Recently, Createquity waded back in to the smart-giving waters after an op-ed by bioethicist Peter Singer comparing donating to a museum to donating to a blindness charity understandably didn’t sit well with the museum community. Singer’s argument had its roots in an emerging area of applied philosophy called “effective altruism,” which argues that we have a moral imperative to do the most good we possibly can and use objective criteria to figure out what that good is. GiveWell has indicated its support for the effective altruist movement, so I thought it was high time to catch up with them to figure out where the arts fit in to all of this.

What was interesting was that the GiveWell folks seemingly came into this experience with a genuine desire to learn from my perspective as much as I was eager to learn from theirs. So at various points I found myself as suddenly the one answering questions, and in particular being challenged to articulate what funding opportunities might exist within the arts that self-aware philanthropists should be paying attention to.

This is a long but rewarding read. Tim and Elie were gracious enough to talk with me for over an hour, and the conversation will be of interest to anyone thinking seriously about philanthropy, advocacy, or research in the arts. That said, simply reproducing the whole thing verbatim here would make for by some margin the wordiest-ever post on Createquity (and that is really saying something), so rather than subject you to that, I’m sharing some of the highlights, condensing and moving things around a bit for the sake of readability.

On Where the Arts Fit in to GiveWell’s World

IDM: GiveWell hasn’t historically given a whole lot of attention to the arts, although I know the arts have been among a broader list of causes considered by the organization. I’m wondering if you can talk briefly about GiveWell’s current orientation to the arts, if any.

EH: There’s two main things I’d tell you about the arts and how they relate to the work that GiveWell is doing. For a long a time GiveWell was almost entirely focused on what we’ve termed evidence-backed, cost-effective, internationally-focused interventions. The arts really didn’t fit into the frame of GiveWell’s research process as it was originally constituted. More recently, as we’ve been working on this broader-scoped research that we call GiveWell Labs, I think it’s not as clear where the arts fit.

One of the things that we’ve always done at GiveWell is research the causes that we collectively, meaning our staff, are most interested in supporting. Early on when GiveWell just started, [it] was just Holden and Elie thinking about where we would give charity. I think now that’s broadened out to the staff we have. My impression is, and I’m certainly speaking for myself, but I think for other staff, that we tend to be more engaged in questions of giving to the causes that we’re currently researching, causes focused on international aid or US policy or scientific research, rather than the arts. And so to some extent those personal interests drive the research we’re doing.

One of the main reasons that we’ve done this is we’ve found that when we are trying to answer the question [of] where would we give our own funds, we tend to do better research then where we’re trying to answer something that I’d say is perhaps more of an intellectual question, which is where would I give if I were interested in something else? So that’s one part of the answer. The other thing I think is just important to ask, and it’s one of the questions that we’re asking for all the causes that we’re currently considering, is to what extent does this field have sufficient funding, versus not? I can’t say that I’m familiar enough with all of arts funding to know exactly how it stacks up, but [I have] sort of a superficial impression that there’s lots of ways in which people can get funding for the arts, whether through, let’s say, privately funded entertainment or government grants or otherwise, and there’s a lot of interest among philanthropists in providing that funding. And so one of the questions that we would have if we were to be involved in this area is what part of this field seems to be under-invested in. I think that question of where additional funding or current funding is not quite meeting the needs is one of the main ways that we’d think about this…[but] in many ways, because of the first point I made I don’t think we’re particularly well positioned to answer [it].

On Prioritizing Basic Versus Higher-Order Needs

IDM: Is it fair to say that GiveWell prioritizes serving the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid or hierarchy of needs? I’m wondering if those concepts of Maslow figure into any of your conversations or thinking about values, or if it’s more coming from an intuitive sense that poverty is central.

TTL: Yeah, I’d say we aren’t just focusing, and don’t want to just focus, on the bottom third or some tier of Maslow’s hierarchy. Traditionally, all the recommendations that we’ve made to date, as you point out, have been in global health and direct aid to people that have dire needs or needs that are different than the needs of people in developed countries.

When we were first deciding what causes we wanted to work on, we wanted to limit it to just causes that had really good evidence of effectiveness, and we found pretty quickly that the types of causes that had really good evidence were interventions in global health and developing countries and direct aid such as using bednets to prevent malaria deaths. There’s been over 20 randomized controlled trials that have connected the properties of bednets to reduce malaria and reduce malaria rates [and] deaths of, especially, people under 5 years old. There are very few interventions available to philanthropists out there that can claim that level of evidence. That was one of the big reasons for our historical focus on global health and direct aid interventions.

What we’ve been working to do recently is also open that up to a broader range of possible causes to look at, and that’s the project we’ve been calling GiveWell Labs, which still hasn’t made any recommendations yet. The causes we’re considering within GiveWell Labs include things that are not just focused in the same areas and includes things like trying to understand if there are ways that a philanthropist can improve scientific research or can change aspects of the political process in the US or elsewhere and a bunch of other causes as well.

We’re definitely very open to the idea that it’s possible to have more impact per dollar with things that are outside of developing health, or things that don’t just affect the bottom tier of Maslow’s hierarchy as you’re saying. But when there’s not as much academic literature on a specific intervention, it’s certainly a lot harder to understand that impact and it’s taking us a long time to try to understand.

IDM: Do you have a formal definition that you use, or even an informal definition, of what the good is that you guys are seeking to create in the world? Because I’m wondering when there are tradeoffs between those kinds of needs, how do you compare higher-level needs to lower-level needs in thinking about that hierarchy?

TTL: Yeah, I think this is a great question. It’s a hard one, and we have not formalized what values we are trying to maximize, if you will, or how to trade off the value of saving the life of someone that’s less than five years old versus maybe reducing the chance of mental development problems in another person, or improving the life of someone in a developed country, or maybe improving an institution like a government that will affect a whole lot of people.

