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Hi,

I'm Brian Douglas Skinner.  I'm new to the GiveWell mailing list, so I 
just wanted to introduce myself.

I'm a computer programmer in the San Francisco Bay Area.  As an 
individual donor, I'm very interested in the question of how to do the 
most possible good with the limited amount of money I have.  I'm a huge 
fan of GiveWell and have started to support GiveWell by making grant 
recommendations to a donor advised fund that I set up years ago.

I'm also a big fan of organizational transparency.  When I first read 
"The Case for the Clear Fund", I was psyched to see such a strong 
emphasis on transparency, and I'm happy to see GiveWell gradually moving 
towards operating more and more openly.  Launching this public mailing 
list seems like a significant milestone, and I've just made an 
additional $8,000 grant recommendation to GiveWell to applaud the 
effort.  Thanks!

Holden & Elie, have you thought about posting something on the blog to 
announce the new mailing list, and updating the main GiveWell site to 
add a link that points to the new Yahoo Groups mailing list page?

Thanks,
   Brian

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Hey Holden & Elie,

I recently read about "Gift4Giving", a new feature of the donor-advised 
funds available at the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund.

You may have already set up a donor-advised fund for the GiveWell Pledge 
Fund, but in case you haven't yet set that up, I thought you might want 
to look into the Gift4Giving thing.  At first blush Gift4Giving seems 
like it might be useful to GiveWell, although I have not read the fine 
print, nor looked at the terms-and-conditions.

Gift4Giving might provide a mechanism that would allow GiveWell to set 
up a single umbrella account, into which GiveWell supporters could 
donate their GiveWell Pledges.  After GiveWell has made a round of 
charity recommendations, GiveWell could then send Gift4Giving gifts back 
to the people who made pledges, and those people could look at the 
GiveWell recommendations, come to their own conclusions, and then send 
grant recommendations directly to the Gift Fund account.

Here's a link to more info, if you think you might be interested:
http://www.charitablegift.org/charity-giving-programs/gift4giving/how-it-works.shtml

:o) Brian

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I think those are some good questions to answer.

I'd also like to see some info at an even higher macro level.

i.e. It's not hard to find arguments that aid has failed for decades.
 It's also not hard to find complaints that much US government aid to
the developing world for a long time was primarily about serving cold
war interests.  Possibly both of these are true - I don't really know.  

To an extent, the latter may help explain the former (if true). 
Hopefully government aid going forward will be better targeted
(although there are no guarantees), but certainly individual donor aid
could be directed towards humanitarian purposes rather than propping
up whichever dictator our government wants in power.  

Anyways, I'd like to see data on the quantity and type of aid sent by
the US and other Western nations, both at a governmental and
individual charitable level since roughly the 60s.  That's a tall
order, but perhaps at least some of that info can be somewhat easily
gathered.

I'd like a more detailed picture of what's going on today - current
annual rates of flow into developing world countries via various
methods - government to government aid.  Remittances.  Charities
funded primarily by individuals/foundations, etc.

This stuff might in turn help in evaluating programs that have worked.
 To take numbers out of the air, if $100 billion in aid has flowed to
sub-Saharan Africa over X years, but 80% of it has been military
support or things of that nature, that's interesting data (to me anyways).




