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?
Over the past thirty years, amid a larger crisis of civic engagement, social isolation, and political alienation, measurable impact has seeped into our civic imagination and become one of the guiding ideals for public-spirited beneficence. And while its proponents do not always agree on how best to achieve or measure the extent of that impact, they have collectively recast civic engagement as objective, pragmatic, and above the fray of politics—a triumph of the head over the heart. But how did we get here? And what happens to our capacity for meaningful collective action when we think of civic life in such depersonalized and quantified terms?
Quantification Amid Civic Decline
As scholars of accounting, evaluation, and metrics have repeatedly shown, the turn toward quantification—what historian Theodore Porter calls a “technology of distance”—is typically precipitated by fraying social networks, infrequent face-to-face interactions, and moments of bad faith that undermine generalized social trust.33xTheodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), ix. At the turn of the twenty-first century, these problems plagued American civil society. Recent decades had seen government offload the burdens of public provision onto nonprofits, helping to fuel the sector’s professionalization. The resulting shift from “doing with” to “doing for” crowded out opportunities for volunteering and exacerbated the already growing problem of citizen disengagement from community life.44xSee works such as Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000) and Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). Making matters worse, the public began questioning the sector’s integrity. Headlines rattled off a litany of scandals at some of the nation’s most-venerated charities: the president of the United Way found guilty of embezzling $1.2 million; managers at Goodwill arrested for stealing $15 million; the Red Cross pilloried after the September 11 attacks for misleading donors to raise $564 million. Public officials worried—and rightly so—that Americans were becoming disillusioned with the nonprofit sector.
The circumstances reflected what James C. Scott calls an “incapacitated civil society”—the perfect terrain on which to build the intellectual frameworks of high modernism.55xJames C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 5. And these were the builders who showed up: a new generation of philanthropists, convinced of the disciplining power of markets and possessed of the kind of confidence that comes with youth and sudden wealth. While they were catalyzed by the nonprofit sector’s flagging accountability, they weren’t content with knowing that “nobody bought a Porsche.”66xLorna Lathram, adviser to Pierre and Pamela Omidyar, quoted in Quentin Hardy, “The Radical Philanthropist,” Forbes, May 1, 2000; https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/0501/6510114a.html. They also wanted to know, in precisely quantified terms, what their money had accomplished. It was a fitting orientation for a generation of results-obsessed tech entrepreneurs and investors, many of whom had recently sold their companies, seen their stock valuations soar, or made a killing through venture capital. Priding themselves on the mantras of “disruption” and “breaking things,” they vowed to do away with the “unimaginative check-writing” of the past and, in their tech-inflected patter, “give philanthropy a reboot” by applying the same principles they had used in making money to the act of giving it away.77xJohn A. Byrne, “The New Face of Philanthropy,” BusinessWeek, December 2, 2002, 83; Quentin Hardy, “The Radical Philanthropist,” 114; Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen quoted in Claire Cain Miller, “Rebooting Philanthropy in Silicon Valley” New York Times, December 18, 2011, BU6. Countless such claims—with modest, if any, actual innovations—suggested that the overpromising bombast that accompanied tech entrepreneurship would become a common feature of philanthropy in the new millennium as well. Of course, had they done more than merely glance at history, they would have realized that much of the radical trail they had set out to blaze was, in actual fact, a well-traveled road. Claiming the mantle of rationality, science, and good business sense is a 130-year-old philanthropic tradition.88xThese are exactly the kinds of claims you might expect from engineering-minded world-beaters proudly contemptuous of history. At least since Carnegie, Rockefeller, and others of their kind began opining on the topic, philanthropy has been chock-full of these sorts of ideas. For instance, Rockefeller’s assertion that a more businesslike philanthropy was necessary to “do the most good for the greatest number” is, as a sound bite, virtually indistinguishable from the claims of today’s impact-obsessed mega-donors, see John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (New York, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1909), 175. See also Taylor Stephens, “Giving Away Liberalism: Philanthropy, Silicon Valley, and the Making of a New Establishment,” unpublished dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University, 2024.