EH: I think the main thing we’ve written that I would just point you to is this blog post [GiveWell co-founder] Holden [Karnofsky] wrote about a year ago called “Deep value judgments and worldview characteristics.” I care about self-actualization, so in some ways, I can easily imagine us being excited about things at the higher end of the hierarchy of needs, but I think it would really depend on the specifics of the circumstance.

One of the things that that blog post talks about is that we are not putting strong weights on achieving specific things in and of themselves – so some artistic endeavor as, like, some sort of achievement, as much as the broader impact that those types of activities could have on individual self-actualization. And so again, I think that one of the challenges for us in engaging with a type of philanthropy that we’re not particularly involved in now is understanding how the activities fund and would contribute to the types of goals that we would value.

On Effective Altruism and Strategic Cause Selection (aka Can You Work in the Arts and Still Be an Effective Altruist?)

IDM: I loved that you guys published a roundup of the GiveWell staff’s personal donation decisions this past December. It was super interesting. One thing I noticed was that there were a couple of staff who chose not to allocate all their charitable dollars to GiveWell-recommended charities. [But] some of the logic that we hear from a theoretical standpoint from effective altruists has to do with the idea of concentrating resources on high-impact opportunities rather than spreading the wealth around.

I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the balance between personal passions and feeding those through charitable activities on the one hand, and on the other hand, the moral imperative that a lot of people involved with this movement do lay out around the idea that you really should maximize the expected amount of good that you can do in your life.

TTL: The way I think about this broadly is that it’s important to me to have as big of an impact as possible and to approach that question sort of systematically. For me, not surprisingly, GiveWell is my primary resource for figuring out how to do that with the bulk of my funds – and I guess on top of that, it’s also how I’ve chosen to try to do that through my career – but then there [are] a bunch of reasons why maybe I should give in ways that aren’t just GiveWell top charities. I think you saw a bunch of these in the staff giving profile but, you know, it includes things like, well, if you have particular or special knowledge of a particular area then that might be a really good reason to expect that you might have a really good giving opportunity even if the broader community or GiveWell in particular hasn’t discovered it and developed the same sort of public degree of confidence that you have privately.

Additionally, for me, I think that certain types of heuristics in terms of one’s giving habits or patterns can be really useful even if they can’t quite be justified in this typical sort of straight-line effective altruist or consequentialist type perspective. Even if you can’t prove or you have no expectation that this marginal dollar if given by anyone would be best spent in this particular way, maybe if it’s related to something that you care a lot about or you use as a service yourself. Then that is an additional reason to value it, or to value the principle in general that people using that service might contribute to it to some extent.

IDM: In my professional life, I work with a lot of people who are very cause-centric, right? [Laughs] People care a lot about the arts. And so I’m wondering if you feel that there are principles from effective altruism, or from your general approach to giving, that could be applied even within a cause? As background, I’ll just tell you that when we were working on our effective altruism article for Createquity, we had a lot of debate internally about whether the idea of effective altruism in the arts is an oxymoron because of that cause-agnostic nature of effective altruism.

TTL: I don’t think it’s an oxymoron. I think that it’s totally possible to – if you can restrict the set of possibilities to some subset before, and then even within that subset, there [are] going to be causes that have more of the impact you’re looking for or less of the impact you’re looking for per dollar.

And so I absolutely don’t think it’s an oxymoron. I think that if I had some pot of money that was going to be dedicated towards the arts, then I would definitely be interested to know what are the opportunities to make changes out there, which of the opportunities seem to be most effective could actually be scaled up with more money, versus they might be really effective but giving them more money won’t allow them to do more of the same work, and other related questions.

EH: Yeah. I mean, I think there [are] a lot of the sort of questions and tools that we ask that I can easily imagine applying well to the arts. I think one of the main questions I’d have is, how does the arts funding ecosystem work, and what types of activities or outputs are for whatever reason not valued by the current funding infrastructure, but they appear to achieve the same types of goals, or the goals that one has as an arts funder or an artist?

Those are the types of things that I think come out of what I would characterize as the broad goals of an effective altruist, trying to use the part of your time or charitable funds that is being directed towards altruistic rather than perhaps personal goals as effectively as possible.

While I think people will reach different conclusions about which causes they are excited to work on, there is nothing that seems particularly problematic to me about someone saying, “the way in which I think that I can best contribute to the world is via the arts and, therefore, I’m going to try and maximize in some broad sense the impact that I have in that domain.”

On How to Think About Giving to the Arts

EH: Sorry, just to follow up actually I have a question for you if that’s okay. I mean, I think one of the questions that I would have when thinking about the arts is, what is the problem that additional funding could solve? I think that would help me because I think I have a relatively superficial understanding of what the problem might be, but I would characterize it in such a naïve way that I’m not sure it’s particularly helpful. So my naïve characterization might be something like, we could fund more art than we are currently funding, and the thing that would start to help me think this through more carefully would be, you know, what are we not funding that we should be, and how bad is that, and how much funding would it require? And I guess, then, ultimately, what could that mean to the development of a more complete, richer world arts community? Those are some of the things that I think I would want to ask when starting to think about this question.

IDM: Yeah, so two things, I guess, on that. The first is that I think the arts in some ways have struggled with this tendency of the broader philanthropic and nonprofit or social sector community to frame things in terms of problems, because what I think a lot of people in the arts might say is that we’re not here to solve a problem, we’re here to create possibility. We’re here to sort of extend the universe of what it is possible for humans to do in a way.

And in some ways, what we do has more in common with something like higher education or even science then it does with international development or aid or things like that. With that being said, I think that your question is still valid and important, because you focused it specifically around the idea of, well, what are the opportunities that we’re missing specifically with respect to funding?

