{ "name": "principles", "description": "Principles of Charitology, chapter by chapter.", "license": "CC BY 4.0. Cite “Charitology (charitology.org)”.", "generated": "2026-10-26", "data": [ { "id": "01-what-charitology-is", "path": "/record/principles/01-what-charitology-is/", "title": "What charitology is", "chapter": 1, "summary": "Charitology is the science of doing the most good. It studies charity as a system and treats the question of where generosity should go as a craft that can be learned.", "sources": [], "review": "draft", "body": "## A science of the system\n\nCharitology is the science of doing the most good. Its subject is not any one cause, method or charity, but the system that connects them all: the people and institutions who give, the signals they see, the channels money passes through, the work it pays for and the results that come back, or don’t.\n\nA field can define a subject to study and improve. Medicine studies the body, economics studies markets and ecology studies ecosystems. Charity is a system too. It moves more than $617 billion a year in the United States alone ([Giving USA 2026](https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-charitable-giving-rose-to-617-20-billion-in-2025-surpassing-the-600-billion-mark-for-the-first-time/)), and like any system it produces the results it is built to produce. Charitology asks what those results are, why the system produces them, and how to change it.\n\n## Three commitments\n\n**No judgment of the good being done.** Every food bank, clinic and volunteer is doing real good. Charitology doesn’t grade anyone’s heart. When it finds a problem, it looks for the mechanism, not the culprit.\n\n**All the ways, not one.** Charitology explicitly considers eight editorial framework sketches and asks where they agree, where they disagree and what each one can’t see. The aim is the best of all ways, not the best of one.\n\n**Unknown stays unknown.** A science says what it doesn’t know. Each condition in the Diagnosis carries an evidence label: established, documented, debated or hypothesis. Interventions use a separate evidence grade. Charitology’s own founding claims are labeled hypotheses, because testing them is the work.\n\n## Symptoms and sources\n\nThe idea at the center of the field is the difference between [symptoms and sources](/record/encyclopedia/symptoms-and-sources/). Symptoms are problems as they show up in people’s lives. Sources are what keep producing them. Charitology describes every piece of work by where it acts on that chain, from relief through repair, prevention and structure to source, and asks whether the system’s mix of them is right. Every level is needed. The question is always the mix.\n\n## A craft, not only a feeling\n\nGenerosity is a feeling. Aiming it is a craft. You can get better at a craft: you can learn its methods, check your work against evidence, learn from people who have done it before and teach it to others. That is what makes charitology a field rather than an opinion, and what makes a [charitologist](/record/lexicon/#charitologist) someone anyone can become.\n\n## How this book works\n\n*Principles of Charitology* is written in the open. Each chapter is a page anyone can improve, and each claim links to its source. Chapter 2 describes the charity system and its parts. The chapters after it work through the method, from evidence and counterfactuals to moral uncertainty, time and feedback, and the last chapter is about becoming a charitologist." }, { "id": "02-the-charity-system", "path": "/record/principles/02-the-charity-system/", "title": "The charity system", "chapter": 2, "summary": "Charity is a system with five stages, from givers to outcomes, joined by feedback that may be incomplete. It proposes a shared craft connecting existing professions. This chapter maps the system and shows where each condition of the Diagnosis acts.", "sources": [ { "title": "Giving USA: charitable giving rose to $617.20 billion in 2025", "url": "https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-charitable-giving-rose-to-617-20-billion-in-2025-surpassing-the-600-billion-mark-for-the-first-time/", "publisher": "Giving USA Foundation", "year": 2026 }, { "title": "Key takeaways from Giving USA’s 2026 report on philanthropy", "url": "https://foundationsource.com/blog/key-takeaways-from-giving-usas-2026-report-on-philanthropy/", "publisher": "Foundation Source", "year": 2026 }, { "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", "year": 2026 }, { "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 Role of Nonprofit Enterprise", "url": "https://yalelawjournal.org/article/the-role-of-nonprofit-enterprise", "publisher": "Henry B. Hansmann, Yale Law Journal 89", "year": 1980 }, { "title": "Listening to Those Who Matter Most, the Beneficiaries", "url": "https://ssir.org/articles/entry/listening_to_those_who_matter_most_the_beneficiaries", "publisher": "Fay Twersky, Phil Buchanan and Valerie Threlfall, Stanford Social Innovation Review", "year": 2013 }, { "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": "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System", "url": "https://www.donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/", "publisher": "Donella Meadows, The Sustainability Institute", "year": 1999 }, { "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": "## A system produces what it is built to produce\n\nChapter 1 made a claim: charity is a system, and like any system it produces the results it is built to produce. This chapter draws the system. It is the map the rest of the book works from, and it is the frame for [the Diagnosis](/diagnosis/), the fifteen conditions that describe how the system goes wrong.\n\nThe map has five stages, a loop that should connect the last stage to the first, and a field around the whole thing. A short version is in the Encyclopedia under [charity as a system](/record/encyclopedia/charity-as-a-system/).\n\n## Five stages\n\n**1. Givers.** The people and institutions who decide to give. In the United States, Giving USA estimates that $617.2 billion was given in 2025. Individuals gave $394.2 billion of it, about 64 percent. Foundations gave about $117 billion, bequests about 10 percent of the total and corporations about 7 percent. Givers bring more than money: they bring values, habits, loyalties and limited time to decide.\n\n**2. Signals.** Givers decide on what they can see. That is a short list: a moving story or a face, a name they trust, an overhead ratio printed on a tax form, a ranking, the prestige of a gala or a building, the tax break. Signals are the system’s information layer, and three conditions of the Diagnosis act here.\n\n**3. Channels.** Money then moves through intermediaries: operating charities, foundations, donor-advised funds, giving platforms and federated campaigns. The IRS master file of tax-exempt organizations listed nearly two million records in October 2026. Donor-advised funds alone held about $326 billion in 2024. Channels decide how fast money moves, how many strings come with it and how many separate organizations share the work.\n\n**4. The work.** What the money pays for. Charitology describes it by where it acts on the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/), from relief through repair, prevention and structure to source. Chapter 3 is about that scale.\n\n**5. Outcomes.** What actually changes: lives saved or improved, institutions changed, futures protected. Outcomes are not the same as the activity that produced them, and they are much harder to see. See [outputs and outcomes](/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/).\n\n## The loop that isn’t there\n\nIn most of economic life, information flows back. When you buy a phone, the price, the reviews and your own experience tell you and everyone else whether it was worth it. A product that fails loses customers.\n\nDonor-funded services can interrupt that loop. The person who pays is usually not the person served. In 1980 the legal scholar Henry Hansmann described the general problem as *contract failure*: the people paying for a service cannot easily judge its quality. Donors funding services for other people may struggle to assess quality or results. Fay Twersky, Phil Buchanan and Valerie Threlfall made the comparison with business in 2013: a company that ignores its customers watches its sales fall, but the people a charity serves often have few alternatives and are not the ones paying, so a weak program can carry on.\n\nCharitology hypothesizes that this can favor visible signals over harder-to-observe results. This is why it treats [the Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) as the root condition. Whether that mechanism causes other conditions is a further hypothesis.\n\n## The field around it\n\nAround the five stages sits the field: the people and knowledge that could steer the system as a whole. There are scholars of philanthropy, evaluators, advisors and researchers in every cause. Charitology proposes a shared craft connecting that existing work across causes and moral frameworks. The need for, and effect of, such a craft must be tested. That is [the Missing Profession](/diagnosis/missing-profession/), and it is the reason this book exists.