Estimated reading time: 6-7 minutes
Introduction to GiveWell and effective altruism
As I was researching GiveWell for the Resources Chapter of my Charity Research Guide, I realized there were additional thoughts I didn’t get to include. This chapter expands on those ideas, offering more detailed critiques of GiveWell and its effective altruism-backed philosophy.
GiveWell is a prominent organization that has garnered significant attention in recent years. Its scale is massive – directing over $2 billion to their recommended charities from over 125,000 donors since 2007. Founded in 2009, GiveWell predates the formalization of the effective altruism movement in 2011, yet it has become a central figure within that ecosystem.
As I introduced in Chapter 5, effective altruism seeks to maximize the “good” of charitable donations by reducing suffering and enhancing well-being. It applies a rational, evidence-driven approach to quantify these outcomes and compares various charitable initiatives to determine the most effective. GiveWell is one of the key organizations that follows this methodology, using evidence-based techniques and complex formulas to rank charities based on their effectiveness.
GiveWell’s research is thorough, examining impact evaluations, academic literature, conducting site visits and interviews, and reviewing other available data. It then analyzes this data using complex models where moral weights are assigned to various outcomes. In the end, the formula provides a “value”, or amount of positive impact, of a specific charitable program, which can then be compared against other programs.
Looking at the moral weights can highlight how they are valuing certain outcomes. For example, the value of saving the life of a person in their 30s is considered comparable to the value of doubling the consumption of 100 people (“consumption” refers to the use of resources that contribute to an individual or household’s well-being).[1] Or, as another example, the value of preventing a malaria death in a child under five years old is roughly equivalent to the value of averting 51 years of life lived with disease or disability[2].
By comparing the values of these programs, while also factoring in organizational efficiency, GiveWell makes an overall assessment of the effectiveness of a charity. Ultimately, they publish a shortlist of top charities. These charities tend to prioritize interventions that aim to prevent childhood deaths, as this outcome is weighted most heavily in their moral framework. One of their top charities currently is the Against Malaria Foundation which distributes mosquito nets in malaria-prone areas and claims that a donation of $5,500 USD will save one life.
This might all sound great to you, as it did to me when I first learned about effective altruism and GiveWell. Who could argue with the idea of directing funding to the most effective charities to maximize the good done? I even read some of the movement’s key books, including Doing Good Better, The Life You Can Save, and 80,000 Hours: Find a Fulfilling Career That Does Good. But after absorbing it all, something never quite sat right with me. I realized that charitable effectiveness is more complicated – both philosophically and practically – than it first appears. In my opinion, effective altruism doesn’t fully live up to its expectations.
My critiques
I have several critiques of GiveWell’s effective altruism-based approach, which is why I decided to dedicate an entire chapter to this. First, GiveWell specifies that “the moral weights that drive our cost-effectiveness estimates are based on our staff’s personal values.”[3] According to their open-source moral weights framework, it appears that only ten staff members have input into these values. This means that their perception of what constitutes a “good” outcome is subjective and shaped by the values of a small group of people. Given that this organization directs hundreds of millions of dollars annually to its top charities, I’m skeptical that this method is rigorous enough to justify such a significant influence.
While diversity is a virtue often valued these days, there seems to be a lack of diversity here in the viewpoints that guide these hundreds of millions of donations. Ten people’s opinions simply don’t seem like enough to make such significant decisions. Furthermore, considering that most of GiveWell’s staff come from Western, Ivy League or Oxford-educated backgrounds with affluent upbringings, I’m not convinced their moral judgments adequately represent the diverse views of all their donors.
And what about the recipients of the aid themselves? Shouldn’t they have a say in how various factors are prioritized? What if they would disagree with the heavy focus on health over other issues, such as economic well-being, or housing? Shouldn’t this be up to them to decide? Acknowledging this issue, GiveWell tried to address this through a 2019 study where they surveyed 2,000 people in Kenya and Ghana living in extreme poverty to better understand their perspectives. However, in my view, this survey is still far too limited in scope and clearly lacks sufficient geographic diversity.
In the words of effective altruists, the movement is about ‘doing good better.’ Let’s pause for a moment – what they’re implying is not just that they have the authority to define what ‘good’ is, but also that they know how to do it ‘better’ than anyone else. To me, this comes across as an elitist notion. The term was coined by William MacAskill, a philosopher and one of the founders of effective altruism, who was educated in private school, then Cambridge, and then Oxford. Can a movement truly be effective if it’s led by people with such a limited perspective?
Overall, I believe the idea that complex outcomes can be simplified into such a calculated formula is unrealistic. Scalar models like these fail to account for the complexities of these systems. For example, if GiveWell evaluated a religious organization, its score would likely be very low compared to malaria prevention organizations. But what if the members of that religious organization were so inspired by the message they heard that they went on to create life-saving charities, which flourished over the coming decades? Similarly, as Prime Minister Modi pointed out in a recent podcast (02:49:15), a teacher, though not directly involved in life-saving work, can inspire students to become doctors, who together could serve millions of patients. Can a formula truly quantify the impact of a good teacher? Perhaps artificial intelligence could one day model the complex social, economic, and cultural systems that intersect with charitable aid, but we’re not there yet.
One issue I have is that GiveWell has only deeply reviewed a small fraction of the millions of charitable organizations globally. While I’m sure the organizations they recommend are doing valuable work, do they truly deserve this coveted position? One concern is that these organizations – and the health sector in particular – have been chosen specifically because their outcomes are easily quantifiable. Health outcomes are often seen as more straightforward to measure because they involve objective data that can be tracked and compared over time. For example, it’s easy to calculate how many mosquito nets must be distributed to save one life. But what about other, less-quantifiable interventions, such as human rights or democracy advocacy, environmental conservation, or education? These areas are far more difficult to evaluate.
And how does the influx of donations from GiveWell’s “top charity” status affect an organization’s impact? Can we really channel massive global funding to just four organizations and still expect high effectiveness? Take the Against Malaria Foundation as a case in point: it was named one of GiveWell’s top charities in 2011, and by 2013, it had received 10.6 million USD in donations. However, the foundation had only distributed 1 million USD worth of mosquito nets, with the rest held in reserve. The funding was too much for the organization to handle. This highlights a potential issue with GiveWell’s approach – directing such large sums to a limited number of organizations can overwhelm them, reducing their ability to effectively utilize the funds.
There are other criticisms of effective altruism that have been discussed widely, and I’ll highlight a few references here for further reading[4][5].
Ultimately, I believe that determining the moral value of a charitable intervention is a personal decision we each must make. Why rely on the opinions of ten experts in San Francisco, when we can rely on our own judgement? As Bob Dylan once sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/12/19/the-search-for-the-worlds-most-efficient-charities
[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hOQf6Ug1WpoicMyFDGoqH7tmf3Njjc15Z1DGERaTbnI/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.4ezmgjboichq
[3] https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness/comparing-moral-weights
[4] https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/11/15/the-good-delusion-has-effective-altruism-broken-bad
[5] https://www.abc.net.au/religion/why-effective-altruism-is-not-effective/13310708