Tradition notwithstanding, the new capitalist elite did find itself occupying an altogether different political environment from that of its philanthropic predecessors. Only a few decades prior, amid popular antagonisms toward the superrich and growing suspicions that foundations were both tax dodges and instruments of plutocratic conspiracy, Congress imposed stringent constraints on philanthropic activity. The question, in effect, was whether the public was getting its money’s worth from these tax-subsidized, insular, and elite-led organizations.99xThis question, embodied in the Tax Reform Act of 1969, haunted philanthropists in the early 1970s. For instance, one insider despaired that “Not one-tenth…of [foundation] grants have any measurable impact upon the major social problems confronting the nation.” Taking the point further, Orville Brim, of the Russell Sage Foundation, accused fellow philanthropoids of making funding decisions based on little more than hunches and “unexamined maxims.”In a feisty essay titled “Do We Know What We Are Doing?”h e argued that, without systematic analyses of “hard-headed evaluative information,”the public was right to wonder whether it was “getting its money’s worth.” If philanthropy wanted to establish its public benefit bona fides, Brim concluded, it would do well to adopt the pragmatic rationalism of Johnson’s Great Society and the War on Poverty. Waldemar A. Nielsen, The Big Foundations (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1972), 425; Orville Brim, “Do We Know What We Are Doing?” The Future of Foundations, Fritz F. Heimann, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1973). See also Peter Dobkin Hall, “A Historical Perspective on Evaluation in Foundations,” Foundations and Evaluation: Contexts and Practices for Effective Philanthropy, Marc Braverman et al., eds. (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2004).
By the 1990s, however, the political mood had changed. Neoliberalism and government funding cuts encouraged private dominion over the public good, elected officials anointed philanthropists as de facto statesmen, and other leading figures heaped adulation onto entrepreneurs who “get shit done.” Quantification and evaluation became less a means of holding philanthropists accountable to the public (as some hoped during a brief period in the 1970s) and more a tool for holding grantees responsible to funders. Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, brusquely personified the era’s strident donor-centricity: “It’s my money. It’s my time…. I want to see an impact.”1010xBono, quoted in Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 194; Richard Fuld, quoted in Richard A. Melcher, et al. “A New Breed of Philanthropist,” BusinessWeek, October 6, 1997, 40–44.
To the new generation of philanthropists, moreover, nonprofits seemed bumbling and amateurish. Without a profit motive—or any other objective and universally agreed-upon signal of organizational performance—how could you tell which charities were most effective? How could you decide which ones deserved support? And in the absence of competition, what was there to pressure them toward greater efficiency? One philanthropic newcomer lamented, “I sometimes miss the marketplace, which really kicks you around when you make a mistake.”1111xPatty Stonesifer, quoted in Jean Strouse, “How to Give Away $21.8 Billion.” New York Times, April 16, 2000; https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/16/magazine/how-to-give-away-21.8-billion.html. So, in the absence of typical market mechanisms, they devised alternative methods for kicking charities around.
Newfangled Giving for Newfangled Wealth
Those alternative methods first took root in Silicon Valley at the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund (REDF). In the late 1990s, REDF began experimenting with what it called social return on investment, or SROI, a tool for analyzing grantees and allocating money. In some ways, the method seems like an obvious extension on ROI—the investor’s bread and butter. But adding the S took ingenuity. Investors had often balked at the idea of social returns, deeming them too elusive to measure. How could you objectively calculate the value of, say, anti-racist advocacy, or cleaning polluted rivers, without treading into questions of ethics, politics, or aesthetics? For REDF, the trick was to identify a “socio-economic” middle ground that allowed them to “quantify and monetize the elements of an activity’s social value.” Accordingly, a job-training nonprofit wasn’t just finding employment for a recovering addict. It was also generating a savings of $12,277 from decreased reliance on public assistance and a benefit of $1,880 in tax revenue from the beneficiary’s increased income. From there, you could easily calculate a nonprofit’s total social value. Divide that by how much funding it required, and you arrive at its “social purpose index of return.” With such metrics, a grantmaker could, in theory, compare any two organizations, no matter their line of work. “It’s kind of a subversive act,” REDF’s executive director explained.1212xCynthia Gair. “A Report From the Good Ship SROI,” The Roberts Enterprise Development Fund, The Roberts Foundation, 2002, 4, http://www.socialreturns.org/docs/good_ship_sroi_gair.pdf; the example in this paragraph is adapted from Roberts Enterprise Development Fund. “Rubicon Landscape Services.” SROI Report, Winter 2000; Jed Emerson, quoted in Jay Tokasz, “Accountability; Putting a Cold, Hard Number on the Value of Good Works,” New York Times, November 20, 2000, F30, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/20/giving/accountability-putting-a-cold-hard-number-on-the-value-of-good-works.html.
