A study by the Center for Effective Philanthropy on the grants given by MacKenzie Scott shows some evidence that unrestricted funding enabled transformational impact for some of the organisations. The thing that most directly impacted outcomes wasn’t just the funding in itself but that the availability of funding created a cultural and psychological confidence that enabled teams to pursue bigger objectives.
I agree with you on discounting time. Treating future impact as fully equivalent to present impact often becomes an excuse for abstraction, moral outsourcing, and of course focusing on hypothetical future problems to avoid the here and now real problems – what I see as morally wrong in longtermism.
I am less convinced about discounting distance. Birds operate with simple local rules in a tightly coupled physical system. Human societies are layered, symbolic, political, and technologically entangled. Local actions routinely have non-local consequences, and what looks like “distance” is often the artifact of ignorance, mediation, or cultural framing rather than a real separation of effects. Supply chains, financial systems, climate, conflict, and information flows collapse distance whether we like it or not.
On charity being “for the giver,” I agree in the existential sense, but my experience with humanitarian NGOs (NGOs being the common vehicle for individual remote “giving”) and state actors complicates that framing. The gap between state actors and NGOs is staggering, not morally but structurally. NGOs are agile, visible, emotionally legible, and politically convenient. States are slow, opaque, and routinely hypocritical. Yet in terms of raw effectiveness, capacity, and causal power, states operate orders of magnitude above even the largest and well managed humanitarian NGOs.
The problem is that the same state entities that fund humanitarian relief are usually the ones funding the wars or the creators of the problems that make that relief necessary. I agree that the moral focus on the nearby should begin with individuals, but it cannot stop there. We are the state - unless we really want to undo two thousand years of res-publican or democratic thinking, hence my usual questions to Americans asking which part of “We the people” are they? And in a res-publica and a democracy our individual and local moral impulses MUST coalesce into our collective institutions to become the action of the state. If that fails, then we all have failed. We deserve the leaders we elect.
And when states are forced to act and are evaluated through an altruistic lens shaped from the bottom up, they are also forced to confront the asymmetry between how efficiently they organize harm and how unwilling they are to apply the same effectiveness to preventing it. After my 35 years of UN, I see this asymmetry as staggering, and the underlying reason why the nations are not “united” anymore – this hypocrisy has been brutally exposed, and many of the 195+ nations comprising the UN are not anymore willing to follow the lead of the ones that founded it some 80 years ago – the legitimacy once had is long gone.
At the UN we used to say that the tiny fraction states devote to humanitarian aid compared to military spending functions largely as conscience-washing, and I would argue that the same applies to a lot of EA funding. But if the same states were simply to reduce military expenditure on those wars, they would alleviate vastly more suffering than decades of downstream humanitarian aid ever could.
Thank you for this thoughtful addition, Lucio! Specifically regarding distance, I much agree with you that for human systems, a distance metric that is not strictly geographical is more correct. I wish I had thought and gone more in that direction: "Close" should be measured more as "only a few hops away in the appropriate network". So supply chains or governments or even social networks can also be "nearby" a particular person.
The last comment in the note might serve well as the first, also.
Two thoughts: the first is that the focus on local and tribalism might just be at the bottom of the worst tragedies mankind has put upon itself - Genocides, wars, etc. We are due an account of how looking local isn’t already our worst characteristic. As to temporal, I wonder if we are not already over-indexed on the present, mining our natural resources to satisfy current consumption demands and preferences rather than managing them for a sustainable future.
Also - agree that either extreme (zero discounting for distance versus hard local boundaries) are equally bad. I had meant to write that into the article but forgot.
agree that local concern leads to tribalism. I think the fix is pluralism: each of us belongs to a few often-overlapping local 'tribes'. Many real-world examples of this being true - for example church groups (or Bowling teams) uniting across socioeconomic classes.
However, aren't you also making "The JD Vance argument?" Vance doesn't say that he doesn't care about people in other countries, only that he cares more about White Christian Americans who reproduce.
TIME
I feel like one ding on EA is the idea that I won't feed my starving neighbor because my money can do more to make lives in the distant future better. That feels like a solid critique. If you don't help your starving neighbor, what are you doing?
Nonetheless, during the 2024 American Presidential Election, it was argued that the outcome of that election would be discernable in the fossil record a million years from now. If I interpret "feeding my neighbor" as "more American jobs in fracking," then the long-term cost of that "altruism" could be quite high.
I'm not sure my brain is big enough to solve the equation you opened with, but I suspect the simple version might be something like "moderation in all things." That we should do something for need now and nearby, but also keep the future and the whole of the earth in mind. Or maybe "think globally, act locally."
GIVE MORE
In any case, I have no doubt that your closing plea for us all to give a bit more is a great idea.
This seems to presume a high level of uniformity throughout the universe of givers and recipients.