\n\n## Where the conditions act\n\nEach condition in the Diagnosis is pinned to the stage where it acts:\n\n| Stage | Conditions |\n| --- | --- |\n| Givers | [Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/), [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/) |\n| Signals | [Overhead Myth](/diagnosis/overhead-myth/), [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/), [Prestige Economy](/diagnosis/prestige-economy/) |\n| Channels | [Restriction Reflex](/diagnosis/restriction-reflex/), [Fragmentation](/diagnosis/fragmentation/), [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/) |\n| The work | [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) |\n| Outcomes | [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/), [Silence About Failure](/diagnosis/silence-about-failure/) |\n| Feedback | [Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/), [Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/) |\n| The field | [Missing Profession](/diagnosis/missing-profession/) |\n\nEvery condition carries an evidence label, from *established* to *hypothesis*, and a “flip”: a description of what the system would look like if it were fixed. Chapter 4 explains the labels.\n\n## Problems travel\n\nThe point of drawing a system is that problems travel between stages. Take the overhead ratio. It starts as a signal: a number donors can find when they cannot find results. It moves into the channels as caps on indirect costs. Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard found that foundation allowances for indirect costs averaged 10 to 15 percent of a grant, while the true overhead of four youth-serving nonprofits they studied ran from 17 to 35 percent. It then reaches the work and the outcomes as underpaid staff, old systems and skipped evaluation, which deepens the [Measurement Gap](/diagnosis/measurement-gap/). Gregory and Howard called the loop the nonprofit starvation cycle.\n\nA system view changes the questions a giver asks. “Is this a good charity?” becomes “What does the system reward, and is this gift pushing against it or with it?”\n\n## Where to push\n\nThe systems thinker Donella Meadows argued that most attention goes to the numbers in a system, such as budgets, rates and targets, although they offer little leverage. Higher leverage lies in the structure of information flows, the rules, the goals and the mindset the system grows from. Charitology’s bet follows from that. Closing the feedback loop is an information-flow change. Changing what the system rewards is a rule change. Naming the field is a change of mindset.\n\nThat bet is a hypothesis. How strongly each link in the map holds has not been measured, and several of the [Open Problems](/open-problems/) exist to test it, starting with [Closing the Feedback Loop](/open-problems/closing-the-feedback-loop/) and [the Depth Census](/open-problems/the-depth-census/). To see your own place on the map, start with the [Giving Dashboard](/tools/giving-dashboard/) or look up an organization in the [Charity Lookup](/tools/charity-lookup/)." }, { "id": "03-depth-from-relief-to-source", "path": "/record/principles/03-depth-from-relief-to-source/", "title": "Depth: from relief to source", "chapter": 3, "summary": "Charitology describes every piece of work by where it acts, from relief through repair, prevention and structure to source. This chapter explains the five levels, how to place real work on them, why depth never grades and what this project has not established about the mix.", "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 }, { "title": "Mishneh Torah, Laws of Gifts to the Poor 10:7", "url": "https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Gifts_to_the_Poor.10.7", "publisher": "Sefaria" }, { "title": "The WHO and the Eradication of Smallpox", "url": "https://origins.osu.edu/read/who-and-eradication-smallpox", "publisher": "Jim Harris, Origins (Ohio State University)", "year": 2025 }, { "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": "## Two questions about every gift\n\nMost ways of judging a gift ask what it does. Charitology also asks *where it acts*: on the problem as it shows up in someone’s life today, or further upstream, on what keeps producing the problem. That is the distinction between [symptoms and sources](/record/encyclopedia/symptoms-and-sources/), and the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) turns it into five levels that anyone can use. The full scale is in [the Method](/method/#depth).\n\n## The five levels\n\n**0. Relief** meets the need today. Its test question: is someone fed, sheltered or treated right now? A meal at a food bank, emergency surgery and a disaster shelter are relief.\n\n**1. Repair** restores what was lost. Is someone back to where they were before the harm? Rebuilding a home, rehabilitation after an injury and a new job after a layoff are repair.\n\n**2. Prevention** stops the harm happening to these people. Will these people avoid the harm altogether? Bed nets, vaccines and clean water for a village are prevention. In the trials pooled by a 2018 Cochrane review, insecticide-treated nets cut child deaths from all causes by about 17 percent.\n\n**3. Structure** changes the rules that produce the harm. Did a law, institution, market or norm change so that the harm stops being produced? A lead-paint ban, a new public health system and a corporate standard are structure.\n\n**4. Source** changes what feeds many problems at once. Did something upstream of a whole family of problems change? The story a society tells itself, how people coordinate and what a culture rewards are sources.\n\n## An old idea\n\nThe intuition behind the scale is old. Maimonides set out eight levels of giving in his code of Jewish law, the *Mishneh Torah*. The highest strengthens a person before they fall, with a gift, a loan, a partnership or work, so that they never need to depend on others. It is prevention placed at the top of a ladder of charity. Charitology’s scale borrows the direction of that ladder but not its ranking. See the entry on tzedakah in the [Giving Traditions Library](/record/traditions/).\n\n## Depth describes. It never grades.\n\nThis is the rule that matters most. Every level is needed. A hungry person needs food tonight; a future promise cannot substitute for that help. A source-level change may take a generation, and it may fail. A world that funded only source work would leave people to suffer while it waited.\n\nSo the scale is not a ranking of virtue, and no charity is better for sitting higher on it. It is a description, like a map’s scale or a thermometer. Its job is to let a giver see what they are paying for, and to let the field ask the question that no single gift can answer: is the mix right? A healthy system funds all five levels on purpose.\n\n## The top of the scale\n\nLevel 4 comes from Humanity’s Checklist, which argues that world problems grow from six sources inside humanity’s collective life: the story we tell ourselves, how we coordinate, what we can picture of the future, what our feeds reward, what we admire and who gets to build. It pairs each source with a *beachhead*: one focused project that wins a foothold on that source. Its claim is that fixing a source stops it feeding the problems below and starts it feeding the cure.\n\nCharitology adopts the six as the top of its scale and treats the larger claim as a hypothesis to test. It is the kind of claim that is easy to state and hard to measure, which is exactly why it needs testing.\n\n## When it works\n\nSource-level results do happen. The campaign against smallpox ended a deadly disease for good. On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly accepted the World Health Organization’s finding that smallpox had been eradicated. Smallpox remains the only human disease declared eradicated worldwide. Eradication does not mean all spending stops: research and preparedness continue. The Record’s source-level classification is a Charitology hypothesis, and readers can challenge whether eliminating one disease fits a level defined around many problems. See [the case study](/record/case-studies/smallpox-eradication/).\n\n## How to place real work\n\nReal work rarely sits neatly on one rung. Four habits help.\n\n- **Classify the activity, not the cause.** Every cause has work at every depth. Homelessness has shelters (relief), rehousing (repair), eviction prevention (prevention) and zoning reform (structure).\n- **Follow the money.** One organization often works at several levels. Describe what each activity does, weighted by what it spends, not what the mission statement says.\n- **Name the chain.** Deeper work depends on a longer [theory of change](/record/encyclopedia/theory-of-change/). Write it down, and the level of the final goal usually becomes clear.\n- **Say when it is hard to call.** If two careful people place the same work at different levels, record both. How often independent coders agree is itself a finding about the scale.\n\n## What this project has not established\n\nCharitology’s founding hypothesis is the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/): that the charity system as a whole is weighted toward the bottom of the scale, because relief is visible, quick and easy to credit, while work on sources is slow, shared and hard to measure. Charitology has not established the current mix or produced a public global dataset on this scale.