If I ever become super rich, I want to do things like paying for people to switch to solar energy, etc. I think there’s a lot I could do as an individual that governments won’t do/too slow to do that isn’t just donating to charities where half the money goes to “admin costs”
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Eliminating all admin costs — were that even possible — might get you a 2x increase in cost-effectiveness (CE). But choosing the right problem to work on & the right intervention to solve it could increase CE 10–1000x. A website about the Overhead Myth: http://overheadmyth.com
Yes, this is true. The best way to make it clear to people is by analogy to startups. Do you care more about how much a company pays in salaries, or what it's building?
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It's even weirder than that! Do you care how many staff Costco somewhat arbitrarily categorises as working in administration vs logistics vs management vs evaluation? Obviously not, you just care whether they're delivering products customers want cheaply.
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It’s incredible how widespread this myth is. How did it gain such market share?? Did somebody invent it? Is it just intuitive for many?
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I think the reason people mistakenly focus on overhead is that they mistakenly consider nonprofits to be mere conduits for money. They don't realize that nonprofits can actually do things.
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Even for a money conduit like
@GiveDirectly, I'd be OK with them raising overhead from 10% to 50% of they could, say, target the money much better on the people who get the most value from it.
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