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Perhaps, but I have a friend who worked in water quality in Haiti after the earthquake, and it's possible to get things done even with corruption and graft pres
by KingMob 11y ago
Perhaps, but I have a friend who worked in water quality in Haiti after the earthquake, and it's possible to get things done even with corruption and graft present.
More likely, the Red Cross is one of many charitable organizations with low direct payout (combined with inexperience on the ground). This is a notorious problem, and was enabled by an earlier era of no-questions-asked donations. But in recent years, big investors have demanded much more accounting of the money, and some organizations aren't up to the increased scrutiny.
Check out http://www.charitynavigator.org/ http://www.charitynavigator.org/ for more.
- jimrandomh 11y agoNo, don't go to Charity Navigator, go to Givewell (http://www.givewell.com http://www.givewell.com). The quality of their research is much better, and they focus on the question that really matters: what effect your donation will have on the margin.
- ceejayoz 11y agoSo now we need a Charity Navigator Navigator?
- byjess 11y agoCharity Navigator Navigator is actually funded by Dow Chemical, FYI.
- mlrtime 11y agoGreat, as if I didn't need more excuses not to give money. I think I stick to the local community soup kitchen/churches even though I'm not religious.
- jimrandomh 11y agoIt's good to do things where you can witness and verify what's going on, but soup kitchens are many orders of magnitude less effective than distributing insecticide-treated bednets to combat malaria, or Givewell's other recommended charities.
- gajomi 11y agosoup kitchens and bednet distribution programs are trying to solve two different sets of problems, so I am not sure what you mean when you say that one is 'orders of magnitude less effective' than the other
- yardie 11y agoWait, are you saying that soup kitchens are ineffective at combating malaria (which goes without saying)? Or are they simply ineffective at the problem they are trying to solve, hunger?
- uxp 11y agoWe're obviously Min/Maxing charitable giving. Why would you give to a local soup kitchen where you can see the effects, and even donate time and labor when the cost/benefit ratio is so much less than giving money to far away lands for cheap materials that protect against incredibly deadly diseases, which is obviously a better option? Or, every one of us could do something different, instead of loading all our eggs in one Red-Cross basket? Sorry. I don't see a reason for this disagreement. Anyone that donates time and/or money to help other people, whether they are on the corner of the street they are standing on right now, or literally thousands of miles away, is a good person in my book.
- rwallace 11y agoThe problem with all the talk about 'effective charity' is that it invariably focuses on magnitude while ignoring sign. The great thing about donating to local soup kitchens as opposed to interfering in other people's countries thousands of miles away where we know little or nothing about what's really going on is that there is a much better chance of being able to verify that all the activity is doing more good than harm.
- astrofinch 11y agoA priori, it seems quite plausible to me that Sub-Saharan Africans find insecticide-treated bed nets significantly helpful for guarding against malaria, and rather implausible that they find them significantly harmful. You can invent far-fetched stories about how anti-malaria nets are somehow harmful, but you can do the same for soup kitchens.