\n\nChecking is [Open Problem 1, the Depth Census](/open-problems/the-depth-census/). A census describes the mix; deciding whether it is balanced also requires an explicit standard tied to the goals being considered. Evidence against the Symptom Trap should change or remove it. Measuring the effect of source-level work, so that it can compete fairly for money, is [Open Problem 3, Measuring the Source](/open-problems/measuring-the-source/). Until both are answered, every depth classification Charitology publishes is a description labeled as a hypothesis and open to challenge.\n\nTo think about where your own giving sits, the [Values Compass](/tools/values-compass/) asks where on the chain you want to act, and the [Portfolio Builder](/tools/portfolio-builder/) helps turn your values into an allocation. For work across causes, see the [Cause Atlas](/record/cause-atlas/) and the [Gap Map](/record/gap-map/)." }, { "id": "04-evidence-and-its-grades", "path": "/record/principles/04-evidence-and-its-grades/", "title": "Evidence and its grades", "chapter": 4, "summary": "Charitology uses evidence labels for conditions and evidence grades for interventions. This chapter explains its two label systems, one for claims about the charity system and one for interventions, how evidence earns each label and how a label can be lost.", "sources": [ { "title": "The Prize in Economic Sciences 2019", "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 }, { "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 }, { "title": "“Scared Straight” and other juvenile awareness programs for preventing juvenile delinquency", "url": "https://www.cochrane.org/evidence/CD002796_scared-straight-and-other-juvenile-awareness-programs-preventing-juvenile-delinquency", "publisher": "Anthony Petrosino and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews", "year": 2022 }, { "title": "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science", "url": "https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716", "publisher": "Open Science Collaboration, Science 349", "year": 2015 }, { "title": "On the Reproducibility of Psychological Science", "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5976261/", "publisher": "Valen E. Johnson and colleagues, Journal of the American Statistical Association", "year": 2016 }, { "title": "Revisiting and Rethinking the Identifiable Victim Effect: Replication and Extension of Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic (2007)", "url": "https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.90203", "publisher": "Maximilian Maier, Yik Chun Wong and Gilad Feldman, Collabra: Psychology 9(1)", "year": 2024 }, { "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": "The GiveWell Blog", "year": 2011 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## Unknown stays unknown\n\nA science is defined as much by what it admits it doesn’t know as by what it knows. Charitology’s rule is simple: claims should make their support and uncertainty clear, and a claim that nobody has tested is called a hypothesis, including Charitology’s own. A gap in the evidence is not hidden. It is published as a finding and, where it fits, linked to an [Open Problem](/open-problems/).\n\nCharitology uses two label systems, because it makes two different kinds of claim. Claims about the charity system, the conditions in [the Diagnosis](/diagnosis/), get evidence labels. Claims about whether a particular intervention works, in the [Intervention Database](/record/interventions/), get evidence grades. Both are summarized in [the Method](/method/#evidence).\n\n## Labels for claims about the system\n\nEach condition in the Diagnosis carries one of four labels:\n\n- **Established.** Strong published evidence from several independent sources. The [Overhead Myth](/diagnosis/overhead-myth/) is labeled established.\n- **Documented.** Reported by credible sources, though how big the effect is remains less certain. The [Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) is documented.\n- **Debated.** Credible people disagree, and both sides are shown. [Fragmentation](/diagnosis/fragmentation/) is debated: the number of charities is a fact, but whether it is too many is not.\n- **Hypothesis.** Charitology’s working claim. It has not been tested, and testing it is the work. The [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/) is a hypothesis.\n\n## Grades for interventions\n\nEach intervention carries one of five grades:\n\n- **Strong.** Several rigorous studies agree.\n- **Moderate.** Some rigorous studies, or strong studies of a related program.\n- **Mixed.** Rigorous studies disagree.\n- **Weak.** Plausible, but rigorous studies are scarce.\n- **Unknown.** The Record has not established what it does.\n\n[Insecticide-treated bed nets](/record/interventions/insecticide-treated-nets/) are graded strong. A 2018 Cochrane review pooled five randomized trials with about 200,000 participants and found that nets cut child deaths from all causes by about 17 percent. The reviewers rated that evidence high-certainty.\n\nA grade says how sure we are that something works. It does not say how much good it does per dollar or where it sits on the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/). A relief program can have strong evidence and a source-level campaign can have none, and both can be worth funding.\n\n## What makes evidence rigorous\n\nThe core of rigor is a fair comparison: what happened to people who got the program, compared with similar people who did not. Random assignment can make that comparison more credible by deciding who receives the program by chance, as in a [randomized controlled trial](/record/encyclopedia/randomized-controlled-trials/). In 2019 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave the economics prize to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for bringing that approach to the study of global poverty. Systematic reviews then pool many trials, so that no single study decides the answer.\n\nRigor has limits. Angus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright argue that a trial’s result applies to the people in it, and that carrying it to a new place needs an argument about why the program worked there. Many important questions, especially about structure and source, can’t be randomized at all. Charitology asks for evidence in proportion to the decision being made, and for methods that fit the question.\n\n## Evidence can overturn intuition\n\nSometimes the most valuable evidence shows that a popular program does harm. “Scared Straight” programs organize prison visits for young people at risk of offending, in the hope of deterring them. A Cochrane review of nine trials found that they increased offending compared with doing nothing at all. Without a credible comparison, apparent success would not establish the effect. See [the case study](/record/case-studies/scared-straight/).\n\n## Evidence can be wrong\n\nLabels can be lost. In 2015 the Open Science Collaboration repeated 100 published psychology studies. Of the original studies, 97 percent had reported statistically significant results. Only 36 percent of the replications did, and the replicated effects were on average about half the size. Charitology has not established an equivalent sector-wide replication rate for charity impact research. That is [Open Problem 10, the Replication Rate](/open-problems/the-replication-rate/).\n\nThe check reaches findings that matter to Charitology directly. The [identifiable victim effect](/record/encyclopedia/identifiable-victim-effect/), one of the findings behind the [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/), failed a pre-registered replication published in 2024. Estimates can also contain plain errors: in 2011 GiveWell found mistakes behind the deworming estimate in *Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries*, a standard reference, that overstated its cost-effectiveness by a factor of about 100. A label is a judgment about the evidence today. When the evidence moves, the label should move too.\n\n## How labels change\n\nAnyone can challenge a label. Every page links to a prefilled issue for corrections and red-team challenges, and corrections are made in the open, with sources. Charitology publishes no ratings of named charities until its method has passed public [red-team](/programs/red-team/) review. The [Evidence Reviews](/programs/evidence-reviews/) and the [Replication Program](/programs/replication-program/) are meant to keep the grades honest, and the [Evidence Library](/record/evidence-library/) is meant to collect the studies behind them.