Potential recipients with quantifiable needs in faraway places may not be able to receive support because local givers are neither able nor inclined to help for a multitude of financial and cultural reasons. What's more, localities may lack the information infrastructure or delivery methods to enable local giving.
While I do understand the motivation, it feels like there is a real risk it can lead to islands of affluent giving in a vast sea of unmet needs.
I would argue that each extreme is bad (extreme locality versus zero discounting), and that the answer probably lies in everyone choosing a strategy with some degree of range. There might be people who choose to help only those they don't know, for example, because for whatever reason that just feels good to them. The basic point I am arguing is that zero discounting only makes sense with a single global giver.
That may well be true. I'll admit that my initial reaction was a little triggered by the fact that EA bears some superficial resemblance to ordo amoris (or ordo caritatis) -- concepts of which I am no fan.
However, I also believe that technology skews this situation somewhat. For example, I can give a homeless person on the street cash in hand, but employ Kiva to lend or give to a group of female entrepreneurs in Ecuador. Doing it the other way around is not feasible, but thanks to tech I can choose who to give to quite independently of distance. To me, either option is equally valuable.
There's also the recent phenomenon on social media where advocates (somewhat randomly) pick people in need and start online fundraisers that bring in huge amounts of money, changing or even saving lives. Most or all of those who contribute to those fundraisers seem to fully discount distance, and while the sample size is tiny, it's difficult to argue that the outcome is not ideal?
This is great. “When you are playing on a team, the best strategies are different than when you are playing alone.”
The nearness in space is covered well. The nearness in time is harder (and I think, produces the perverse outcome of EA’s thinking). Children show us a bit of the value of time-delayed outcomes.
Over-indexing for the technical outliers as low likelihood / high reward bets in the distant future is demented, especially in relation to saving the starving. But why?
I suppose one "why" might be the selfish desire to maximize one's own results... by giving "locally" (note that as others have reinforced this shouldn't mean strictly geographically locally, but more broadly local to your own knowledge/connections) you are more likely to give well.
A study by the Center for Effective Philanthropy on the grants given by MacKenzie Scott shows some evidence that unrestricted funding enabled transformational impact for some of the organisations. The thing that most directly impacted outcomes wasn’t just the funding in itself but that the availability of funding created a cultural and psychological confidence that enabled teams to pursue bigger objectives.
Philip,
I agree with you on discounting time. Treating future impact as fully equivalent to present impact often becomes an excuse for abstraction, moral outsourcing, and of course focusing on hypothetical future problems to avoid the here and now real problems – what I see as morally wrong in longtermism.
I am less convinced about discounting distance. Birds operate with simple local rules in a tightly coupled physical system. Human societies are layered, symbolic, political, and technologically entangled. Local actions routinely have non-local consequences, and what looks like “distance” is often the artifact of ignorance, mediation, or cultural framing rather than a real separation of effects. Supply chains, financial systems, climate, conflict, and information flows collapse distance whether we like it or not.
On charity being “for the giver,” I agree in the existential sense, but my experience with humanitarian NGOs (NGOs being the common vehicle for individual remote “giving”) and state actors complicates that framing. The gap between state actors and NGOs is staggering, not morally but structurally. NGOs are agile, visible, emotionally legible, and politically convenient. States are slow, opaque, and routinely hypocritical. Yet in terms of raw effectiveness, capacity, and causal power, states operate orders of magnitude above even the largest and well managed humanitarian NGOs.
The problem is that the same state entities that fund humanitarian relief are usually the ones funding the wars or the creators of the problems that make that relief necessary. I agree that the moral focus on the nearby should begin with individuals, but it cannot stop there. We are the state - unless we really want to undo two thousand years of res-publican or democratic thinking, hence my usual questions to Americans asking which part of “We the people” are they? And in a res-publica and a democracy our individual and local moral impulses MUST coalesce into our collective institutions to become the action of the state. If that fails, then we all have failed. We deserve the leaders we elect.
And when states are forced to act and are evaluated through an altruistic lens shaped from the bottom up, they are also forced to confront the asymmetry between how efficiently they organize harm and how unwilling they are to apply the same effectiveness to preventing it. After my 35 years of UN, I see this asymmetry as staggering, and the underlying reason why the nations are not “united” anymore – this hypocrisy has been brutally exposed, and many of the 195+ nations comprising the UN are not anymore willing to follow the lead of the ones that founded it some 80 years ago – the legitimacy once had is long gone.
At the UN we used to say that the tiny fraction states devote to humanitarian aid compared to military spending functions largely as conscience-washing, and I would argue that the same applies to a lot of EA funding. But if the same states were simply to reduce military expenditure on those wars, they would alleviate vastly more suffering than decades of downstream humanitarian aid ever could.
My 2 cents...
Thank you for this thoughtful addition, Lucio! Specifically regarding distance, I much agree with you that for human systems, a distance metric that is not strictly geographical is more correct. I wish I had thought and gone more in that direction: "Close" should be measured more as "only a few hops away in the appropriate network". So supply chains or governments or even social networks can also be "nearby" a particular person.
