{
  "name": "myths",
  "description": "The Myth-Busting Series.",
  "license": "CC BY 4.0. Cite “Charitology (charitology.org)”.",
  "generated": "2026-10-26",
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "aid-never-works",
      "path": "/record/myths/aid-never-works/",
      "title": "Aid never works",
      "summary": "Some aid has failed, and economists still argue about how much aid raises countries’ growth. But specific, well-measured programs, from smallpox eradication to oral rehydration and cash transfers, have saved and improved millions of lives.",
      "verdict": "false",
      "conditions": [
        "measurement-gap",
        "story-bias"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth?",
          "url": "https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533003769204344",
          "publisher": "William Easterly, Journal of Economic Perspectives 17(3)",
          "year": 2003
        },
        {
          "title": "Counting Chickens When They Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth",
          "url": "https://www.cgdev.org/publication/counting-chickens-when-they-hatch-timing-and-effects-aid-growth-working-paper-44",
          "publisher": "Michael Clemens, Steven Radelet, Rikhil Bhavnani and Samuel Bazzi, Center for Global Development working paper 44, published in The Economic Journal 122(561)",
          "year": 2012
        },
        {
          "title": "The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health",
          "url": "https://www.cgdev.org/publication/moral-imperative-toward-cost-effectiveness-global-health",
          "publisher": "Toby Ord, Center for Global Development",
          "year": 2013
        },
        {
          "title": "The Short-term Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers to the Poor: Experimental Evidence from Kenya",
          "url": "https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjw025",
          "publisher": "Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro, Quarterly Journal of Economics 131(4)",
          "year": 2016
        },
        {
          "title": "Insecticide-treated nets for preventing malaria (Cochrane systematic review)",
          "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6418392/",
          "publisher": "Joseph Pryce, Marty Richardson and Christian Lengeler, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews",
          "year": 2018
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## Why people believe it\n\nAid failures are real, documented and memorable, from [PlayPumps](/record/case-studies/playpumps/) to the slow [rebuilding of Haiti](/record/case-studies/haiti-earthquake-reconstruction/). Serious economists have been sharply critical. Successes are harder to see, because a success is often a death that didn’t happen.\n\n## What’s true\n\nWhether aid makes whole countries grow is a live debate. In 2003 the economist William Easterly argued that the evidence that aid buys growth is weak, and that aid agencies underinvest in scientific evaluation. He urged more modest goals: “helping some of the people some of the time.” A later reanalysis by Michael Clemens and colleagues of three influential studies found that increases in aid were followed, on average, by modest increases in growth, with wide variation between countries and smaller gains at high levels of aid. And some programs fail outright or cause harm.\n\n## What’s false\n\nThe word “never.” Judged program by program, some aid has worked spectacularly. Smallpox was eradicated through a [global campaign](/record/case-studies/smallpox-eradication/). Drawing on the official history, the philosopher Toby Ord puts its total cost at about $1.5 billion in 2013 dollars, against more than 100 million lives saved. He also cites estimates that global health efforts against diarrhea, malaria, smallpox and vaccine-preventable diseases have each led to at least 2.5 million fewer deaths a year. Child deaths from diarrhea fell by millions a year as [oral rehydration therapy spread](/record/case-studies/oral-rehydration-therapy-spread/). In randomized trials pooled by a Cochrane review, [bed nets](/record/interventions/insecticide-treated-nets/) cut child deaths from all causes by about 17 percent. A randomized trial of unconditional cash transfers in Kenya found higher household consumption and large gains in psychological well-being.\n\nThe fair reading is that “aid” is not one thing. Some programs work very well, some do nothing and some do harm, and the difference can be measured.\n\n## What to ask instead\n\nWhich program, for whom, and what is the evidence? Ask what was compared with what, and whether failures were published as well as successes. See [Open Problem 20, When Charity Harms](/open-problems/when-charity-harms/), and the [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "if-a-program-sounds-logical-it-works",
      "path": "/record/myths/if-a-program-sounds-logical-it-works/",
