Charitology
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Disagreement Register

A searchable register of positions, cruxes and unresolved questions, with source lists, review labels and downloadable debate dossiers.

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8 entries in this working collection.

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Draft · human review pending 4 sources

Are donor-advised funds good for charity?

Donor-advised funds now hold hundreds of billions of dollars set aside for charity. Supporters see a vehicle that makes giving easier and pays out faster than foundations. Critics see tax breaks claimed today for money that may reach working charities years later.

Debate status
open
Positions covered
They grow giving · They park money · The averages can’t settle it
Inspect the recorded fields
Positions in this entry
  • They grow giving: Donor-advised funds make giving simple and flexible, and the money in them is already under a charity’s legal control. They paid out $64.9 billion in 2024, and as a whole they pay out far faster than private foundations do.
  • They park money: Donors get an immediate tax break, but the rules on when the money must reach working charities are loose. Hundreds of billions of dollars sit in accounts while the needs they were meant for go unmet, and the public subsidizes the wait.
  • The averages can’t settle it: An aggregate payout rate mixes very active accounts with dormant ones, and many small accounts used for workplace giving inflate the count. What matters is how individual accounts behave and whether the money would have been given anyway, and aggregate sponsor-level data do not show either on their own.
Cruxes that could change minds
  • How much money in donor-advised funds is new giving that wouldn’t otherwise have happened, and how much would have gone straight to charities.
  • How payouts are spread across accounts, and whether active accounts hide many that rarely make grants.
  • Whether payout deadlines would cut contributions, and by how much.
  • How fast the problems themselves need money to move.
Read the source list (4)
  1. DAF Assets Soar 30% to $326 Billion — The Chronicle of Philanthropy, reporting the Annual DAF Report 2025 by the DAF Research Collaborative, 2025
  2. The Annual DAF Report 2025 — Johnson Center for Philanthropy, 2025
  3. Donor-advised funds — Internal Revenue Service
  4. Annual DAF Report 2025, full report — Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative, Indiana University repository, 2025
Link Challenge
Draft · human review pending 9 sources

Does deworming pay off decades later?

One Kenyan program suggests that treating children for worms raised their earnings twenty years later, while systematic reviews of dozens of trials find little short-term benefit. Researchers and funders disagree about what to believe and what to do.

Debate status
open
Positions covered
The long-run gains are real · The evidence is too thin to rely on · Act on expected value
Inspect the recorded fields
Positions in this entry
  • The long-run gains are real: A randomized program in Kenya found that children who got more years of deworming had higher consumption and hourly earnings as adults. Trials that treat children one by one miss the spillover benefits of treating whole schools, and short trials measure too little, too soon, to see effects that build over a lifetime.
  • The evidence is too thin to rely on: Dozens of trials, pooled in Cochrane and Campbell reviews, find that mass deworming does little for growth, cognition, school performance or survival. A large economic effect with no measurable health effect needs an explanation, and it rests mostly on one program whose reanalysis weakened some of its findings.
  • Act on expected value: Deworming may well do little, but it costs about 50 cents to a dollar per child treated. A modest chance of large lifelong gains can still make it a good bet, as long as the estimate is discounted heavily for the doubt.
Cruxes that could change minds
  • Whether large economic gains can exist when short-term health gains are too small to detect.
  • Whether results from heavily infected children in Busia in 1998 carry over to the lighter infections common today.
  • Whether new long-run studies in other places would find what the Kenya studies found.
  • How much weight a funder should give a small chance of a large benefit compared with a near-certain small one.
Read the source list (9)
  1. Twenty-year economic impacts of deworming — Hamory, Miguel, Walker, Kremer and Baird, PNAS 118(14), 2021
  2. Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities — Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer, Econometrica 72(1), 2004
  3. Public health deworming programmes for soil-transmitted helminths in children living in endemic areas (Cochrane systematic review) — Taylor-Robinson, Maayan, Donegan, Chaplin and Garner, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2019
  4. Mass deworming to improve developmental health and wellbeing of children in low-income and middle-income countries: a systematic review and network meta-analysis — Welch and colleagues, The Lancet Global Health 5(1), 2017
  5. Re-analysis of health and educational impacts of a school-based deworming programme in western Kenya: a pure replication — Aiken, Davey, Hargreaves and Hayes, International Journal of Epidemiology 44(5), 2015
  6. Re-analysis of health and educational impacts of a school-based deworming programme in western Kenya: a statistical replication of a cluster quasi-randomized stepped-wedge trial — Davey, Aiken, Hayes and Hargreaves, International Journal of Epidemiology 44(5), 2015
  7. Commentary: Deworming externalities and schooling impacts in Kenya: a comment on Aiken et al. (2015) and Davey et al. (2015) — Hicks, Kremer and Miguel, International Journal of Epidemiology 44(5), 2015
  8. Deworming might have huge impact, but might have close to zero impact — GiveWell Blog, 2016
  9. Why I mostly believe in Worms — David Roodman, GiveWell Blog, 2016
Link Challenge
Draft · human review pending 5 sources

