Effective Altruism: A New Movement, or Another Failed Philanthropic Proposition Repurposed?

credit: ATV Illustrated

This blog post discusses the growing trend of effective altruism. Effective altruism, in essence, is choosing where to donate money based on how much good the charity is doing. It's a weird way of thinking, it that it holds the donor accountable for his contributions instead of the charity organization. Another way to describe this trend would be that it's charitable giving from the head, rather than the heart.

This kind of thinking has been around for many years. For example, William MacAskill, who is founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism, states that donating to organization which waste money does more harm than good, since those funds aren't going to the right places. The author of this blog post suggests donating directly to poorer countries and areas, so they can invest in better diets and education.

However, in the end, one should note that using these pseudo-scientific metrics for how effective a charity is discourages people from donating, because they become too worried about whether they're using the money in the "right" way.

People love the warm fuzzy feelings that come from helping others, and effective altruism removes many of those. Read the Entire Article

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