\n\nFor a giver, the practical question is the one in the [Giver’s Checklist](/method/#checklist): how do we know it works? Look for outcomes, not activity, and ask what the strongest study found. See [outputs and outcomes](/record/encyclopedia/outputs-and-outcomes/)." }, { "id": "05-counterfactuals-and-neglect", "path": "/record/principles/05-counterfactuals-and-neglect/", "title": "Counterfactuals and neglect", "chapter": 5, "summary": "A gift’s real effect is the difference it makes compared with what would have happened anyway. This chapter covers counterfactual reasoning, neglectedness and the scale, neglectedness and tractability framework, and what changes when you look at them from the system’s point of view.", "sources": [ { "title": "Counterfactuals and how they change our view of what does good", "url": "https://80000hours.org/articles/counterfactuals/", "publisher": "Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours", "year": 2021 }, { "title": "Doing good together: how to coordinate effectively and avoid single-player thinking", "url": "https://80000hours.org/articles/coordination/", "publisher": "Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours", "year": 2018 }, { "title": "Revisiting leverage", "url": "https://blog.givewell.org/2018/02/13/revisiting-leverage/", "publisher": "James Snowden, The GiveWell Blog", "year": 2018 }, { "title": "Our Criteria", "url": "https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/criteria", "publisher": "GiveWell" }, { "title": "A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact", "url": "https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/", "publisher": "Robert Wiblin, 80,000 Hours", "year": 2016 }, { "title": "The Important/Neglected/Tractable framework needs to be applied with care", "url": "https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/74oJS32C6CZRC4Zp5/the-important-neglected-tractable-framework-needs-to-be", "publisher": "Robert Wiblin, Effective Altruism Forum", "year": 2016 }, { "title": "A framework for strategically selecting a cause", "url": "https://80000hours.org/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/", "publisher": "Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours", "year": 2013 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## What happens if I don’t give?\n\nThe second question in the [Giver’s Checklist](/method/#checklist) is a question that can change an answer: what happens if I don’t give? If the work would be funded anyway, the real effect of a gift lands somewhere else.\n\nThis is [counterfactual](/record/lexicon/#counterfactual) reasoning, and it is the hidden half of every claim about impact. A program’s results are what happened. A gift’s results are the difference between what happened and what would have happened without it. The share of an outcome that would not have happened without a particular gift is its [additionality](/record/lexicon/#additionality).\n\n## The counterfactual in practice\n\nCounterfactual reasoning can make a gift look smaller than it seems, or larger, and it can show that something that looks good is doing harm. Benjamin Todd of 80,000 Hours gives the example of a passer-by who pushes trained paramedics aside to perform CPR. The patient lives, but with a permanent spinal injury the paramedics would likely have avoided. The rescuer did good directly and harm counterfactually.\n\nThree patterns matter most for givers.\n\n**Funding gaps fill.** A charity’s funding gap is not a fixed hole. Todd warns against treating it as if you were the only donor: if others would have filled it, your gift does less than it appears. But assuming your gift does nothing is also a mistake, because filling the gap frees those other donors for other work and saves the charity time spent fundraising. You cannot ignore what everyone else will do.\n\n**Other money moves.** A gift can pull in money from others or push it out. GiveWell calls the first *leverage*, a charity’s influence on how governments and other funders spend, and the second *funging*, when spending crowds out money that would have come from elsewhere. Since late 2017 it has estimated both for each charity it recommends, while saying plainly that the estimates involve a lot of guesswork. GiveWell also asks of every charity how much *room for more funding* it has: what extra money would achieve beyond what the charity would raise anyway.\n\n**Credit is shared.** Most good outcomes need several contributors. Todd points out that when two groups are each necessary, each can be counterfactually responsible for the whole result, so claimed impacts can add up to more than 100 percent. That is not a logical error, but it creates a practical one: funders who each count the whole result may together pay more than it is worth. Game theory offers ways to divide credit, such as Shapley values, but there is no settled rule.\n\n## Neglectedness\n\nThe counterfactual question has a shortcut: where are other people not giving? A problem is [neglected](/record/encyclopedia/neglectedness/) when few resources go to it relative to its size. Because the first resources in a field tend to go to its best opportunities, returns diminish as the field fills. 80,000 Hours argues that they most likely diminish logarithmically, so that each doubling of resources buys about the same amount of progress. If so, an extra dollar can do far more in a neglected problem than in a crowded one.\n\nThe shortcut has limits. Neglect is a good guide only when a problem is neglected for bad reasons; some problems get little money because they are small or nobody knows how to solve them. And Robert Wiblin warns that the factors overlap: a problem can stay important precisely because nobody is working on it.\n\n## Scale, neglectedness and tractability\n\nOne tool for combining these ideas is the [scale, neglectedness and tractability framework](/record/encyclopedia/scale-neglectedness-tractability/). It grew out of the work of GiveWell Labs; in 2013 Benjamin Todd proposed a version for 80,000 Hours, crediting GiveWell Labs for the names, and in 2016 Wiblin set out the formal version. It asks how good solving a problem would be, how many resources already go to it and what fraction of it more effort would solve.\n\nCharitology uses the framework inside each moral lens rather than once for everyone, because *scale* needs a unit, and choosing a unit is a moral choice. Chapter 6 takes up that problem.\n\n## The system’s point of view\n\nCounterfactual reasoning is usually applied to one decision at a time. Charitology adds two observations from the level of the system.\n\nFirst, Charitology proposes testable patterns of neglect. The [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/) predicts that problems without faces or headlines will be underfunded. The [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/) predicts the same for distant need, and the [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) for goods that the dominant frameworks cannot see. Charitology’s founding hypothesis, the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), predicts that work at the structure and source levels is neglected relative to relief. If that is true, depth is one of the most important dimensions of neglect. Charitology has not established that depth mix; that is [the Depth Census](/open-problems/the-depth-census/).\n\nSecond, counterfactual reasoning works best when givers coordinate. If every donor chases the most neglected gap alone, gaps can be overfilled, abandoned or fought over. Todd calls the habit of ignoring other actors single-player thinking. The [Fragmentation Problem](/diagnosis/fragmentation/) is what single-player thinking can look like across a whole sector, and whether coordination layers would help is [Open Problem 11](/open-problems/the-fragmentation-question/).\n\n## What remains open\n\nA giver may not have a credible counterfactual estimate for a particular gift. Producing one cheaply, with an error range, at a cost small relative to the gift, is [Open Problem 4, the Counterfactual Problem](/open-problems/the-counterfactual-problem/). Until it is solved, a giver can still ask the checklist questions: what happens if I don’t give, and who else is already funding this? The [Impact Calculator](/tools/impact-calculator/) and the [Compare Tool](/tools/compare-tool/) are places to start." }, { "id": "06-comparing-the-incomparable", "path": "/record/principles/06-comparing-the-incomparable/", "title": "Comparing the incomparable", "chapter": 6, "summary": "Every choice between causes sets an exchange rate between goods that seem impossible to compare. This chapter covers the scales people use, the moral frameworks behind them, how to act under moral uncertainty and how Charitology looks through eight frameworks at once.", "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, "note": "Open access under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0); freely readable at https://www.moraluncertainty.com/s/Moral-Uncertainty.pdf" }, { "title": "Moral uncertainty – towards a solution?", "url": "https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solutionhtml", "publisher": "Nick Bostrom, Overcoming Bias", "year": 2009 }, { "title": "The parliamentary approach to moral uncertainty", "url": "https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b6b3bc2e-ba48-41d2-af7e-83f07c1fe141", "publisher": "Toby Newberry and Toby Ord, Future of Humanity Institute Technical Report 2021-2", "year": 2021 }, { "title": "The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health", "url": "https://cgdev.org/sites/default/files/1427016_file_moral_imperative_cost_effectiveness.pdf", "publisher": "Toby Ord, Center for Global Development", "year": 2013 }, { "title": "Cost-Effectiveness", "url": "https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness", "publisher": "GiveWell", "year": 2025 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## Every allocation is an exchange rate\n\nA donor with $1,000 who gives half to a malaria program and half to a museum has made a judgment, whether or not they meant to, about how those two goods compare. A foundation that funds animal welfare instead of education has set an exchange rate between the suffering of animals and the learning of children. Every choice between causes makes such a judgment. Writing the judgment down is what lets people argue about it.