I think that there are a lot of potential ways to answer that, but the reason why I asked about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is because if you think about where the arts kind of fit into that, you know, it seems pretty clear to me that where they slot in is in that top need of self-actualization. The arts, creativity, and sort of related concepts – I don’t think anyone would argue that it’s the only form of self-actualization, but Maslow himself talks about that being one of the ways in which self-actualization manifests.

[Later on…]

EH: I do think there is this question about the arts, which I would be interested in hearing from people who are themselves very interested in providing charitable support there, answering the question of how those funds will make a difference. Because I guess I don’t want to, sort of let the arts off too easy relative to any other cause, and I’d be interested in this question of trying to determine what is not being funded that should be, and why. Because it strikes me that there are a lot of institutions and individuals who are interested in being part of the arts and funding the arts, and so there’s something of an obstacle to overcome in terms of convincing, me, let’s say, or other donors that additional funding is really what is most needed there.

IDM: So let me ask, do you think that the greater obstacle for you is more about the value of the arts in the abstract, compared to some of the other things that GiveWell focuses on? Or is it more about, as you kind of expressed just now, a lack of familiarity or confidence that, in GiveWell’s term, there is room for more funding in the arts?

EH: I think the issue is more a room for our funding issue, but I’ll try to explain what I mean by that and then let me know if this makes sense. Basically, I think a world – like, imagine you could just take all of the funding and time that goes into arts and totally take it away, and now it all goes to just, I don’t know, like poverty prevention programs.

I mean, that doesn’t strike me as the ideal balance for the world. You know, like absolutely no entertainment or literature or painting or music. I mean, that does not seem like a good world to live in and so, now, again, I’m just kind of giving you my own values and my impression, [but] I wouldn’t want to see a world where there was none of that. And so, therefore, to me the big question is, does this area have sufficient funding or insufficient funding to engage humanity as much as it potentially can or should, relative to the other needs that people have? That’s a very hard question to answer, but that’s the way that at least I personally look at it.

IDM: So, I think my readers might kill me if I didn’t at least attempt to hazard an answer to that question. I’ll preface this by saying there is no sort of canonical consensus around the answer to that question of, you know, what is it that philanthropic intervention in the arts is supposed to do? But a while back I articulated two ways of thinking about justifications for subsidy of the arts which are mine alone, but also do have antecedents and connections to other work that people have done.

I don’t think it’s realistic to imagine a world where there is literally no art or entertainment, or anything like that. Because it’s part of human expression and people find a way to make it happen, sometimes in very adverse conditions.

[But] if it were only up to the commercial marketplace to decide what art gets created and who gets to be an artist, there would be two things that would happen. In the long run, over time, on average, you would have art and cultural products that cater to a wide, broad-based audience, and so you’d lose some of the diversity of product. You would lose a lot of the most interesting kind of expressions of human creativity that you get, and there are plenty of examples of artists who are considered very famous or important today that basically survived to the present day entirely because of luck. If they survived because of luck, then how many other geniuses or brilliant contributions to the literature or to the set of human achievement were lost, because they were never created in the first place or because they were literally lost? That’s one kind of justification.

The other justification is – so, if we go back to this idea of self-actualization and sort of take it as a given that for at least some people, the path to that is through being an artist or through engaging with the arts in some really deep sustained way in order to have peak experiences, understand and really experience what it means to be alive in this very present and visceral way [such] that you could make a moral argument that everybody deserves to have that opportunity – people’s access to the arts is determined in many ways by the market. And there are many disparities in the level of access that is available to people in various ways, for example due to cuts in arts education funding, it’s much less common now for people from poor or minority communities to have access to arts education than was the case in the past. That’s not necessarily to say that they won’t come into contact with the arts outside of school, but it’s less likely that they will have these pathways into discovering themselves through this medium that is one way to kind of achieve one’s potential. That’s sort of the way that I’m currently thinking about it.

EH: Got it. Yeah, I mean so those two points, and I think maybe this is just something about definitions, but I think that this problem that people who are perhaps socioeconomically disadvantaged have less access to the arts, it’s something that I would almost categorize as part of the general cause of inequality in the rich world. That’s to just say that is broadly speaking how I mentally file this cause, and it would almost be outside of art specifically.

On the first point, you know, I think the place I start is I think the most recent Giving USA survey data says there was roughly $14 billion given to the arts in 2012 and $19 billion given to international aid. And so the question is, you know, we can all agree that here should be, or at least I’m willing to agree that there should be some level of non-market-based arts funding, and then the question is should it be equivalent, roughly speaking, to the amount going internationally or should it be more or should it be less. That seems like the major question to try to answer and it becomes difficult to answer what the appropriate level should be in some abstract sense.

And so that’s why the approach that we’ve taken, at least in the research we’re doing under the name GiveWell Labs, is trying to look for specific areas that where we’re seeing ideas or problems that don’t seem to be funded in the way that they should be, where you can almost see the full concept and idea behind a lack of funding in a particular area. And you can say, you know, this thing, it would cost X dollars and it appears to have insufficient funding, therefore, this is something that is worthy of serious consideration.

On Evaluating and Allocating Resources to Research

IDM: You guys have devoted quite a lot of resources over the last few years to reviewing research literature, often either in connection with GiveWell Labs or to develop a knowledgebase of evidence-backed [interventions] in international aid.

I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about how your process has evolved and changed since you first started. I’m especially interested in whether you feel like you’ve kind of hit upon the answer at this point to what an effective research process is in terms of just going into a completely new area and finding out as much information as you can about what the evidence base is for guiding philanthropic decisions, or if you feel like there is still inefficiencies and problems that you’re still trying to figure out.

