What Does It Mean to Give Well?

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The Ezra Klein Show

By Ezra Klein

Produced by Jack McCordick

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

This article is part of Times Opinion’s 2025 Giving Guide.

It is the holiday season, and many years ago, during the holiday season at New York Times Opinion, Nicholas Kristof kicked off a tradition that I love. Different columnists and parts of the organization now offer up their recommendations for giving, and it’s one of my favorite things about being here: trying to make people aware of charities they might want to support and where money that they can spare might do a tremendous amount of good.

In my personal giving, every year I donate to a local charity, but then I also contribute to GiveWell. Out of every organization I have known, I have the most trust in GiveWell to do the vetting, to run the experiments, to read the research — to really figure out where my money will go the farthest in helping other people. GiveWell has not been around that long, but in the time they have, they’ve become a pretty big channeler of givers’ funds for this exact reason: because a lot of people trust the work they do, because it is so transparent and so rigorous. Billions of dollars have been given through them.

So I am recommending that if you have money to spare, you consider giving some of it through GiveWell, which you can do at givewell.org. But I thought rather than writing a column, I would have Elie Hassenfeld, GiveWell’s chief executive officer and one of its founders, on the show to talk about how GiveWell started, how it works, how it makes difficult decisions in terms of what to recommend and what not to recommend, and how givers themselves should think about donating money — to whom, to where and under what conditions — as we all wrestle with how we can do a little bit more good in a world that needs a lot more good done.

Ezra Klein: Elie Hassenfeld, welcome to the show.

Elie Hassenfeld: Great to be here.

I want to start a little bit before your work at GiveWell. You studied religion at college, which is not what I would expect from somebody who goes on to work at a hedge fund and then becomes an apostle of cost-benefit analysis and randomized controlled trials.

Why religion?

I think in an alternative life, I’m not doing what I’m doing here at GiveWell. Instead, I’m an academic studying the Talmud. It was something that, at the time, I was incredibly interested in, and in college I spent a lot of time in Talmud courses studying other religious texts and Judaism and otherwise. I just found it incredibly fulfilling and interesting to think about how people had tried to answer questions about their lives.

What is the Talmud, for people who don’t know? And what did you learn from studying it?

It’s a huge compendium of Jewish ideas and thought from roughly the 500s of the common era.

The thing it taught me most is how challenging it is to know anything. I spent about a year just studying Talmud, and in that year after high school, it was the first time that I think I had a really challenging intellectual experience where I wasn’t able to understand the text and the content that I was trying to — but nevertheless found myself drawn to understand it and to deal with the layers of challenge that the text presented.

So I spent a year doing that. And then when I was in college, I would say that this was my main extracurricular activity outside of school — spending several hours a day studying Talmud.

But in thinking about whether that was something I would do as a career, I ultimately realized it wasn’t the right fit for me.

You moved on to Bridgewater, a very unusual hedge fund. What is that movement for you?

As I moved through college, I was thinking about what my career would be and had the opportunity to have internships in many different places. My parents are both lawyers. I got to work at a law firm. That convinced me not to go to law school because I didn’t think that would be right for me.

I was able to get a job in finance at a small company. They were essentially selling research to the big banks and just trying to figure out how to succeed as an organization. Because of that, they were willing to give me, a 21-year-old college kid, a lot of leeway to try to do things and help the company grow. That experience, of being in a place where I was needed and able to do something interesting and challenging, motivated me to look for jobs in finance coming out of school.

I was able to get a job at Bridgewater Associates, which in 2004, when I graduated college, was not well known at all. Everyone I talked to said: Don’t go work there. Go work at a well-known investment bank. That will be better for your career.

But when I interviewed there, they asked me about my senior thesis. I was a religion major, so it was about martyrdom in medieval Islam, Judaism and Christianity. We talked about that for an hour, and I got a callback. And it was one of the few places that called me back. You might not be surprised to hear that religion majors don’t often do so well interviewing for finance jobs.

And because of that, I thought that Bridgewater was just one of the more interesting places to go work, and I was grateful to be able to work there.

So Bridgewater later became fairly well known because it’s Ray Dalio’s hedge fund. Dalio, of course, is a sort of public finance intellectual now, but he had a very strange and famous management style.

What was working at Bridgewater like? What was unusual about working at Bridgewater at that time?

Bridgewater is known for its culture of radical transparency. Just saying what you think, sharing that with your colleagues. Not worrying too much about how you say it, but just saying what you believe. And then over time —

Or about how they’ll feel about it.

Or how they’ll feel about it. And over time, Ray developed these principles that were passed out inside the organization. The way I described it to my friends at the time is it felt to me like working in almost an academic environment. People didn’t wear fancy clothes; they argued a lot about ideas. Sure, there were ways in which I think the culture wasn’t ideal for many. It was a place where it was more about getting things right — and then worrying about people’s feelings later. And if that wasn’t the right fit for you, then people moved on.

But for me, it was an extremely valuable experience. The thing that I appreciated, certainly as a young person in my early 20s, is I would go to my boss sometimes, and he was one of the heads of the company, and say: Hey, I think you’re wrong about this — and he would listen to me. And sometimes I was wrong, sometimes I was right. But to be taken seriously early in your career was so valuable and something I’m really grateful to them for providing me.

I think this is relevant to what you end up doing at GiveWell. Because when hedge funds and investment banks are trying to understand a company, a sector, a quirk in the market, at a level where you can make a trade other people will not make, you’ll lose a lot of money if you’re wrong.

So what is the pathway to having something of any value to say?

I think the core idea that was true then, and I think has carried through in GiveWell and in my life today, was first, in order to make decisions about what to do in the world, we have to understand the world accurately.