\n\nCan outcomes in different causes be put on one scale, and where must comparison stop? That is [Open Problem 2, the Exchange Rate Problem](/open-problems/the-exchange-rate-problem/), and it is one of the hardest questions in the field.\n\n## Common scales and what they carry\n\nWithin health, there is a standard common scale. A **disability-adjusted life year** (DALY) counts years of life lost to a condition plus years lived with a disability, weighted by how severe it is. Toby Ord used DALYs to show how far apart health interventions can be: in one standard set of estimates, the best produced about 15,000 times the benefit per dollar of the worst. A common scale made that difference visible. See [cost-effectiveness analysis](/record/encyclopedia/cost-effectiveness-analysis/).\n\nEvery scale has values built in. The severity weights in a DALY are judgments about how bad a disability is. GiveWell, which compares saving lives with raising incomes, has to decide how much one is worth against the other. It calls these choices *moral weights*, bases them partly on a survey of people similar to those its programs reach and says plainly that donors may disagree. Outside health, the trouble grows. A life saved, a forest protected, a law changed and a tradition kept alive do not share a natural unit.\n\n## Eight ways of seeing\n\nCharitology does not pick one framework and convert everything into its currency. It looks at every gift through eight moral frameworks, each with its own central question:\n\n- **Welfare:** What reduces the most suffering and adds the most wellbeing?\n- **Rights and duties:** What do we owe each other, whatever the cost?\n- **Justice:** What is unfair, and how do we fix it rather than soften it?\n- **Care:** Who depends on me, and how do I show up for them?\n- **Faith and tradition:** What does my tradition ask me to give, and to whom?\n- **Future generations:** What protects the people who aren’t born yet?\n- **All life:** What protects animals and the living world for their own sake?\n- **Flourishing:** What helps people become who they could be?\n\nEach framework makes some goods easy to see and others hard to see. A welfare lens asks about wellbeing from both bed nets and museums. A care lens asks about relationships and responsibilities, which can include neighbors and distant strangers. The frameworks differ internally, and these short sketches cannot speak for every holder of a view. Charitology hypothesizes that considering more than one lens can reveal choices a giver might otherwise miss; it has not measured how many givers use a single lens. That is the [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/), the condition Charitology was founded to treat.\n\n## Deciding when you are not sure which view is right\n\nUncertainty about which moral view is correct has a name: [moral uncertainty](/record/encyclopedia/moral-uncertainty/). William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord argue that it is the normal condition, given how hard ethics is and how widely people disagree. They examine several ways to act under it.\n\nThe simplest is to follow your favorite theory and ignore the rest. They argue that this approach has serious problems. Another is to give each theory weight in proportion to your [credence](/record/lexicon/#credence) in it and choose the option with the highest expected choiceworthiness, which works when theories can be compared on a common scale. When they can’t, the authors borrow tools from voting theory.\n\nA fourth approach is the [moral parliament](/record/lexicon/#moral-parliament). Nick Bostrom proposed in 2009 that you imagine each theory sending delegates to a parliament in proportion to your credence in it, where they bargain and vote. A view with few seats can still win on the issues it cares about most by giving way elsewhere. In 2021 Toby Newberry and Toby Ord developed the idea and showed that other approaches can be read as parliaments with different rules.\n\nEvery approach faces hard cases. One is fanaticism: a view you barely believe could take over your choices if it claims the stakes are enormous. Chapter 7’s discussion of the far future is where that worry bites hardest.\n\n## How Charitology does it in practice\n\nCharitology’s method has four steps, each with a tool or page to go with it.\n\n1. **Say what you value.** The [Values Compass](/tools/values-compass/) asks how strongly you agree with a statement from each framework and where you stand on questions such as whose suffering counts and how much uncertainty you can live with.\n2. **Look for agreement.** Some gifts look good under almost every framework. Those are robust choices, and they can anchor a portfolio.\n3. **Map the disagreement.** Where frameworks part, say so and say why. The [Disagreement Register](/record/disagreements/) records live debates in full, such as whether to [give near or give far](/record/disagreements/near-or-far/).\n4. **Allocate on purpose.** The [Portfolio Builder](/tools/portfolio-builder/) uses a simple credence-weighted method to turn your weights into an allocation, so that every framework you take seriously gets its share.\n\nThe authors of *Moral Uncertainty* also argue that moral information has value: thinking harder about ethics can be worth doing, because it can change what you ought to do. That is part of the case for Charitology’s [Moral Frameworks Program](/programs/moral-frameworks-program/).\n\n## Where comparison stops\n\nSome comparisons may never be possible, and an honest field says where. Whether different methods of acting under moral uncertainty give stable answers for real donors, and which is most defensible, is [Open Problem 16, Moral Parliament in Practice](/open-problems/moral-parliament-in-practice/). Until it is solved, the best a giver can do is make the exchange rate visible, hold it loosely and revisit it. The frameworks themselves are editorial sketches, and real philosophers disagree inside every one of them. Anyone can propose a better version with a pull request. See [the Method](/method/#frameworks)." }, { "id": "07-time", "path": "/record/principles/07-time/", "title": "Time", "chapter": 7, "summary": "Some good ends when the money stops, and some compounds for generations. This chapter covers how long work takes to pay off and how long it lasts, how to weigh the future against the present, whether to give now or later, and how fast money set aside for charity should move.", "sources": [ { "title": "Ramsey and Intergenerational Welfare Economics", "url": "https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ramsey-economics/", "publisher": "Partha Dasgupta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", "year": 2019 }, { "title": "A review of GiveWell’s discount rate", "url": "https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/a-review-of-givewells-discount-rate/", "publisher": "Jenny Kudymowa, James Hu, Melanie Basnak and Tom Hird, Rethink Priorities", "year": 2023 }, { "title": "Phil Trammell on how becoming a ‘patient philanthropist’ might allow you to do far more good", "url": "https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/phil-trammell-patient-philanthropy/", "publisher": "80,000 Hours Podcast", "year": 2020 }, { "title": "Minimum investment return", "url": "https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/minimum-investment-return", "publisher": "Internal Revenue Service" }, { "title": "The 5 Percent Foundation Payout Requirement May Be a Floor, but the Ceiling Is Awfully Low", "url": "https://inequality.org/article/foundation-payout/", "publisher": "Helen Flannery, Inequality.org (Institute for Policy Studies)", "year": 2023 }, { "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": "Gates to give away $200 billon and shutter foundation in 2045", "url": "https://www.alliancemagazine.org/blog/gates-to-give-away-200-billon-and-shutter-foundation-in-2045/", "publisher": "Alliance magazine", "year": 2025 }, { "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 }, { "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 short horizon\n\nShort funding and reporting cycles can sit beside goals that take decades, and many of the people they affect are not yet born. Charitology’s working claim is that the system’s timescale is shorter than the timescale of its problems. That is [the Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/), and it is labeled a hypothesis because this project has not established a sector-wide mismatch.\n\nTime enters giving in four ways: how long work takes to pay off, how long its effects last, how much the future should count and when money should be spent.