What if Charity Shouldn’t Be Optimized?

Equipped with tools to measure our calories, steps, working hours, wasted hours, water intake and sleep cycles, we have now been exhorted to measure our charitable impact, too. Books, podcasts, TikToks and digital guides implore us to donate our money cautiously, rationally, to the charities that promise to make a dollar go the furthest it can. Holiday season giving can start to feel a little like sports betting: It doesn’t matter if you’re loyal to a scrappy local team — the data can tell you exactly where your money should go.

This is not how I thought about charity when I was growing up. I remember my childhood neighbor declaring that when he rode the subway he sometimes found himself spending more than he would on a cab, because he did not believe in toughening his heart toward people asking for change. This seemed like an approach that made up for impracticality with grace: When someone in front of you says they need help, do not look away.

What is the right way to give away money, anyway? The debate has been fomented partly by a group of billionaires — most prominently the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna — whose approach to charity argues, essentially, that you do not get to feel good for having done anything at all. People should give wherever their money is most needed and most likely to yield the biggest effects.

Mr. Moskowitz and Ms. Tuna are among the Silicon Valley billionaires who have embraced the philosophical movement known as effective altruism, a worldview that focuses on optimizing good. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, said effective altruist thinking closely aligned with his views. The co-founder of Skype, Jaan Tallinn, also supported the movement, and former board members of OpenAI had ties to it as well.

For billionaires who made their money by crunching numbers, effective altruism extends that into the way they give away their money, too. It is a data-loving engineer’s mode of do-gooding, for the first generation of ultra wealth created by engineers.It’s an approach that can give people moral permission to keep amassing more wealth — as long as they give some of it away. E.A. fits comfortably into an era of widening inequality, as the fortunes of the world’s richest have grown, and so has their ability to shape ideas for the rest of us.

E.A. applied the sheen of good will (altruism) to a brand of thinking (optimization) that had already taken over the way we eat and exercise, work and live. And just as health optimization began as a tech-world obsession that trickled down to the rest of us, something similar has happened in recent years with the ethos of effective altruism and Americans’ sensibility around charitable giving.