But REDF wasn’t alone in its subversion. In New York City, the Robin Hood Foundation was developing a similar approach. While the foundation is best known for its A-list board and star-studded galas—where one might catch Jay-Z leading charter-school students in a rap about reading—it was also insistent on using benefit-cost ratios in its grantmaking. Broadly, Robin Hood’s “BC ratio” wasn’t all that different from REDF’s SROI in that it allowed the grantmaker to compare affordable housing and early-childhood education as coldly as a company could “decide whether the unit producing toothpaste works better than the unit producing shoes.” Making philanthropic decisions, according to board member Tom Brokaw, was “like going to a GE division meeting.”1313xMichael M. Weinstein, “Measuring Success: How Robin Hood Estimates the Impact of Grants,” New York, NY: Robin Hood Foundation, February 27, 2009, 16, https://web.archive.org/web/20240827214303/https://toolkit.robinhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Measuring-Success-How-Robin-Hood-Estimates-the-Impact-of-Grants.pdf; Tom Brokaw, quoted in Andy Serwer, “The Legend of Robin Hood,” Fortune, September 8, 2006, 103–14.
In 2002, BusinessWeek summarized philanthropy’s emergent analytical inclinations, observing that the “new philanthropists attach a lot of strings. Recipients are often required…to produce measurable results.” The approach—which some referred to as venture philanthropy (and others derided as “newfangled giving for newfangled wealth”)—quickly worked its way through the sector.1414xJohn A. Byrne, “The New Face of Philanthropy,” BusinessWeek, December 2, 2002, 83–94, https://web.archive.org/web/20021208093559/http://businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_48/b3810001.htm; quoted in Tony Proscio, “The Foundations of Civil Society: A Review of Investments by the Atlantic Philanthropies in the Fundamentals of the US Philanthropic Sector, 1984–2001,” Atlantic Philanthropies, March 2003, 59. Venture philanthropy was codified in an essay titled “Virtuous Capital: What Foundations Can Learn from Venture Capitalists,” by Christine Letts, William Ryan, and Allen Grossman, Harvard Business Review, March/April 1997: 36–44. In that essay, the authors write that “foundations and venture capitalists face similar challenges: selecting the most worthy recipients of funding, relying on young organizations to implement ideas, and being accountable to the third party whose funds they are investing.” The head of the Community Foundation Silicon Valley described his region’s up-and-coming philanthropic ethos:
The word they use is “invest”…. How do I invest in the community, how do I invest in education, and how do I measure a societal return on that investment? A lot of these people are engineers. They’re used to measuring things.1515xPeter Hero, quoted in Sam Howe Verhovek, “Internet’s Rich Are Giving It Away, Their Way,” New York Times, February 11, 2000; https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/11/us/internet-s-rich-are-giving-it-away-their-way.html.
The most vocal champion of this ethos—albeit from a perch in Seattle—was Bill Gates. In 2000, Gates and his wife Melinda established their eponymous foundation, vowing to conduct their philanthropy just as Microsoft conducts its business. Hard-nosed analysis had been good for the software empire; it would be essential for eradicating malaria as well. While the idea was hardly original, Gates’s media-appointed standing as the high priest of measurable impact and the fact that he helmed one of the world’s largest foundations enticed others to follow his lead.