\n\n## How long until it works, and how long it lasts\n\nEvery entry in the [Intervention Database](/record/interventions/) records two estimates about time. **Time to effect** runs from immediate through months and years to decades. **Durability** runs from “while funded” through years and generations to permanent.\n\nThe two often trade off. Relief tends to work immediately and stop when the money stops. Bed nets work from the first night but must be replaced as they wear out. Structure and source work tend to take longer to show results, and when they succeed they can last for generations. Smallpox eradication removed naturally occurring disease worldwide. Its durability does not mean every related cost ends: research and preparedness continue. The [Giver’s Checklist](/method/#checklist) puts the question simply: will it still matter in ten years?\n\nNeither column is better. A gift that ends when the money stops did real good while it lasted. The question, as always, is the mix.\n\n## How much the future counts\n\nTo compare a benefit now with one in twenty years, you need a [discount rate](/record/encyclopedia/discounting/). It helps to separate three reasons for discounting.\n\nThe first is uncertainty: the benefit might not arrive, because a program fails or the world changes. A risk that humanity does not survive at all works like a discount rate on everything after it. The second is growth: if future people are richer, an extra dollar will do less for them. The third is **pure time preference**, valuing later wellbeing less simply because it is later. The philosopher Frank Ramsey rejected it in 1928 as an ethical position, attributing it to a failure of imagination.\n\nThe first two reasons are claims about the world that evidence can improve. The third is a moral question. A 2023 review by Rethink Priorities described GiveWell’s then-current 4 percent rate for future income and consumption gains, split into 0 percent for pure time preference and the rest for uncertainty, rising incomes and benefits that compound. Writing a rate down this way shows exactly where the moral choice sits.\n\nHow much the future should count is [Open Problem 13, Discounting the Future](/open-problems/discounting-the-future/). The [Future generations](/tools/values-compass/) framework puts the claims of people not yet born at the center. Here the worry about fanaticism from Chapter 6 bites hardest: a tiny chance of protecting an enormous future can swamp everything else in an [expected value](/record/encyclopedia/expected-value/) calculation. MacAskill, Bykvist and Ord treat that as a central problem for anyone deciding under moral uncertainty.\n\n## Give now or give later?\n\nMoney can be spent this year or invested and spent later. The economist Philip Trammell has argued that a truly patient philanthropist can do far more good by waiting: invested money compounds, and later givers may know more about how to help. Money invested at 5 percent a year grows more than a hundredfold in a century.\n\nThe case for giving now is just as real. Some problems compound if left alone, and some opportunities disappear. A fund that waits may be lost to war or financial collapse, or drift from its founder’s goals as its trustees change. Trammell discusses these risks himself.\n\nReal foundations choose differently. A foundation can be set up to last indefinitely or to spend down by a set date. In May 2025 the Gates Foundation chose the second course: it announced plans to spend about $200 billion over 20 years and close on December 31, 2045, decades sooner than its charter had planned.\n\n## How fast should parked money move?\n\nU.S. private foundations must generally spend an amount tied to 5 percent of their investment assets each year. An analysis of IRS data by Helen Flannery of the Institute for Policy Studies found that the median payout rate of private non-operating foundations ranged from 5.2 to 5.6 percent between 2015 and 2021, close to the minimum. For donor-advised funds the public figures are aggregates: they held about $326 billion in 2024 and granted $64.9 billion that year, an aggregate payout rate of 25.3 percent.\n\nIs that too slow, too fast or about right? The answer depends on how fast the best opportunities are used up, how fast investments grow and how much the future counts, which is to say on every question in this chapter. That is [Open Problem 12, the Payout Question](/open-problems/the-payout-question/), and it is one of the largest allocation decisions in philanthropy. This page does not establish how many funders set that timing deliberately. See [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/), [private foundations](/record/encyclopedia/private-foundations/) and [donor-advised funds](/record/encyclopedia/donor-advised-funds/).\n\n## Choosing on purpose\n\nThe goal is not to make every giver patient or every giver urgent. It is to make the choice deliberate. A giver who knows the time to effect and durability of each gift, has written down a discount rate with its reasons and has decided when to spend is no longer letting the annual budget decide. The [Legacy Planner](/tools/legacy-planner/) is a place to start." }, { "id": "08-feedback-and-voice", "path": "/record/principles/08-feedback-and-voice/", "title": "Feedback and voice", "chapter": 8, "summary": "When donors pay for services used by others, feedback and shared decisions can help address gaps in what the funder knows. This chapter covers the missing feedback loop, the practices that restore parts of it and what would close it.", "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", "year": 1980 }, { "title": "Listening to Those Who Matter Most, the Beneficiaries", "url": "https://ssir.org/articles/entry/listening_to_those_who_matter_most_the_beneficiaries", "publisher": "Fay Twersky, Phil Buchanan and Valerie Threlfall, Stanford Social Innovation Review", "year": 2013 }, { "title": "Feedback Labs", "url": "https://feedbacklabs.org/", "publisher": "Feedback Labs" }, { "title": "Fund for Shared Insight", "url": "https://fundforsharedinsight.org/", "publisher": "Fund for Shared Insight", "year": 2026 }, { "title": "New report on how funders can engage in participatory grantmaking", "url": "https://www.alliancemagazine.org/blog/new-report-on-how-funders-can-engage-in-participatory-grantmaking/", "publisher": "Alliance magazine, on Cynthia Gibson’s GrantCraft guide “Deciding Together”", "year": 2018 }, { "title": "Six Practices of Trust-Based Grantmaking", "url": "https://www.trustbasedphilanthropy.org/practices", "publisher": "Trust-Based Philanthropy Project" }, { "title": "Top Foundations Pledge Flexible Funding to Grantees in Wake of COVID-19 Crisis", "url": "https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/news-and-press/news/top-foundations-pledge-flexible-funding-to-grantees-in-wake-of-covid-19-crisis/", "publisher": "Ford Foundation", "year": 2020 } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## Two people, not one\n\nIn a market, the buyer and the user are usually the same person. If a product is bad, the person who paid for it knows, and the next time they pay for something else. Prices and reviews carry what each buyer learns to everyone else. Those signals can help, though markets also have information failures.\n\nIn donor-funded services, the payer and the person served can be different people. A donor in one city pays for a clinic in another country. The patients know whether the clinic helped. The donor may need other evidence. In 1980 Henry Hansmann described the general problem as *contract failure*: the people paying for a service cannot easily judge its quality. Charitology calls the result [the Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/) and treats it as the root of the Diagnosis.\n\nTwo gaps can arise. Results may not reach givers, and the knowledge of the people served may not influence funding decisions. That second gap is [the Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/).\n\n## What a loop would look like\n\nA complete feedback loop has three parts. The people served say how the work is going. Someone listens and changes the work. And the money responds: what works attracts more, and what doesn’t attracts less. How often charity contains all three, and when that improves outcomes, are questions for evidence rather than assumptions.\n\n## Listening\n\nIn 2013 Fay Twersky, Phil Buchanan and Valerie Threlfall argued that funders and nonprofits consult experts and crowds but rarely ask the people they serve in any systematic way. They pointed to fields that do listen. In health care, research had found that patients’ perceptions of their care, especially nursing care, predicted clinical quality and lower death rates among heart attack patients. In education, the YouthTruth initiative had surveyed about 142,000 students, and 98 percent of the participating school leaders said they used or planned to use the results. The views of the people served, they argued, can be a leading indicator of trouble.\n\nThey were candid about the costs. Good feedback is expensive to collect, people with low incomes or low literacy are hard to survey well, and people may fear that honest criticism will cost them help. Feedback works alongside other evidence, not in place of it. See [beneficiary feedback](/record/encyclopedia/beneficiary-feedback/).