EH: Yeah, so the short answer is we don’t have it all figured out yet and there’s a lot we’re still trying to figure out about the best research process. The longer answer is that I think that we have come to a reasonably good process for our traditional research on international aid organizations but even that, you know, is not particularly formulaic because it varies a lot based on the specifics of the intervention or the organization.

There’s two different ways that we’ll look at an intervention. One is the more traditional GiveWell focus, which is very specific interventions that have a great degree of rigorous evidence evaluating their effectiveness. Another type, I wouldn’t even call it an intervention as much as a charitable program area, you know, where one might say hey, we could have a big impact on the world if we were to increase labor mobility or have some sort of software patent reform. These are areas that I don’t think one could call the activity we undertake evidence review as much as trying to get a better sense of the area.

I think the first kind is one where we have a pretty standard process we go through of looking for research that evaluates the question we have. You know, do bednets work, how well do they work. Then we are trying to think of all the questions that we have of the ways that the program could fail and then looking for literature on those questions. So, in the case of bednets, just to play out this example, it would involve how often do people actually use the bednets and was it the case that they only used the nets in smaller, randomized trials but in a larger-scale government program they might not. Or what impact does insecticide resistance have. So then we just go about listing out the questions and trying to answer them.

IDM: So, there’s a piece of that that you’re glossing over a little bit that I’m really interested in. I have to imagine that in the area in which you’re looking, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of studies that are potentially relevant to the questions that you’re looking at. So what are the filters that you use to decide which studies you’re even going to take a look at in depth? And then do you sort of structure the process in such a way so that you are looking at some of them at a shallow level, some of them at a deeper level, and so forth?

EH: The biggest filter that is imposed in the health interventions is we give serious priority to randomized controlled trials, which are created explicitly to evaluate the causal relationship between the intervention and the outcome in a way that other study methodologies have greater challenges to overcome.

That said, we don’t only focus on randomized trials. There’s evidence in our reports that comes from other types of evaluations, other types of studies, but because other types of studies often are not created in such a way to answer causal questions as directly, as easily, and it’s really the causal question is the one that we have (meaning “what can we say generally about bednet effectiveness?” is a question of what the causal relationship is between distributing bed nets and cases of deaths from malaria), we tend to prioritize the randomized studies.

TTL: The other thing that can be really useful when there’s thousands of studies in a general area that you’re trying to understand is using other people’s literature, or in the case at least when there is a lot of randomized controlled trials, there’s some times meta-analyses that are done to try to combine the statistical power of many of these different studies.

Now, I don’t know if this actually applies in the arts. I don’t know how common randomized controlled trials are or whether there is …

IDM: They are not. And I’ll just tell you guys that it’s a little bit funny to hear you talk about how you have so many doubts about the room for more funding in the arts and the general impression that the arts are overfunded. I don’t think that you actually used those words, but the thing is that compared to, like, the NIH spending on research, the amount of resources that actually go into research on the arts is incredibly paltry.

It’s true that there are big, big sums of money spent on arts organizations and arts interventions, but a lot of times that goes to things like buildings, whereas only a tiny fraction of that amount might actually go into studying whether that building ever made a difference to anybody.

I think it’s interesting because, while I think there are lots of arguments that you can make about the relative proportion of funding in the arts versus other areas, I would imagine that the typical ratio of funding that is spent on research about the topic or evaluations of the topic compared to the amount that is actually spent on the program delivery is way, way, way lower in the arts than it is in a lot of other fields.

TTL: It sounds like you think there is a lot of, the research on arts effectiveness is very underfunded.

IDM: I think so, yeah, and it’s, and because of that, you know, by the kinds of standards that you guys are using, the overall quality of evidence in the arts is pretty poor. There’s just, there are a lot of things that haven’t been studied, or they have been studied but not with the kind of rigor that you guys are looking for in your process.

EH: You know, the reason that earlier I was trying to distinguish between sort of these evidence-backed interventions versus other types of research that we’re doing for GiveWell Labs is I really think the latter is the one that seems like an easier fit for the arts, and the one that makes more sense.

It’s almost like I think there needs to be something of a more qualitative case that some part of the arts is underfunded or there is some segment that should be funded to a greater extent than it already is. I wouldn’t expect that rigorous evaluations are the right fit for evaluating that type of activity because I’m not even sure that we could agree on what impact we’re trying to evaluate.

IDM: Right. That makes sense. Could [you] describe a little bit more what that more qualitative analysis looks like? And in particular, I’m curious, is that entirely or almost entirely a theoretical exercise, or are you drawing in research that maybe doesn’t reach the level of randomized controlled trials and is maybe a little bit less expensive or less ambitious as part of the background for information-gathering for that analysis?

EH: I think the best way to get an idea of how we do that research is, we have these web pages that we’ve published that we call GiveWell Labs investigations of new causes or also called shallow investigations. They’re our initial look into various different areas.

On each of these pages, we do our best to answer the questions that we have about that area. It’s kind of like the things that we want to know in 10 to 20 hours of investigation. The questions we’re trying to answer are, what is the problem, and as part of what is the problem, some sense of how big a problem this is in the scheme of things. I think we’ve taken a lot of different approaches to answering that question, but on some level, trying as much as we can to quantify the problem and when we can’t quantify anymore, trying to explain it more qualitatively.

So you’ll see that on these pages. The other question that we’re trying to answer is a question about tractability. We can define the problem, but what can be done, and how likely are these goals to be achieved? Again, these require, without a doubt, a large degree of qualitative judgment about what it is and is not feasible and what is and is not likely, and we largely form these conclusions through conversations with people in the field. In the issues that are listed on this page, the shallow investigations, maybe we have two or three conversations with people in the field. Then there are other investigations that are larger, we call them “medium investigations,” maybe there we’re talking to 25 or 30 people to just try and triangulate what we can understand about the area.

