No, seriously, it's virtuous to repair the world.

Contra the New York Times and the DNC on faith vs. works.

I wrote recently about PeerForward, née College Summit. To recap, PeerForward is a nonprofit that has, for decades, been spending about ten million dollars a year to help students in disadvantaged areas go to college. It has not, however, increased the rate at which students in the areas it serves go to college. Their promotional literature unwittingly gives this away with a statistical error a child could spot (and did).

But according to a recent feature in the New York Times, this complete absence of impact doesn’t matter and we should ignore it. The piece is in the Business News section and not labeled as opinion, presumably because the headline is “What if Charity Shouldn’t Be Optimized?” and therefore not technically a statement of objective fact.

The article is a critique of “effective altruism”—not Effective Altruism the movement, which is made up of fallible humans and institutions, but the basic concept. Emma Goldberg argues that it is morally questionable to be effective. Rich people can’t go around thinking about the consequences of their actions all the time, she says—that might make them feel too good about themselves, or us about them.

A billionaire pledging to do “the most good” with his or her fortune can also provide a justification for having that fortune to begin with, no matter how it was acquired.

…

On top of being a philanthropic approach, it’s also, sneakily, a moral claim. The giving justifies the earning; it’s a permission slip for the accumulation of vast sums of wealth.

Non-billionaires should also be leery.

Naturally, we want answers on who needs our help most. But outsourcing our choices about charitable giving to empirical guides … can even short circuit the painful process of paying attention.

The correct way to think about charity, says Goldberg, is to center yourself—your guilt over having money, your preferred aesthetics, the people you personally interact with. Don’t think too much about what others actually want and need—that takes away from the time you’re morally obligated to spend doomscrolling.

Actually, she gets more anti-consequentialist than that.

If number crunching tends to reduce friction and uncertainty, what this last school of philanthropy emphasizes is facing the tensions and hurtling toward the hardest questions: Should we have all this money to donate in the first place?

If you are donating money, then by definition you already believe you should not have that money, and are acting directly to fix this. For Goldberg to favor “facing the tensions” over “number crunching,” she has to believe that it’s more virtuous to have money and think you shouldn’t than it is to give your money away.

Goldberg is right to say that nobody can be perfectly effective, fully optimized, all the time, nobody should try, and we should leave room for a diversity of values and strategies. But I think she’s very wrong to imply that seeking effectiveness is bad for the soul. Ineffectiveness is what corrupts your morality, with insidious and catastrophic results.

To illustrate, let’s do a little check-in on the founders of PeerForward.

Stop All The Cerebral Hoops

In 2002, the year I first encountered College Summit, it had three longtime staffers, according to this consultant’s report. The official founder, J.B. Schramm, had for the past four years delegated at least the running-the-summit part of College Summit to “the organization’s two other staffers, Cynthia Cheadle and Jaime Harrison.”

Cynthia Cheadle was an elementary school teacher Schramm happened to know. In 2002, she left the organization and returned to teaching elementary school. I doubt there’s any public record of why she left the role and the field, but her commitment to the ideal of effectiveness might’ve been part of it. From her teacher bio:

Every year we set goals -- sometimes monthly, sometimes quarterly -- whatever we need as a class. We talk about the need for achievable goals and the importance of sharing them with each other. I always start by talking about areas of my life that I could imagine improving and then pick a goal to help me do that. I think it's important that kids see adults as flawed and I share my goal with them because communities help hold each other accountable. An achieved goal makes the community stronger, so we are all invested in each other's success. I love watching kids be really self-aware and open and vulnerable with each other. When we get it right I know we are on our way to building a strong, trusting community.

I love that.

Jaime Harrison went a different way. He got a law degree and went to work for the Democratic Party. (He was also employed by the Podesta Group for much of this time, lobbying for transportation and coal interests. “It's how I pay back the $160,000 of student loan debt.”)

In 2020, Harrison raised and spent a record 132 million dollars, slightly more than PeerForward over its entire lifetime, to support his election campaign for Senate in South Carolina, against Lindsey Graham. He lost by 10 points — Graham got the same share of the vote he’d gotten last time, against a Democratic candidate who’d spent $400,000, or 0.3% as much as Harrison. But that’s the kind of analysis the New York Times feature calls “a data-loving engineer’s mode of do-gooding.” It neglects the intangibles, the magnificent. Democratic leadership doesn’t seem to have thought it was important. Right after his 132-million-dollar loss, Harrison was named the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, essentially putting him in charge of every Democratic campaign in the country.

He remains in that position to this day. I’m not going to try to claim that the 2024 elections were all his fault. But I think he deserves a chunk of the blame, not only for the results, but also for the fact that Joe Biden is still President, despite being very blatantly mentally unfit. Where another DNC might have seen it as its job to intervene¹, to unite the party behind an effort to get Biden to resign, Harrison’s DNC, and Harrison, saw themselves as cheerleaders. Even after Biden’s disastrous debate in June 2024, Harrison insisted that Biden should be the nominee, that he’d “earned it.” He told MSNBC:

Stop the hand-wringing. Stop all the cerebral hoops that we’re jumping through and unite behind Joe Biden.

