One is that in order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that’s the problem with most philanthropy–there’s no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation. So if you can’t succeed or fail, it’s really hard to get better.
– Steve Jobs
There have been a round of new rebukes leveled at both Steve Jobs’ and Apple’s philanthropy efforts in the last week. Regardless of what you think about the issue, Jobs raises an solid point in the above quote. If you can’t readily measure the effect of something, how do you know you’re money is doing any good?
The effect of giving a meal to someone can immediately be seen: that person doesn’t go hungry, or depending on where you are, starve to death. But is that the measurement you’re looking for? Is sustaining a miserable life enough? Is that free meal creating dependency? Is that dependency keeping evil people in power? All of this stuff is extremely difficult to measure.
Look at breast cancer research. It gets more funding than any other cancer. If I donate to the Susan G. Koman foundation, am I using my dollars effectively? Honestly? I have no idea. Breast cancer is bad, but there’s already a ton of money behind it. Would my money be better spent battling colon cancer? Or the nearly 100% fatal pancreatic cancer? Or heart disease, which kills 10 times as many people each year as breast cancer? It’s hard to say because it’s so hard to measure results.
Me? I want to build a school in east Africa. I love that place, but its people need help, which I think can only come through education. But how do I know any school I built would have a meaningful impact? At this point, I have no idea. Maybe it’s the worst way to spend the money. One of the biggest breakthroughs we need is a way to obtain better data on the stuff we want throw money at. We need demographics data that can help us understand not only what problems are going on where, but various inputs that are contributing to those problems. Hopefully with brilliant minds like Gates behind some major philanthropy dollars, we can figure this out.
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