      "title": "If a program sounds logical, it works",
      "summary": "Plenty of programs with convincing logic have failed when tested, and some have caused harm. Scared Straight, which took teenagers into prisons to frighten them away from crime, made later offending more likely in randomized trials.",
      "verdict": "false",
      "conditions": [
        "measurement-gap",
        "story-bias"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "Justice Department Discourages the Use of “Scared Straight” Programs",
          "url": "https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/sites/ojjdp/files/pubs/news_at_glance/234084/topstory.html",
          "publisher": "Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention",
          "year": 2011
        },
        {
          "title": "Scared Straight and Other Juvenile Awareness Programs for Preventing Juvenile Delinquency, a systematic review",
          "url": "https://doi.org/10.4073/csr.2013.5",
          "publisher": "Anthony Petrosino, Carolyn Turpin-Petrosino, Meghan E. Hollis-Peel and Julia G. Lavenberg, Campbell Systematic Reviews 2013:5",
          "year": 2013
        },
        {
          "title": "Project DARE: no effects at 10-year follow-up",
          "url": "https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.67.4.590",
          "publisher": "Donald R. Lynam and colleagues, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 67(4)",
          "year": 1999
        },
        {
          "title": "How effective is drug abuse resistance education? A meta-analysis of Project DARE outcome evaluations",
          "url": "https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.84.9.1394",
          "publisher": "Susan T. Ennett, Nancy S. Tobler, Christopher L. Ringwalt and Robert L. Flewelling, American Journal of Public Health 84(9)",
          "year": 1994
        },
        {
          "title": "Technology and Child Development: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program",
          "url": "https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20150385",
          "publisher": "Julian Cristia, Pablo Ibarrarán, Santiago Cueto, Ana Santiago and Eugenio Severín, American Economic Journal, Applied Economics 9(3)",
          "year": 2017
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## Why people believe it\n\nMost everyday decisions run on plausible reasoning, and most of the time that works well enough. A program’s logic is visible the moment you hear it. Its results take years, and a comparison with people who didn’t take part, to see. So the logic does the persuading.\n\n## What’s true\n\nLogic matters. A good program starts with a [theory of change](/record/encyclopedia/theory-of-change/), a chain of reasons from what it does to the change it wants, and writing that chain down is a good way to find its weak links. And evidence can tell sound logic from unsound. In a 1994 review of rigorous studies, interactive programs that built social skills did better at preventing drug use than D.A.R.E.’s original lessons.\n\n## What’s false\n\nThat a convincing theory is enough. Three cases:\n\n- **Scared Straight.** The logic was deterrence: show teenagers what prison is like and they will avoid it. A 1978 documentary reported a 94 percent success rate with no comparison group. When researchers ran randomized trials, the programs increased the odds of later offending by a factor of about 1.6 to 1.7. On average, the teenagers did better without the program.\n- **D.A.R.E.** Police officers teaching children to resist drugs became the most widely used school drug prevention program in the United States. Ten years after sixth grade, young people who had gone through it were doing no better on drug use than those who had standard drug education.\n- **One Laptop per Child.** Giving every child a laptop seemed a direct route to better learning. A randomized evaluation in rural Peru found children used computers far more, but their math and language scores did not improve.\n\nIn each case the logic was clear, and only measurement against a comparison group showed what was really happening. See the case studies on [Scared Straight](/record/case-studies/scared-straight/), [D.A.R.E.](/record/case-studies/dare/) and [One Laptop per Child](/record/case-studies/one-laptop-per-child/).\n\n## What to ask instead\n\nCompared with what? Has anyone checked what happens to similar people who don’t get the program? That comparison is the idea of [counterfactual impact](/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/), and a [randomized controlled trial](/record/encyclopedia/randomized-controlled-trials/) is one strong way to test it. How often promising findings hold up when repeated is [Open Problem 10, the Replication Rate](/open-problems/the-replication-rate/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "low-overhead-means-a-good-charity",
      "path": "/record/myths/low-overhead-means-a-good-charity/",
      "title": "A low overhead ratio means a good charity",
