Time · Charitology

The short horizon

Short 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, and it is labeled a hypothesis because this project has not established a sector-wide mismatch.

Time 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.

How long until it works, and how long it lasts

Every entry in the Intervention Database 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.

The 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 puts the question simply: will it still matter in ten years?

Neither column is better. A gift that ends when the money stops did real good while it lasted. The question, as always, is the mix.

How much the future counts

To compare a benefit now with one in twenty years, you need a discount rate. It helps to separate three reasons for discounting.

The 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.

The 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.

How much the future should count is Open Problem 13, Discounting the Future. The Future generations 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 calculation. MacAskill, Bykvist and Ord treat that as a central problem for anyone deciding under moral uncertainty.

Give now or give later?

Money 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.

The 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.

Real 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.

How fast should parked money move?

U.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.

Is 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, 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, private foundations and donor-advised funds.

Choosing on purpose

The 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 is a place to start.

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