Then finally, we’re asking the question, how crowded is this area? Who else is working here? How much are they funding? What are they funding? Putting it all together, areas where the problem is large and seems particularly tractable, and there is relatively little philanthropic funding, or if there is funding, we can understand why it is focused on part A of the issue but not part B. Those are very attractive and areas that say seem less important, less tractable, but highly crowded are less attractive.

In practice, things don’t kind of fall out so nicely; like normally problems have some combination of these factors and ways that require some thinking about how exactly to prioritize them. Those are the types of questions we’re asking and the types of information that we’re trying to feed into our process as we think about what we’re doing. To me, you know, these are the questions that I would have about the arts. Are we talking about, I don’t know, large museums in major cities? It seems like there is a lot of funding that goes to the Met, and the Guggenheim or other museums like that. I’m sure I sound hopelessly naïve when talking about the arts but that’s one type of question.

IDM: You are stating fact, my friend.

EH: And then maybe on the other hand, you know, you say, well, really the issue is funding of arts access in poorer communities. You could do a little investigation of that area and try to determine, is this something that people focus on and to what extent do they? We would wonder, like, is it that there’s no funding from local government as part of schools? Is there just no interest from major donors? How much money really is there? What could we expect to happen if this were to go well?

Those are all the questions that we ask. One thing just to add, and I know I’ve gone on for a little while on this, but another broad type of activity we’re undertaking in this area is what we call the history of philanthropy project where we basically say we recognize that all of these areas that don’t have that same type of rigorous evidence so arts, but also policy, or even science – it’s harder to know what will work.

One of the things we’re trying to look at is just what has worked historically when philanthropy has been involved, and this is an area where there is very limited information available. The basic idea is to try and do something that is more like investigative reporting or journalistic reporting where you better understand the role philanthropy has played. And I could imagine that also being helpful in thinking about arts philanthropy, where you can look back and say you know, what did someone do 30 years ago and what impact does that seem to have had? It obviously can’t be quantified in the way that saving lives with bednets could be quantified, but it can perhaps offer a deeper picture of what role philanthropy plays in achieving some outcome.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The value of the creative sector to the U.S. economy? Half a trillion dollars. The value of the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s official inclusion of our sector in its GDP analysis? Priceless. Responses from the field have been mixed. Some are celebrating how full the glass is: the creative sector, led by Hollywood, advertising, and television, accounted for 3.2% of the economy – more than tourism (2.8%) – and employed 2 million workers. Others have focused on the top half of the glass: the recession hit our sector especially hard and to lasting effect, and the bulk of the economic value is from advertising, with relatively little from “independent artists and performing arts.” Still others question the value of glasses entirely: embracing economic measurements of the arts could undermine aesthetic arguments for their necessity – though Createquity’s Jena Lee recently suggested otherwise.
• In the latest installment of the Detroit Institute of Arts saga, museum leaders have joined closed-door negotiations with several of the nation’s largest private foundations, both local and national, to protect the beleaguered institution by raising a whopping $500 million for the city’s underwater municipal pensions. Sources say they could be close to a deal. Meanwhile, efforts to raise private funds to spin the museum off from the city got a boost from biotech millionaire Paul Schaap, who has pledged $5m.
• The Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation has released a policy paper detailing several strategies for mayors and local government to support cultural entrepreneurship.
• A new report published by old friend Shannon Litzenberger intends to “ignite a conversation about addressing the existing logjam in arts funding in [Canada].”
• Arts Council England wants the the field to “transform itself into a low-carbon, sustainable and resilient sector” — so much so that it requires environmental reporting of its grantees, and is out with a summary of the first year of that effort.
• The Seattle Department of Cultural Affairs is offering $10,000 for an action plan on a Cultural Development Certification — intended to be the arts’ parallel to the LEED designation. Proposals are due January 22.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Deborah Rutter, President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will succeed Michael Kaiser as President of the Kennedy Center in DC, with potential implications for classical music programming.  This leaves a number of important vacancies at the capital’s cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran, the board of the Kennedy Center itself – oh, right, and both the NEH and NEA.
• Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theatre has found its first President and CEO: Wayne S. Brown, current director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. David DiChiera, the Theatre’s founder and general manager, will transition to serving as artistic director beginning January 1. Brown’s departure continues a recent exodus of top NEA officials, including the directors of Theatre & Musical Theatre, Literature, and Public Affairs/Chief of Staff.
• John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design and prominent advocate of “STEAM” education, is leaving his post at the end of the semester to join a venture capitol firm and consult for eBay – right as eBay announces plans to follow Amazon’s footsteps and launch an online art marketplace.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Debate over effective altruism is raging on, and not just in the arts. Charity Navigator President and CEO Ken Berger slams it as “defective altruism” in a blog post for Stanford Social Innovation Review, and 80,000 Hours co-founder William MacAskill counters. Lest the bickering ruin your holiday spirit, GiveWell released its top charities of 2013 (no, the arts are not included) along with a thoughtful set of notes from staff members on where (and why) they each plan on giving this year.
• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a new grantmaking priority to promote an American governing process that is more productive, more civil, and less polarized.
• A new Center for Effective Philanthropy survey suggests that most foundation CEOs are skeptical that real progress has been made against the major problems they are tackling, but that their own organizations have made substantial contributions. Lucy Bernholz points out that they also lack confidence in their own measures of success and wonders whether boards can effectively hold them accountable.
• Speaking of Bernholz, her annual list of philanthropy’s top buzzwords is out for 2013 and might just be the perfect gift for the “makers” and “solutionists” on your list this holiday season.