The gospel of data-driven philanthropy quickly spread. Foundations such as Hewlett and Kellogg published how-to guides on evaluation and urged others to incorporate quantitative rigor into their decision-making. Consultancies such as Bridgespan, the Foundation Strategy Group, and the Center for Effective Philanthropy helped plan and perform the necessary analyses. Others took the calling even further. One consultancy, for instance, collaborated with the Chief Musicologist behind Pandora’s Music Genome Project with the ambition of doing for nonprofits what Pandora had done for music. By analyzing a database of 77,000 nonprofit outcomes, the Impact Genome Project (and its resulting Impact Genome Registry) distilled a list of “132 common outcomes” that together encapsulated the entire sector. According to those involved in the project, the world’s thorniest problems could be solved, “All we need are better data.”1616xRoshni Chengappa, “Using Big Data for Social Good,” Forbes, September 28, 2014; Jason Saul and Matt Groch, “Introducing the Impact Genome Project,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, April 9, 2014.
Such meliorist enthusiasm was, to a certain extent, understandable. By imposing exacting clarity on the morass of reality, quantitative analyses help to ferret out patterns that are invisible to the naked eye, adjudicate among otherwise incommensurable interventions, and identify optimal courses of action to achieve a given goal. But that’s not all. Quantification helps discipline decision-makers’ biases by restricting the wiggle room for whim and personal discretion. (And when those biases break free, invocations of rigorous analysis confer an air of objectivity that insulates judgment calls from charges of prejudice.) Putting these attributes together, impact’s evangelists promoted quantification as a democratizing force. As they saw it, funding allocations made in accordance with metrics were, in principle, a matter of merit—less a question of who you know and more a question of how well you perform.1717xStandardized testing, credit scoring, and workplace performance assessments justify themselves in similar terms. Regarding the case for impact measurement see, for instance, Braverman et al., Foundations and Evaluation: Contexts and Practices for Effective Philanthropy (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2004).
By 2008, 50 percent of all foundations (84 percent of those with more than $400 million in assets) were regularly conducting formal evaluations of their grantees. Even old-guard funders like the Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation came online. Rockefeller titled its 2006 annual report, simply, “Impact” and made the case that there was “no other meaningful yardstick” by which to judge philanthropy than “measurable outcomes.” Reorganized around this new philosophy, it would require grantees to yield “measurable outcomes within at most three to five years.”1818xGrantmakers for Effective Organizations, “Is Grantmaking Getting Smarter? A National Study of Philanthropy Practice” (Washington, DC, 2008), https://search.issuelab.org/resources/1593/1593.pdf; Rockefeller Foundation, “Impact” (2006 Annual Report); (New York, 2007), 2, 11, https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report-2006-1.pdf. Failing that, they would be abandoned. With grantees increasingly rewarded for what they could prove numerically, more elusive civic goals, such as political advocacy and community building, tended to fall by the wayside—a pattern frequently observed in research on civic organizations subjected to top-down evaluative demands.1919xSee, for instance, Lehn M. Benjamin, Alnoor Ebrahim, and Mary Kay Gugerty, “Nonprofit Organizations and the Evaluation of Social Impact: A Research Program to Advance Theory and Practice,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2023). More generally, regarding the distorting effects of over-reliance on metrics, see Jerry Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). The guiding ideal of measurable impact, coupled with the sector’s growing professionalization, served to limit opportunities for lay participation in what had once been the organizational bulwarks of community life.
Metrics for the Masses
Giving a commencement address at Harvard in 2007, Bill Gates posed a rhetorical question to the audience: If they could donate a few dollars each month, to which organizations would they give? How would they each “do the most good for the greatest number?” After explaining that he and Melinda routinely grappled with the same question, he outlined a process to cut through complexity and make contributions. The first step was to identify a tractable goal. The last was to “measure the impact of your work.… You have to have the statistics, of course.”2020x“Remarks of Bill Gates, Harvard Commencement Address,” The Harvard Gazette, June 7, 2007; https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/06/remarks-of-bill-gates-harvard-commencement-2007/. In some ways, it was curious that Gates gave a speech so squarely focused on humanitarianism. Only a decade prior, his reputation wavered somewhere between miserly and monopolistic. But his philanthropy offered an opportunity for a rebrand, and, by 2005, Time had named him and Melinda—and U2 frontman Bono—its “Persons of the Year,” calling them “The Good Samaritans.”
