A Case Against Charity?

Interesting article from Slate in which Tim Harford claims to argue that charity is selfish.

It appears to me that he actually argues for two things: firstly, that people's motivation for charitable donation is not altruism (no great shock there); and secondly, that by diversifying one's charitable investment across multiple charities one is actually doing less good than just giving it all to the most deserving charity - he argues here that people draw a false analogy with diversifying their financial investments.

I disagree with him here: I believe this analogy is appropriate given the limited information of someone donating to a charity.  That person is not able to determine exactly which charity is the most deserving.  Thus they seek to minimise the risk of a bad 'investment' in a charity by splitting their investment across several.  This seems like a sound strategy to me for two reasons: firstly, one does not operate in a vacuum - many other people will be donating at the same time and so the overall benefit to all deserving charities will be large; and secondly, it will reduce the possible waste of resources that may result from excess spending on marketing by charities in order to secure donations in a 'winner takes all' world.

The article can be found here.