Rising DFID Spending hasn't Crowded Out Private Giving

Last week I was poking around the ESRC’s 'Administrative Data Research Network’ and discovered the Charity Commission data download website - containing every annual financial return made by every individual charity in England and Wales since 2007. The data comes in a slightly weird file format that I’d never heard of, but thankfully the NCVO have a very helpful guide and Python code for converting the data into .csv format (which was easy enough to use that I managed to figure out how to run without ever having really used Python). 

One obvious question you could ask with this data is whether the private income of international charities has dropped as DFID spending has gone up (more than doubled over the same period) - it is conceivable that people might decide that they could give less to international charity as more of their tax money is being distributed by DFID.

That does not seem to be the case at all. There are two ways of identifying international charities - by their stated area of operation, or by their stated objective category. I’ve coded charities that have no UK activities as “International”, and also picked out the charities that ticked the box for "Overseas Aid/Famine Relief” as their activity category. These two categories do overlap but far from perfectly. 

Charities have multiple categories of income - I focus here on the ‘voluntary’ category which basically means all donations, whether large or small. 

Charities with exclusively international activities, and those focused on 'overseas aid' did appear to take more of a hit than domestic charities from the 2008 global financial crisis and recession, but since then growth has tracked the income of other charities (and is 40-50% higher in 2015 than in 2007 (not adjusting for inflation)). 

You can download the Stata code here, csv files (large) here, and variable descriptions here.

The Case for Restrictions on New Charities

"Drawing upon the all-pay auction literature, we propose a model of charity competition in which informed giving alone can account for the significant quality heterogeneity across similar charities. Our analysis identifies a negative effect of competition and a positive effect of informed giving on the equilibrium quality of charity. In particular, we show that as the number of charities grows, so does the percentage of charity scams, approaching one in the limit. In light of this and other results, we discuss the need for regulating nonprofit entry and conduct as well as promoting informed giving."

Information, Competition, and the Quality of Charities, by Silvana Krasteva and Huseyin Yildirimb

How much does the new deworming replication matter for Effective Altruists?

It doesn’t at all, as far as I can tell. As Calum points out, what matters is the systematic review of evidence not one study. And the new Cochrane systematic review doesn’t seem to have responded to the criticism from Duflo et al to their 2012 review, that it ignores quasi-experimental and long-term evidence on positive impacts of deworming (specifically Bleakley 2004, Ozier, and Baird et al).

A replication of the famous Miguel and Kremer deworming paper that launched the whole RCT in development economics movement, is published in the Journal of International Epidemiology today (along with comment from Hicks, Kremer, and Miguel, and reply from the replication authors), with coverage in the Guardian and by Ben Goldacre for Buzzfeed.

You may remember Berk Ozler's review of the draft of the replication paper back in January - concluding

"Bottom line: Based on what I have seen in the reanalysis study by DAHH and the response by HKM, my view of the original study is more or less unchanged."

You can probably expect to see more on the replication coming from @cblatts, which I’m not going to get into, but back in 2012, Givewell were convinced that the Cochrane review shoudn’t change their recommendation to donate to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative or Deworm the World.

The ambiguity does make me a little queasy, and pushes me more in the direction of GiveDirectly (I see basically zero risk that giving $1000 to someone on a very low income can really be totally wasted, in the way that an ineffective drug could theoretically have zero impact).

How to live well

Some interesting ideas from Alex Evans about the importance of building a movement

"Rich and I set out the need for a different theory of influence. Many of us who work in the fight for development, justice, and sustainability have I think been feeling the limits of theories of change that rely primarily on ‘insider lobbying’. We take that here as our starting point for asking what an alternative approach might look like: one that places much more emphasis on how we build new grassroots coalitions, transform values, and tell each other much deeper stories about where we are, how we got here, where we might choose to go next, and who we really are."