      "summary": "Overhead ratios say how a charity splits its costs, not what it achieves. A charity can spend almost nothing on overhead and achieve nothing, or invest in good systems and change thousands of lives.",
      "verdict": "misleading",
      "conditions": [
        "overhead-myth"
      ],
      "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
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## Why people believe it\n\nOverhead is one of the few numbers a donor can find, and it sounds like it answers the right question: how much of my gift reaches the cause?\n\n## What’s true\n\nVery high spending on fundraising or management can be a warning sign worth asking about. And the question behind the myth, whether my money is doing good, is exactly the right one.\n\n## What’s misleading\n\nThe ratio can’t answer that question. It says how costs are split, not what they buy. Staff, data systems and evaluation are often what makes a program work, and charities that starve them to keep ratios low can end up less effective. In 2013 the leaders of GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, three groups that had popularized overhead ratios, published an open letter asking donors to stop treating overhead as a measure of performance.\n\n## What to ask instead\n\nWhat does this charity achieve per dollar, and how does it know? See the [Giver’s Checklist](/method/#checklist) and [the Overhead Myth](/diagnosis/overhead-myth/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "most-charities-are-about-equally-effective",
      "path": "/record/myths/most-charities-are-about-equally-effective/",
      "title": "Most charities are about equally effective",
      "summary": "The differences are enormous. Among health programs in poorer countries, the most cost-effective were estimated to do about 15,000 times as much good per dollar as the least, and ordinary donors guess the gap is far smaller than experts do.",
      "verdict": "false",
      "conditions": [
        "missing-feedback-loop",
        "measurement-gap"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health",
          "url": "https://www.cgdev.org/publication/moral-imperative-toward-cost-effectiveness-global-health",
          "publisher": "Toby Ord, Center for Global Development",
          "year": 2013
        },
        {
          "title": "Donors vastly underestimate differences in charities’ effectiveness",
          "url": "https://doi.org/10.1017/S1930297500007452",
          "publisher": "Lucius Caviola, Stefan Schubert, Elliot Teperman, David Moss, Spencer Greenberg and Nadira S. Faber, Judgment and Decision Making 15(4)",
          "year": 2020
        },
        {
          "title": "Errors in DCP2 cost-effectiveness estimate for deworming",
          "url": "https://blog.givewell.org/2011/09/29/errors-in-dcp2-cost-effectiveness-estimate-for-deworming/",
          "publisher": "GiveWell Blog",
          "year": 2011
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## Why people believe it\n\nFrom the outside, charities look alike. They tell similar stories, publish similar annual reports and report similar overhead ratios. Results, when they are published at all, are rarely in a form you could compare. So it is natural to assume the differences are modest. In studies by Lucius Caviola and colleagues, members of the public guessed that the most effective charities helping the world’s poorest people were about 1.5 times as effective as the average one. Experts put the gap at about 100 times.\n\n## What’s true\n\nEffectiveness depends on more than the cause. The same program can be run well or badly, in a place where it fits or one where it doesn’t. The estimates are uncertain, too. *Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries*, known as DCP2, is the most comprehensive compendium of health cost-effectiveness estimates, in the philosopher Toby Ord’s description. In 2011 GiveWell found errors in its estimate for deworming that overstated cost-effectiveness by a factor of about 100. And some kinds of good are very hard to compare at all, such as a museum and a vaccine, because they are measured in different units.\n\n## What’s false\n\nThat the gaps are small. In a 2013 essay, Ord charted DCP2’s estimates for 108 health interventions. They spanned more than four orders of magnitude, from 0.02 to 300 years of healthy life gained per $1,000, with a median of 5. Moving money from the least to the most effective would produce about 15,000 times the benefit, and moving it from the median to the best about 60 times. The estimates are rough, but Ord shows that even if the best were ten times worse and the worst ten times better than estimated, a factor of 150 would remain.\n\nThe gaps are between interventions, not named charities, and Charitology doesn’t rate charities. But a charity can only be as effective as what it does. In Caviola’s experiments, telling people how large the differences are moved their donations toward the most effective option.\n\n## What to ask instead\n\nWhat does this charity achieve per dollar, compared with other ways of reaching the same goal, and how does it know? See [cost-effectiveness analysis](/record/encyclopedia/cost-effectiveness-analysis/), the [Giver’s Checklist](/method/#checklist), and for comparisons across causes, [Open Problem 2, the Exchange Rate Problem](/open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "sending-supplies-is-the-best-disaster-help",