For a hedge fund, understanding reality is really key. If you are right, you make money — or you can. If you’re wrong, you tend to lose money. So the stakes of getting to the “truth” are very high.

Part of that is you have to be careful not to fool yourself. So one of the things that investors do is they have an idea about what might perform well in the market. And then you can say: Well, how well did this idea perform historically? And you can backtest the idea. And when you do that, you have to be really careful not to fit your idea to the past. Instead, you have to ask this question —

Wait. Can you describe what that would mean?

So you might say a simple rule, like, let’s say — I’m going to make something up that’s entirely fictitious: If oil prices go up, then train stocks go down, because an input into railroad costs is the price of gas. So when the input cost goes up, the performance will be poor. And you could try to look at this historically, and let’s say we tested this going back: Would this have been a successful strategy in the market?

The challenge is that it’s very easy to convince yourself that you should tweak your rule in one way or another to enable the idea that you have to perform on the backtest. But you don’t want to do that, because you only want to bet money on this idea if it really will work.

So you’re working at Bridgewater, a hedge fund — I would say, one of the more acquisitive industries that exist. Where does your interest in giving as a pursuit — and giving differently — come from?

I’d been there for a couple of years. My friend had a friend there, Holden Karnofsky. And he and I just started realizing: We’re young, we don’t have high expenses, we’re saving some money. Let’s try to use some of this money to help people.

So back in the summer of 2006, he and I and a few others got together and said: Let’s just work on figuring out where we’ll give by the end of the year. You know, a few thousand dollars.

It was in that process, with that group of people, that we learned a few things. First, we learned it’s really hard to get answers about what charitable organizations do and how well they work.

Second, I just found myself somewhat obsessed by this question of where we should give. At the time, I knew very little about what the lives of people around the world were like. It’s not something I had studied, it’s not something I knew much about. But learning about the challenges of accessing water or of disease was just a very motivating topic to work on.

And I remember this night in probably December of 2006 — I was up at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. reading academic papers about diarrhea in Africa. If you find yourself reading about diarrhea at 3 a.m., you know you have found something you’re really drawn to.

And so after working on this essentially part-time, Holden — my co-founder — and I left Bridgewater and started GiveWell as a full-time project back in the summer of 2007.

Two things in there. One is the impulse to start looking for the effectiveness data on the charities you might support. Not to just say: We’re going to give the money to Doctors Without Borders, we’re going to give it to UNICEF. There are big charities out there. We’ve all heard of them. There was Charity Navigator, which is something that I used when I was younger.

What happened, what did you see, when you began looking?

We just started asking some really basic questions, and the answers we got back were shocking.

We each researched a different cause. I decided to research the cause of water in Africa. First we looked at Charity Navigator. At the time, Charity Navigator essentially just reported financial metrics. So it said: This is the amount of money that’s spent on overhead versus programs and fund-raising. And while this measure can tell you whether a charity is a scam or not, it’s not going to tell you whether the program is actually working.

Let’s say the charity spends all its money digging wells, but those wells disappear a year later and fall into disrepair. Well, that’s not a very effective use of funds, even if all of it was spent on programs.

So I called up the organizations and asked them: So what do you do? What do I get if I give you money?

And they said: Twenty dollars provides a child water for life.

Great! That’s amazing. I would love to give to that. But what do you mean? How does that work exactly? What does it pay for, and how do you know?

At that point, it’s like the conversation fell flat. They just didn’t have answers. What they actually said was: We don’t get questions like these from our million-dollar donors.

And this lightbulb went off: Almost no one was asking these questions.

Were they annoyed by you?

Some of them were annoyed by us. One organization accused Holden of being a spy for a rival organization. He had asked: How much money do you spend in each country? And they could only imagine that question would be asked if he had some nefarious purpose.

So I think they were annoyed. I mean, we were — what? — 25 at the time, so I’m sure we were annoying. But we really saw how neglected this area was, and it really motivated us to start GiveWell.

What’s striking to me about the way you approached it is that you even had the intuition that maybe you would give to a charity, and that what you were doing was making a bet in the same way as when you’re trading.

When you’re trading, the bet is supposed to make you money. When you’re giving to a charity, it’s supposed to improve lives.

In some ways, this basic question of: What is true? How can we know that it’s true? How can we assess the empirical data and evidence that we have to make the best decisions?

That’s exactly what GiveWell does in a very different way, in a very different context. But it’s bringing that same commitment to rigor and truth seeking to bear on trying to answer questions about what we should do in the world.

What are the things that, in your view, most commonly stand in the way of organizations — or for that matter, individuals — that care deeply about their mission or have skin in the game — financial or otherwise — from finding truthful answers?

I think there are two big things that happen, and there are many more that are downstream.

The first is, as an individual running an organization, you have an incentive for your organization to succeed. It’s very difficult to look for information that would mean your organization is not succeeding or shouldn’t receive money.

It’s not realistic to expect someone who, say, is running an organization that delivers food in a way that is very cost inefficient to determine that they should shut that program down and move on to something else. That’s just not how human beings operate. And I think that’s completely understandable.

The second challenge is that in order to make good decisions about where to put money, it’s very helpful to have a broad perspective. If you’re focused on, let’s just say, an inefficient delivery of food aid, you’re not going to be thinking about the role that a malaria vaccine could now have and whether you should be, in fact, delivering malaria vaccines instead of delivering food aid.

So I just think the place that most people sit in, let’s call it, the nonprofit economy, makes it implausible that they would take this kind of perspective.

I think that when I was younger and giving to charity, I didn’t really think at all about the idea that the money could fail.

I mean, these are good people. They’re trying to do something hard. They’re out there working on the ground. So it didn’t really occur to me early on that you might just give money to some of them, and that money would be useless.

What was the intuition that led you to treat money given to charity as money that could........

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