Comment by demallien | Hacker News Reader

Comment by demallien | Hacker News Reader

Of course, Adams' argument falls down because of one minor point - you get value in return for donating. Here's a few examples: 1) Your children will get priority when it's their turn to go to university. 2) Keeping the school at the top of list means that your own degree has more value - it's much more impressive to be able to say 'I went to Harvard' than to say 'I went to Harvard before it became the run down dump of a school that it is today' 3) Alumni generally retain the ability to access various university resources.

On top of these direct compensations, there are a couple of others to consider: 4) When you go to a school such as Harvard, your experience is being subsidised by the Alumni. Once you too are an alumni, you would have to be a poor person indeed to not feel at least a little obligated to do the same for the next generation, if your circumstances permit it. 5) If you do have money that you want to donate, I for one can think of few rational choices that are better for society than a university. However the university uses that money, it will help them to obtain the best researchers (either directly or indirectly), and help those researchers get access to the funds they need to improve the state of human knowledge.

>I for one can think of few rational choices [for donations] that are better for society than a university

I disagree. Sometimes people analyze the charitable causes that do the most good (by various metrics, such as lives saved) and I've never seen university donations on the list. The Copenhagen Consensus is one example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Consensus

Some people, noting that universities are non-profits and enjoy government subsidies, think that Ivy League universities are likely to be wasteful, and that society may be over-investing in them. Some even argue that the value of an Ivy League university is more the signal that it sends than the education it provides. Competition for this signal leads to a lot of wasted or inefficiently allocated effort. For this reason, marginal tertiary education may have negative externalities (because we'd all be better off if everyone signaled 50% less). http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/e370/IO7.ht...

So I would hesitate to donate to a university rather than, say, an AIDS prevention charity. If I specifically wanted technological progress, I'd probably consider contributing to the X Prize Foundation, or something like it.

> So I would hesitate to donate to a university rather than, say, an AIDS prevention charity.

You know that most AIDS prevention charities are a giant waste of money? There is almost no metric with which they are measured - so people keep doing the same thing over and over.

With private colleges the metric is fairly clear (publications, degrees awarded, patents, etc...).

To find an example that I considered better than a university, I just referred to the most effective charity that the Copenhagen Consensus came up with, according to Wikipedia: "The highest priority was assigned to implementing certain new measures to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS. The economists estimated that an investment of $27 billion could avert nearly 30 million new infections by 2010."

That sounds like a pretty good deal, but it turns out the Copenhagen Consensus website says micronutrients are the best investment, so maybe Wikipedia's information is old.

In the hypothetical that I had serious money to donate, I would of course try to evaluate effectiveness of the charities. Hopefully I could find the exception to "most".

27 billion for 30 million infections? That's a very poor return on investment (if we can calculate such things for life).

AIDS is not curable, just preventable. If on the other hard we worked on malaria and TB we would prevent closer to 1 billion infections!

And malaria and TB are curable, and malaria causes anemia which makes people tired and less productive, and the cure is considerably cheaper than AIDS prevention.

I (cynically) think that the reason people are focused on AIDS is that the donor countries are worried about it, but they are not worried about malaria and TB. People donate for causes that are close to them, so it's not so cynical for an individual, but I think governments should be instructed by utility - but they are not.

TB is usually a final stage disease that people with AIDS get. It is one of the most common ones (AIDS only destroys the immunity). When you hear someone who died of AIDS or lung infection in a high-AIDS country (e.g. South Africa) you can be fairly sure that it is AIDS.

TB can almost always be cured in healthy adults. The point being - even if you rescue 10 million people form dying from TB - 10 million would probably die of something else.

The best focus for anti-AIDS programs is probably things such as mother to child prevention (i.e. preventing an unborn baby from contracting AIDS from his mother, and providing formula milk to new mothers). The effects of this is measurable.

Ok, I'm not particularly attached to the idea of AIDS prevention being the greatest charity of all. As mentioned, I just checked Wikipedia to find out what the Copenhagen Consensus came up with because I'm sure they put more thought into it than the few minutes I'd allocated for it.

That said, I'm aware that givewell.org rates charities for their effectiveness. Their top-rated charity is Population Services International, which works on - among other things - preventing AIDS and malaria. "We estimate that it costs PSI $650-$1000 to prevent a case of HIV/AIDS and $500-$2500 to prevent a death from malaria; across the organization, we estimate that it costs PSI about $650-$1000 to save a life." http://www.givewell.net/PSI

If GiveWell's figures are accurate, it seems that $650-$1000 is what it should take to save a life. $27 billion to prevent 30 million infections sounds about right. If you have a cheaper way to save lives, I'd love to hear about it.

  to do the same for the next generation

This is fulfilling the generative drive, see [1]. This is an important and powerful mechanism that insures the community's and species continuity. I am not surprised that universities have learned to tap it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosocial_development

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