a life with rights that can’t be overridden simply because humans benefit. Relational and care-based views hold that moral status depends on our relationships with animals rather than on a property they have.\n\nScience has changed the question of which animals can suffer. The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, released in April 2024, says there is strong scientific support for conscious experience in mammals and birds, and at least a realistic possibility in all vertebrates and many invertebrates, including cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans and insects. It calls it irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting an animal. The United Kingdom’s Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 counts cephalopod mollusks and decapod crustaceans as animals, alongside vertebrates.\n\nComparing species is the hardest part. Rethink Priorities’ 2023 welfare range estimates put a chicken’s median welfare range at about a third of a human’s and a shrimp’s at about 3 percent. These are conditional model estimates, not measured moral exchange rates. The authors call them placeholders based on contested philosophical assumptions, including hedonism, and their use also depends on sentience assumptions.\n\n## Where Charitology stands\n\nHow much animals count is a value question, and the frameworks Charitology uses answer it differently. Charitology doesn’t settle it. The evidence question is narrower, and it is moving: scientific support for sentience now reaches well beyond mammals, while estimates of how to compare one species with another remain very uncertain. A giver who uses one framework without noticing may never see this choice at all, which is [the Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/). See [the exchange rate problem](/open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/), [the moral parliament in practice](/open-problems/moral-parliament-in-practice/), the [Values Compass](/tools/values-compass/) and [corporate animal welfare campaigns](/record/interventions/corporate-animal-welfare-campaigns/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "near-or-far",
      "path": "/record/disagreements/near-or-far/",
      "title": "Give near or give far?",
      "summary": "Should distance matter when you decide where to give? Philosophers and giving traditions offer different answers.",
      "status": "open",
      "positions": [
        {
          "name": "Distance doesn’t matter morally",
          "claim": "A life is a life wherever it is. If the same money does far more good abroad, that is where it should go."
        },
        {
          "name": "Proximity creates duties",
          "claim": "We have special obligations to family, neighbors and community, and local giving builds the trust a good society needs."
        },
        {
          "name": "It depends on what you are fixing",
          "claim": "Local knowledge and institutions can matter to changing a local institution or national law. Distance matters for some problems and not others."
        }
      ],
      "cruxes": [
        "Whether special obligations to people near us are real moral duties or a bias we should correct for.",
        "How big the cost difference between near and far giving really is once the counterfactual is counted.",
        "Whether local giving produces community benefits, such as trust and civic strength, that cost-per-outcome comparisons miss."
      ],
      "conditions": [
        "proximity-pull",
        "single-lens"
      ],
      "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": "## The debate\n\nIn 1972 Peter Singer argued that if you could save a child drowning in front of you at the cost of ruining your clothes, you should, and that a child dying far away has the same claim on you. Many people find the argument hard to refute and hard to live by.\n\nThe other side is just as serious. Some care-based and religious accounts hold that the people closest to us have special claims: we owe our children more than strangers, and communities are built by people who show up for each other.\n\n## Where Charitology stands\n\nCharitology doesn’t settle this for anyone. It treats the information gap as the problem it can fix. Comparisons should make their evidence, uncertainty and assumptions about special obligations clear. The sources here do not establish how many donors lack such information. See [the Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/) and [Open Problem 18](/open-problems/proximity-and-obligation/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "systemic-change-or-proven-programs",
      "path": "/record/disagreements/systemic-change-or-proven-programs/",
      "title": "Systemic change or proven programs?",
      "summary": "Should givers fund programs with rigorous evidence of results, or efforts to change the laws, markets and institutions that produce problems, where results are harder to prove?",
      "status": "open",
      "positions": [
        {
          "name": "Fund what is proven",
          "claim": "Programs that have been studied rigorously, ideally more than once, let givers know what their money does. Evidence protects against waste and against good intentions that backfire, and cheap proven programs save lives today."
        },
        {
          "name": "Fund systemic change",
          "claim": "Charity that works only inside existing institutions leaves untouched the structures that produce suffering, such as trade, debt and political power. Changing them matters more than any single program, even when the results can’t be priced in advance."
        },
        {
          "name": "Structural work can be evidenced too",
          "claim": "Some of the largest documented gains came from structural change, such as taking lead out of gasoline and paint or raising tobacco taxes. Their effects can be measured by other methods when no trial is possible, so givers can hold systemic work to evidence standards instead of choosing between evidence and depth."
        },
        {
          "name": "Proven programs can become structure",
          "claim": "A program proven in trials can be built into government systems and change institutions from the inside. The two approaches are stages of one path, not rivals."