The last comment in the note might serve well as the first, also.
Two thoughts: the first is that the focus on local and tribalism might just be at the bottom of the worst tragedies mankind has put upon itself - Genocides, wars, etc. We are due an account of how looking local isn’t already our worst characteristic. As to temporal, I wonder if we are not already over-indexed on the present, mining our natural resources to satisfy current consumption demands and preferences rather than managing them for a sustainable future.
Also - agree that either extreme (zero discounting for distance versus hard local boundaries) are equally bad. I had meant to write that into the article but forgot.
agree that local concern leads to tribalism. I think the fix is pluralism: each of us belongs to a few often-overlapping local 'tribes'. Many real-world examples of this being true - for example church groups (or Bowling teams) uniting across socioeconomic classes.
Your argument makes a lot of sense!
DISTANCE
However, aren't you also making "The JD Vance argument?" Vance doesn't say that he doesn't care about people in other countries, only that he cares more about White Christian Americans who reproduce.
TIME
I feel like one ding on EA is the idea that I won't feed my starving neighbor because my money can do more to make lives in the distant future better. That feels like a solid critique. If you don't help your starving neighbor, what are you doing?
Nonetheless, during the 2024 American Presidential Election, it was argued that the outcome of that election would be discernable in the fossil record a million years from now. If I interpret "feeding my neighbor" as "more American jobs in fracking," then the long-term cost of that "altruism" could be quite high.
I'm not sure my brain is big enough to solve the equation you opened with, but I suspect the simple version might be something like "moderation in all things." That we should do something for need now and nearby, but also keep the future and the whole of the earth in mind. Or maybe "think globally, act locally."
GIVE MORE
In any case, I have no doubt that your closing plea for us all to give a bit more is a great idea.
Happy Holidays & Best Wishes in 2026!
This seems to presume a high level of uniformity throughout the universe of givers and recipients.
Potential recipients with quantifiable needs in faraway places may not be able to receive support because local givers are neither able nor inclined to help for a multitude of financial and cultural reasons. What's more, localities may lack the information infrastructure or delivery methods to enable local giving.
While I do understand the motivation, it feels like there is a real risk it can lead to islands of affluent giving in a vast sea of unmet needs.
I would argue that each extreme is bad (extreme locality versus zero discounting), and that the answer probably lies in everyone choosing a strategy with some degree of range. There might be people who choose to help only those they don't know, for example, because for whatever reason that just feels good to them. The basic point I am arguing is that zero discounting only makes sense with a single global giver.
That may well be true. I'll admit that my initial reaction was a little triggered by the fact that EA bears some superficial resemblance to ordo amoris (or ordo caritatis) -- concepts of which I am no fan.
However, I also believe that technology skews this situation somewhat. For example, I can give a homeless person on the street cash in hand, but employ Kiva to lend or give to a group of female entrepreneurs in Ecuador. Doing it the other way around is not feasible, but thanks to tech I can choose who to give to quite independently of distance. To me, either option is equally valuable.
There's also the recent phenomenon on social media where advocates (somewhat randomly) pick people in need and start online fundraisers that bring in huge amounts of money, changing or even saving lives. Most or all of those who contribute to those fundraisers seem to fully discount distance, and while the sample size is tiny, it's difficult to argue that the outcome is not ideal?
If you know of any charity that’d be open to being onboarded to grove.city, I’d really appreciate an introduction!
Our vision is agents tipping humans, but we’re staying with humans tipping humans.
It uses crypto rails being the scenes, but we’re working on abstracting that away as much as possible.
Fascinating! So I can use this to send small payments for stuff I read on socials? FWIW, I think that is something that is vitally needed.
If you have 3-4 minutes, I wrote about the vision here: https://olshansky.substack.com/p/why-micro-tipping-is-the-fuel-for
Working on abstracting out the underlying crypto-rails for humans, and then it should be g2g as a v1.
Yea, exactly!
You load/top up your tipping jar, and enjoy the same experience across different platforms or websites: just click a green shiny button.
The first version of the product is live, but we're calling it an "open beta" as we're iterating on the onboarding flow.
Would love to get your feedback if you're open to a demo or onboard as an earner/tipper or hear about the API.
If not, I'll definitely publish something on Substack once it's officially live :)
This is great. “When you are playing on a team, the best strategies are different than when you are playing alone.”
The nearness in space is covered well. The nearness in time is harder (and I think, produces the perverse outcome of EA’s thinking). Children show us a bit of the value of time-delayed outcomes.
Over-indexing for the technical outliers as low likelihood / high reward bets in the distant future is demented, especially in relation to saving the starving. But why?
I suppose one "why" might be the selfish desire to maximize one's own results... by giving "locally" (note that as others have reinforced this shouldn't mean strictly geographically locally, but more broadly local to your own knowledge/connections) you are more likely to give well.