\n\nA small infrastructure has grown up to make listening normal. Feedback Labs supports funders and nonprofits to listen to people and act on what they hear. Fund for Shared Insight, a national funder collaborative, worked on the same goal for 12 years before concluding in 2026, and launched Listen4Good to give nonprofits tools and coaching for collecting feedback.\n\n## Sharing decisions\n\nListening still leaves the decision with the funder. Some funders go further and share it. In [participatory grantmaking](/record/encyclopedia/participatory-grantmaking/), described in Cynthia Gibson’s 2018 guide for GrantCraft, funders cede decision-making power about funding to the communities they aim to serve. [Trust-based philanthropy](/record/lexicon/#trust-based-philanthropy) works on the relationship between funders and grantees: its six practices include giving multi-year unrestricted funding and soliciting and acting on feedback. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, a pledge led by the Ford Foundation asked funders to listen to the communities least heard, alongside loosening restrictions on their grants.\n\n## Letting people choose\n\nThe most direct way to put the people served in charge is to give them the money. In [cash transfers](/record/interventions/cash-transfers/), recipients decide what to buy, so every purchase is a decision about what they need most. It is not the right answer to every problem, since some goods, such as a vaccination campaign or a new law, cannot be bought one household at a time. But it raises a useful question for any program that spends money on people’s behalf: would they be better off with the money itself?\n\n## Feedback to givers\n\nThe loop also has a giver’s end. What a donor sees after giving shapes the next gift. That information might include a thank-you letter, accounts, feedback or evaluation results. A system with a working loop would show givers what changed, honestly, including when nothing did. The [Giving Dashboard](/tools/giving-dashboard/) and [Charitology Wrapped](/tools/charitology-wrapped/) are meant to give the giver’s end of the loop something better to show.\n\n## What would close it\n\nEach practice in this chapter repairs part of the loop. This chapter does not establish which of these practices links the voice of the people served to funding at scale, or how reliably. What mechanism could? That is [Open Problem 5, Closing the Feedback Loop](/open-problems/closing-the-feedback-loop/). It targets the root condition of the Diagnosis: Charitology hypothesizes that a better loop could also improve other conditions.\n\nA related question needs context-specific comparison: do 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/). Differences in outcomes would inform program design. They would not by themselves settle whose rights or decision authority should count." }, { "id": "10-becoming-a-charitologist", "path": "/record/principles/10-becoming-a-charitologist/", "title": "Becoming a charitologist", "chapter": 10, "summary": "Anyone can become a charitologist. This chapter is a practical start, with the Giver’s Checklist, a routine for one gift, how to contribute to Charitology on GitHub and how to take on an Open Problem.", "sources": [], "review": "draft", "body": "## Anyone can be one\n\nA [charitologist](/record/lexicon/#charitologist) is someone who practices charitology: studying, testing, teaching or improving how generosity is aimed. There is no exam to pass first and no institution to join. A donor who asks better questions before giving is practicing it. So is a program officer who funds an evaluation, a student who codes a sample of charities on the depth scale and a volunteer who finds a broken source and fixes it.\n\nThis chapter is about how to start.\n\n## The Giver’s Checklist\n\nThe simplest way to practice is to ask ten questions before a gift. Together they are the [Giver’s Checklist](/method/#checklist), and each one points to a chapter of this book.\n\n1. **Symptom or source?** Where on the chain does this gift act: relief, repair, prevention, structure or source? Know which one you are paying for. See [the depth scale](/method/#depth).\n2. **What happens if I don’t give?** If the work would be funded anyway, the real effect of your gift lands somewhere else. See [counterfactual impact](/record/encyclopedia/counterfactual-impact/).\n3. **How do we know it works?** Look for outcomes, not activity, and ask what the strongest study found. See [the Method](/method/#evidence).\n4. **How would anyone find out if it stopped working?** A program nobody measures can fail for years without anyone noticing. See [the Missing Feedback Loop](/diagnosis/missing-feedback-loop/).\n5. **Who decided this was the need?** Ask what knowledge and decision rights the people served bring. See [the Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/).\n6. **Is this the cheapest way to get this result?** Compare results per dollar, not overhead ratios. See [the Overhead Myth](/diagnosis/overhead-myth/).\n7. **Does my gift come with strings it doesn’t need?** Unrestricted money lets an organization fix what it learns is broken. See [the Restriction Reflex](/diagnosis/restriction-reflex/).\n8. **Will it still matter in ten years?** Some good ends when the money stops, and some compounds. See [the Short Horizon](/diagnosis/short-horizon/).\n9. **Am I giving to the story or to the size of the problem?** Some studies find attention effects, while replications show important limits. Check whether the appeal helps you see the scale and the evidence. See [the Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/).\n10. **Who else is already funding this?** Neglect can suggest opportunity, but only if there is a useful way to make progress. See [neglectedness](/record/encyclopedia/neglectedness/).\n\nNo gift will score well on every question, and that is not the point. The checklist turns a feeling into a set of choices you make on purpose.\n\n## A routine for one gift\n\nPick one gift you are planning to make, and write a page about it before you give. It can be short.\n\n- **Place it.** Say where it sits on the [depth scale](/record/encyclopedia/source-depth/) and why. If you are unsure between two levels, write both.\n- **Write the chain.** Sketch the [theory of change](/record/encyclopedia/theory-of-change/) from what the money buys to the outcome you hope for, and mark the weakest link.\n- **Label the evidence.** Is the claim that it works strong, moderate, mixed, weak or unknown? Chapter 4 explains the grades.\n- **Name your lenses.** Which of the eight moral frameworks does this gift serve, and which would question it? The [Values Compass](/tools/values-compass/) can help.\n- **Make a forecast.** Write down the chance you think the program will achieve its stated outcome within a year or two. When the time comes, check. Over many gifts, scored forecasts show whether your confidence is [calibrated](/record/lexicon/#calibration).\n\nThen give, and keep the page. Reading it again a year later starts your own feedback loop.\n\n## Contributing to Charitology\n\nCharitology is written in the open, and every page is a file anyone can improve. Every page has a link to edit it on GitHub and a link that opens a prefilled issue for a correction or a red-team challenge. See the [Contribute](/contribute/) page for how to get started. The short version follows the rules in the project’s style guide:\n\n- **Every factual claim needs a source you have read.** If you can’t find one, leave the claim out. A gap is a finding, and it can be linked to an Open Problem.\n- **Label claims honestly.** Use the evidence labels and grades in [Chapter 4](/record/principles/04-evidence-and-its-grades/). Charitology’s own untested claims are always hypotheses.\n- **Describe mechanisms, not people.** No judgment of anyone’s character or motives, and no ratings of named charities.\n- **Write plainly.** Short sentences, everyday words and a definition or link for every technical term.\n- **Expect review.** Every new entry starts as a draft. A second contributor who has checked the sources marks it reviewed.\n- **Disclose AI assistance** in your pull request, and check every source yourself.\n\nGood first contributions include checking the sources on an existing page, adding a term to the [Lexicon](/record/lexicon/) and writing an entry for the [Encyclopedia](/record/encyclopedia/) or the [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/).\n\n## Taking on an Open Problem\n\nThe [Open Problems](/open-problems/) are 23 questions precise enough that someone could answer them, each with a stated test for what would count as progress. Anyone can work on one. Approaches, datasets and partial results go into GitHub issues tagged `open-problem`, where they are discussed in public. When a result holds up under review, the problem’s status moves from open to partial or solved, and the [Progress Report](/record/progress-report/) records it.\n\nSome problems can be started small:\n\n- **[The Depth Census](/open-problems/the-depth-census/).** Draw a random sample of organizations from a public registry, place each one on the depth scale using its program descriptions, and have a second person do the same. How often you agree is a finding in itself.