        }
      ],
      "cruxes": [
        "Whether the effects of advocacy and policy change can be measured well enough to compare with direct programs.",
        "How much of a law’s success any one funder or group can claim.",
        "Whether funding proven programs delays structural change or builds the trust and capacity that make it possible.",
        "How much risk of achieving nothing a giver should accept for a chance at a much larger change."
      ],
      "conditions": [
        "symptom-trap",
        "measurement-gap"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "GiveWell’s Criteria for Top Charities",
          "url": "https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/criteria",
          "publisher": "GiveWell"
        },
        {
          "title": "Stop the Robot Apocalypse",
          "url": "https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n18/amia-srinivasan/stop-the-robot-apocalypse",
          "publisher": "Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books 37(18)",
          "year": 2015
        },
        {
          "title": "Blood Lead Levels in U.S. Children Ages 1–11 Years, 1976–2016",
          "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7969125/",
          "publisher": "Egan, Cornwell, Courtney and Ettinger, Environmental Health Perspectives 129(3)",
          "year": 2021
        },
        {
          "title": "Effectiveness of tax and price policies in tobacco control",
          "url": "https://doi.org/10.1136/tc.2010.039982",
          "publisher": "Chaloupka, Straif and Leon for the IARC Working Group, Tobacco Control 20(3)",
          "year": 2011
        },
        {
          "title": "Introduction to randomized evaluations",
          "url": "https://www.povertyactionlab.org/resource/introduction-randomized-evaluations",
          "publisher": "J-PAL",
          "year": 2023
        },
        {
          "title": "Sin Tax Reform in the Philippines: Transforming Public Finance, Health, and Governance for More Inclusive Development",
          "url": "https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/638391468480878595/pdf/106777-PUB-PUBLIC-PUBDATE-7-26-2016.pdf",
          "publisher": "Kai Kaiser, Caryn Bredenkamp and Roberto Iglesias, World Bank",
          "year": 2016
        },
        {
          "title": "Mainstreaming an Effective Intervention: Evidence from Randomized Evaluations of “Teaching at the Right Level” in India",
          "url": "https://www.nber.org/papers/w22746",
          "publisher": "Banerjee, Banerji, Berry, Duflo, Kannan, Mukerji, Shotland and Walton, NBER Working Paper 22746",
          "year": 2016
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## The debate\n\nGiveWell’s criteria state the case for proven programs. It looks for programs that have been studied rigorously and ideally repeatedly, estimates what they achieve per dollar and, since July 2022, recommends only charities it estimates to be at least ten times as cost-effective as cash transfers.\n\nIn a 2015 essay in the London Review of Books, Amia Srinivasan made the case from the other side. She argued that effective altruism works within existing institutions instead of questioning them, leaves structural causes of suffering such as trade, debt and labor exploitation unexamined, and judges political change with an expected-value arithmetic that can’t price radical change.\n\nThe third position points to evidence. In the United States, children’s average blood lead levels fell about 95 percent between the late 1970s and the 2010s, declines the researchers credit largely to federal regulation. That evidence comes from national health surveys, not a randomized trial, and J-PAL notes that randomization is hard when a policy applies to a whole country. An expert review convened by the International Agency for Research on Cancer found sufficient evidence that higher tobacco taxes cut smoking.\n\nAttribution is the hard part. A World Bank account of the Philippines’ 2012 tobacco and alcohol tax reform credits a coalition of officials, legislators, development partners, medical professionals and civil society activists, and concludes that no single actor could have done it alone.\n\nThe fourth position points to programs that moved into government. Teaching at the Right Level was tested by researchers and a nonprofit, then run through government schools in Indian states. The first attempts failed and later versions worked; see the [entry](/record/interventions/teaching-at-the-right-level/).\n\n## Where Charitology stands\n\nCharitology’s [depth scale](/method/#depth) speaks directly to this question. It describes where work acts without grading it, so givers can see the mix they fund. The evidence shows that structural change can produce very large, measurable gains, and that credit for any one change is hard to assign. Whether to accept more uncertainty for a chance at deeper change is a value question Charitology doesn’t settle. It treats the measurement gap as the problem it can work on. See [measuring the source](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/), [the Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), [systemic change](/record/encyclopedia/systemic-change/), and the entries on [lead](/record/interventions/lead-exposure-elimination/) and [tobacco taxes](/record/interventions/tobacco-taxation-advocacy/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "the-long-term-future-or-present-needs",
      "path": "/record/disagreements/the-long-term-future-or-present-needs/",
      "title": "The long-term future or present needs?",
      "summary": "Should giving focus on people alive now, whose needs are certain and urgent, or on protecting the potentially far larger number of people who may live in the future?",
      "status": "open",
      "positions": [
        {
          "name": "The long-term future matters most",
          "claim": "Humanity’s future could last millions of years and hold vastly more people than are alive today. If their lives count as much as ours, work that shapes the long run, such as reducing the risk of catastrophe, may be the most important thing we can do."