Does microcredit transform lives?

Microcredit was honored with a Nobel Peace Prize as a path out of poverty. Randomized evaluations found average effects that were modest. The live debate is over what those averages hide and what microcredit should be judged on.

Debate status
narrowing
Positions covered
It is a path out of poverty · The averages are the answer · Averages hide the people who gain · Judge it on flexibility, not income
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Positions in this entry
  • It is a path out of poverty: Credit lets people with ideas and energy but no collateral start and grow businesses, and proponents value the autonomy and self-reliance that credit can support. The Nobel committee honored it for building development from below.
  • The averages are the answer: Randomized evaluations on four continents found modest, not transformative, effects. Demand was lower than expected, profits rarely rose and average household income didn’t change. Money that could do more elsewhere shouldn’t follow the old story.
  • Averages hide the people who gain: Most borrowers see little change, but a minority who already run businesses gain a lot, and those gains can grow for years. The right question is who benefits, not whether the average borrower does.
  • Judge it on flexibility, not income: Poor households need ways to invest, smooth spending and handle shocks. Microcredit gives them more freedom to do that, and that freedom is a real benefit even when income doesn’t rise.
Cruxes that could change minds
  • Whether effects that grow over many years, which most trials were too short to see, change the average picture.
  • Whether lenders can find, in advance, the borrowers who will gain.
  • How to value freedom and flexibility against income, consumption and schooling.
  • What counterfactual to use, since cash transfers and other programs compete for the same money.
Read the source list (5)
  1. The Nobel Peace Prize 2006, press release — Norwegian Nobel Committee, 2006
  2. Six Randomized Evaluations of Microcredit: Introduction and Further Steps — Banerjee, Karlan and Zinman, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7(1), 2015
  3. Where Credit Is Due (policy bulletin) — Angelucci, Banerjee, Crépon, Duflo, Glennerster, Karlan, Parienté and Zinman, Innovations for Poverty Action and J-PAL, 2015
  4. Understanding the Average Impact of Microcredit Expansions: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of Seven Randomized Experiments — Rachael Meager, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11(1), 2019
  5. Can Microfinance Unlock a Poverty Trap for Some Entrepreneurs? — Banerjee, Breza, Duflo and Kinnan, NBER Working Paper 26346, 2019

    Revised July 2024; the six-year business-asset and revenue figures refer to that version.

Link Challenge
Draft · human review pending 2 sources

Give near or give far?

Should distance matter when you decide where to give? Philosophers and giving traditions offer different answers.

Debate status
open
Positions covered
Distance doesn’t matter morally · Proximity creates duties · It depends on what you are fixing
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Positions in this entry
  • Distance doesn’t matter morally: A life is a life wherever it is. If the same money does far more good abroad, that is where it should go.
  • Proximity creates duties: We have special obligations to family, neighbors and community, and local giving builds the trust a good society needs.
  • It depends on what you are fixing: Local knowledge and institutions can matter to changing a local institution or national law. Distance matters for some problems and not others.
Cruxes that could change minds
  • Whether special obligations to people near us are real moral duties or a bias we should correct for.
  • How big the cost difference between near and far giving really is once the counterfactual is counted.
  • Whether local giving produces community benefits, such as trust and civic strength, that cost-per-outcome comparisons miss.
Read the source list (2)
  1. Famine, Affluence, and Morality — Peter Singer, Philosophy & Public Affairs 1(3), 1972
  2. How Much Does It Cost to Save a Life? — GiveWell, 2024
Link Challenge
Draft · human review pending 4 sources

How much do animals count?