and then what those movements should do

We argue that it starts with the changes that all of us need to make in our own lives. This is partly because of the direct impact that such changes can have, of course, but we think the main issue here is something to do with the quality of intention that movements exemplify. Wherever movements not only demand but live out the change they want to see in the world, there’s a raw power there that can exert the kind of non-linear effect on politics that progressives so urgently want to see.

and from the full report

In practice, we think there are five areas that each of us needs to think about, which we describe in more detail below:

1. Live within our fair share of the world’s resources and environmental limits
2. Respond to poverty and inequality with radical generosity
3. Speak out prophetically
4. Use our power as a voter, a citizen and a consumer
5. Live restoratively and prioritise relationships

All of this is in a report for Christian Aid and supported by references to the bible rather than econ journals. Personally I’ve shifted somewhat from a Dawkins atheist to a de Botton atheist, and think there are important lessons here too for emerging secular congregations.

We can be (British) heroes

A reminder, whilst we are celebrating the 'British Schindler' Sir Nicolas Winton, who saved 669 mainly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia in 1939, that actually saving so many lives is entirely achievable for the average person in the modern world. Toby Ord, founder of Giving What We Can, has estimated that you can save a life for around $250. So to save 669 lives would cost you a little over £100,000, or spread over a 45 year career, £2,300 a year. Nicolas Winton has a knighthood, a statue at Prague railway station, Czechoslovakia’s highest honour (the Order of the White Lion), and a small planet named after him. 

Best charity in the world update

Depressing news from Givewell on the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF).

The good news: Givewell has directed $10m in the last 2 years to AMF. 

The bad news: This is a massive increase in scale for AMF, and they haven't yet managed to spend the money. This seems to be primarily because the transparency and accountability measures that help to make them such an attractive proposition for donors, also makes them a pretty unattractive proposition for implementers such as national governments. 

There's something about a sexy new NGO innovation which then runs into trouble when it tries to scale-up working through national government that sounds somehow familiar.

We shouldn't be too disheartened - this is hopefully just a set-back and the money will still eventually be spent. And it is still useful to model what good practice can look like even it is isn't replicated more widely immediately. But "room for more funding" - the capacity to implement at large scale, is clearly critical here. 

In the short-term this implies finding someone else to give your money to - your two best options seem to be Give Directly (tax deductible in the US) or the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (tax deductible in both the US and UK, but with some concerns here) - neither of which seem to be entirely satisfactory for me as a UK-taxpayer. I'll wait for further comment from Givewell.

"Aren't you going to recycle that?"

I'm terrible about remembering to recycle. It's partly moving about so much and not keeping up with the different rules in each city. It's partly just laziness.

Andrea reprimanded me for forgetting last week, and after some debate I realised that though she was right about the recycling and my excuses were lame, I was annoyed about the reprimanding. Or rather interested - how and when did it became socially acceptable to reprimand people for forgetting to recycle, or for wasting food as the pope just did (by the way, it's great that this new pope is such a do-gooder, but wow is he a naive do-gooder for someone who has presumably been in the do-gooding business for... how many years?).

And why is it not socially acceptable to reprimand people for wasting money on crap they don't need when they could be giving it to charity and saving lives? Sure it's annoying, but so is being reprimanded about recycling.

In the UK at least I think a lot of this is our squeamishness about talking about money in general. As Kate Fox writes:

Our distaste for money-talk in everyday social life is well established: you never ask what someone earns, or disclose your own income; you never ask what price someone paid for anything, nor do you announce the cost of any of your own possessions. In social contexts, there is a sort of ‘internal logic’ to the money-talk taboo, in that it can be explained, to some extent, with reference to other basic ‘rules of Englishness’ to do with modesty, privacy, polite egalitarianism and other forms of hypocrisy.

But at the same time it is kind of nuts that there are such good giving opportunities out there to make the world a better place and we're not allowed to talk about them. In the UK only 39 percent of people give more than fifty pounds a year to charity (NPC 2013). Of those, the average amount for "mainstream" donors is £303 a year, for high-income donors £1,282 a year. Meanwhile, you could be saving a child's life for as little as £1500.

