I make Kleptomania look good.

One person gets this joke.

Alright, stealing one more from Beth, but it'll be quick.

 Unlike her usual self, she's brought up two stealworthy posts in a row. This time, She's brought up charity as a topic, and mentions some facts regarding popular charities. She brings up a great point:

 "With so many charities out there, if you're thinking of making a donation, it's important to know how to choose the right one."

I couldn't agree more with this. This is nearly the most important factor of picking charities, and most blatantly ignore it. In the United States it's very popular to text in a donation that bills your phone company. There's literally no information on how it'll be spent, where exactly, or how efficient it is. This is exactly what she's talking about.

However, I do disagree with one point she brings up later:

"For a charity to be considered as one that spends it's money well, two thirds, or 66.6% of donations should go directly towards programmes supporting the charities aims."

It's a very good indicator, but to bring up an analogy where it might not always work would be  educational spending. Many sources claim increases in educational spending as something desirable in and of themselves, but as professor Heckman would put it, spending is an input, not an output. So, I agree absolutely that we need to spend time and choose, but now it has become considerably more complex on how we choose.

If two charities, A and B, make $100,000 each, but A spends 10% on administration costs, and firm B spends 30%, then, superficially, it appears that firm A has more "bang for the buck". After all, 90,000 goes to the stated cause for A, but only 70,000 for B.

However, let's say B is more efficient than A. Let's say that, out of the money that goes, 1/4th of A's is spent efficiently, but firm B spends 3/4ths of it's money efficiently. Some examples would be that A spends more money on things that aren't used, or perhaps it spends it on projects that are relatively less helpful than B.

Well, now multiplying the money they have to the percentage of it that's used effectively, we get A has $22,500 going to the charity, and firm B has $52,500. The roles have reversed.

How do we know which charities are efficient? Well, I've heard of some estimates that mix Beth's definition with other efficiency measures, like this. If you want more rigorous studies I've heard of a whole slew of research coming from John List over at Chicago. Since I haven't gone over that, I'll cover one paper of his that I have, which is this. One part of the Abstract runs:

"We design a door-to-door fund-raiser
in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a
flyer on their doorknobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. We find
that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9% to 25%
and, if the flyer allows checking a Do Not Disturb box, reduces giving by 28%
to 42%. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10.
These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-
door giving."

So, apparently part of the reason we give is social pressure. Could be pressured into doing worse things, I suppose.

Now I'll stop stealing for a while and be original.