Comment by nchmy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nchmy | Hacker News Reader

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In my fairly extensive experience, non-profit organizations are not just full of and run by grossly incompetent people, but deeply arrogant and/or deluded ones as well. I have NEVER found an organization that has a genuine desire to seek truth, efficacy etc. They often go with whatever their first (inevitably insufficient) idea was, and not only reject all criticism but respond with indignity, etc...

There's no meaningful/competent oversight. It's all just about feels and optics. And thus no real progress has or will be made.

Anyway, yes, I agree that competent and genuine people (who are extremely rare) ought to try to make a meaningful impact in the world. But there's generally more money in something else.

(one rare exception that comes to mind, though i haven't visited them, is The Ocean Cleanup project. They seem to be experimenting and succeeding towards the worthwhile goal of making effective engineering interventions for cleaning up waterways and oceans)

The Carter Center has nearly eliminated the Guinea Worm: https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/

I'm sure there's plenty of incompetent nonprofits out there, but there's plenty of incompetent for-profits as well.

The difference is that the non-profits come with the expectation that they're genuine, well-run, accountable etc. For profits don't really have any moral expectation

To some extent, one doesn't even see the competent non-profits. They don't market aggressively, they don't scale up rapidly, they just stick to their niche and quietly hammer away at it for decades on end (often on things that have no feasible exit, like schools that will need to be externally funded forever)

That seems like a simple money regulations issue. If the school has a $100 million endowment, but doesn't spend into it, the school would exist forever. If we say 10% returns a year, that's $10 million to spend on students in the form of teachers and classrooms and housing and books and everything. Unfortunately, that only teaches N students per year. But it would last ~forever. If, however, you get greedy with wanting to teach more than N students per year, then you get into the treadmill of needing external funding forever, but on the face of it, I don't accept that external funding is required forever.

A 100 million endowment is effectively "forever funding" from the perspective of a school that takes in maybe 200k/year of donations. You don't get 100 million endowments without the scale and marketing, unfortunately

The vast majority of the chicken flocks in South Korea are descended from chicks donated by Heifer International during and shortly after the Korean War.

https://www.heifer.org/blog/historic-gift-from-south-korea-a...

There are plenty of nonprofits making a difference, your cynicism aside.

How is that difference measured, in general?

Setting aside cynicism is one thing but what answers are there for skepticism besides the very common moralizing personal attacks?

When I see a lot of nonprofit leadership improving their own lot much more reliably than the people “they serve”, I wonder if the handouts are just being politically diverted to the best and most politically valuable promoters.

If UBI is off the table, competition for gatekeeping resources becomes a dark market.

https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/#by-the-nu...

> Since our efforts began in 1986, the incidence of Guinea worm has fallen by more than 99.99% to 10* human cases in 2025

Notice I am not asking for an example. Anecdata of one, and for sure there are many, in isolation is—demonstrably—mostly PR.

So your honest position that you're arguing here is that literally every nonprofit is not making a difference? Every one of them? What are we even talking about here?

>How is that difference measured?

So it is personal attacks? Are you joking?

Is there no gatekeeping of pools of money?

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