What Does It Mean to Give Well?
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What inspired Elie Hassenfeld to start GiveWell and how did the idea originate?
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It's a holiday season, and at New York Times opinion, Nick Kristoff many years ago kicked off a tradition, which I love. It's one of my favorite parts about being here, where different columnists and and parts of the organization Offer up their recommendations for giving. Try to make people aware of charities, philanthropies they might want to support, where money that they can spare might do a tremendous amount of good. In my personal giving every year, I give some of the money I'm giving to a local charity, but then I give a lot of it to GiveWell. And the reason I give it to GiveWell is that of every organization I know of, I have the most trust in them. To vet To run the experiments, to read the research, to really figure out where my money will go the furthest in helping other people.
Givewall has not been around that long, but in the time they've been around, they've become a pretty big channeler of givers' funds for this exact reason, because a lot of people trust the work they do because it is so transparent, because it is so rigorous. Billions of dollars have ended up being given through them. And so I am recommending that if you have money to spare, you consider giving some of it through GiveWell, which you can do at givewall.org. But I thought as a way to talk About this rather than writing a column, I would have GiveWell's CEO and one of its founders, Ellie Hassenfeld, on the show to talk about how Givewell started. How it does its work, how it makes some of its very arguable and very difficult decisions in terms of what to recommend and what not to recommend.
And how givers themselves should think about donating money, to whom, to where, and under what conditions, as we all sort of wrestle with how we can do a little bit more good in a world that needs a lot more good done. As always my email as reclined show at nytimes dot com.
Ellie Housenfeld, welcome to the show. Great to be here. So I want to start a little bit before your work at Givewell. When I was looking into the show, you studied religion at college. Which is not what I would expect necessarily from somebody who goes on to work at a hedge fund and then become an apostle of cost benefit analysis and randomized controlled trials. So religion, why?
I think in an alternative life, I'm not doing what I'm doing here at Givewell. And instead, I'm a academic studying the Talmud. It was something that at the time I was incredibly interested in. And in college, I spent a lot of time in Talmud courses studying other religious texts and Judaism and otherwise. And I just found it incredibly. Fulfilling and interesting to think about how people had tried to answer questions about their lives.
What is the Talmud for people who don't know, and what did you learn from studying it?
It's a huge compendium of Jewish ideas and thought from roughly the 500s of the common era. And I think the thing that taught me most is how challenging it is to know anything. Uh I spent about a year just studying Talmud. And in that year after high school, it was the first time that I think I had a really challenging intellectual experience where I wasn't able to understand. understand the text and the content that I was trying to, but nevertheless found myself drawn to understand it and to deal with the layers of challenge that the text presented. And so, you know, I spent a year doing that. And then when I was in college, I would say that this was my main extracurricular activity outside of school was spending several hours a day studying Talmud and thinking about whether that is something I would do as a career and ultimately
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What inspired Elie Hassenfeld to start GiveWell and how did the idea originate?
0:00–7:54
2
How did Elie's background in religion and finance shape his approach to charitable giving?
7:54–14:42
3
What were the early challenges in figuring out which charities were truly effective?
14:42–23:29
4
How does GiveWell measure impact and decide which programs to recommend?
23:29–32:36
5
Which charities are considered GiveWell’s top recommendations and why?
32:36–40:49
6
What are the biggest limitations and uncertainties in measuring charitable outcomes?
40:49–48:36
7
What mistakes has GiveWell made and how does it incorporate transparency and learning?
48:36–56:42
8
How is the future of global health funding changing and what should donors focus on now?
56:42–1:07:22