In the video, he taps his head, mockingly, as he coins the phrase “cerebral hoops.²” Thinking about your own choices and their consequences? Reconsidering your next steps in light of new information? That’s weakness and disloyalty.

J.B. Schramm himself stayed in the non-profit world, and remains closely associated with PeerForward, but I think he’s focusing more on a similar project called OneGoal. Like PeerForward, it’s highly selective, picking a cohort of about 25 students from participating high-schools—B-grade students who say they want to go to college. Like PeerForward, it is then inordinately proud of the stat that 72% of these kids end up spending at least two years in a postsecondary school, an “effect” that is completely explainable by the selection process. Unlike PeerForward, it’s named OneGoal.

So that’s three possible career trajectories after running an ineffective charity. You can nope out entirely and switch careers, like Cheadle. You can keep doing the same thing over and over, getting the same results but getting better and better at spinning them, like Schramm. Or you can repeatedly fail upward, like Harrison, with the consequences getting worse and worse each time, so that it becomes more and more psychologically essential to ignore them.

There is a fourth option, thankfully. But it’s for gross nerds.

It is actually hard to do good

Those Effective Altruist organizations the Times objects to, the ones trying to measure and compare the impact of donations to different organizations, spend a fair bit of their time “red teaming”—actively trying to refute their own analyses and find pitfalls in their own plans. They offer “red team grants” to outsiders interested in criticizing their work. They publish lists of every significant mistake they’re currently aware that they’ve made. And those lists are pretty long, and include some pretty big mistakes, because the task is difficult. There are altruists everywhere. If you think you’ve found a cheap way to do a lot of good, you are probably wrong: it’s like finding a $100 bill on the ground in Grand Central Station. If nobody’s picked it up yet, it’s probably fake.

Most charities, instead of looking for evidence that their intervention isn’t working, look for evidence that it is, which they can always find. This is equivalent to just acting on a hunch. They are therefore probably not being effective, and quite possibly doing harm.

If the Times is under the impression that people are taking EA too seriously, they’re mistaken. The Against Malaria Foundation, the charity EA people have talked about the most over the years, currently has a funding gap of $250 million, meaning more than 30,000 more people (conservatively) are likely to die of malaria than if it had been fully funded. Our society is not currently in danger of getting overly fixated on EA-recommended charities. We’re still funding PeerForward! PeerForward has gotten three articles in the Times, all singing its praises, while the Against Malaria Foundation has gotten none—it’s only mentioned in the context of EA.

Likewise, the article worries that effective altruism will make people like billionaires more, and that seems backwards to me. If a robber baron in New York puts his name on a magnificent new opera house, he’s a philanthropist. If he sends that money directly to poor people in Africa instead, he gets good press for a day and then goes back to being a robber baron.

But I guess I’m still stuck in my engineer mindset, if I’m thinking in terms of “what problem is the Times article trying to solve?” They’re not trying to solve problems. They’e trying to be virtuous.

How fundamental a gap is this?

I don’t really trust my ability to empathize with virtue ethicists. They’ve decided on a Right Way To Think, cultivating certain virtues in themselves, making them a little alien. But I’ll try to meet them where they are, and argue that publishing that article was indicative of a lack of moral fiber.

The principle intent and effect of publishing that article is to discourage people from donating to some charities in favor of others. Its specific claim is that people are donating too much to charities that operate in third world countries, and should instead be donating more to charities that operate in first world ones.

The article is telling people who were going to make life-saving donations to instead give that money to people whose voices they can personally hear. Of a charity Goldberg finds more wholesome:

It directs its charitable giving based on what recipients say they need — their voices and opinions, not just data about their lives.

That “data about their lives” that drives GiveWell’s analysis is, of course, the aggregated voices and opinions of third-world recipients. They’re just further away, and therefore less real to Goldberg. So she feels comfortable telling people to let them die, and expecting that some of them will listen. It’s not a wrench, for her. Not a decision she’s approaching with gravity and self-reflection. It’s just another day at the office.

That’s irresponsible.

Photo by author.

tikkun olam

When progressive Jews talk about altruism, we often use the term “tikkun olam,” which literally translates to “repairing the world.”

I’ve gone back and forth on this phrase. I don’t like the idea of “repairing” as meaning “the world used to be better/perfect, let’s make it the way it was.” I don’t think the world was ever perfect, and I think it mostly has gotten better.

But I don’t think that’s really the point of the word choice, at least not in the modern day. The world is broken with respect to how it should be, not how it was. You can repair something that has never worked, that came off the assembly line defective.

The power of tikkun is that it puts the world, not the do-gooder, in the center. You’re repairing the world because it’s broken, not because you want to fulfill a mitzvah, or feel a certain way, or be a better person. Tikkun is an act of love, but it’s not about following your heart. It’s about looking at the world and seeing what it needs. Listening to people, hearing what they want, and figuring out how best to help them get it.

So I’ve come back around to tikkun olam. “Giving to the needy” or “doing good works” centers the doer too much—it risks making the actual consequences irrelevant, turning the whole thing into a performance, an exercise. Repair the world, for the world’s sake.

Or, if you’re a data-loving engineer, optimize it.

1. President Truman, for example, was talked out of running for re-election by Democratic party leadership.

2. Cerebral Hoops is also the name of a podcast about women’s basketball. So there is prior art.