Ethical traditions disagree about whether animals matter in their own right, how much their suffering weighs next to human suffering, and which animals can suffer at all. The answer changes where giving goes.

Debate status
open
Positions covered
Equal interests count equally · Animals have rights · Count them by capacity for welfare · Humans come first
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Positions in this entry
  • Equal interests count equally: What matters morally is the capacity to suffer, not species, reason or language. Equal interests deserve equal weight whoever has them, so the suffering of farmed animals may be among the largest moral problems there is.
  • Animals have rights: Animals are subjects of a life with value of their own, not resources. Using them merely as means violates their rights, and those rights can’t be overridden simply because humans benefit.
  • Count them by capacity for welfare: Animals count, but how much depends on how much they can feel. Careful estimates of each species’ capacity for welfare, uncertain as they are, are better than ignoring animals or treating all species alike.
  • Humans come first: Only rational beings have moral worth in their own right. Duties to animals are real but indirect, because cruelty to them damages our own character and humanity. Where human and animal needs conflict, human needs come first.
Cruxes that could change minds
  • Which animals are sentient, and how confident anyone can be.
  • Whether experiences can be compared across species, and how.
  • Whether moral status rests on the capacity to suffer, on rationality or on relationships.
  • How to act when the evidence about animals’ inner lives is uncertain.
Read the source list (4)
  1. The Moral Status of Animals — Lori Gruen and Susana Monsó, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024
  2. The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness — New York University, 2024
  3. Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022, section 5 — UK Parliament, legislation.gov.uk, 2022
  4. Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range Estimates — Bob Fischer, Rethink Priorities, 2023
Link Challenge
Draft · human review pending 7 sources

Systemic change or proven programs?

Should givers fund programs with rigorous evidence of results, or efforts to change the laws, markets and institutions that produce problems, where results are harder to prove?

Debate status
open
Positions covered
Fund what is proven · Fund systemic change · Structural work can be evidenced too · Proven programs can become structure
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Positions in this entry
  • Fund what is proven: Programs that have been studied rigorously, ideally more than once, let givers know what their money does. Evidence protects against waste and against good intentions that backfire, and cheap proven programs save lives today.
  • Fund systemic change: Charity that works only inside existing institutions leaves untouched the structures that produce suffering, such as trade, debt and political power. Changing them matters more than any single program, even when the results can’t be priced in advance.
  • Structural work can be evidenced too: Some of the largest documented gains came from structural change, such as taking lead out of gasoline and paint or raising tobacco taxes. Their effects can be measured by other methods when no trial is possible, so givers can hold systemic work to evidence standards instead of choosing between evidence and depth.
  • Proven programs can become structure: A program proven in trials can be built into government systems and change institutions from the inside. The two approaches are stages of one path, not rivals.
Cruxes that could change minds
  • Whether the effects of advocacy and policy change can be measured well enough to compare with direct programs.
  • How much of a law’s success any one funder or group can claim.
  • Whether funding proven programs delays structural change or builds the trust and capacity that make it possible.
  • How much risk of achieving nothing a giver should accept for a chance at a much larger change.
Read the source list (7)
  1. GiveWell’s Criteria for Top Charities — GiveWell
  2. Stop the Robot Apocalypse — Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books 37(18), 2015
  3. Blood Lead Levels in U.S. Children Ages 1–11 Years, 1976–2016 — Egan, Cornwell, Courtney and Ettinger, Environmental Health Perspectives 129(3), 2021
  4. Effectiveness of tax and price policies in tobacco control — Chaloupka, Straif and Leon for the IARC Working Group, Tobacco Control 20(3), 2011
  5. Introduction to randomized evaluations — J-PAL, 2023
  6. Sin Tax Reform in the Philippines: Transforming Public Finance, Health, and Governance for More Inclusive Development — Kai Kaiser, Caryn Bredenkamp and Roberto Iglesias, World Bank, 2016
  7. Mainstreaming an Effective Intervention: Evidence from Randomized Evaluations of “Teaching at the Right Level” in India — Banerjee, Banerji, Berry, Duflo, Kannan, Mukerji, Shotland and Walton, NBER Working Paper 22746, 2016
Link Challenge
Draft · human review pending 6 sources

The long-term future or present needs?

