The problem with US charity is that it's not effective enough

> A piece this week in the New York Times, however, warns that we’re at risk of giving too much money to malaria and not enough money to less optimized causes, like fixing acoustical shortcomings in concert halls. Author Emma Goldberg laments that effective altruism (EA), which asks us to use reason and evidence to find the charitable causes that can do the most good per dollar, has become “the dominant way to think about charity,” which “argues, essentially, that you do not get to feel good for having done anything at all.”

> But the first claim, that EA has become the dominant way that charity is done in the US, is even more wrong, and more insidious. 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.

> 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.