I have a bit of an advantage here because I'm from Yorkshire. As Kate explains:

There are pockets of stronger resistance to the money-talk taboo, particularly in Yorkshire, a county that prides itself on being forthright, blunt and plain-spoken, especially on matters that mincing, hesitant southerners find embarrassing, such as money.

Also it's much easier to type things into the internet ether than to actually say them to people in person. So consider this an annoying reprimand. We have the tools. We have efficient, low overhead, transparent, charities that have proven impact on poverty and child health. Excuses about waste and corruption just don't cut it any more. Aren't you going to recycle that?

Addendum:

I waste money on crap I don't need all the time, and it's annoying to be reminded of that. But is it bad to be reminded? Shouldn't I feel guilty? Andrea owes me some money, and so I'm making her give it to poor Kenyans via givedirectly.org instead of back to me, mostly just in order to annoy her or something. Which had instant positive results - she writes "excellent punishment actually. I started searching "bobbi brown cream eye shadow" and had to close it because the givedirectly page was open right next to it". How about that for a nudge - keeping a givedirectly tab open in your browser all the time?

This TED talk will probably save someone's life

Against Malaria Foundation

As part of my personal evidence-based living regime (ahem) I'm planning a £1,000 donation to the Against Malaria Foundation. It's at least partly selfish - one of the few ways that spending money can actually bring you happiness is by spending it on other people (can you tell how smug I feel writing this?). There has also been a lot of analysis into the effectiveness of buying bednets. Givewell estimate that the marginal cost of a net is $5.15, and that by buying enough of them, you can probably save a child's life for about $1,600 (or £1,000). I had been hesitating over a recent story about behavioural adaptation by mosquitoes to nets, but responses from Givewell and AMF have basically reassured me. Unless anyone has any other good objections?

Givewell:

our positive view on LLINs remains in place. There is strong evidence that LLINs reduce malaria and save lives and only preliminary/suggestive/mixed evidence that insecticide resistance may reduce their impact. In addition, it appears to us that the malaria control community has been devoting at least some attention and investigation to this issue for a long time, has developed a reasonable knowledge base (if one that has plenty of room to grow), and still recommends the use of LLINs regardless of the resistance situation. 

Indeed, the fact that we’re discussing this issue at all speaks to the extraordinarily and unusually strong evidence base (and supply of data) behind ITN distribution. For most aid interventions that donors can fund, the set of “things that could go wrong” is large and broad, and we have little evidence to address most of them, but when looking at LLIN distribution, the salient concerns are few and specific enough that the malaria control community is able to put substantial resources into specifically investigating them.

 And AMF:

Currently both issues - resistance to pyrethroids and changed time of biting - are not widespread. Currently LLINs remain highly effective in reducing the incidence of malaria.

 And why not, here's the Donation Page. 

We can be heroes

Recently the figures for saving the life from people who are suffering from tuberculosis through the DOTS program was around about $250 for saving a life. And on that figure the average person living in the U.K. - so a medium income earner in the U.K. could if they wished with their salary while still living a reasonable life certainly by world standards, could save more than a thousand lives from tuberculosis. 

And so more than 50% of the population of Britain could save actually more than 1,200 lives, which is the number I picked because it is the number of lives Oskar Schindler saved in World War II and is generally thought to be a very heroic person in the time of heroes and villains where there were terrible things going on, but also amazing opportunities for heroism. And it’s very interesting to see that actually most people on the street could achieve that level of benefit for other people 

... 

Why isn’t there a big public discussion about the fact that we all could do as much good as Oskar Schindler and yet we tend not to?

Toby Ord speaking to Owen Barder.

Kiva: A Gateway Drug?

It's pretty clear that "lending" money on Kiva is not the best way of giving to the poor. You aren't at all really lending to those individuals, but rather donating the interest you could have earned on your deposit to a microlending institution. And microlending institutions can raise their own money from deposits or capital markets, so you would be much better off donating to something more effective, such as buying bednets or deworming pills (see givewell.org's current recommendations, or the Proven Impact Fund).