      "path": "/record/myths/sending-supplies-is-the-best-disaster-help/",
      "title": "Sending clothes and supplies is the best way to help after a disaster",
      "summary": "Disaster agencies ask for money, not goods. Cash lets responders buy exactly what is needed, often from local businesses, while unrequested goods have to be sorted, stored and moved by the same people trying to help.",
      "verdict": "false",
      "conditions": [
        "missing-voice",
        "missing-feedback-loop"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "Volunteer and Donate",
          "url": "https://www.fema.gov/disaster/recover/volunteer-donate",
          "publisher": "Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)",
          "year": 2026
        },
        {
          "title": "How to Donate",
          "url": "https://www.nvoad.org/donate/",
          "publisher": "National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster"
        },
        {
          "title": "Cash-based approaches in humanitarian emergencies: a systematic review",
          "url": "https://doi.org/10.4073/csr.2017.17",
          "publisher": "Shannon Doocy and Hannah Tappis, Campbell Systematic Reviews 2017:17",
          "year": 2017
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## Why people believe it\n\nGoods feel real. You can picture the blanket or the case of water reaching someone who needs it, while a donation feels abstract. After a disaster people want to do something right away, and a collection drive at work or school makes giving physical and social.\n\n## What’s true\n\nGoods can help when they are asked for. FEMA says donated items can be useful if relief organizations have requested them, the donor confirms someone is ready to receive them and the items are new, clean, sorted and labeled. And cash isn’t better for every purpose. A Campbell Collaboration review of cash in humanitarian emergencies found that food handouts raised calorie intake more than cash did.\n\n## What’s false\n\nThat goods are the best way to help. FEMA’s guidance opens with the heading “Cash is Best.” Money given to trusted relief organizations is usually the fastest and most effective help, it says, because they know what is needed, can buy in bulk and, when possible, buy from local businesses, which helps the local economy recover. The National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster asks people not to send or bring unsolicited donations at all. Shipping goods is expensive, and used clothing, household items and mixed food pull volunteers away from helping survivors so they can sort, pack, store and hand out things that may not meet anyone’s needs.\n\nThe research points the same way. The Campbell review found that unconditional cash transfers cost less per person to deliver than vouchers, which cost less than handing out food, and that cash programs generated more than $2 of benefit for local markets for every $1 given. Cash also did more than food to improve the variety of people’s diets.\n\nThe deeper problem is that a box of goods carries the donor’s guess about what survivors need. Money lets the people on the ground, and often the survivors themselves, decide.\n\n## What to ask instead\n\nWhat have the organizations already working there asked for? Do they take money, and do they buy locally? See the [Disaster Response Guide](/tools/disaster-response-guide/), the [Intervention Database entry on cash transfers](/record/interventions/cash-transfers/) and the case of [rebuilding Haiti](/record/case-studies/haiti-earthquake-reconstruction/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "small-donations-dont-make-a-difference",
      "path": "/record/myths/small-donations-dont-make-a-difference/",
      "title": "Small donations don’t make a difference",
      "summary": "Small gifts add up, and individuals, not foundations or companies, give most of the money in American charity. A small gift can also do a lot on its own, because some programs cost very little per person helped. What a small gift achieves depends far more on where it goes than on its size.",
      "verdict": "false",
      "conditions": [
        "prestige-economy"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "The Giving USA 2026 Report Deserves a Closer Look",
          "url": "https://philanthropy.indianapolis.iu.edu/professional-development/blog/the-giving-usa-2026-report-deserves-a-closer-look.html",