        },
        {
          "name": "Present needs come first",
          "claim": "People suffering now have needs we can see and help we know works, and a few thousand dollars can save a life. Duties to people who exist are clearer than duties to people who may never exist, and the further ahead we look, the less we know."
        },
        {
          "name": "Nobody can see that far",
          "claim": "Most effects of any action lie in a future we can’t foresee. If we are clueless about them, confident bets on the long term aren’t justified. The same doubt applies to the long-run effects of helping people now, so it doesn’t simply favor the present."
        },
        {
          "name": "Count the future, discount for uncertainty",
          "claim": "Valuing well-being less just because it comes later is hard to defend, but risk, uncertainty and growth are real reasons to discount. Giving can take the future seriously while weighting it for how little we know."
        }
      ],
      "cruxes": [
        "Whether future people’s well-being counts as much as present people’s.",
        "Whether we can predict and influence the long-run future well enough to act on it.",
        "How to weigh a tiny probability of an enormous benefit against a near-certain modest one.",
        "Whether duties to people alive now, and to those close to us, take priority."
      ],
      "conditions": [
        "short-horizon",
        "single-lens"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "What We Owe The Future (book website)",
          "url": "https://whatweowethefuture.com/",
          "publisher": "William MacAskill, Basic Books"
        },
        {
          "title": "The Precipice (book website)",
          "url": "https://theprecipice.com/",
          "publisher": "Toby Ord"
        },
        {
          "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
        },
        {
          "title": "Intergenerational Justice",
          "url": "https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-intergenerational/",
          "publisher": "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy",
          "year": 2026
        },
        {
          "title": "Cluelessness",
          "url": "https://academic.oup.com/aristotelian/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/arisoc/aow018",
          "publisher": "Hilary Greaves, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116(3)",
          "year": 2016
        },
        {
          "title": "A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change",
          "url": "https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.45.3.686",
          "publisher": "William D. Nordhaus, Journal of Economic Literature 45(3)",
          "year": 2007
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## The debate\n\nThe case for the long term rests on scale. William MacAskill’s *What We Owe the Future* argues that humanity’s story could continue for millions of years, so choices made now could shape the lives of enormous numbers of people whose interests deserve weight. Toby Ord’s *The Precipice* argues that advanced weapons, engineered pandemics, unaligned artificial intelligence and other dangers threaten that future, and that reducing those risks is among the most urgent moral issues of our time.\n\nThe case for the present rests on certainty and on duty. Help for people alive now can be measured: GiveWell’s April 2024 explanation reported typical modeled costs of $3,000 to $5,500 per life saved for grants to its top charities. This is a dated estimate, not a guarantee for a current gift. Some philosophers argue that people who don’t yet exist can’t hold rights against us, and others that our obligations to them carry less weight.\n\nUncertainty cuts both ways. Hilary Greaves argued in 2016 that because most of an action’s effects are unforeseeable, we may be clueless about much of what matters for choosing well, and that this problem is especially pressing for effective altruism.\n\nDiscounting is the technical heart of the dispute. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Sidgwick, Ramsey, Rawls and Parfit all rejected pure time discounting, which values well-being less simply because it comes later. Economists still argue about discount rates. William Nordhaus wrote in 2007 that the Stern Review’s case for deep, immediate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions depended heavily on its near-zero discount rate, and that with rates closer to market interest rates the case was no longer clear-cut.\n\n## Where Charitology stands\n\nWhether future people count as much as present ones, and how to act on tiny chances of vast outcomes, are value questions. Charitology doesn’t settle them. It notes a difference in evidence that matters for both sides. Work for people alive now can usually be measured within years. Work aimed at the far future has to be judged mostly by reasoning, because its results may never be observed by the people who fund it. That is [the Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/) seen from the other end. See [discounting the future](/open-problems/discounting-the-future/), [discounting](/record/encyclopedia/discounting/), [moral uncertainty](/record/encyclopedia/moral-uncertainty/) and [the moral parliament in practice](/open-problems/moral-parliament-in-practice/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "what-randomized-trials-can-tell-us",
      "path": "/record/disagreements/what-randomized-trials-can-tell-us/",
      "title": "What can randomized trials tell us?",
      "summary": "Randomized trials have become a leading way to judge whether charitable and development programs work. Critics argue that trials answer narrower questions than they seem to, and that results often change when a program grows or moves.",
      "status": "open",
      "positions": [
        {
          "name": "Trials are the best test of what works",
          "claim": "Random assignment makes groups comparable, so differences in outcomes can be credited to the program rather than to who chose to take part. Without trials, givers fall back on stories and correlations that often mislead."
