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Because right now, per a dollar spent, it will be the most effective, and that will be true for at least an order of magnitude more funding;. When it ceases to be the most effective, I'll advocate giving to other causes. In that regard, it isn't that dissimilar to why Give Well advocates giving to Against Malaria as the best way to save lives per a dollar spent https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf - yes at a sufficient level of funding that analysis will change but it hasn't yet. . And no, I didn't assert anywhere that it will make things worse in the long haul, and I'm not even sure where you are getting that idea. And yes, research and other things are good too. Right now, research for better solar and batteries is happening at a nearly break-neck pace. If you want to help longer term climate mitigation then one thing to do is give to specific solar which I also linked to.

Your choice of charities optimizes for charities which maximizes how much one personally feels emotionally good about it, rather than maximizing the amount of good done per a dollar. For those who want to maximize utility increased, here are some others to consider, based on the Givewell ratings which tries to maximize things like quality adjusted life years per a dollar donated https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities. Their most effective charities are the Against Malaria Foundation https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf and the Malaria Consortium https://www.givewell.org/charities/malaria-consortium, which are so effective in part because malaria is such a huge problem but treatment for it is very cheap. If one wants to help deal with global warming then Cool Earth is the most optimal https://www.coolearth.org/, with other good ones including Everybody Solar http://www.everybodysolar.org/ and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://self.org/.

Your choice of charities optimizes for charities which maximizes how much one personally feels emotionally good about it, rather than maximizing the amount of good done per a dollar. For those who want to maximize utility increased, here are some others to consider, based on the Givewell ratings which tries to maximize things like quality adjusted life years per a dollar donated https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities. Their most effective charities are the Against Malaria Foundation https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf and the Malaria Consortium https://www.givewell.org/charities/malaria-consortium, which are so effective in part because malaria is such a huge problem but treatment for it is very cheap. If one wants to help deal with global warming then Cool Earth is the most optimal https://www.coolearth.org/, with other good ones including Everybody Solar http://www.everybodysolar.org/ and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://self.org/.

Your choice of charities optimizes for charities which maximizes how much one personally feels emotionally good about it, rather than maximizing the amount of good done per a dollar. For those who want to maximize utility increased, here are some others to consider, based on the Givewell ratings which tries to maximize things like quality adjusted life years per a dollar donated https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities. Their most effective charities are the Against Malaria Foundation https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf and the Malaria Consortium https://www.givewell.org/charities/malaria-consortium, which are so effective in part because malaria is such a huge problem but treatment for it is very cheap. If one wants to help deal with global warming then Cool Earth is the most optimal https://www.coolearth.org/, with other good ones including Everybody Solar http://www.everybodysolar.org/ and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://self.org/.

Put aside enough for me and my family for the foreseeable future, then donate the rest.

Please check out GiveWell, a charity research organisation: http://www.givewell.org/

They evaluate a wide range of categories over a bunch of different criteria.

The emerging Effective Altruism movement is full of young people figuring out how to make to make charitable donations go further. The difference in impact between typical charities and carefully targeted intervention spans many orders of magnitude. Top ranked causes tend to be in the areas of global health and catastrophic risk, particularly AI risk. A few links:

GiveWell - detailed evaluation of top charities
Giving What We Can - people who have pledged to give 10% or more of their income to the most effective causes they can find
Back of the Envelope Guide to Philanthropy - my own website; some very rough math-geek evaluations of charitable endeavors
The Most Good You Can Do - a recent book on the Effective Altruism movement by Peter Singer
Machine Intelligence Research Institute - MIRI focuses on AI risk

For staying in touch there is EffectiveAltruism.org, supposedly a very active FaceBook group (disclaimer: I don't use FaceBook), and upcoming effective altruism conferences at the Googleplex in Mountain View, in Oxford, and in Melbourne.

http://www.givewell.org/ rigorously evaluates charities and their top recommendations benefit poor people. http://www.thelifeyoucansave.o... has a longer list of recommended charities. Both websites are part of the effective altruism movement which applies evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to improve the world.

There's a website that focuses on exactly this point:

Give Well

They analyse charities for cost/benefit of their activities and what percentage of the charity's funding goes on ancillaries vs the charity's stated purpose.

Also, they look for evidence that the charity actually does what they say they do.

Another resource for evaluating charities is the BBB, apparently.

"Today is the black day of my life and same for Pakistan because I lost my princess colleague and Pakistan lost her Pakistani." -Gates

Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, has reportedly approached parents of Arfa Karim, world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP, to offer her treatment in United States at billionaire’s expense.

It is obvious why he would invest into saving her. I do not fault it. But, I have to point out to anyone looking for some low-hanging fruit to invest into from a utilitarian perspective, there are lives to be saved in Africa for a much lower cost; money is fungible. Just something to consider before that next purchase of an Apple product.

