Charitology
The science of doing the most good.
Americans gave $617.2 billion to charity in 2025. The generosity is real, and so is the good it does. But the system that aims it, meaning the signals, incentives and habits that decide where the money goes, has never had a science of its own. Until now it didn’t even have a name.
The most obvious name for the most important field was never taken
In October 2026, charitology.org was available to register for about ten dollars. We have words for the study of bells, of flags and of mixing cocktails. The science of doing the most good, harder than rocket science and more important, had never been named, let alone practiced as a craft.
That isn’t a story about a domain. It’s a finding about the field: the hardest problem we have was never stamped as a trade.
Read the manifesto, “Ten Dollars” →Charity is a system
Money moves from givers, through the signals they see and the channels that hold it, into work that ranges from relief to source, and on to outcomes. Results rarely travel back. Each pin below is a condition of the system, placed where it acts.
- 1
Givers
Individuals 64% · Foundations 19% · Bequests 10% · Corporations 7%
U.S. giving by source, 2025
- 2
Signals
Stories, faces, overhead ratios, rankings, prestige, tax breaks
- 3
Channels
Charities, foundations, donor-advised funds, giving platforms
- 4
The work
- Source
- Structure
- Prevention
- Repair
- Relief
- 5
Outcomes
Lives, institutions, futures
No judgment of the good being done
Every food bank, clinic and volunteer is doing real good. Charitology studies the system that aims them, not their hearts.
Symptoms and sources
Most problems keep coming back until their sources change. Charitology asks every gift where it acts, and asks the system whether its mix is right.
Unknown stays unknown
A science says what it doesn’t know. Every claim here is labeled established, documented, debated or hypothesis.
From relief to source
Every piece of work acts somewhere on the chain from symptom to source. Depth describes the work. It never grades it: every level is needed. The question is always the mix.
- 0 Relief Meets the need today A meal at a food bank, emergency surgery, a disaster shelter.
- 1 Repair Restores what was lost Rebuilding a home, rehabilitation after an injury, a job after a layoff.
- 2 Prevention Stops it happening to these people Bed nets, vaccines, clean water for a village.
- 3 Structure Changes the rules that produce it A lead-paint ban, a new public health system, a corporate standard.
- 4 Source Changes what feeds many problems at once The story a society tells itself, how people coordinate, what a culture rewards.
Fifteen conditions of the charity system
None of them is anyone’s fault. All of them can be fixed. Each is labeled with how strong its evidence is.
- C01 The Missing Feedback Loop Documented
- C02 The Overhead Myth Established
- C03 The Story Bias Established
- C04 The Symptom Trap Hypothesis
- C05 The Restriction Reflex Documented
- C06 The Silence About Failure Documented
- C07 The Measurement Gap Debated
- C08 The Fragmentation Problem Debated
- C09 Parked Money Debated
- C10 The Short Horizon Hypothesis
- C11 The Missing Voice Documented
- C12 The Prestige Economy Hypothesis
- C13 The Single Lens Hypothesis
- C14 The Proximity Pull Debated
- C15 The Missing Profession Hypothesis
23 questions nobody has answered
In 1900 David Hilbert’s list of 23 unsolved problems steered a century of mathematics. These are charitology’s. Solve one and you change where billions of dollars go.
- 01 The Depth Census What share of the world’s charitable money goes to relief, repair, prevention, structure and source work?
- 02 The Exchange Rate Problem Can outcomes in different causes (a life saved, a species protected, a law changed, a child educated) be compared on a common scale, and where must comparison stop?
- 03 Measuring the Source How do you measure the impact of source-level work, such as changing a story, a norm or an institution, when the effects are diffuse, shared and delayed?
- 04 The Counterfactual Problem How can a giver estimate what would have happened without their gift, cheaply and at scale?
- 05 Closing the Feedback Loop What mechanism lets the people a charity serves send a signal that moves money, the way prices do in markets?
- 06 The Overhead Replacement What simple public measure could replace overhead ratios as the default way donors judge a charity, without being easy to game?
Everything a science needs, built in the open
Each piece is honest about its status: live, seeded, designed, or waiting on partners.
Programs
Research to find out what works, funding to act on it, training to grow the field.
3 live · 6 seeded · 8 designed · 9 need partners
19Tools
Free instruments that put the method in anyone’s hands. Everything runs in your browser.
19 live · 0 seeded · 0 designed · 0 need partners
21The Record
What the field knows, and what it doesn’t yet, with every claim sourced and labeled.
4 live · 15 seeded · 2 designed · 0 need partners
Open projects charitology builds on
Independent, open tools that already measure parts of the system. Charitology links them into one field.
Humanity’s Checklist
Six root causes that sit upstream of every world problem, each with one beachhead project. Charitology’s source level comes from here.
Structural-change evidenceSystemic Altruism
A beta tracker of charities working on structural change, with inspectable judgments, uncertainty ranges and a searchable IRS registry.
Where the money goesCharity Impact Media
Sourced Form 990 spending breakdowns for about 25,000 U.S. charities with $10 million or more in revenue. No ratings.
Who funds whomWHOFUNDS
The open grant graph of U.S. private foundations, built from Form 990-PF filings, with its own miss rate on the page.
Become a charitologist
The field is open. Study it, question it, test it, teach it. Prove a claim wrong and make it better. Every page here is a file anyone can improve.
- Researchers take on an open problem.
- Builders ship a designed tool or program.
- Writers grow the Record, with sources.
- Critics red-team any claim on the site.
- Givers try the tools and tell us what broke.