Gates was particularly adept at using his nerdy cultural cachet to trumpet the worldview quickly suffusing philanthropic discourse. His speeches, interviews, annual letters for his foundation, and op-eds—often replete with graphs and references to data—repeatedly demonstrated a self-professed “maniacal focus on…measuring results.”2121xBill Gates, “Annual Letter 2009,” Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/annual-letters/annual-letter-2009. In many cases, measurable impact takes the lead as Gates jumps between disparate issues ranging from elementary education in the United States to antiviral medications in Burkina Faso. The connection? Both involve workers delivering well-studied interventions that advance well-defined outcomes. Measurable at every step. Reading these arguments, one quickly gets the impression that Gates’s understanding of reality is almost wholly quantitative.
And while Gates’s quantification often appears as a means to an end, there are times when he seems fixated on measurement as an end in itself. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Gates muses:
If I could wave a wand, I’d love to have a way to measure how exposure to risks like disease, infection, malnutrition and problem pregnancies impact children’s potential—their ability to learn and contribute to society.2222xBill Gates, “My Plan to Fix the World’s Biggest Problems,” Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2013; https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323539804578261780648285770.
It’s a revealing bit of text: If Gates had a magic wand, he’d collect data. (If anything, he sounds more interested in waving a ruler.) Rhetorical gaffes notwithstanding, Gates successfully converted others to his perspective. As one of his most ardent boosters, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, argued, “Bill and Melinda Gates are among the best things that have happened to Africa,” not because of their funding but because they’d set the “expectation that ‘do-gooders’ should be cost-effective and rely on metrics to prove their performance.”2323xNicholas D. Kristof, “Bill Gates and Creative Capitalism,” New York Times, June 27, 2008; https://archive.nytimes.com/kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/bill-gates-and-creative-capitalism/.
But it wasn’t just Gates pushing quantitative rigor into the civic imagination. Popular magazines exhorted readers to, as Cosmopolitan put it, “Donate! But do it wisely!” And outlets as varied as Consumer Reports, GQ, Newsweek, Town & Country, USA Today, and Vogue gave similar advice, even encouraging readers to follow the lead of multibillion-dollar foundations. People like Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, wrote approvingly of “bottom-line philanthropy” and showcased charities that operationalized children as “nonperforming assets” in which one could invest.2424xShannon Barbour, “How to Check if a Nonprofit or Fundraiser Is Legit and What to Do if You Donate to a Shady One,” Cosmopolitan, June 18, 2020, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a32872489/what-to-know-before-donating-nonprofit-organizations-fundraisers-refunds/; Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, “Bottom-Line Philanthropy,” New York Times Magazine, March 9, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/magazine/09WWLN-freakonomics-t.html. Farhad Manjoo and Ezra Klein promoted similar ideas to their audiences. Likewise, a slew of books encouraged readers to Give Smart, Measure What Matters, and take a Leap of Reason. And TED Talks on philanthropy and generosity seamlessly merged the tropes of self-help, management-speak, and worldly do-goodism. In this media landscape, popular conceptions of charity joined forces with notions of self-actualization and dispassionate analysis. The civic ideal of measurability was catching on.
The ideal found its way into the evolving infrastructure of civic life as well. The crisis of nonprofit accountability had fed the creation of private rating agencies like CharityNavigator, initially developed, in effect, as the Morningstar of nonprofits. And while the raters initially focused on helping donors avoid scammers, they soon pivoted toward helping donors identify cost-effective, or “impactful,” nonprofits. Meta-charities like DonorEdge, Philanthropedia, and ImpactMatters—each sporting distinctive evaluative methodologies—provided ratings, rankings, and curated lists to help users make data-informed donations.