IN THE FIELD

• Louisiana ArtWorks, a lavish $25 million art studio construction-project-turned-fiasco that has stood nearly empty since its completion, is up for auction. On top of the $600,000 yearly mortgage left to New Orleans taxpayers, more than $15 million state and federal funds had been sunk into the project.
• A new 300-student charter school for the arts is set to open on the site of a former department store in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
• In the rare positive story from Motown, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is back in the black after a lengthy and debilitating musicians’ strike three years ago. Meanwhile, musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra, having spent the last year locked out in a labor dispute, are going rogue by applying for a 501(c)(3) and organizing their own concert series.
• Philadelphia has been adjusting to the shifting priorities of three major local arts funders, and Peter Dobrin details the ramifications and changes in a three-part series.
• The History Colorado Center takes “visitor tracking” to a new level with a “business intelligence” system that integrates and mines data from all areas of the museum, including “who is visiting, whether they’re members or donors, whether they’re coming as families or in adult pairs or alone, and from where… Whether those visitors eat in the café or shop in the store, what they ate and what they bought.” Not creepy at all…

BIG IDEAS

• With the National Endowment for the Arts gearing up to announce new collective impact funding for arts education next month, now’s a great time to brush up on what collective impact is – and while you’re at it, dig into this new series on measuring backbone organizations’ success.
• Beth Kanter unpacks the developmental evaluation strand of last month’s Next Generation Evaluation conference and offers some insight on its relationship to social change initiative and nonprofit practice.
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is partnering with Google, Accenture and other for-profit companies to launch an art and technology lab that will “will award grants and make museum facilities available to help artists explore new boundaries in art and science.” Elsewhere in LA, though, the public school system’s efforts to equip classrooms with iPads seem to be suffering from One-Laptop-Per-Child-like problems, which one pundit blames on “innovation fatigue.”
• Real-estate developers are increasingly cultivating artists and designers as tenants in low-rent neighborhoods who will help transform the area, raise the rents, and eventually move out. One developer calls the process “gentlefication.”
• Now this is a different kind of conference report: Arts & Ideas has created a gorgeous interactive document of The Art of Placemaking conference hosted last month in Providence, RI by the folks at WaterFire.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Dallas’s National Center for Arts Research has released its inaugural report on the health of America’s arts and cultural organizations. The report includes the average performance of organizations in eight indices and an examination of what drives organizations, and introduces the concept of high performance and intangible performance indicators (KIPIs). NCAR is working with IBM to create a online dashboard for organizations to access their own KIPIs.
• Roland Kushner, co-author of Americans for the Arts’ National Arts Index, looks at the relationship between private sector giving and arts index scores between 2000 and 2011. He finds a correlation beyond charitable contributions to the arts increasing the vitality of the sector, arguing that “charitable giving and engagement in the arts may emanate from the same instincts, values, and attitudes.”
• Americans love libraries! Nearly half of adults have visited a library in the past year, and fully 90% believe their community would be adversely affected if the local branch closed, according to a Pew study.
• A new study from Germany suggests that the relationship between studying music and improved academic performance may be causal: when researchers controlled for differences such as parental background, student musicians still out-performed their peers on cognitive tests – especially verbal ones.
• Some interesting findings have been reported by psychologists studying the effects of first-person shooter games. They surmise that players who enjoy these immersive and violent games are satisfying an innate desire for control and split-second decision making that is rarely achievable in today’s society. Video games also got some support from a new study out of Israel’s Center for Educational Technology.
• Korea-Finland Connection, a collaboration between Korean Arts Management and Dance Info Finland, has published an evaluation of its three-year program intended to create long-term  relationships between Finnish and Korean artists and organizations in the performing arts.
• Half of Equity members in Britain earned less than $8,200 in the last year, according to the union’s latest survey.  Additionally, “95.8% said they had never been pressurised to appear nude at a casting.”

“I want change” by m.a.r.c.

Toward the end of the summer, bioethicist Peter Singer raised the hackles of art lovers everywhere with a New York Times op-ed that considered a hypothetical dilemma: should you donate to a charity that combats blindness in the developing world or should you spend that money instead on an art museum? After running through a cost-benefit analysis of each option, he determined that the charity addressing blindness “offers [donors] at least 10 times the value” of the museum.

Ouch.

To no one’s surprise, the arts community didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat for the piece, calling Singer’s argument “a shocker,” “absurd,” and “tyrannical.” Another round of alarm ensued recently when none other than megaphilanthropist Bill Gates threw his support behind Singer’s thesis. The responses from our field to date have generally coalesced around two broad counter-arguments:

•  Why does it have to be “either/or”? Why can’t we support both? Singer forces a false choice in “assuming charitable giving is a zero sum game.” Weighing the value of saving a life against the value of donating to an art museum is comparing apples to oranges when “both are essential, and if either disappeared you’d be in bad shape.” We need a holistic approach to ensure we don’t “solv[e] Third World crises at the expense of fostering crises right here at home.” Just as we have “multiple passions in [our] lives,” donors can and should target multiple causes and direct their charitable dollars in a “proportionally prioritized” manner. Anyway, we can’t really be sure than curing blindness is more important than inspiring the next Jackson Pollock, and even if we were, concentrating all our resources with one or two tried and true nonprofits runs counter to the “messiness and power of America’s [decentralized] approach to charity.”

• Saving lives is all fine and good – but only if those lives have meaning. If we’re so concerned with making sure that people can see, shouldn’t we also try to make sure they have beautiful things to look at? Singer’s logic is dangerous because he fails to acknowledge the “creative outlet[s] and emotional oas[e]s that only art museum[s] can provide.” If all philanthropic dollars were channeled toward alleviating disease and poverty, arts and culture would languish, society would become monochromatic and dull, and life would cease to be worth living.

As satisfying as these rebuttals may feel to arts advocates, they unfortunately miss the point. The crucial assumptions behind Singer’s argument are that

1. “there are objective reasons for thinking we may be able to do more good in one [sector] than in another,” and
2. we have a moral obligation to make choices that do as much good as possible.

