Q: You argue that miserliness is equitable to charitable contributions in the net use of resources, while giving more to one single charity is better than giving less to different charities. What is your personal approach to charitable contributions ( i.e., how much do you give, and to whom)?
A: Miserliness is equivalent to charity in the sense that both the miser and the philanthropist forego consumption, which makes more goods available to others. If you give your money away, someone else gets to eat better. If, instead, you squirrel your money under your mattress, it’s still true that someone else gets to eat better, because whatever you’re not eating is available to someone else. There’s a complicated chain of events in between — you hoard money, which drives down the price level, which lowers the price of food, which allows someone somewhere to buy more food — but you don’t have to follow that whole chain to know that if you eat less, there’s more for someone else.
So if you want to be charitable, all you have to do is hoard your money, or for that matter burn it. But that’s not the best way to be charitable, because you can’t control who gets the benefits. Miserliness is like a random act of kindness; effective philanthropy is about directed acts of kindness. And I argue in the book that a philanthropist who really cares about helping others will usually pick a single charity and target his giving to that one charity. If 100 children are dying of rickets and another 100 are dying of scurvy and you have enough funds to save two children, there’s no particular reason to save one of each; you might as well give your entire contribution to either the Rickets Foundation or the Scurvy Foundation. Either way, you’ve saved two children. And if you have even the slightest inkling that one of those charities might be more effective than the other, then that’s where both your dollars should go.
It took me a long time to fully understand that argument, so I’m sympathetic to the fact that readers often find it hard to swallow. In the book, I’ve tried to answer all the objections that I myself raised when I first started thinking about this.
I think I’ll decline to comment on the details of my own giving, for the same reason that I’d decline to comment if you asked me about what I had for breakfast this morning: I have nothing interesting to say about my particular preferences. It’s general principles, not individual eccentricities, that are really important