In 2007, an organization called GiveWell emerged, immediately becoming the most devoutly empirical of the set. What had started as an effort to provide donors with “more information about their ability to improve the world than can be found anywhere else,” soon became a de facto evangelist for effective altruism, the utilitarian moral philosophy so vividly illustrated via the potato people of MyGoodness.2525x“The Case for the Clear Fund,” 3, GiveWell; https://www.givewell.org/about/progress#Originalbusinessplanpublished472007. GiveWell, much like other proponents of EA, was interested in accomplishing, as Peter Singer’s popular treatise on the topic states in its title, The Most Good You Can Do. “Good” here is defined unambiguously as the number of lives saved or, in terms of the movement’s preferred metric, increases in quality-adjusted life years, or “QALYs”. And if saving one life is good, then saving more lives is better. The goal is restated accordingly: the most good you can do per dollar. In practice, this means GiveWell’s highly selective “Top Charity” recommendations are typically awarded to organizations providing well-studied, inexpensive, effect-of-x-on-y interventions—such as malaria-resistant bed nets—often in places where your dollar goes further, such as Nigeria or Mozambique.2626xEfforts to maximize the “amount of good” accomplished according to QALY-centric metrics has also led to philosophies like “earning to give,” in which one opts for the most remunerative line of work with the ambition of donating even more money to the most-effective charities. Through this line of thinking, one can reframe work in private equity or as, say, a dodgy cryptocurrency mogul, as a philanthropic act and a net positive for humanity. This last point is crucial. As one of GiveWell’s founders explained, “…if you want to do the most good…the worst place you can start is your neighborhood, your friends, your country.”2727xHolden Karnofsky, interviewed by Ezra Klein in “Warning: This Episode Gets Really Weird About How Much Good You Can Do,” The Ezra Klein Show, October 5, 2021; https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-holden-karnofsky.html.
In many ways, GiveWell and EA are the apotheosis of a broader cultural transformation around charity, what we expect from it, and how we relate to it. For many working in nonprofits, these sweeping shifts have cast a pall of impersonality over their work. According to the director of a nonprofit serving low-income families, new donors did not want to get involved or experience the organization firsthand. Instead, they “want to know how we rank from an outside source.” And the head of a women’s shelter lamented, “Our world is going into numbers and trying to do things online that ought to be done in person.”2828xQuoted in Aaron Horvath, “Organizational Supererogation and the Transformation of Nonprofit Accountability,” American Journal of Sociology 128, no. 4, 2023: 1054, 1051.
A Utopia of Bed Nets
It is no coincidence that our obsession with measurable impact came about during what some have called the loneliest time in human history. Both conceptually and discursively, the injunction to “have an impact” resonates with broader shifts in the popular social imagination that have been underway for the past half century. Where we once understood ourselves as enmeshed in robust structures and institutions, beholden to social forces beyond our control, we have increasingly come to see ourselves as disaggregated, agentic individuals—our society remade as a “constellation of private acts.” In this environment, the technical vocabularies of economics, cognitive psychology, and business management began filtering out of universities and boardrooms and into everyday life, where they served not merely as metaphors for understanding reality but as tools for bending that reality to our will.2929xDaniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 17; Jason Blakely, We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020). Markets, incentives, and cost-benefit tradeoffs became the stuff of personal decision-making. And the popularizers of behavioral economics delighted in telling us we were ill-equipped for the task. Convinced of our fallibility, we increasingly sought quantitative rigor and coolheaded analyses to see us through. Consequently, we’re not just evaluating charities more; we’re evaluating everything more.
But charities—and the conceptually squishy “civil society” of which they are a part—were in some sense a last frontier for the quantification-centric worldview: a bulwark against the hegemonic rationalizations that have consumed other domains, a counterbalance against an increasingly isolating and inequitable economy, and an outlet for citizen voices otherwise diminished by pay-to-play politics. And while some hoped the turn toward metrics would restore confidence in civic organizations and inspire renewed engagement in community life, it seems to have had the opposite effect. Rather than getting involved ourselves, we look to data-savvy intermediaries to tell us what we should care about and how we should give. In other words, our fixation on quantification isn’t just the product of a civil society in decline; it has also helped to accelerate that decline by supplanting the ideal of hands-on community engagement with the ideal of unsentimental calculation.