It’s important to understand this perspective in the context of “effective altruism,” a relatively nascent but growing area of applied ethics that has been featured more than once on this blog, not to mention a recent edition of This American Life. Besides Gates, fellow philanthropic heavyweight and past Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest has declared himself a fan. “Effective altruists,” or EAs, are on a quest to “do good” by way of hard-nosed rationality. “Doing good” doesn’t mean recycling a little more, or occasionally doling out spare change to a beggar on the street. It doesn’t mean foregoing a high-powered corporate career to work for a nonprofit. It means taking the time to analyze how to do the most amount of good possible with the resources available – or, to use a more nerdy turn of phrase, to “[use] science and rational decision-making to help as many sentient beings” as they can.

Most funders are already in search of a big “bang for your buck,” but in trying to identify the objectively best causes to support, effective altruists stray from the conventional wisdom of mainstream philanthropy. EAs cast a global net when determining where to focus, and often settle on supporting causes in faraway parts of the world, the results of which they may never see in person. They also believe that while human lives are created equal, philanthropic causes are not. Those causes that can save or improve the most lives must take first priority.

How does this play out in practice? Let’s say you donate to the free medical clinic in your area. You do this for good reasons: you care about inequities in the American healthcare system, and want to give back to your community. You like the feeling you get when you walk by that clinic every day. Maybe you even know people who benefit from the services the clinic provides. The clinic gets its donation, and you get warm fuzzies. Everybody wins. Right?

Not so, an EA would counter. Despite your good intentions, your donation amounts to a near-waste of resources:

We understand the sentiment that ‘charity starts at home,’ and we used to agree with it, until we learned just how different U.S. charity is from charity aimed at the poorest people in the world. Helping people in the U.S. usually involves tackling extremely complex, poorly understood problems… In the poorest parts of the world, people suffer from very different problems…

We estimate that it costs [Givewell’s] top-rated international charity less than $2,500 to save a human life… Compare that with even the best U.S. programs… over $10,000 per child served, and their impact is encouraging but not overwhelming.

EAs advocate making evidence-based decisions even if they don’t resonate on an emotional or intuitive level:

Effective altruism is consistent with believing that giving benefits the giver, but it’s not consistent with making this the driving goal of giving. Effective altruists often take pride in their willingness to give (either time or money) based on arguments that others might find too intellectual or abstract, and their refusal to give suboptimally even when a pitch is emotionally compelling. The primary/driving goal is to help others, not to feel good about oneself.

If this approach leaves you with an empty feeling in the back of your throat, it is by design. “Opportunity costs” – the costs of choosing not to behave in a certain way – weigh heavily on EAs. Every time you make a donation, considering where your money could have gone is as important as considering where it will ultimately go (emphasis mine):

In the “Buy A Brushstroke” campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 to keep the famous painting “Blue Rigi” in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease…  Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people … But these people didn’t have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.

Weighing choices isn’t limited to how we spend our money – it also applies to how we spend our time. Just as EAs dispute the notion that people should support whichever charities they feel “passionate” about, they question whether channeling those passions into a nonprofit or medical career is the best way to make a difference. Many suggest instead that people “earn to give,” saying they “might be better off…in a high-earning job and making a deliberate commitment to give a large portion of what [they] earn away.“ The organization 80,000 Hours, founded to “become the world’s number one source for advice on pursuing a career that truly makes a difference in an effective way,” elaborates,

Working at a non-profit can be a great way to make a difference. But it’s no guarantee. Amazingly, lots of non-profits probably have no impact. And do workers at [a] non-profit have more impact than the people who fund them? The researchers who push forward progress? The entrepreneurs who transform the economy? Policy makers? Maybe. No one stops to ask.

Putting ideas like these on the table is a great way to make those of us in the arts squirm. While there are echoes of the effective altruism movement in some recent trends within our field, like the “universal call” for better data on the impact of the arts and the pointed questions about who ultimately benefits from arts funding, the arts are chock-full of people – artists and arts administrators alike – who were drawn to their work by that same passion that EAs claim clouds our judgment. The idea of allowing cold rationality to dictate and limit our quest to “do good” flies in the face of our artistic sensibilities, and challenges the assumptions many of us made when we entered the nonprofit sector in the first place – even those of us who have a sincere desire to address social inequities.

Tempting as it may be, it would be short-sighted to dismiss the EA movement as the pet project of a bunch of aesthetically stunted curmudgeons. It’s hard to dispute the notion that we could improve the human condition if only we could get our act together and commit our resources to a data-driven approach. After all, the nonprofit darling of the moment, collective impact, is based on the same premise. What effective altruism does is counter our cause-specific argument for the arts with a dizzying moral appeal for cause agnosticism. And to be honest, it’s hard to see how the arts win if they play the game by the EAs’ rules. The “both/and” argument mentioned previously is unlikely to sway an effective altruist who weighs each decision as a choice between two different futures, one in which a museum gets funded and some lives get saved and one in which the museum struggles and more lives get saved. Even if the museum shut down completely, its patrons could probably find or create an alternative “creative outlet and emotional oasis,” while the people dying of malaria can’t very well make the mosquito nets themselves. The “we give lives meaning” argument likewise rings hollow when we’re talking about lending privileged lives (anyone living on more than $2 a day is privileged in a global context) a dose of incremental “meaning” at the expense of giving others a shot at basic survival. It also comes across as incredibly condescending to those others considering that they would likely never get the opportunity to visit or benefit from Singer’s hypothetical museum. In any case, art is hardly the only possible delivery mechanism for meaning. In the words of one effective altruist,

Trying to maximize the good I accomplish with both my hours and my dollars is an intellectually engaging challenge. It makes my life feel more meaningful and more important. It’s a way of trying to have an impact and significance beyond my daily experience. In other words, it meets the sort of non-material needs that many people have.

