Should charitable giving be subject to rigorous outcome scrutiny?
5 recorded positions from 3 people, first published Apr 2008. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Giving is only virtuous if it causes outcomes
Paul Graham · published Apr 2008
Most explicitly benevolent projects fail to hold themselves accountable, behaving as though good intentions guaranteed good effects
source Be Good
Tobi Lütke · published May 4, 2026
Giving money away is not virtuous in itself — only if it causes the right outcomes — and there are too many charity dollars chasing causes that lack a self-healing fitness function.
Charity dollars can't be given to anything that has a self-healing fitness function, so the world prioritizes things that sound good over things that work.
0:00 20VC: Shopify's Tobi Lütke on How AI is a Scapegoat for Mass Layoffs & What Will Labour Markets Be in the Future | Why We Need More Scrutiny on Charitable Giving, Governments are Bad at What They Do and Trump Derangement Syndrome in Canada
Tobi Lütke · published May 4, 2026
Giving money away is not virtuous unless it causes the right outcomes; good-sounding actions must not be treated as beyond scrutiny, and donors need to look at the data on what effects they cause
31:46 20VC: Shopify's Tobi Lütke on How AI is a Scapegoat for Mass Layoffs & What Will Labour Markets Be in the Future | Why We Need More Scrutiny on Charitable Giving, Governments are Bad at What They Do and Trump Derangement Syndrome in Canada
Also on the record
Harry Stebbings · published May 4, 2026 · hedged
Demanding rigorous diligence on charitable giving will suppress giving overall, because busy founders lack time to do it and will simply not bother, so good organizations that would have been funded won't be
Founders building large companies have no time to vet organizations, and a scrutiny norm tells them not to trust recommendations either
32:01 Scrutiny norms suppress giving overall
Tobi Lütke · published May 4, 2026
Genuinely good charitable organizations already receive plenty of money; the real problem is that money in these systems is captured by bad actors
The go-to defense of philanthropy is always Carnegie's libraries and Rockefeller's hospitals — examples that are a hundred years old, which shows how thin the modern case is
32:28 Good orgs are already funded the money is captured by bad actors
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 5 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.