Why charity should be optimized.

Dylan Matthews' devastating response to Emma Goldberg's New York Times article

On December 7, the New York Times published an article by Emma Goldberg entitled “What if Charity Shouldn’t be Optimized?” The article suggested that optimizing charity – that is, trying to do the most good we can with our charitable donations – is taking over the way we give. It then gave voice to criticisms of this approach, and indicated some support for those criticisms.

At one point, Goldberg refers to an article I co-authored with Michael Plant in 2019, entitled "How many lives is Notre Dame worth?” Plant and I argue that the more than $1 billion that some of France’s wealthiest people had pledged to the fund to rebuild the Cathedral of Notre Dame could have been put to better uses. In response, Goldberg describes Amy Schiller, the author of The Price of Humanity, asking: “How could anyone put a numerical value on a holy space?”

That’s an old question. About forty years ago, when I was directing the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University, in Melbourne, I wrote an article questioning the treatment of extremely premature infants. Infants weighing less than 500 grams, (1.1lbs), were being placed in intensive care units at a cost of more than $1000 a day (and this was in the 1980s - roughly equivalent to $3000 today). They might have to be there for three months before they could be discharged. Many died despite the intensive care, and many others survived only with severe disabilities. Health care is a limited resource, and I argued that there were better uses for these resources. Nevertheless, an outraged editorial in an Australian newspaper said: “We can’t let an accountant’s pencil scratch a line through a child’s life.”

That is essentially what Amy Schiller is saying, but this time about a “holy space” rather than a child’s life. Dylan Matthews, writing in Vox, has now published the best answer I have seen to that position. He begins with a story:

“In September 1973, the hi-fi sound equipment mogul Avery Fisher made a massive gift of $10 million (about $70 million in today’s dollars) to the New York Philharmonic. In thanks, Lincoln Center renamed the venue where the orchestra performs Avery Fisher Hall. Fisher was reportedly reluctant to agree to have the hall named after him, but nonetheless, the donation specified that his name be used ‘in perpetuity.’

But in 2015, Lincoln Center wanted more money, and the record company billionaire David Geffen wanted to put his name on some stuff. He wanted that very hall to be renamed in his own honor, despite the Fisher name supposedly being forever.

Geffen succeeded with a gift of $100 million to Lincoln Center and — perhaps more importantly — Lincoln Center paid $15 million to Fisher’s descendants so they would not sue. What that means is that the most prominent cultural organization in New York City lit $15 million on fire so that Geffen’s name would be on a concert hall.

That $15 million didn’t even go to renovating the hall — it was just a bribe for Geffen’s own vanity, taking $15 million away from other things Lincoln Center could have invested in. Don’t worry though, the other $100 million reportedly helped with a variety of ‘acoustical shortcomings’ in the concert hall.

Meanwhile, about 586,000 people, most of them children under the age of 5, died of malaria in 2015, a disease that is easily treatable and preventable with inexpensive interventions that Geffen could have funded instead. But he wanted his name on a theater.”

That’s the warm-up. Then Matthews offers his riposte to Goldberg’s assertion that effective altruism has become “the dominant way to think about charity.”

“The best data I’ve seen aggregating donations from major effective altruist groups — like grants from the Open Philanthropy group, individual donations given through GiveWell, etc. — found that a little under $900 million was donated by EA funders in 2022. Those donations were mostly, but not exclusively, made in the US.

By contrast, total US charitable donations in 2022 were $499 billion. That means that even if all EA funding were in the US, it would amount to a whopping 0.18 percent of all giving. Giving to the arts alone that year totaled $24.67 billion, or over 27 times more than was allocated based on EA ideas.

Put differently: US philanthropy is still much, much, much more about rich guys like David Geffen slapping their names on concert halls than it is about donating to help people dying from malaria, or animals being tortured in factory farms, or preventing deaths from pandemics and out-of-control AI, to name a few EA-associated causes.”

Finally, Matthews turns to Schiller’s question how we can put a numerical value on a holy space:

“Well, here’s one way. The Notre Dame restoration cost a reported $760 million. Top anti-malaria charities like the Malaria Consortium and the Against Malaria Foundation can save a life for $8,000, taking the highest estimate for the latter.

Let’s double that, just in case it’s still too optimistic; after all, $760 million, even spread over a few years, would require these groups to massively grow in size, and they might be less cost-efficient during that growth stage. At $16,000 per life, the Notre Dame restoration budget could save 47,500 people’s lives from malaria.

Effective altruism often involves consideration of quantitative evidence, and as such, proponents are often accused of being more interested in numbers than humanity. But I’d like the Notre Dame champions like Schiller to think about this in terms of concrete humanity.

47,500 people is about five times the population of the town I grew up in, Hanover, New Hampshire, which, as it happens, contains the college that Schiller now teaches at. It’s useful to imagine walking down Main Street, stopping at each table at the diner Lou’s, shaking hands with as many people as you can, and telling them, ‘I think you need to die to make a cathedral pretty.’ And then going to the next town over and doing it again, and again, until you’ve told 47,500 people why they have to die.”

I’ll just mention, parenthetically, that Matthews’ estimate of $8000 to save a life is very conservative. GiveWell has recently estimated that donating to a specific anti-malaria program in Nigeria can save a life for $3000. Restoring sight for someone who is blind costs far less – in some circumstances, as little as $50. Let’s follow Matthews’ conservativism and say it costs $100, and then re-run his method of putting a number on the cost of a holy space. Now, instead of going around five towns in New Hampshire, we need to imagine that almost the entire population of the San Francisco Bay area has lost their sight, and we need to say to them: “We could restore your sight, but you, along with 7.6 million other people living here will have to remain blind so that French people and tourists to Paris can see Notre Dame looking just as beautiful as it was before the fire.”

Matthews is right. We can put numbers on the cost of restoring Notre Dame. That still leaves open the question of whether it was right to rebuild it, but at least you now know what was at stake. And if you would like to help to save lives or restore sight, you can do it here.