Whether the EA movement sputters or gathers steam, taking the time to engage with its principles, even critically, is a healthy exercise. The bottom line is that EAs may actually be onto something when they argue it’s possible to make a bigger dent in one sector than another. Rather than insisting otherwise or dodging the argument altogether, we could heed the call to examine how altruism really manifests in our work, particularly when examined through the lens of what benefits the people we engage, rather than what benefits our organizations or our donors. Might we, too, have objective reasons for thinking we may be able to do more “good” in one program, or with one population, than in another? Do we, too, have a moral obligation to maximize that good? How would that change how we operate and who we serve? Do we want to change how we operate?

If the effective altruism debate makes anything clear, it’s that to be able to make art, not to mention argue about it, is to be fortunate. Taking a hard look at our assumptions about what draws and keeps us to this work may not be easy, but if we squirm a little, so be it. In the grand scheme of things, a little squirming is a luxury too.

Kenyan shilling. Photo by Claudia Daggett.

A few years ago four grad students from Harvard and M.I.T. decided they wanted to use their brains and dollars to improve the lives of some of the poorest people in the world. They researched different strategies of philanthropy, looked at the data available, and based on the evidence they chose a novel approach. No microlending, school-building, or vaccination campaigns for them: they would just give away cash, no strings attached. They called their new charity, simply enough, GiveDirectly.

The Concept

This is how it works: money is transferred from the organization to pre-identified families in Kenya via cell phones. GiveDirectly’s selection of recipients is based solely on need as signaled by mud or thatch roofs, as opposed to more durable materials. The standard amount is $1,000 over one to two years, about as much as a poor Kenyan family might spend in a single year. There are no restrictions on what a family can buy with money from GiveDirectly. Unlike with more traditional philanthropic efforts, there are no mandatory health check-ups or vaccinations, no obligatory training programs, and no mandates of any kind. The cash is completely unfettered. It is a “UCT”: unconditional cash transfer.

One common use of GiveDirectly cash transfers is the purchase of a metal roof. Mud and thatch don’t hold up well to weather elements and must be repaired or replaced often. There are major savings to be had with the purchase of a metal roof, which typically lasts at least a decade.

That’s not the only way in which recipients spend the money, however. If you own a motorbike in Kenya that can withstand the terrain, won’t break down on long journeys, and can carry a passenger, you can be a taxi driver. With an influx of cash, you can literally buy yourself a livelihood.

These sorts of purchases improve quality of life and increase earning capacity, and some even have a ripple effect beyond a single family. A cow, for example, can provide milk for an entire village, an income stream for the owner, and can create more cows to continue to multiply the benefits.

The Logistics

Since a normal transfer from bank account to bank account isn’t an option, and transportation and distribution of thousands of dollars of physical cash would require security and increase liability for the charity, the transactions are carried out via cell phone. In Kenya the “mobile-money system” is called M-Pesa, and it’s one of the most successful of its kind; transfers are discreet, simple, and perfect for this atypical exchange.

One M-Pesa location in Kenya. Photo by Fiona Bradley.

Using this technology, GiveDirectly can keep track of hundreds of recipient families with a single spreadsheet and send them money each month safely and securely. The recipient gets a text message indicating that the money has arrived and goes to his or her local M-Pesa franchise to pick it up (the one described in the radio show “This American Life”’s GiveDirectly coverage is basically a VW bus turned bank with a ledger, a box of cash, and one staff person). It might sound dodgy to the Western world, but the M-Pesa system is dependable and ubiquitous in Kenya and saves people time and money previously spent traveling to traditional banks or delivering money to family in remote and inaccessible areas.

The Evidence 

As Jacob Goldstein for the New York Times writes, “At its most basic level… GiveDirectly’s work is an attempt to test one of the simplest ideas in economics — that people know what they need, and if they have money, they can buy it.” As radical as the approach may seem, it is grounded in a strong evidence base. According to Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of a charity that supports GiveDirectly, “cash transfers…happen to be the most extensively studied non-health intervention we know of.” Indeed, traditional charities often call the very act of transferring funds into the hands of low-income people success. In GiveDirectly’s model, by contrast, the impact measures are more nuanced. Money changing hands is the intervention, not the desired outcome.

GiveDirectly is committed to investigating and recording its own impact. The organization recently completed a randomized control trial in Kenya, which reveals that; “recipients are not just spending their transfers, providing a one-time boost to their consumption without affecting their overall well-being.” The trial shows that food-consumption increased 20 percent for transfer recipients and the value of recipients’ livestock increased by 50 percent. The study even showed that recipients’ stress levels improved – their actual stress hormone levels decreased. The full report and a summary are available here.

The Implications

Pondering the broader lessons of UTCs and GiveDirectly, I’m reminded of all of the nonprofit organizations out there for which an influx of funding could really change their organizational “standard of living.” What GiveDirectly is providing goes by another name in the nonprofit sector: general operating support.

General operating support is the holy grail of nonprofit fundraising, defined by the Foundation Center as “grants for the day-to-day operating costs of an existing program or organization; also called unrestricted grants.” There may be reporting requirements Kenyans don’t have to adhere to, and an application process with more vetting than GiveDirectly’s system of identifying families in need, but the concepts aren’t too far off. The similarities between general operating support to organizations and cash transfers to families, however, might not be as obvious for some in the nonprofit sector.

“We had conversations with people [in the non-profit sector] who said there was a lot of internal resistance to unconditional transfers,” Niehaus [one of GiveDirectly’s four founders] told [reporter Dana Goldstein]. “If this works, what are we all here for? Why do we have jobs? There’s an industry that exists that tries to make decisions for poor people and determine what’s best for them.”

Shouldn’t we want the same kind of aid for the poor that we in the nonprofit sector would want for ourselves?