Inefficient Charity and Proximity

I was wondering today what the world would be like today if all the charitable donations in the world had gone to one organization to tackle one problem at a time.  I mean the most important problem, in my view the one that causes the most suffering over time.  I think that this would be the health and education of mothers and children.  Why?  Healthy and educated women contribute more to the economy, fight for their own rights, but most importantly have fewer children.  The size of the world's population is the greatest driver of environmental destruction, and the greatest strain on food resources etc..  Healthy and educated children grow up to be better for the economy of any country, and most importantly have fewer children.  Improved health simply decreases the greatest source of misery in the world, disease.

The closest estimate of worldwide giving to charity that I can find is about one trillion dollars.  Imagine the effects on global health, poverty, and the environment if this amount of money had been spent each year for the last two generations, say forty years.  At the moment worldwide women average 2.45 births in their lifetime.  Imagine if this had been reduced to a simple replacement rate of about 2.2 births per woman.  This would mean that the present population would be static, not increasing, and a smaller number than it is now.  The UN prediction for the number of people on the planet when population level become static is somewhere around ten billion.  Imagine a world living with only 6 billion people from now on.  5/3 the amount of resources per person.  3/5 the number of people to feed.  3/5 the amount of land needed to farm rather than left to be wild.  3/5 the number of people to emit global warming gasses.  Billions of women and children not dying of preventable diseases.

When put like that it seems to me extremely difficult to come up with a better use for charitable giving.  Fix the problem of an increasing population and then move on to the next thing.  However, it didn't happen and never will happen.  Why is this so?  It is because of the power of proximity in human emotion.

I feel confident enough in the basic decency of the readers of this blog that I believe if we walked by a child wasting away from hunger and a treatable disease on the street in front of our houses we would take that child to a hospital and provide money for treatment and food.  Are you really the sort of person who could let a child die on your doorstep?  It seems enormously unlikely to me.  There are millions of children around the world in a similar predicament and yet we (and I certainly include myself) don't treat them in any way remotely close to what we would do with the child on our doorstep.  Why?

We give based on emotions, and our emotions are hugely driven by our proximity to an event.  We read about a fatal car crash and go on about our day.  We see a fatal car crash and we are traumatized.  We go to a shelter and see the condition of mistreated dogs and we feel an emotional pain, we want to help.  This characteristic of emotional proximity leading to donation is obviously well known to charitable organizations.  Watch any advertisement asking for charitable help and there will be a heart wrenching picture of the consequences if you don't help.

This emotional element to giving reaches down to those who start these charities.  Mostly the people who start charities are horrified by some awful situation and become inspired to try to fix the problem.  This results in the plethora of charities, a mad hodgepodge of different organizations using different techniques to help different things.  This is wildly inefficient, but it is how people work.

Now, I'm not saying that these other charitable causes aren't wonderful, beautiful, inspiring, good things.  The passion, caring, dedication and just plain goodness of the people trying to do these things are just about the best things a person can have.  There are hundreds of thousands of people around the world doing these things and consequently being better people than I am.  I want battered women to have safe places to go.  I want old churches to be repaired.  I want homeless men to have a place to stay and some money to spend.  It is just that if we ignored all of those problems and just put everything into tackling contagious diseases and women's education it would do much, much more good.  It would reduce suffering worldwide if we didn't fund shelters for battered women and used the money more efficiently.

Even I, when writing that last sentence, feel guilty and queasy, as if there is something wrong with me.  This is because I imagine being able to help raped and beaten women and choosing not to do so.  That's simply disgusting.  On the other hand when I think of not helping starving, ill children I also feel disgusted.  Our feelings about what we should do depend on our proximity to the problem, even down to which thing we are thinking about.

I have talked before about the Circle of Compassion, the dividing line between who is truly "human" and who is not. I have talked about the expansion of this circle over time from family to humanity as a whole.  However, this circle is not just a case of an inside and an outside, there is a gradation from the middle outwards.  If a family member of yours is in trouble and a stranger on the street is in trouble, almost everyone helps the family member first.  Most Americans prefer to help Americans first.  Humanity will became a species of saints when this gradation disappears, when a woman in Myanmar is as important to you as your mother.  I don't see this happening in my lifetime (unless I live forever) but I think we edge closer and closer over time.

However, I'm still going to give cash to that guy on the side of the road with a cardboard sign even though I know I'd do more good taking that five dollars and donating it to SCI.  I'm a flawed human, put misery in front of me and I stop acting rationally.