On Sat, May 03, 2008 at 10:40:21PM +0530, Biju Chacko wrote: > Aadisht is a banker by profession so one assumes he knows something > about investments.
heh but since i'm an economist i know about opportunity cost. so put another way - unless you are sure that the cost of your own time, commissions, fees etc required in order to achieve a significant return on investment, together with the return on investment itself, is greater than the net present value of the donation to the recipient of your choice, including also the opportunity cost to the recipient (who needs money for school now, not 20 years later), then it's best just to make the donation today. on another note: some people cribbed about charities with administrative costs, advertising and brochures etc. yes, administrative cost is important to consider, but also consider that a charity like CRY is NOT GOING TO RAISE MONEY unless it takes half page ads featuring mournful cute 5-yr-olds. and this is not CRY's fault, but yours and ours. i strongly recommend that everyone read _The Zanzibar Chest_ by aidan hartley. it is a harrowing tale of a reuters reporter who: drove into ethiopia with meles zenawi; drove into mogadishu with farah aideed and coined the term "somali warlord"; marched into rwanda with paul kagame; and lots more, all before he was 30. makes me feel like i've wasted my life. he writes [1] movingly about the role of news reporting in getting attention to "unimportant" causes; how a BBC reporter loudly complains that a bunch of starving villagers rounded up for the camera are "NOT... THIN... ENOUGH!" not because he's callous but because starving villagers need to be thin enough or the footage won't be broadcast because viewers are only interested in seeing really thin people; of how when sophia loren visits a refugee camp as a UN ambassador, the hordes of hangers on trample over a starving half-dead child, breaking his arm, and the author doesn't write about it, because a UN officer begs him not to, because "then we won't get donations"; the UN officer also tells him, when asked "why sophia loren", that "we tried to get Madonna, but apparently starving refugees aren't good for her image". and the sound recorder who has been shoving his mike in front of dying people until he triumphantly reports capturing someone's last breath, "the sound of death". all this in the faint hope of having at least one person in the rich world (and that includes most silk listers too, i guess, even those living in india) to cry over the morning newspaper and coffee, and do something. i looked at CRY's financial reports before deciding to donate 10% of my indian income to them while i lived in delhi, because i figured that the money was effectively spent, including the advertising and brochures. finally, it is frankly silly and unfair to suggest that only charities supported by volunteers are worth donating to. if software engineers, well paid in their day jobs, want to volunteer their time to charitable causes, that'd be great. but people working in charities full time are doing enough good just with their work, and deserve to be paid well too; there is no need to expect a higher standard of selflessness from them. indeed, just like well paid public officials (e.g. singapore), well paid charity workers can be expected to perform better too, all else being equal (efficiency, oversight, administrative overhead) which admittedly it often is not. best, rishab 1. http://www.thezanzibarchest.com/
