Charity is one of the oldest human institutions and one of the least examined. It does not even have a widely used name for its science, a gap explored in Charitology: The Surprising Lack of a Name for the Science of Charity. Most people give, many give regularly, and very few ask what their giving actually changes. Charitology is the study of that question.
Humanity's Checklist grew out of it.
What charitology asks
Charitology treats charity as a system to be understood, not just a virtue to be practiced. It asks:
- What does a gift change? Not what it buys, but what is different afterward.
- For whom? Who benefits, who decides, and whose voice is missing.
- For how long? Does the change last, or does the need return next year?
- Through which systems? What story, incentive or structure does the gift strengthen or weaken?
- Why do people give the way they do? And what would make them give differently?
What it builds on
Charitology draws on several fields that already study giving.
Philanthropic studies. Universities have built programs devoted to philanthropy. The Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, founded in 2012, describes itself as the first school dedicated to the study and teaching of philanthropy.
Behavioral economics. Economist James Andreoni described "warm-glow" giving: people give partly for the good feeling of giving, not only for the result. That helps explain why donors often care more about the act than the outcome.
Psychology. Researchers have documented the identifiable victim effect, a pattern economist Thomas Schelling first described in 1968: people give far more to help one named person than to help many anonymous ones. Giving follows stories and faces, not scale.
Effective altruism. The effective altruism movement brought cost-effectiveness analysis to giving and asked donors to compare causes by evidence.
What charitology adds
Charitology takes those findings and asks a systems question. If giving is driven by warm glow, identifiable victims and whatever is in the news, then the overall pattern of charity will be shaped by psychology and attention rather than by where help would do the most good. That pattern is itself a system, and it can be redesigned.
From that view come four principles, which Humanity's Checklist adopts:
- Give to sources as well as symptoms. Fund the systems that keep producing need, not only the need.
- Judge giving by leverage. Ask how many problems a change reaches, not only what each outcome cost.
- Coordinate givers. Isolated budgets miss the connections between problems.
- Make generosity visible and admired. Status steers money, so point status at giving.
From charitology to the checklist
Apply those principles to the whole world and you get Humanity's Checklist. It names six sources that sit upstream of every world problem: the story we tell ourselves, coordination, vision, attention, status and gatekeepers. It pairs each with one buildable project and asks whether $5 million, spent at the source, could do more than budgets far larger spent on symptoms.
The world does not have a charity problem. It has a coordination, vision and status problem. Charitology is how we found that out, and systemic altruism is the practice that follows from it. Learn more at charitology.com.