Charitology studies the system that connects them all. Like any system, it produces the results it is built to produce, so to change the results you have to understand the structure.
Five stages
- Givers. The people and institutions who give. In the United States, Giving USA estimates that $617.2 billion was given in 2025. Individuals gave 64 percent of it, foundations 19 percent, bequests 10 percent and corporations 7 percent.
- Signals. What givers see when they decide: stories and faces, overhead ratios, rankings, prestige and tax breaks.
- Channels. Where money is held and routed: charities, foundations, donor-advised funds and giving platforms. The IRS master file of tax-exempt organizations of every kind listed nearly two million records in October 2026, and donor-advised funds alone held about $326 billion in 2024.
- The work. What the money pays for, described by where it acts on the depth scale, from relief to source.
- Outcomes. What changes in people’s lives, in institutions and in the future.
The missing loop
In a market, the person who pays is usually the person who benefits, and prices and reviews carry information back. In charity, the payer and the person served are usually different people. The legal scholar Henry Hansmann called the general version of this contract failure: the people paying for a service cannot easily judge its quality. This can make results harder for donors to assess. The frequency and allocation effects of the gap are not measured by Hansmann’s theory. That is the Missing Feedback Loop, and Charitology treats it as the root of the Diagnosis.
The field around it
Around all five stages is the field: the knowledge, methods and people that could steer the system as a whole. Researchers, evaluators, advisors and philanthropy educators already study parts of this system. Charitology proposes a shared craft connecting their work across causes and frameworks. That is the Missing Profession.
Where the conditions sit
Each condition in the Diagnosis acts at one point in the system:
- Givers: Short Horizon, Proximity Pull
- Signals: Overhead Myth, Story Bias, Prestige Economy
- Channels: Restriction Reflex, Fragmentation, Parked Money
- The work: Symptom Trap, Single Lens
- Outcomes: Measurement Gap, Silence About Failure
- Feedback: Missing Feedback Loop, Missing Voice
The map is a model, not a measurement. Its value is that it shows how a problem at one stage shows up at another. Signals that reward what is visible shape what channels fund, and short, restricted grants favor work with quick, countable outputs. Charitology’s working hypothesis is that fixing one stage while the loop stays open changes little. See Principles, Chapter 2 for the full account.