\n- **[Proximity and Obligation](/open-problems/proximity-and-obligation/).** A scoped survey experiment could test how comparisons affect choices, with its cost and limits stated.\n- **[Story Without Bias](/open-problems/story-without-bias/).** Test whether a story about a whole community, or a picture of scale, changes giving compared with a story about one person.\n- **[The Question of Questions](/open-problems/the-question-of-questions/).** Estimate which open problem, if solved, would move the most money, and publish your reasoning.\n\nPrizes for progress are planned through [Question Bounties](/programs/question-bounties/), once that program is funded.\n\n## Going further\n\nFor people who want to make charitology a larger part of their life, Charitology’s programs include the [Principles Course](/programs/principles-course/), the [Charitology Fellowship](/programs/charitology-fellowship/), the [Certified Charitologist](/programs/certified-charitologist/) program, [University Chapters](/programs/university-chapters/) and [Local Charitology](/programs/local-charitology/) groups.\n\nWhether training in charitology changes where money goes is itself an open question. Charitology’s founding claim is that a profession would improve how generosity is aimed, as medicine improved how illness is treated. That claim is a hypothesis, and testing it is [Open Problem 17, the Profession Question](/open-problems/the-profession-question/).\n\n## The point of naming it\n\n[The Missing Profession](/diagnosis/missing-profession/) ends with a simple observation: a name can invite people to learn and test a proposed craft. This book has tried to name it, map its subject and set out its first methods. The rest is practice, and the practice belongs to anyone who wants it." }, { "id": "09-failure-and-learning", "path": "/record/principles/09-failure-and-learning/", "title": "Failure and learning", "chapter": 9, "summary": "Sharing unsuccessful results can help a field learn. This chapter covers why failure stays silent, what the silence costs, and the practices that turn failure into shared knowledge, from failure reports to replication, red teams and scored forecasts.", "sources": [ { "title": "“Scared Straight” and other juvenile awareness programs for preventing juvenile delinquency", "url": "https://www.cochrane.org/evidence/CD002796_scared-straight-and-other-juvenile-awareness-programs-preventing-juvenile-delinquency", "publisher": "Anthony Petrosino and colleagues, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews", "year": 2022 }, { "title": "Failure Reports: A how to guide", "url": "https://www.ncfp.org/knowledge/failure-reports-a-how-to-guide", "publisher": "Fail Forward, via the National Center for Family Philanthropy", "year": 2016 }, { "title": "Our Mistakes", "url": "https://www.givewell.org/about/our-mistakes", "publisher": "GiveWell" }, { "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": "The GiveWell Blog", "year": 2011 }, { "title": "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science", "url": "https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716", "publisher": "Open Science Collaboration, Science 349", "year": 2015 }, { "title": "On the Reproducibility of Psychological Science", "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5976261/", "publisher": "Valen E. Johnson and colleagues, Journal of the American Statistical Association", "year": 2016 }, { "title": "Revisiting and Rethinking the Identifiable Victim Effect: Replication and Extension of Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic (2007)", "url": "https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.90203", "publisher": "Maximilian Maier, Yik Chun Wong and Gilad Feldman, Collabra: Psychology 9(1)", "year": 2024 }, { "title": "Brier score tutorial", "url": "https://scores.readthedocs.io/en/0.9.3/tutorials/Brier_Score.html", "publisher": "scores (Python package documentation), citing Glenn W. Brier, Monthly Weather Review 78(1), 1950" } ], "review": "draft", "body": "## Learning from unsuccessful results\n\nAn unsuccessful result can help later teams learn. Charitology hypothesizes that concern about losing support can discourage disclosure in charity; the sources here do not establish its frequency or funding effect. Selective reporting also occurs in medicine. That is [the Silence About Failure](/diagnosis/silence-about-failure/), and it costs the field the data it most needs: what doesn’t work, and why.\n\nThe hypothesis concerns incentives, not character. It should be tested without assuming what any individual thinks or why they disclose a result.\n\n## When good intentions do harm\n\nThe cost of silence is not only wasted money. Some programs do harm, and only careful comparison reveals it. “Scared Straight” programs take young people at risk of offending on organized visits to prisons, to deter them from crime. The idea sounds sensible. A Cochrane review of nine trials found that the programs increased offending compared with doing nothing. See [the case study](/record/case-studies/scared-straight/), and the [Historical Case Studies](/record/case-studies/) for other cases worth learning from, such as [PlayPumps](/record/case-studies/playpumps/) and [D.A.R.E.](/record/case-studies/dare/)\n\nWhen does charity cause harm, and through what mechanisms? That is [Open Problem 20, When Charity Harms](/open-problems/when-charity-harms/).\n\n## When the evidence itself fails\n\nFailure is not only something programs do. Studies fail too.\n\nIn 2015 the Open Science Collaboration repeated 100 published psychology studies. Ninety-seven percent of the originals had reported statistically significant results, but only 36 percent of the replications did, and the effects found were on average about half as large. Some findings that shape how charities raise money are now being retested. A pre-registered replication published in 2024 found no support for the [identifiable victim effect](/record/encyclopedia/identifiable-victim-effect/), one of the best-known findings about giving.\n\nEstimates fail as well. In 2011 GiveWell found five errors in the spreadsheet behind a standard global health reference’s cost-effectiveness estimate for deworming. Together they overstated it by a factor of about 100. Charitology has not established a sector-wide rate for how often charity impact findings hold up when tested again. That is [Open Problem 10, the Replication Rate](/open-problems/the-replication-rate/), and the [Replication Program](/programs/replication-program/) is meant to work on it.\n\n## Organizations that publish their failures\n\nA few organizations have shown that admitting failure is possible. Engineers Without Borders Canada has published failure reports since 2008, and a how-to guide based on its process, written by Fail Forward, helps other organizations do the same. GiveWell keeps a public page listing its own mistakes in research, grantmaking, strategy and operations, and the lessons it drew from them. These examples do not establish whether disclosure costs or earns trust and funding. That is [Open Problem 9, the Failure Commons](/open-problems/the-failure-commons/). Charitology’s [Failure Archive](/record/failure-archive/) is the commons in seed form. See also the [Failure Lab](/programs/failure-lab/).\n\n## Practices that turn failure into learning\n\nScience has developed habits that make failure useful. Each has a place in charity.\n\n- **Pre-registration.** State in advance what you will measure and what would count as success, so a disappointing result can’t be quietly redefined. The 2024 replication above was pre-registered.\n- **Red teams.** Ask people whose job is to find the flaws to attack a claim before it is published. Charitology publishes no ratings of named charities until its method has passed public [red-team](/programs/red-team/) review.\n- **Scored forecasts.** Before funding a program, write down how likely you think it is to work, then check. A [Brier score](/record/lexicon/#brier-score) measures how close probability forecasts come to what happened, from 0 for perfect to 1 for the worst possible. The average Brier score combines calibration and the ability to distinguish likely from unlikely outcomes. Calibration should also be checked directly across many forecasts; a score alone is not a complete calibration test. See the [Forecasting Platform](/tools/forecasting-platform/).\n- **Failure reports.** Publish what didn’t work, what was learned and what changed, on a regular schedule, so that disclosure becomes routine rather than an admission.\n\n## Charitology’s own failures\n\nA field that asks others to admit failure has to do it first. Every Charitology page links to a prefilled issue for corrections and red-team challenges. Mistakes are fixed in the open, and significant ones are noted when they are fixed. Its own founding claims are labeled hypotheses, and some of them may turn out to be wrong. When the [Depth Census](/open-problems/the-depth-census/) or any other test contradicts a condition in the Diagnosis, the condition should come off the list, in public. That is what would make Charitology a science rather than a set of opinions." } ] }