Info Cuts Charity
Our culture tends to celebrate the smart, creative, and well-informed. So we tend to be blind to common criticisms of such folks. A few days ago I pointed out that creative folk tend to cheat more. Today I’ll point out that the well-informed tend to donate less to charity:
The best approach for a charity raising money to feed hungry children in Mali, the team found, was to simply show potential donors a photograph of a starving child and tell them her name and age. Donors who were shown more contextual information about famine in Africa — the ones who were essentially given more to think about — were less likely to give. …
Daniel Oppenheimer … found that simply giving people information about a charity’s overhead costs makes them less likely to donate to it. This held true, remarkably, even if the information was positive and indicated and the charity was extremely efficient. …
According to [John] List, thinking about all the people you’re not helping when you donate … makes the act of giving a lot less satisfying. (more; HT Reihan Salam)
Mary, I'm pretty sure that the nonstandard conclusion Robin is hinting at is more "charity is bad" than "information is bad". (Of course both of those, as they stand, are too simplistic.)
Why do you think it’s overly pessimistic rather than appropriately pessimistic?Hm, I'm not sure. I guess it depends on context. You're right that eaten food can't be stolen, but theft is a crime, and the better response to crime could be better law enforcement rather than more paternalism. Aid often fails because there is no feedback link between the donors (who have the financial power) and the beneficiaries (who are often passive recipients). This is one of the reasons why infrastructure projects are built, but then not maintained, compare this TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/da...
Money is the unit of caring. Giving to the poor directly can be more effective if the poor have a minimum understanding of their own good, and theft is contained. The advantage is that the beneficiaries themselves are empowered (they can decide to whom to give the money).