Charity Navigator doesn't actually address the OP's question. They rate charities based on *efficiency*, but not based on *impact*. You can do a lot of things that have little impact but high "efficiency", and a lot of things with huge impact but high overhead. Efficiency is simply the wrong quantity.

GiveWell (GiveWell.org) measures impact and effectiveness directly, and just put out their new list of recommended charities.

See also: http://www.givewell.org/

GiveWell.org

Givewell evaluates charities and they recommend two charities, Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI). Another good charity is Marie Stopes International, a family planning provider.

In a similar vein: http://www.givewell.org/charities/topcharities GiveWell does a very thorough job of vetting charities and evaluating their impact.

Please think that statement through :-).

I have. And the statement still seems to be approximately accurate. In societies with shorter lifespans, the frequency of the deaths of family and friends will be higher. The total number will be the same but that's a distinct issue. As to people struggling- sure lots of people are struggling. Is the standard now that we can't do anything at all when there are a lot of people struggling? That seems to be a much stricter standard than what you espoused earlier. That means that in order for this to matter, you need to making an even stronger claim than you were earlier. Are you sure you want to do that?

Put bluntly, if you give $100/week locally to someone who is too mentally ill to work, you may allow them to maintain themselves while they are on a programme of recovery and you may stop them from stealing on the streets. But before you consider $10/week to someone healthy but destitute half way across the world, you will have to help battle transport/corruption/crime/illness/etc before that $10 is really going to give the foreigner a fighting chance. To help individuals you must build societies, and you cannot help a society abroad without first maintaining a society at home (it is the society at home which provides the assistance!).

This is the sort of thing that on its surface sounds nice but is both inaccurate and is confused with secondary issues. First you are essentially agreeing here that proximity isn't what actually matters. You are making a pragmatic claim about proximity, rather than a moral claim. It is possible that I misread your earlier claim in which case I have less of an objection to the argument. Does it reflect reality? Not really. The truth is that our society will be able to easily provide support for another society whether or not the mentally ill homeless person gets support. That sort of person being on the margins doesn't substantially impact our society's productivity or stability. If Givewell's data http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/villagereach is accurate then giving that money to VillageReach will easily do far more than giving that money to the nearby homeless guy.

Overtime, the amount of suffering has gone down by many metrics. For example, in most of the developing world, infant mortality now is much less than it was 50 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality The infant mortality rate of the planet as a whole has gone down by a factor of about 3 compared to the rate in the 1950s. The world's level of literacy is also increasing. Average lifespan has also gone up in the developing world. More importantly, that lifespan increase has occurred even if one just looks at the average lifespan of people who survive 3 years of age (this helps deal with most of the infant mortality issue). So no, civilization isn't collapsing. In fact, civilization is doing quite well.

Sure there are things we can do in the here and now to help people directly, like give more money to help deal with malaria and the like. If you want to really care about your own money going to optimal causes, a good thing to look at is Givewell http://www.givewell.org/ which identifies efficient, underfunded charities that are doing helpful work, especially in the developing world.

But, let's address your final claim that this is having fun while others suffer. That's simply not accurate and is missing the point. When the Apollo moon landings happened, people in poor areas crowded around the few radios they had to listen in. Why? Because as badly off as they were, they understood that some things really are achievements for humanity as a whole. In the long run, we're going to need to colonize space. And we'll need to be ready for it. Moreover, we have a real reason to figure out how common life is- for some reason there's almost no intelligent life out there. We need to figure out, for the good of humanity as a whole, if the Great Filter preventing the rise of intelligent civilizations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_filter is ahead of us or behind us. I suspect that most of it is behind us, but if there's any in front of us, it needs to appear before space travel becomes cheap or easy. The more we know about how common life is, what kinds of life evolve, and other related issues, the better understanding we get of whether we need to be prepared for possible filtration up ahead. This is for the good of humanity as a whole.

GiveWell is the strictest website I've found about analyzing charities for cost-effectiveness. I'm not vouching for their accuracy, but go have a look around their website—they try to be pretty open about how they judge things.

I bring that up as background to this: GiveWell is recommending that people do not donate money specifically for Japan disaster relief, for reasons they explain in that link. Their recommendation is that if you want to donate to a disaster relief charity at this time, you just make a general donation to Doctors Without Borders.

I should stress: click on that second link and at least skim through it.

GiveWell is the strictest website I've found about analyzing charities for cost-effectiveness. I'm not vouching for their accuracy, but go have a look around their website—they try to be pretty open about how they judge things.

I bring that up as background to this: GiveWell is recommending that people do not donate money specifically for Japan disaster relief, for reasons they explain in that link. Their recommendation is that if you want to donate to a disaster relief charity at this time, you just make a general donation to Doctors Without Borders.

I should stress: click on that second link and at least skim through it.