GiveWell & alike are our only hope against greedy pseudo-charities and the article hates that someone is trying to shine light on the pseudo-charity hustle. Sm

GiveWell & alike are our only hope against greedy pseudo-charities and the article hates that someone is trying to shine light on the pseudo-charity hustle. Small-scale charity generally functions well. Many different people with good intentions have visibility into the inputs and outputs and can ensure it more or less stays on task. Large-scale charity is very different. It's too big for ad-hoc accountability, so it needs to use market accountability, but by its very nature market accountability is completely broken in this sector. The people who receive the product are not the people who pay for the product. You've seen this dynamic play out before -- enterprise software, kids and toys, government projects -- but charity is even worse on account of having even more separation between the two groups. Employees can complain to management, kids can complain to their parents, local associations can throw a stink about wasteful projects, but are the starving African children going to compare the price of the meals they received to the amount you donated and and give you a phone call when the numbers don't add up? No, they are not. The market feedback loop is broken in the charity sector, so the optimal strategy for a self-interested pseudo-charity is to plow most of its donations back into marketing and executive compensation (if people complain just put on a TED talk and repeatedly assert that it's fine) and as a distant third priority do a little bit of what they are supposed to be doing. This gets them a photo album for the landing page and forces accountability arguments to use numbers rather than absolutes. Then, if anyone tries to come after them, they can accuse those people of being nerds -- or, when that ceases to be rhetorically effective, accuse them of being technocrats. Accountability is boring at best and confrontational at worst, but it's extremely important because if we don't do it the parasitic load on the charity ecosystem gobbles up all the money. Accountability doesn't have to mean spreadsheets and numbers, small local charities can absolutely get away with doing it ad-hoc, but it's important to do it one way or another.