In 2017, the MIT Media Lab launched MyGoodness, an online game billed as a way to teach players to “maximize the impact of [their] charitable donations.”11xJanine Liberty, “MyGoodness: Maximizing Effectiveness of Charitable Giving,” MIT Media Lab Blog, December 11, 2017; https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/mygoodness-maximizing-effectiveness-of-charitable-giving/. The game’s premise is simple. In each of ten rounds, you’re given one hundred dollars and asked to choose between two charities, each representing a different mix of characteristics. In one round, for instance, Charity A provides clean water to thirty-six adult women in South Asia and Charity B provides nutritious meals to twenty-eight senior men in Eastern Europe. In another round, Charity A provides medication to thirty-one girls in Southern Africa and Charity B provides medication to one boy—a family member of yours—in North America. The options are endearingly illustrated. Nutritious meals are depicted as bowls of rice, medication is depicted as a first-aid kit, and beneficiaries are depicted as yellow potato-like people wearing tattered clothes and forlorn expressions. When you pick a charity, the chosen potato people smile and throw their arms aloft as confetti fills the air. You’ve just saved their lives. The others aren’t so lucky. While their counterparts celebrate, the ones you’ve passed over turn blue and fall off the screen dead because of your decision.
For all its cartoonish simplicity, MyGoodness adamantly positions charity as a series of rational calculations with life-and-death consequences. To be an effective giver, the site explains, your contributions should “result in saving the maximum possible number of lives.” You should research your options and let dispassionate analysis guide your open wallet. You shouldn’t let biases like geographic proximity or personal relationships steer your largess. If after ten rounds of MyGoodness you’re inclined to put these lessons into practice, just click the site’s “Donate” button to reveal a list of twenty-four charities—each carefully vetted, evaluated, and proven in its ability to achieve measurable impacts. If the question is how to do more good with your giving, then the answer MyGoodness provides comes with crisply quantified moral clarity.
MyGoodness isn’t alone in its enthusiasm for calculation. In fact, the website is a product of effective altruism (EA), a movement informed by utilitarianism and committed to “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible.”22xWilliam MacAskill, “Effective Altruism: Introduction,” Essays in Philosophy 18, no. 1, 2017: 1580; https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5506078de4b02d88372eee4e/t/5bc7205d104c7bf5cc8f1dca/1539776611190/Effective+Altruism+-+Introduction.pdf. But that movement, which has grown in popularity in recent years, is only a ridgeline on a rapidly changing civic and philanthropic landscape teeming with injunctions to maximize the social impact of every dollar. Foundations make grants conditional on demonstrable results. Charities tout the evidentiary basis of their work. And impact consultants play both sides: assisting funders in their pursuit of rational beneficence and helping grantees translate the jumble of reality into orderly, spreadsheet-ready metrics.
Measurable impact has crept into everyday understandings of charity as well. There’s the extensive (often fawning) news coverage of data-crazed billionaire philanthropists, so-called thought leaders exhorting followers to rethink their contributions to charity, and popular books counseling that intuition and sentiment are poor guides for making the world a better place. Putting ideas into action, charity evaluators promote research-backed listings of the most impactful nonprofits. Why give to your local food bank when there’s one in Somerville, Massachusetts, with a better rating?