--- In givewell@yahoogroups.com, "Holden Karnofsky" <Holden@...> wrote:
>
> As Elie works on the feasibility of cataloguing charities'
activities (and
> matching them to literature on past effectiveness at the micro
level), I'm
> trying to find helpful literature on the more "macro" questions (see
> http://blog.givewell.net/?p=303).
> What I'm most interested in right now is the history of aid and
development
> - seems like the logical starting point for answering most of these
> questions, and understanding the factual basis for the various
claims that
> are made.  Specifically, what I'd ideally like to see is - for each
> country/relevant geographic region -
> 
>     a - what aid programs have been run?  where has the aid money gone?
>     b - what has happened to infant mortality, education, growth, etc.?
>     c - what do experts think the connections are between a and b?  (And
> what is their evidence?)
>     d - what else do we need to know about this country ... government,
> people, conditions, etc.?
> 
> I'm not sure exactly how to dive into this sort of literature.  I
plan on
> consulting various advisors of ours over the weekend.  Right now I'm
also
> seeing what I can do with Google - starting with a couple of places:
> 
>    - Center for Global Development
> (http://www.cgdev.org/<http://www.cgdev.org/section/about/>),
>    an international aid think tan
>       - Success stories: we've downloaded and catalogued these, will
take a
>       look later.
>    - http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/3646 - rates
countries
>       on the efficacy of their aid.  Quality (as opposed to quantity)
> indicators
>       are (a) how much aid is "tied"; (b) tendency to fund larger
and fewer
>       projects; (c) tendency to give to poorer countries; (d) tendency
> to give to
>       countries that are good environments for aid according to the
> World Bank's
>       Worldwide Governance Indicators (
>       http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi2007/)
>       - I don't think there's anything else of much interest here.
>    - Bill Easterly's homepage (
>    http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/Research.html).  He
is well
>    known for arguing that the potential of aid has been oversold,
although
>    certain sorts of programs (what he calls "marginal" programs) can
work; I
>    figure that in order to make this argument convincingly, he ought
to provide
>    quality references to relevant historical data.  (Sachs is the
celebrity on
>    the other side of the debate, but what I've seen of his writings
is often
>    more focused on sweeping, emotional arguments - as Easterly's
view is not as
>    "simple" or emotionally compelling, I'm guessing he will put more
care into
>    presenting it).
>    - I'm also reading Paul Collier's book and noting the
relevant-looking
>    references.
>

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Simon - a couple of your comments crystallized some of my own thoughts
a bit.  

>>Simon's comment:
The literature on each of the questions Holden poses in the e-mail
from Holden Dec. 16 and at http://blog.givewell.net/?p=303 seems vast.
It would take a long time and a good understanding of research methods
to evaluate the discussion on even a single issue such as how foreign
aid affects economic growth (it seems a project someone could
undertake in a PhD dissertation). 
<<

I think that's the reason why GiveWell COULD be useful.  Digesting and
summarizing a wide ranging academic literature in any topic is
challenging and time-consuming.  I don't think most mid-level donors
who might consider giving money to a developing-world charity will
locate, download, and read even 2 or 3 academic papers on the topic,
much less 20 or 30. 

By the same token, GiveWell spending money to create what amounts to 1
or 2 MORE academic papers on the topic, that then get buried in an
obscure location and read by few, doesn't seem very useful.

What GiveWell should do, IMO, is to focus on being the bridge between
donors and the broad scholarship that already exists.  GiveWell
should, in some fashion, read, digest and summarize those 20-30
papers, present the results on a well formatted, well structured
website (that proceeds hierarchically from short high-level summaries
down through various levels of detail, and ultimately links out to
source documents).

There's a lot of research already out there.  What's lacking (or at
least, I haven't found) is a central hub that collates that research
and presents it in a way that's easy for those who aren't academics or
professionals to easily parse.



>>Simon's comment:
It seems that those who donate to GiveWell's running costs would get
more value for their money if someone with something like a PhD in a
relevant field were hired to do reviews and evaluations research
literature, than if Holden, Elie, or a research analyst with the
qualifications currently required by GiveWell do these reviews and
evaluations.
<<

I don't have a strong opinion on whether GiveWell's next hire should
have a PhD or not.  But this comment and the general theme of Simon's
post makes me think that making GiveWell a bit more community-oriented
may be a bit more important than I'd previously thought.  There *ARE*
experts out there in many of the fields that GiveWell is interested
in.  I'm not aware of any broadly popular website that facilitates
easy communication between these experts and the giving public.  I
think at least some of these experts would be happy to share their
expertise, for free, with the broader public, if there were a good
venue to do so.  I've seen this kind of interaction on different web
forums (devoted to topics different from GiveWell's).  Developing and
fostering a web community is neither trivial nor 'free' (time-wise). 
Still, if we evaluate use of GiveWell's time/money on a bang for the
buck metric (as we are expecting GiveWell to evaluate other
charities), I can't help but think that there's at least a POSSIBILITY
of a high return for a low to moderate investment here.

