Rationally Speaking #38 - Holden Karnofsky on Evidence-based Philanthropy

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2011

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our guest Holden Karnofsky joins us to discuss Givewell, the nonprofit organization he founded. Givewell is devoted to investigating charities and NGOs to determine how much of an impact they’re having. You could call it “evidence-based philanthropy.” He discusses how Givewell evaluates charities, and what the research has to say about various controversies as well as the conventional wisdom in the nonprofit world: Can large charities be efficient? Is the percentage of the donation that goes to expenses really a useful metric? Should we focus on problems closer to home instead of giving to foreign countries? Do microfinance NGOs like Kiva or Grameen Bank live up to their claims? And should or can charities be evaluated objectively?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.5	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.
0:31.1	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:41.1	I am your host, Massimo Pilucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.
0:45.3	Julia, what are we going to talk about today?
0:47.3	Massimo, we have a special guest with us in the studio today.
0:50.5	Holden Karnowski is the founder of Give Well, which is a nonprofit organization devoted to investigating charities and NGOs to determine how much of an impact they're having.
1:00.0	You could call it evidence-based philanthropy, basically, determining whether a charity is doing good as opposed to just telling a convincing story and helping people figure out where to donate their money if they want to get the most done for their dollar.
1:11.6	Holden, welcome.
1:12.6	Thanks.
1:13.6	So do you want to start off by telling us a little bit about how you got the idea for Givewell and sort of how the process of founding it went?
1:20.6	Yeah, absolutely. Givewell started in 2006, and at that time it was just a volunteer part-time project.
1:26.6	It was myself and seven friends.
1:30.0	We were all working at the same hedge fund, and we were all just trying to give away money as
1:34.9	effectively as possible. So we were all giving something between $500 and $10,000. And, you know,
1:41.4	kind of with every other major purchase we would make, we wanted to see that we were getting the best deal.
1:45.8	So in this case, that meant doing the most good for our money.
1:49.8	And we would get together every couple of weeks to try and help each other sort through the issues
1:54.1	and share good charities we were finding and the information we were finding on what areas were promising.
2:00.3	And we found, A, that there was almost no information out there to help people like us.
2:05.7	So there are ratings agencies, and there were ratings agencies like Charity Navigator,
2:10.6	that discuss the charity's financial metrics.
	...

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