          "publisher": "Bill Stanczykiewicz, Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy",
          "year": 2026
        },
        {
          "title": "Real Time Charitable Giving",
          "url": "https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2012/01/12/real-time-charitable-giving/",
          "publisher": "Aaron Smith, Pew Research Center",
          "year": 2012
        },
        {
          "title": "Diarrhoeal disease, fact sheet",
          "url": "https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/diarrhoeal-disease",
          "publisher": "World Health Organization",
          "year": 2024
        },
        {
          "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": "The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health",
          "url": "https://www.cgdev.org/publication/moral-imperative-toward-cost-effectiveness-global-health",
          "publisher": "Toby Ord, Center for Global Development",
          "year": 2013
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## Why people believe it\n\nThe gifts that make the news are the giant ones: the nine-figure pledge, the name on the building. Next to a problem as large as hunger or disease, $20 can feel like nothing. And a small donor rarely hears what their particular gift did.\n\n## What’s true\n\nOne small gift rarely changes an organization or a problem by itself, and its effect is usually invisible to the giver. Where a gift goes also matters more than its size. Comparing estimates for health programs, the philosopher Toby Ord found that moving money from the median program to the most cost-effective one would produce about 60 times the benefit. A small gift in the right place can outdo a much larger one in the wrong place.\n\n## What’s false\n\nThat small gifts don’t matter. Added together they are a large part of the system. Giving USA estimates that charitable giving in the United States reached $617.2 billion in 2025, and individuals gave $394.2 billion of it, far more than foundations, bequests or corporations. That figure includes wealthy donors as well as small ones. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, donors sent an estimated $43 million in small gifts by text message alone.\n\nA small gift can also do real work on its own. The World Health Organization says a treatment with oral rehydration salts, which counter the dehydration that is diarrhea’s most severe threat, costs a few cents. GiveWell estimates that its top charities have typically saved a life for $3,000 to $5,500. At that rate, a $100 gift covers roughly 2 to 3 percent of the cost of saving a life, and GiveWell expects these costs to rise over time.\n\n## What to ask instead\n\nNot “is my gift big enough?” but “where will it do the most?” See [Most charities are about equally effective](/record/myths/most-charities-are-about-equally-effective/) and, on why big gifts get the glory, [the Prestige Economy](/diagnosis/prestige-economy/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "the-cause-that-moves-you-needs-your-money-most",
      "path": "/record/myths/the-cause-that-moves-you-needs-your-money-most/",
      "title": "The cause that moves you most needs your money most",
      "summary": "What moves us is usually a face, a story or a headline, and those are not a measure of need. Being moved is a good reason to give, but the causes that move the most people often already draw the most money, while large, less visible problems go short.",
      "verdict": "misleading",
      "conditions": [
        "story-bias",
        "proximity-pull"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "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": "Real Time Charitable Giving",
          "url": "https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2012/01/12/real-time-charitable-giving/",
          "publisher": "Aaron Smith, Pew Research Center",
          "year": 2012
        }
      ],
      "review": "draft",
      "body": "## Why people believe it\n\nBeing moved feels like information. A strong feeling seems to signal an urgent need, and a personal connection, such as an illness in the family or a disaster on the news, gives a real reason to care and to keep caring.\n\n## What’s true\n\nFeeling moved matters. It is often what gets people to give at all, and the decision researcher Paul Slovic argues that feelings are needed to motivate lifesaving action. A personal tie to a cause can bring knowledge, commitment and staying power. Many moral traditions also hold that we owe more to the people close to us, a question Charitology leaves open in its [Disagreement Register](/record/disagreements/).\n\n## What’s misleading\n\nThe strength of a feeling tracks how vivid a need is, not how large or how neglected. Research by Slovic and others shows the pattern. People gave more to help one named girl than in response to statistics about many people in need, and adding the statistics to her story lowered giving. A single sick child drew more money than a group of eight. Slovic calls this “psychic numbing”: concern does not grow with the number of people suffering, and it can shrink.