More insidiously, the once-vibrant discourse of democratic civic life has been hollowed out and transformed into mathematized geek-speak, effectively baking the prerequisites of empirical analysis into our cultural vocabulary for doing good. To achieve the needed analytical clarity, we are asked to embrace what Herbert Simon called a “drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world.”3030xHerbert Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization, second edition (New York, NY: Free Press, 1957), xxv. SROI indices, BC ratios, and QALYs per dollar are effective tools because they flatten the meaning of social progress—stripping it of place, context, or concern for how particular outcomes are achieved.3131xArguably, we can see this observation at work in the financialization of impact via impact investing, the conversion of 501(c)(3) foundations into LLC forms (often on the grounds that the nonprofit form is too limiting for philanthropic impact), rhetorical appeals that one’s business enterprise is one’s philanthropy (e.g., Elon Musk calling himself the greatest environmentalist because of Tesla), and the fact that domains of nonprofit activity like education and eldercare are being eaten up by private equity. Impact doesn’t seem to know any sectoral affiliation. It’s agnostic to means, only concerned with ends. In this abstracted mode, we are encouraged to regard the charity down the street through the same lens that we regard a charity in sub-Saharan Africa. (Consider how MyGoodness regards familial ties and relationships to place as biases that impede rational giving).
The empirical imperative, likewise, implies that all manner of problems, no matter how intractable, are reducible to orderly, often linear cause-and-effect relationships—amenable to intervention. But by sanitizing the chaos and messiness of actual society, measurable impact depends on an adamant avoidance of politics, structure, and the institutions that produce social problems in the first place. Beneficiaries, better understood as statistical lives than identifiable people, have no relevant say. According to Bill Gates in an op-ed titled “My Plan to Fix the World’s Biggest Problems,” social advancement is merely a distributional problem: “a pit toilet, first-aid training…. All these interventions are quite simple.”3232xGates, “My Plan to Fix the World’s Biggest Problems.” As an ethos, measurable impact is the antithesis of active engagement in the disorderliness of politics. It wants the world to operate with the placidity of a silently spinning top. It just needs more spin in the right direction.
To be sure, measurable impact has much to recommend it. In a time when opportunities for more substantial civic engagement are in short supply and the levers of political influence feel ever further out of reach, perhaps a quantitative conception of civil society is empowering—one of the few mechanisms through which we can reliably make material differences in the lives of strangers. But in some ways, that’s the problem. The civic vision that accompanies measurable impact is robbed of all relationality, spontaneity, conflict, and shared experiences. Whether it’s the gussied-up trolley problem of MyGoodness or one of the many popular books invoking the heroic individual’s ability to catalyze worldwide change, the impact ideal puts you at center stage. A generous interpretation suggests that meaningful social change comes from the arithmetic summation of individual decisions. It’s a rather anemic vision of collective action.
In the world of measurable impact, the communitarian ethos is eroded by atomistic consumerism wherein civic-minded individuals are tasked with comparison shopping for deals on progress. (Tellingly, CharityNavigator’s website displays a shopping cart in the top right corner, just like any other e-commerce site.) The diminished ideal is one where people bump into each other, encounter unfamiliar perspectives, and relinquish parochialisms. They form into groups, forge coalitions across differences, and exercise political influence. While it’s true that this romantic vision of civil society has never been fully realized, it’s also true that, on the barren landscape of measurable impact, these features are not even acknowledged. On that abstract, apolitical, and atomistic terrain, individuals arrive with easily measured, coherent conceptions of the good; their preferences fully formed and convictions seldom challenged. It can be a useful approach, insofar as it is used to make sense of reality. But it’s a thin line, at least for some of impact’s leading proponents, between a reality described by their abstractions and a reality constituted by their abstractions. And the more they, and we, fall under the spell of the latter, the more difficult it becomes to imagine how else we might contribute to meaningful social change.
The familiar adage that “what gets measured gets managed” rings true. But when measurement consumes our civic imagination, everything that can’t be measured—the relationships and collective experiences that uphold democracy—is liable to wither.