Exactly. Nonprofits have a principal agent problem — they are funded by donors, not the people they serve. As a result, they are incentivized to find ways to gi

Exactly. Nonprofits have a principal agent problem — they are funded by donors, not the people they serve. As a result, they are incentivized to find ways to give a non financial ROI to donors in order to keep the money coming (eg galas, name a building, focus on the donor’s pet project, etc) instead of serving the interests of the people they are supposed to help. This dynamic — which is similar to politicians serving special interests rather than constituents — leads to lots of inefficient philanthropy. EA tries to solve this with - better spreadsheets! Surely we can just math our way out of this. This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t solve the root problem that donors, not beneficiaries, allocate capital and they are not in a great position to determine what is “effective” because it’s highly subjective. So even though I think EA largely means well, these same problems of donor motives creep back into giving, despite better spreadsheets and a bunch of phds. EA gets funding from tech VCs and all of a sudden Mars and AI are the central topics to giving. If hedge funds were the main donors, we’d probably be back focusing on microfinance. And in a sense, the false confidence and superiority that EA lends to donors, even though it does help on the margins creates more cover for the rare nefarious donors or nonprofit that use it to hide sinister ulterior motives. The whole thing is similar to communism not working and the people in charge think, “we need better spreadsheets to allocate resources!” Rather than, “maybe we should give some of our power back to the people we’re ostensibly trying to help so they can pick what best serves them.” The single thing missing from 99% of philanthropy conversations after all these years is STILL the voices of the people we’re all trying to help. We don’t need more phds or business tycoons deciding what’s best for the poorest people in the world. We just need to give them a little more money and power. But deep down, most of us don’t want to do that. We want to help in our way, on our terms, while controlling the purse strings and taking the credit.