How to Improve iPhone’s New Charity Snooze App: Pick an Anti-Charity
A new iPhone app links your alarm clock snooze button to your wallet. Every time you hit snooze, you pay. To be precise, 25 cents goes to charity. Whilst I admire the charitable impulse and the entrepreneurialism here, I do wonder how effective this commitment device will be. A quarter isn’t a lot. Particularly when in a deep slumber. And the money goes to a good thing. Two slight twists on this app would intrigue me:
1) The anti-charity. A popular option at stickK.com (disclosure: Ian Ayres, fellow Freakonomics contributor, and I are co-Founders of stickK.com), is to pick an “anti-charity” such as the Bush or Clinton Presidential Libraries, depending on your particular persuasion (those in the UK can choose their most despised football team).
2) The reverse: Donate if you do NOT press snooze. Set a goal for money to raise for a charity you love. Every day you do NOT press snooze, you add money to your “to donate” pot. (Yet another disclosure: this would thus work similarly to the American Cancer Society’s http://www.chooseyou.com campaign, which is powered by stickK.com). Read More »
Freakonomics Poll: Will New Cigarette Warning Labels Reduce Smoking?
Soon, new warning labels on cigarette packs will have even scarier messages, and photos too. Canada has been doing this for years. Will it reduce smoking?
Here are three quick thoughts.
1) I strongly doubt it will increase the quantity of information about smoking. Folks know it is bad for you already.
2) This does not mean it won’t work. Maybe people try to forget the health risks in that moment of passion (folks know birth control helps prevent pregnancy, but similarly, when faced with impending temptations, magically forget such trivial details). Will these photos remind them at that moment of temptation? Maybe. Or maybe it will increase how often their kids or friends give them grief for it, thus creating some social pressure to stop. Naturally there is a counter-argument, that this may enhance teenage smoking, if “being bad” makes it cooler. Read More »
More Misadventures in Foreign Aid?
Last week CNN told the story here and here of Derreck Kayongo, a refugee from Uganda now living in Atlanta. His father was a soap-maker, and Mr. Kayongo is following in his footsteps, but with a nonprofit twist: he cleans and reprocesses discarded used soap bars from American hotels and ships them to Africa. He started the Global Soap Project, a U.S.-based non-profit organization, to do this.
An inspiring story of someone trying to turn waste into something good. That of course is great, and I like the ingenuity. And I admire how Mr. Kayongo has managed to navigate both the nonprofit and corporate space to figure out how to mobilize people to contribute the soap, and to coordinate delivery to people in need.
But is the best solution here really half-used soap? Read More »
Why Ranking Charities by Administrative Expenses is a Bad Idea
How does one know whether a charitable donation will make an impact? For this we need a simple formula (easy to write, hard to apply):
Idea X Implementation = Bang for your buck
When I give talks about aid effectiveness, people often comment that they too think this is important. And to make sure they are supporting good charities, they always hone in on the charities’ finances to see how much goes to administrative and fundraising expenses. Charity Navigator, for example, scrubs these numbers and doles out stars to charities that don’t spend “too” much on operations.
Given the title of my book with Jacob Appel, More Than Good Intentions, many assume that they are speaking my language, and that I admire such focus on those numbers too.
But I do not. Those numbers do not tell you what is really happening. Read More »
Winners of Heart + Mind Donations Contest
Earlier I ran a contest for two free copies of More Than Good Intentions. The quick summary: we ran a randomized trial to test whether employing the use of statistics, and worse yet scientific evidence, would raise more or less money when added to a standard emotional appeal in a direct mail marketing solicitation for donations for Freedom from Hunger (a charity I respect and do research with). We split the analysis by size of prior gift. The Freakonomics contest then asked two questions: Read More »
Deciding How to Decide: Taste-Matching Or Expert-Based?
This blog post is co-authored with Jacob Appel, co-author of my recent book, More Than Good Intentions.
Among the many questions David Gomberg and Justin Heimberg pose in their hilarious book Would You Rather is the following:
“Would you rather…
Become increasingly intelligent with the consumption of alcohol, but also become increasingly convinced you are Gloria Estefan
OR
Have a firm grasp of Roman numerals but look exactly like Weird Al Yankovic?”
Well, that’s a tough one. Seriously. It’s a classic problem of apples and oranges—or maybe, given the absurdity of the alternatives, a problem of apples and, say, cut-off jeans shorts—two things that are thoroughly incommensurable. Fortunately, those are not real choices. Read More »
Heart + Mind? Or Just Heart? Experiments in Aid Effectiveness (And a Contest!)
When signing our book, More Than Good Intentions, Jacob Appel and I often sign “Heart + Mind = Good Giving.” Nobody argues with the premise that we should act with compassion, but be smart about it. Of course nobody would ever say they do not care about the effectiveness of the charity they support.
But in practice, does evidence about charitable effectiveness impact donations? Or does the presentation of dorky evidence turn off the emotions that cause us to donate in the first place? Read More »
How to Attack Global Poverty? More Than Good Intentions Authors Answer Your Questions
Dean Karlan of Yale, and Jacob Appel of Innovations for Poverty Action answer reader questions on how to tackle global poverty. Read More »
and 
. You can also watch it on 