Heard of the one charity argument? Donate to only one charity. I first learned about this from Steven Landsburg’s book More sex is safer sex: the unconventional wisdom of economics. The chapter where he describes the argument is an adaptation of this Slate article. It’s an interesting argument that I’ve heard of in a few other contexts, so I’ll sketch some of its main features.
The first thing I want to make clear is what “charity” means here and what the best form of charity is. Charity involves giving one’s money, time and effort in a manner aimed to maximize benefit (including tangible and intangible benefits) to society on the whole, rather than focusing solely on maximizing personal benefits. The place where personal choice comes into charity is in the personal judgment of what constitutes value and how to compare benefits to different people.
For instance, if I consider the happiness of a chicken to be as important as the happiness of a human, then I might donate money to chicken welfare — somebody else, who places the happiness of chickens several notches below the happiness of humans, may consider chicken welfare a waste of money.
I repeat — charity is where benefits are measured to society as a whole, but the yardstick used to measure those benefits is personal.
The one charity argument in short
Suppose there are two big charities, and you have 20 units of money that you want to donate to one or both of the charities. They are both noble causes in your view, and the amount of money that you intend to donate is too small to make a direct and significant reduction to the challenges confronting either charity. What do you do? The one charity argument says: find the charity that creates the most value per unit money, and donate to that. Why?
