With charities competing for dollars, should money go to one Canadian child, or to 17 in the Third World?

Jonathan Kay

National Post

Every month, the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Canada makes a wish come true for about 10 children who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness or life-threatening medical condition. Some kids want to ride horses. Others want to meet movie stars or hockey players. Every child is different.

To make a sick child smile -- even for just a short time -- is a noble enterprise; and the MAW "wish co-ordinators" deserve praise. But because the benefits that stem from the organization's expenditures are so limited -- each gift benefits only one family, and only for a short time -- the Foundation's activities bring to mind a disturbing comparison.

According to the organization's executive director, the average cost of each wish is $5,000. That doesn't seem like an excessive amount if we assume that money given to the MAW would otherwise be used by donors to buy luxury items.

But the figure seems less benign if we assume the donations come at the expense of other charities. Though a child's smile is priceless, so are the lives the money might save if applied more productively. Though we have been taught to measure the size of a philanthropists' heart according to the raw number of dollars he doles out, we often ignore the question of how much good those dollars are doing -- and whether they might be better spent elsewhere.

After all, you can help a lot of malnourished children in the Third World with $5,000. In fact, you can help 17. According to the calculations of Peter Unger, a New York University philosopher, a donation of $300 to a good hunger-relief charity -- Oxfam, for instance -- is enough, after accounting for transaction costs and administrative expenses, to provide a malnourished two-year-old with the food and medication necessary to survive his infant years. (Such calculations are a messy business, and Unger's numbers may be slightly off -- but not enough to affect the argument that follows.)

Of course, nothing is stopping a philanthropist from writing cheques to MAW and Oxfam out of the same cheque book. But will he?

"People who are inclined to give to charities probably at the end of the day have a notional amount that they figure they can allocate," says Patrick Johnson, President of the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy. "It's like a budget, essentially -- and they've got X amount for charities."

Indeed, statistics show that total philanthropy as a percentage of North American national income has been roughly constant for the last 30 years, hovering between 1.5% and 2% (though it is also true that national income, itself, has been rising). When charities solicit contributions, they know they are fighting to fatten their slice of a predictably sized pie. "People have a relatively fixed amount to give," an official with a prominent Toronto-area charity told me on condition of anonymity. "When I am out there ... I am in competition with every other charity."

What this means is that charitable solicitation is basically a zero-sum game. Money given to the MAW is money withheld from every other charity -- including those operating in the Third World. To the extent that a philanthropist denies the latter at the expense of the former, a dying child's weekend at Disney World may indirectly cost desperately poor children hundreds of man-years of life.

The MAW paradox -- and it is a "paradox" because nothing could seem more laudable, on the face of things, than giving money to the Make-A-Wish Foundation -- illustrates a more generic ethical rule popularized by Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. As he sees things, a rich Westerner makes the decision to let a poor person die every time he buys a luxury item. "The [ethical] formula is simple," he writes. "Whatever money you're spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away ... After all, a [US]$1,000 suit could save five children's lives."

Of course, even the most monkish among us falls short according to this exacting standard. As George Orwell wrote in a 1942 essay, a humanitarian, at some level, is always a hypocrite. I myself am no exception. This hand-wringing essay will fatten my next Post paycheque by a few hundred dollars. I could save a child in a poor country with that money. But instead, I will probably go to The Gap.

Yet the fact that I fail Mr. Singer's test doesn't mean I am irrational, whatever it may say about my ethics. Though I am arguing that giving to some charities makes more sense than giving to others, I recognize that the entire idea of giving to charities is, from a selfish economic point of view, pointless. Humans are fleshy robots programmed to propagate the genes encased within -- "survival machines" in the words of Oxford professor Richard Dawkins. It makes good sense to hoard material resources. And charity, where displayed, should begin at home. My parents each share half my genetic material. From a gene's eye view, it is easy to see why I prefer to treat them to a fancy dinner rather than buy, say, a cauldron of rice gruel for a starving village in Burundi.

But, that said, the greedy gene principle doesn't explain why someone would give to the MAW instead of Oxfam. In terms of self-preservation, either donation is money wasted. Both expenditures go to strangers with rival genes. Which means, in broad terms at least, the comparison between the two hypothetical donations is amenable to rational analysis: It concerns like and like. And I cannot think of a reason why we would assign a lower value to saving 17 human lives than to temporarily enriching just one -- except, perhaps, for the fact that the MAW beneficiaries happen to be (generally) white and Canadian, while the Oxfam beneficiaries are (generally) non-white and always foreign. And that is not a reason I find persuasive.

I have been picking on the MAW, but the same argument applies to college endowment funds, PBS, Ronald McDonald House and B'nai Brith. With a donation of $25 to Calgary-based Operation Eyesight Universal, you can restore eyesight to a blind Third World cataract victim. But so many of us give that $25 to the local library instead, so it can update its CD-ROM collection. Why?

According to Giving Better, Giving Smarter, a report issued in 1997 by the U.S.-based National Commission on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, it is difficult to understand how people select charities. "Many economists approach this topic with at least one arm tied behind their backs ... charitable giving, which looks awfully much like money or time given away without clear benefit in return, simply appears out of character when examined through conventional economic lenses."

Still, a few theorists have attempted to make quasi-economic stabs at explaining philanthropic behaviour -- borrowing ideas from psychology and sociology in the process.

The mainstream view suggests three explanations for giving: one, recognition and gratitude; two, the so-called "warm glow" that results from helping someone in need; and three, a sense of obligation rooted in religious or moral beliefs.

If we accept these explanations, then it is easy to see why we often spend money on local charities. The personal recognition and gratitude a person receives from a gift decays exponentially with the distance between grantor and grantee. The Warm Glow factor also suffers from distance. The farther away death occurs, the less it means to us.

And that leaves us with the third rationale for giving: our sense of obligation. But what sort of obligation is that exactly? Most of us do not feel an obligation to help so much as we feel an obligation to give. Partly because of the structure of our tax system, which rewards all charitable donations equally, our society encourages a reductionist attitude toward giving.

At the end of each year, we quantify our altruism according to the total sum of how much we give, with little thought to the good the money does -- despite the fact a single dollar sent to one charity may do more good than a thousand sent to another.

This reductionism encourages philanthropists to take the path of least resistance and greatest self-aggrandizement.

Perversely, a philanthropist who gives $5-million to a local university so he can put his name on a pavilion is deemed to have a larger heart than one who quietly provides Medecins Sans Frontières $1-million to save a thousand or so anonymous Third World lives. We give to the girl scout selling cookies because she has dimples and we want to make her smile. We attend expensive balls in support of fashionable diseases that claim few victims. We give to our alma mater because we know others will read about our donation in the newsletter. We give, in other words, according to self-interest and vanity.

That's our right, of course. People can give to whomever they like or not at all. But let us not deceive ourselves: In this context, self-interest and vanity costs lives. Not all gifts are equal. The amount of money a philanthropist gives away is no measure of the good he or she does the world.

Jonathan Kay is on the National Post's editorial board.