Should giving focus on people alive now, whose needs are certain and urgent, or on protecting the potentially far larger number of people who may live in the future?

Debate status
open
Positions covered
The long-term future matters most · Present needs come first · Nobody can see that far · Count the future, discount for uncertainty
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Positions in this entry
  • The long-term future matters most: Humanity’s future could last millions of years and hold vastly more people than are alive today. If their lives count as much as ours, work that shapes the long run, such as reducing the risk of catastrophe, may be the most important thing we can do.
  • Present needs come first: People suffering now have needs we can see and help we know works, and a few thousand dollars can save a life. Duties to people who exist are clearer than duties to people who may never exist, and the further ahead we look, the less we know.
  • Nobody can see that far: Most effects of any action lie in a future we can’t foresee. If we are clueless about them, confident bets on the long term aren’t justified. The same doubt applies to the long-run effects of helping people now, so it doesn’t simply favor the present.
  • Count the future, discount for uncertainty: Valuing well-being less just because it comes later is hard to defend, but risk, uncertainty and growth are real reasons to discount. Giving can take the future seriously while weighting it for how little we know.
Cruxes that could change minds
  • Whether future people’s well-being counts as much as present people’s.
  • Whether we can predict and influence the long-run future well enough to act on it.
  • How to weigh a tiny probability of an enormous benefit against a near-certain modest one.
  • Whether duties to people alive now, and to those close to us, take priority.
Read the source list (6)
  1. What We Owe The Future (book website) — William MacAskill, Basic Books
  2. The Precipice (book website) — Toby Ord
  3. How Much Does It Cost to Save a Life? — GiveWell, 2024
  4. Intergenerational Justice — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2026
  5. Cluelessness — Hilary Greaves, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116(3), 2016
  6. A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change — William D. Nordhaus, Journal of Economic Literature 45(3), 2007
Link Challenge
Draft · human review pending 6 sources

What can randomized trials tell us?

Randomized trials have become a leading way to judge whether charitable and development programs work. Critics argue that trials answer narrower questions than they seem to, and that results often change when a program grows or moves.

Debate status
open
Positions covered
Trials are the best test of what works · Trials answer narrower questions than they seem · Results change at scale · The deepest questions can’t be randomized
Inspect the recorded fields
Positions in this entry
  • Trials are the best test of what works: Random assignment makes groups comparable, so differences in outcomes can be credited to the program rather than to who chose to take part. Without trials, givers fall back on stories and correlations that often mislead.
  • Trials answer narrower questions than they seem: A trial’s estimate is unbiased only on average over imagined repeats of the trial, and it describes the people and place studied. Using it anywhere else requires knowing why the program worked and whether the conditions it needs are present, which the trial itself can’t show.
  • Results change at scale: Programs run by researchers and nonprofits tend to show bigger effects than programs run by governments. A trial of a pilot is a weak guide to the national program that follows it.
  • The deepest questions can’t be randomized: National laws, policies and social movements can rarely be assigned at random. If funders back only what can be trialed, money drifts away from some of the deepest work.
Cruxes that could change minds
  • How well a result from one place predicts the result in another.
  • Whether theory and studies of mechanisms can make trial results travel.
  • How much weight other kinds of evidence deserve when a trial is impossible.
  • Whether what a trial teaches is worth what it costs.
Read the source list (6)
  1. Introduction to randomized evaluations — Michael Gibson and Anja Sautmann, J-PAL, 2023
  2. Understanding and misunderstanding randomized controlled trials — Angus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright, Social Science & Medicine, 2018
  3. How Much Can We Generalize From Impact Evaluations? — Eva Vivalt, Journal of the European Economic Association 18(6), 2020
  4. Mainstreaming an Effective Intervention: Evidence from Randomized Evaluations of “Teaching at the Right Level” in India — Banerjee, Banerji, Berry, Duflo, Kannan, Mukerji, Shotland and Walton, NBER Working Paper 22746, 2016
  5. Targeting Foundational Skills to Improve Learning at Scale in Zambia — J-PAL
  6. Re-analysis of health and educational impacts of a school-based deworming programme in western Kenya: a pure replication — Aiken, Davey, Hargreaves and Hayes, International Journal of Epidemiology 44(5), 2015
Link Challenge