How a charitologist thinks
Nine instruments you can use on any gift, program or system. None of them needs a degree. All of them get better with practice, which is what makes charitology a craft.
See the system
Start by placing any gift in the system it moves through: who gives, what signals they see, which channel holds the money, what work it pays for, what changes, and whether anyone finds out. Most problems in giving aren’t about one gift. They’re about the system’s habits. The Diagnosis names fifteen of them.
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Givers
Individuals 64% · Foundations 19% · Bequests 10% · Corporations 7%
U.S. giving by source, 2025
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Signals
Stories, faces, overhead ratios, rankings, prestige, tax breaks
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Channels
Charities, foundations, donor-advised funds, giving platforms
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The work
- Source
- Structure
- Prevention
- Repair
- Relief
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Outcomes
Lives, institutions, futures
Measure depth
Every piece of work acts somewhere on the chain from symptom to source. Charitology uses five levels. Depth describes the work; it never grades it. Relief keeps people alive while sources are fixed, and every level is needed. The question is always the mix.
| Level | What it does | Question to ask | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 · Relief | Meets the need today | Is someone fed, sheltered or treated right now? | A meal at a food bank, emergency surgery, a disaster shelter. |
| 1 · Repair | Restores what was lost | Is someone back to where they were before the harm? | Rebuilding a home, rehabilitation after an injury, a job after a layoff. |
| 2 · Prevention | Stops it happening to these people | Will these people avoid the harm altogether? | Bed nets, vaccines, clean water for a village. |
| 3 · Structure | Changes the rules that produce it | Did a law, institution, market or norm change so the harm stops being produced? | A lead-paint ban, a new public health system, a corporate standard. |
| 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, what a culture rewards. |
Level 4 takes its sources from Humanity’s Checklist, which names six roots upstream of every world problem: story, coordination, vision, attention, status, gatekeepers. Whether fixing them really helps everything downstream is a hypothesis charitology exists to test.
Grade the evidence
Every claim carries a label. There are two systems, one for claims about the charity system and one for interventions.
Claims about the system
- Established
- Strong published evidence from several independent sources.
- Documented
- Reported by credible sources. How big the effect is remains less certain.
- Debated
- Credible people disagree. Both sides are shown.
- Hypothesis
- Charitology’s working claim. It has not been tested yet, and testing it is the work.
Interventions
- Strong evidence
- Several rigorous studies agree.
- Moderate evidence
- Some rigorous studies, or strong studies of a related program.
- Mixed evidence
- Rigorous studies disagree.
- Weak evidence
- Plausible, but rigorous studies are scarce.
- Unknown
- Nobody has measured it well yet.
Look for outcomes, not activity: lives changed, not meals counted. See outputs and outcomes and the Measurement Gap.
Ask what would happen anyway
The real effect of a gift is the difference between the world with it and the world without it. If the work would be funded anyway, your gift’s effect lands somewhere else. That’s why neglect matters: an extra dollar does more where few dollars go. See counterfactual impact and Open Problem 4.
Look through every lens
Every moral framework makes some kinds of good easy to see and others invisible. Charitology looks through all of them, reports where they agree, and is honest where they don’t. These are the eight it uses today:
Welfare
What reduces the most suffering and adds the most wellbeing?
Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Peter Singer
Rights and duties
What do we owe each other, whatever the cost?
Immanuel Kant, W. D. Ross, Onora O’Neill
Justice
What is unfair, and how do we fix it rather than soften it?
John Rawls, Iris Marion Young
Care
Who depends on me, and how do I show up for them?
Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Virginia Held
Faith and tradition
What does my tradition ask me to give, and to whom?
Maimonides, Religious and community traditions worldwide
Future generations
What protects the people who aren’t born yet?
Derek Parfit, Hans Jonas, Toby Ord
All life
What protects animals and the living world for their own sake?
Aldo Leopold, Arne Næss
Flourishing
What helps people become who they could be?
Aristotle, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum
Find your own mix with the Values Compass, then turn it into a budget with the Portfolio Builder. Seeing through only one lens is the Single Lens.
Mind the horizon
Ask how long the good lasts and who it reaches across time. Some good ends when the money stops. Some compounds for generations. Charity runs on annual budgets while its deepest problems run on decades, which is the Short Horizon. How much the future should count is Open Problem 13.
Close the loop
A donor may be paying for work whose results they cannot observe directly. Ask how anyone would find out if the work stopped working, and whether the people it serves get a say. See the Missing Feedback Loop and the Missing Voice.
The Giver’s Checklist
Ten questions to ask of any gift, large or small. Tick them off as you go. Nothing is saved or sent. The browser extension puts the same list on donation pages.
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Where on the chain does this gift act: relief, repair, prevention, structure or source? Every level is needed. Know which one you are paying for. More
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If the work would be funded anyway, the real effect of your gift lands somewhere else. More
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Look for outcomes, not activity: lives changed, not meals counted. Ask what the strongest study found. More
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A program nobody measures can fail for years without anyone noticing. More
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The people closest to a problem often know which fix will last. More
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Two programs with the same goal can differ enormously in cost. Compare results per dollar, not overhead ratios. More
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Unrestricted money lets an organization fix what it learns is broken. More
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Some good ends when the money stops. Some good compounds. More
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One face moves us more than a million people. That is human, and it is also a bias. More
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An extra dollar does more where few other dollars go. More
0 of 10 answered for this gift.
The honesty rules
- Unknown stays unknown. Say what has not been measured here, without assuming nobody else has studied it.
- Charitology’s own claims are hypotheses until tested, and the Diagnosis labels them that way.
- No ratings of named charities until the method has passed public red-team review. Depth classifications are descriptions, open to challenge.
- Every claim has a source, and every page links to a public correction.
- Failures are published. Including Charitology’s own.
The full standard is in the Methodology Handbook.