\n\nDisaster giving shows the same pull. In a Pew survey of people who gave to Haiti by text message in 2010, 89 percent had heard about the appeal on television, and half gave the moment they heard. Causes that move many people at once, like the [Ice Bucket Challenge](/record/case-studies/ice-bucket-challenge/), can raise enormous sums in a single summer.\n\nThat last point cuts against the myth. When a cause moves everyone, money pours in, and the next dollar may do less there than in a cause few people have heard of. This is the idea of [neglectedness](/record/encyclopedia/neglectedness/): how much a problem already receives, compared with how big it is.\n\n## What to ask instead\n\nHow large is the need, how much money is already going to it, and what would one more gift change? Then give with your heart and your head together. See the [identifiable victim effect](/record/encyclopedia/identifiable-victim-effect/), [psychic numbing](/record/encyclopedia/psychic-numbing/) and [the Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/)."
    },
    {
      "id": "you-cant-measure-the-good-a-charity-does",
      "path": "/record/myths/you-cant-measure-the-good-a-charity-does/",
      "title": "You can’t measure the good a charity does",
      "summary": "A great deal of it can be measured, often well. Thousands of randomized evaluations have tested anti-poverty programs, and their results have shaped programs reaching hundreds of millions of people. Some good really is hard to measure, which is a reason to measure carefully, not a reason not to.",
      "verdict": "misleading",
      "conditions": [
        "measurement-gap"
      ],
      "sources": [
        {
          "title": "The Prize in Economic Sciences 2019, press release",
          "url": "https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2019/press-release/",
          "publisher": "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences",
          "year": 2019
        },
        {
          "title": "About us",
          "url": "https://www.povertyactionlab.org/about-us",
          "publisher": "J-PAL (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab)"
        },
        {
          "title": "The Short-term Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers to the Poor: Experimental Evidence from Kenya",
          "url": "https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjw025",
          "publisher": "Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro, Quarterly Journal of Economics 131(4)",
          "year": 2016
        },
        {
          "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": "## Why people believe it\n\nMuch of what charity offers feels beyond numbers: dignity, hope, a sense that someone cares. And charities often report activities, such as meals served or classes held, rather than what changed afterward, so it can look as if change itself can’t be counted. Measuring change well costs money, and few funders pay for it.\n\n## What’s true\n\nSome of the most important work is genuinely hard to measure. Advocacy, research, shifts in culture and prevention, where success is a disaster that never happens, rarely fit a simple before-and-after count. Measurement has limits even where it works. Angus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright argue that a randomized trial’s result applies to the people in the trial, and extending it to other places takes further evidence and reasoning.\n\n## What’s misleading\n\nThe claim that the good can’t be measured at all. The 2019 Nobel Prize in economics went to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Their method breaks big questions into smaller ones that careful experiments can answer, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences notes that one of their studies led to remedial tutoring programs that have reached more than five million children in India. Researchers affiliated with J-PAL, a global research center based at MIT, have led more than 2,700 randomized evaluations, and J-PAL says programs informed by them have reached more than 850 million people.\n\nThe results can be concrete. A randomized trial of unconditional cash transfers in rural Kenya found that monthly household consumption rose from about $158 to $193, adjusted for local prices, nine months after the transfers began, along with large gains in psychological well-being. Measurement also catches harm that good intentions miss, as in the case of [Scared Straight](/record/case-studies/scared-straight/).\n\n## What to ask instead\n\nWhat has this charity measured, how, and what result would tell it that it is failing? Look for [outcomes, not just outputs](/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/). For the hardest cases, see [Open Problem 3, Measuring the Source](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/)."
    }
  ]
}