        },
        {
          "name": "Trials answer narrower questions than they seem",
          "claim": "A trial’s estimate is unbiased only on average over imagined repeats of the trial, and it describes the people and place studied. Using it anywhere else requires knowing why the program worked and whether the conditions it needs are present, which the trial itself can’t show."
        },
        {
          "name": "Results change at scale",
          "claim": "Programs run by researchers and nonprofits tend to show bigger effects than programs run by governments. A trial of a pilot is a weak guide to the national program that follows it."
        },
        {
          "name": "The deepest questions can’t be randomized",
          "claim": "National laws, policies and social movements can rarely be assigned at random. If funders back only what can be trialed, money drifts away from some of the deepest work."
        }
      ],
      "cruxes": [
        "How well a result from one place predicts the result in another.",
        "Whether theory and studies of mechanisms can make trial results travel.",
        "How much weight other kinds of evidence deserve when a trial is impossible.",
        "Whether what a trial teaches is worth what it costs."
      ],
      "conditions": [
        "measurement-gap"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "Introduction to randomized evaluations",
          "url": "https://www.povertyactionlab.org/resource/introduction-randomized-evaluations",
          "publisher": "Michael Gibson and Anja Sautmann, J-PAL",
          "year": 2023
        },
        {
          "title": "Understanding and misunderstanding randomized controlled trials",
          "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6019115/",
          "publisher": "Angus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright, Social Science & Medicine",
          "year": 2018
        },
        {
          "title": "How Much Can We Generalize From Impact Evaluations?",
          "url": "https://academic.oup.com/jeea/article/18/6/3045/5908781",
          "publisher": "Eva Vivalt, Journal of the European Economic Association 18(6)",
          "year": 2020
        },
        {
          "title": "Mainstreaming an Effective Intervention: Evidence from Randomized Evaluations of “Teaching at the Right Level” in India",
          "url": "https://www.nber.org/papers/w22746",
          "publisher": "Banerjee, Banerji, Berry, Duflo, Kannan, Mukerji, Shotland and Walton, NBER Working Paper 22746",
          "year": 2016
        },
        {
          "title": "Targeting Foundational Skills to Improve Learning at Scale in Zambia",
          "url": "https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/targeting-foundational-skills-improve-learning-scale-zambia",
          "publisher": "J-PAL"
        },
        {
          "title": "Re-analysis of health and educational impacts of a school-based deworming programme in western Kenya: a pure replication",
          "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4681107/",
          "publisher": "Aiken, Davey, Hargreaves and Hayes, International Journal of Epidemiology 44(5)",
          "year": 2015
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## The debate\n\nJ-PAL, a research center at MIT, sets out the case for trials. Random assignment makes the groups comparable, so differences in outcomes can be attributed to the program, and chance differences shrink as samples grow. J-PAL also lists the limits: randomization is hard when a policy applies nationally, when spillovers affect the comparison group, or when the thing being studied, such as gender, can’t be assigned.\n\nAngus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright (2018) push further. They argue that randomization makes an estimate unbiased only across hypothetical repeats of a trial, so any single trial can still be thrown off by chance. Trial samples are often convenience samples, so applying a result elsewhere needs its own justification. Whether a program works in a new place depends on its mechanisms and on whether the conditions it needs are present. In their view trials work best combined with theory, prior knowledge and other methods.\n\nThe evidence on scaling supports some caution. Eva Vivalt (2020) built a dataset of impact evaluation results and found a large amount of variation in effects. Programs implemented by governments showed smaller effects than those implemented by academics or nonprofits, even after accounting for sample size. Teaching at the Right Level shows the pattern. Early attempts to run it through government schools in two Indian states failed, later versions worked, and a trial of Zambia’s government-run program found real but smaller gains than the strongest Indian results.\n\nTrials can also be contested after the fact. An independent reanalysis of the data from a Kenyan deworming study found coding errors and weakened some of its findings, while the original authors held that their conclusions stood. That dispute is in the [Disagreement Register](/record/disagreements/deworming-long-run-effects/).\n\n## Where Charitology stands\n\nCharitology treats randomized trials as a strong tool with known limits, and its [evidence grades](/method/#evidence) lean on them. Both sides largely agree that a well-run trial is good evidence for the question it tests. The real dispute is how far results travel, and the scaling evidence suggests results often shrink when programs grow. Charitology adds a concern of its own, which is a hypothesis, not a finding: methods shape funding. If only trial-ready work counts as proven, money may tilt toward the relief and prevention levels of the depth scale, where trials are easiest to run. See [randomized controlled trials](/record/encyclopedia/randomized-controlled-trials/), [the replication rate](/open-problems/the-replication-rate/) and [measuring the source](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/)."
    }
  ]
}