===

BTW - thanks for the link to the Index of Global Philanthropy.  I'll
read it later, but a quick glance makes it look like a useful
document.  I'll note that it's prepared and presented in a fairly
old-fashioned format - as an 80 page PDF, designed to be read as one
huge block of text, and not very web friendly.  Good information
(potentially), but presentation more oriented towards communication
styles of years past, and as a result, probably overlooked by many who
could learn/benefit from its contents.

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I like your summary, and you've gotten to the core of at least some
key questions, albeit with answers from only one source.  Yes, it
seems Easterly is in turn referencing other sources, but we don't know
if he has a balanced presentation or is trying to sell a particular
viewpoint.  (I'm guessing his presentation is reasonable, but I
haven't dug deep enough to know.)  So obviously, some further sources
would be helpful.  

Organizationally, I assume the current document is a bit transitory
(and you will eventually mold things into a better form somewhere,
presumably on the main site).  My big thing for dense information like
this is hierarchy and navigation.  The level of summary you've
presented in the first part feels about right.  But there needs to be
an easy way to call up the more detailed information presented in the
footnotes, then, preferably, navigate back to the part of the summary
you were on.   

Hyperlinks to footnotes are a first step, and fairly easy to
implement.  But they're often a bit imprecise on the return trip (back
to the original).  Depending on what software you end up using, there
may be other/better alternatives - that allow easy expansion of
collapsed "detail" sections, or sidebars with more detail, or maybe
some kind of framed solution - I'm not really sure.  

Frankly, I can't think of any great examples on the web that do this
super well (allow easy flipping between condensed summaries and
detailed explanations).  Perhaps you can find one, or another reader
of this group knows of one...

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Good bits Holden.

Some thoughts:

I think the issues raised by these three (and perhaps others) are
pretty important in assessing aid to Africa and the undeveloped world.
 If the macro case is weak (aid doesn't work), then finding
micro-examples that DO work (without negative long-term effects) will
be hard.

I suspect that the answer will not be a simple black and white "aid
does/doesn't work" but rather a nuanced picture of past and current
practices.

I'm familiar with some of Sachs and Easterly's writings (though it's
been a while since I read them) - I'm not sure if I've read anything
by Collier.

I assume the authors pick and choose facts, studies, examples, and
such that support the broad point(s) they are trying to make, and I
know that the general broad views of Sachs and Easterly are quite
different.  One interesting area to explore would be any points they
agree on (if these two agree on something, there's probably something
to it), and also, if there are any details that they disagree on.  I
know they disagree at the big picture, but I'd be curious if that
holds as one drills down to very specific points (should health care
aid (or specific interventions) be delivered within existing
government health care systems or separately?)

I've got a couple of other books on my shelf that are along these
lines.  Unfortunately, I haven't read them (yet).

"Does Foreign Aid Really Work?" by Roger Riddell.  Blurbs on the back
make it sound like the author takes a middle view (neither wildly
optimistic nor pessimistic).  Extensive endnotes and references.

"Africa In Chaos" by George Ayittey.  From backcover and VERY quick
flip-through, seems pessimistic about Africa in general.  Seems less
aid focused and more about general failures in Africa, especially
political (but seems to include some discussion of aid).  Appears to
include reasonable number of references in-line in the text, with
"Literature Cited" at the end.

The Riddell book looks quite on-point for this topic.  The Ayittey
book is probably more marginal, but perhaps worth consideration.

===

After writing the above, I found a trove of additional books in this
area in my basement that I'd ordered over the last couple years or so.
 But it's late and rather than just listing titles and authors, I'll
try to go through them a bit more at a later time and give some very
quick synopses - at least whether they seem like they might be useful
for Holden's current line of inquiry.

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Easterly and Sachs did engage each other reasonably directly a few
years ago.

This page chronicles at least some (perhaps all) of that:

http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/SachsDebates.htm

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