Thinking About Charitable Giving
The Wall Street Journal this morning has a fascinating article about a group, Give Well, that attempts to evaluate which charities give the most good (e.g. saved lives) for the buck. As you might expect, they determine that particular interventions in the third world provide the best return on the charitable investment: GiveWell sits at the center of a small but growing movement in philanthropy, what you might call "evidence-based giving," which is particularly in vogue among tech millionaires and billionaires. In addition to praise from economists and those in the traditional philanthropic world, GiveWell has earned accolades from tech types. Its largest funder is Good Ventures, the foundation created by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who now runs the foundation. In its philosophical outlook, GiveWell also has much in common with other tech-funded philanthropies, including Pierre Omidyar's , Jeff Sk...