The potential saving grace for me is Kiva as a development gateway drug. The story and personal connection is powerful. What if Kiva can get people hooked on development, who will then eventually find out more and graduate to doing something with bigger impact? I feel similarly about voluntourism. Would love to see any research on either of these topics.

Does succumbing to Kiva or voluntourism advertising have a causal impact on individual's attitudes and actions towards development, after the selection effect of those individuals being more likely to be interested in development in the first place?

Last minute donations

If you're into giving and tax deductibility and American, tomorrow is your last day (if you're not American or into giving - New Year resolution to save some lives?). I would highly recommend taking a look at Givewell's recommendations - hours of serious research into making your money go the furthest. 

The Lottery of Life

Save the Children have what I think is a fantastic new ad campaign highlighting the importance of luck in determining life chances. Being born in the UK almost automatically guarantees you a position as one of the richest 15% of people on the planet (that is at the basic rate of unemployment benefit for 18 year olds, excluding additional benefits).

the policy-induced portion of the place premium in wages represents one of the largest remaining price distortions in any global market; is much larger than wage discrimination in spatially integrated markets; and makes labor mobility capable of reducing households’ poverty at the margin by much more than any known in situ intervention (Clemens, Montenegro and Pritchett).

People worry about the ethical implications of randomly allocating treatments in small research projects. Yet when people are randomly born in hopeless economies with tyrannical rulers, we do everything we can to prevent them escaping.

Spin the wheel for yourself and see where you could have ended up.

HT: @viewfromthecave @laurenist

What do the latest experimental psychological research and the British talent show the X-Factor have in common?

This cross-posted at the IPA blog

They both have important implications for how we think about engaging citizens of rich countries with the world’s poor.
An experimental game conducted by James Andreoni and Justin Rao shows that communication triggers increased altruism. A result which has been seen for real in the British tabloid newspapers, as a normally fiercely anti-immigration press has developed a bit of a soft-spot for Zimbabwean migrant and frustrated X-Factor star Gamu Nhengu (who, is awesome, by the way).
Chris Dillow draws out the implications:

The world’s poorest do not communicate with us, which causes us to give less to them than we otherwise would. By contrast, we are bombarded with messages from the well-off, which - on its own - tends to dispose us to be altruistic towards them.

and

there are huge costs to being out of sight. Whether it be benefit claimants in the UK or the poor overseas, the mere fact of being anonymous means people are meaner towards you.

And so the challenge: if we want to increase altruism towards the world’s poor, how to create a space for communication between them and the citizens of rich countries? Poverty porn? Slum tourism? Fasting? How do we create this engagement whilst respecting the dignity of all involved?

Books for Sudan

 

This looks like a great project. There is a container at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London waiting to be filled with academic books for Juba University. Get down there if you have any and you are based in London; the deadline is the end of March.

More generally - many forms of aid seem to run into bottlenecks - for instance millennium villages might be wonderful but the well trained and motivated implementers can’t easily be scaled up to a national level.

Giving books to university libraries seems pretty scalable to me.

Read these before you donate to the Haiti earthquake relief effort

Texas in Africa

Blood and Milk

Givewell

Tales from the Hood

Aid Watch

Charity Christmas Card Edition

Perhaps a little early, I just received, an invitation to buy christmas cards from Jacari.

"Jacari is a student-run charity providing home teaching for children living in Oxford. These children, who are between 4 and 16 years old, do not speak English as their first language and often come from refugee families and those seeking asylum. University students volunteer to help improve their allotted child's English and performance in other subjects as required."

I spent an hour a week for about 3 months reading with a kid and helping him with his maths homework. The improvement in his ability and enthusiasm for reading was noticeable every week.

Fantastic organisation. I am amazed that it hasn't been scaled up. The government should mandate this for all university students who want any kind of government subsidy.